Pretty wild for a single fiber, but super involved, using 5 different doping type amps. Current systems use just EDFAs (Erbium). These guys used Erbium, Thallium, Bismuth, and others.
The original title is "Deepfake Defense Tech Ready for Commercialization, Transition" but has been changed to "DARPA to launch efforts that will bolster defenses against manipulated media". The changed title is unnecessarily unsettling and misleading. I don't want to see the title changed to a clickbait title like a lowbrow gossip magazine would give it.
It means that it is malicious to replace the title with what would have been the subheading because it looks like a clickbait title. Subheadings do not mean that anything can be changed into a title if it is a subheading. The fact is that this thread is now occupied by a discussion of bike yards that has nothing to do with technology.
It's not 'malicious', its relatively standard HN title practice. If you think the submitter got it wrong just email [email protected] and they'll take a look at it.
> Sometimes I think about how much money people would pay to make their computer run 20x faster.
Bottlenecks that can make a computer 20x faster are very rare. First, pay $1m for a specialist to find the bottlenecks. However, it is even rarer that it is a bottleneck of the entire service. Rather, it is more likely to be an accidental drop in performance. Thus, basically performance monitoring is the best use of money.
> Its weird to me that we'll pay thousands of dollars for faster CPUs then write new software in python, electron or a docker container running in a VM.
There are more labor costs and lost commercial opportunities due to delays in development.
Hm, this thread once again slid down the top page at an alarming rate, even though the safety of the environment surrounding engineers is a serious concern of engineers. Hacker News is surprisingly dismissive of user interests and votes.
Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.
- Little of HN's moderation is done directly by moderators. Rather it's user actions (flags on stories, downvotes and flags on comments), and some automated mechanisms, most especially the "flamewar detector".
- HN detects flames where a story has > 40 comments and the ratio of comments to votes is greater than one. As I write this comment, the story has a ratio of 2.24:1, which is quite high. The average front-page story floats far closer to 0.55 to 0.60 (2021 & 2022, respectively, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926236>, based on my own analysis of all HN front-page archives).
(At some point I'd looked at all the "spiciest" HN stories in the front-page archive, and though I don't have that handy, a 2.24 ratio is remarkably high by comparison.)
The flamewar detector isn't perfect, but it's often appropriate, and can take what seems to be an otherwise interesting story off HN's front page quite quickly. I've seen this happen to a number of my own submissions, and until I understood the mechansism and cause (and inquired to the mods via email) it could be quite discouraging. Note that mods do occasionally override the metric (as they have in this case, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676385>).
Ironically, your best defence against the flamewar detector is to upvote the story and not comment on it.
- The story is of course possibly significant, but we've got very little information to go on presently. HN, as with other online discussion sites, has a tendency to go off half-cocked in such cases, often with regrettable results in terms of discussion accuracy or relevance. My suggestion is to absorb the report, keep it in mind, suspend judgement as to what you think may have happened, and look for further investigations or reports.
It's standard moderation practice on HN to downweight offtopic comments. If we didn't do that, most HN threads would have something generic or offtopic at the top of the page, choking out more interesting discussion. There's nothing secretive here—I've posted about this lots of times over lots of years.
I know it's fun internet time to play sinister speculation, but if anyone wants to know what's actually happening, all they have to do is ask.
Edit: I mean about anything happening on HN. Suspicious deaths, I can't help with.
The previous comment was deleted as expected. You will surely say that you have nothing to do with it.
> This comment was, even though it has 8 points, moved from the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674829 to the lowest level here below 0 points. The order of comments in the original thread has also been reversed. It has to be said that this is a m...dishonest cover-up. Probably the most importantly for HN users, it proves that the order of comments can be changed by the moderators, not by the order of points. For example, the same operation could be performed in the same thread to produce the same result. This neatly matches the strange behavior often seen on HN. Oh, this comment may be deleted for going too deep.
> Also, with this move, the shadowban to this thread has been lifted and this thread is now back on the top page. The previous ranking was page 3.
You don't need to re-quote yourself. Even though your comment was flagged (I flagged it, and I'm sure others did too), it has not been deleted.
You can verify this for yourself by enabling showdead in your profile which will let you see the full text of all comments from all posters even if they are flagged or dead.
Nothing was deleted. We never delete a comment, except when the author asks us to.
As hayst4ck pointed out, your parent comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676467 was flagged by users. When enough users flag a comment, it gets killed—but not deleted. Anyone with 'showdead' turned on in their profile can see all the killed comments.
We can only guess why users flag things, but most likely it's because you're posting dramatic off-topic claims that experienced HN readers find tedious, because they've seen so many and know there's no substance to them.
> Nothing was deleted. We never delete a comment, except when the author asks us to.
I have confirmed that the text of the comment has been replaced by [flagged] and is no longer readable. It's just sophistry to say that the text was only deleted and the comment was not deleted.
I'm sure plenty of users will be happy to confirm to you that they can still read your comment and that it is therefore not deleted.
I wonder if you're using a third-party app to read HN, because if you're using a web browser, you should not be seeing just [flagged]. I unkilled your comment when I posted my last reply.
When I logged out, last time it was replaced by flagged on Chrome and I couldn't read the text, but now I can, even though it's still flagged. Now there is a strange thing. Why are the other flagged comments still replaced with flagged? Your moderation is too variable.
> I unkilled your comment when I posted my last reply.
When a comment gets a certain number of flags, the [flagged] marker appears on the comment. When it gets an additional number of flags, the comment becomes killed and the [dead] marker also appears.
If a reader does not have 'showdead' turned on in their profile, or is logged out, then the text of [dead] comments is not displayed. Instead it will show as either [flagged] or [dead]. This is what happened with your comment when it was in the [flagged][dead] state. Had you viewed it with 'showdead' turned on in your profile, you would have seen that the comment was still readable and not deleted.
Once I unkilled it, it went back from [flagged][dead] to just [flagged], and it went back to being visible to everyone whether they are logged in or not, or have 'showdead' turned on or not.
If you're logged in and seeing some comments that just say [flagged] instead of text, this is because you haven't yet turned on 'showdead' in your profile.
> Once I unkilled it, it went back from [flagged][dead] to just [flagged], and it went back to being visible to everyone whether they are logged in or not, or have 'showdead' turned on or not.
In other words, you resurrected the deleted text. I just hope this conversation will not be deleted/flagged again and become unreadable.
I don't want to argue definitions. If you prefer to call a comment 'deleted' which anyone with 'showdead' turned on in their profile can read, that's fine. On HN, we've always used the word 'dead' for that class of comments.
I don't want to argue about what to call it. I just confirmed the fact that the text that was deleted and made unreadable is back to readable. Still, I'm surprised that comments are sometimes hidden from even being present here.
Wrong, your original comment is still viewable with showdead on. Dang is not trying to mislead you here, it seems you just legitimately aren't very familiar with this site.
A comment with +40/-32 and a comment with +8/-0 are moderated differently despite both being +8. That's a good faith policy that makes sense if you don't want to promote highly divisive "fight provoking" content.
I think it's also worth pointing out that this is done algorithmically and not randomly or arbitrarily by moderators based on their prejudices.
Are you surprised about the lack of curiosity on this sort of case? When many here are within 2 degrees of the people involved. Most within 3 degrees. It's a small world
> Number of comments and upvotes doesn't suggest lack of curiosity
Yes, I agree with you. I was doing double speak. Many things of public interest are nudged "off the front page". Promoting Political Bread & Circuses instead. I think the networks of the Managerial Class are tight. Due to shared interests, values, & upbringing. So I'm not surprised to see the circling of wagons. I'm more surprised that this post was not flagged yet.
> Are you surprised about the lack of curiosity on this sort of case?
I don't think it's a matter of curiosity. If most of the comments in this thread were things like the history of corporate violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...) then I think there would be less downvotes. Few people are aware of corporate oppression of the past which robs people of context for the present.
Unfortunately rather than provoking curiosity by introducing people to information they didn't know they didn't know, most of the comments here are some form of "in the back of the head twice..." which just isn't interesting or thought provoking.
Honestly you're probably better off reading threads on reddit about it. The system may not be as elite as HN but it does allow for more attention and free speech IF you're willing to dig through the detritus.
Let's see if you still feel that way in 5 minutes.
Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass.
"Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with just enough randomness to be confusing.
People assume all kinds of things—whatever they want. Trying to stop that is a madhouse ticket. One eventually learns these things although in my case it seems to take years.
Another slow learning is that it's a bad idea to undertake impossible tasks like "showing clear evidence that astroturfing is not the norm"; especially before breakfast.
Btw, though - no one is denying "front page manipulation", though manipulation is an emotionally loaded word. HN is a curated site, always has been. I've posted, let's see, 70,000 comments as an HN moderator and thousands of those are precisely about this. How "posting thousands of comments of explanation" turns into "denying the idea of" is a good example of the first sentence of my comment here.
If the people investigating Hunter Biden suddenly turned up dead, or the people investigating Trump, and if that happened over and over across several years, then I'd say yes. Oh, and if you could be arrested for a protest.
You can be arrested for a protest. You can also be shot and killed without consequences for protesting in some scenarios. Whether either of these survive a SCOTUS challenge, not sure, but in the meantime it sure fucking happens. We’re less free in 2024 than we were in 2001.
But at least you’re still right about the political assassinations, which is not yet a thing that happens here on an organized basis.
It's not a technical article. It's a lurid media topic* about a suspicious-looking alleged suicide with zero information for a substantive discussion, and tons of fuel for sinister speculation. That's not what HN is supposed to be for. However, we can give this one a pass because the ongoing Boeing saga is of interest and there's clearly a community appetite to discuss this development.
Edit: even though the thread is terrible, which is just what one would expect from a sensational topic with zero information for a substantive discussion.
* Edit 2: I changed the word 'story' to 'topic' because I don't mean to disparage the BBC article itself - anigbrowl's reply is right on that
Flatly untrue. It's a soberly worded recitation of the available facts with multiple caveas; the frenzy of speculation stems from Boeing's increasingly tattered corporate reputation, not the story. This was written to far higher standards than (for example) a story from the Daily Mail or New York Post; I'm astonished that you would characterize this way.
Sorry—I'm tired and expressed that carelessly, and you're quite right. I wasn't talking about the article and am glad that it is as good as you say. In fact I merged the other thread into this one precisely because the BBC article was better.
What I mean is that the story itself, i.e. the significant new information, is a lurid apparent suicide, and there aren't any details about that, other than it happened. Not because the article is bad but because that is the only piece of information available.
The interest in such a story is neither technical nor intellectual and we shouldn't pretend that it is. It's a suspicious death story with sinister overtones. The curiosity here is not primarily intellectual, which means it's not really a good story for HN, but I'm giving it a pass because it is strange enough to be different and there's a community appetite to discuss it. Normally the latter isn't enough to justify a story remaining on HN's front page but there are degrees of community appetite and I recognize this one.
I also think there are 2 different ways of discussing this - one is on mental health (if it's truly a suicide), shadowy agencies, Boeing's failures, and about corporate whistleblowing and its risks in general.
The other discussion is speculation on what this truly is - which is a more political/controversial topic.
There are lots of discussions on the former set of topics which are fairly popular on HN which explains why this thread is popular. I do think such discussions are valuable if there isn't a ton of speculation, which I think this thread is handling decently (although maybe I'm late enough to see all controversial comments already dead).
The required explanation is unnecessarily unreadable, so I explain it again.
As I wrote in my other comment, I meant the article as it relates to technology. My original comment is hidden below so I explain it again here.
The safety of the environment surrounding engineers is a serious concern of engineers. Note that even if it is a suicide, it is still a safety problem of the environment surrounding engineers. Since it is Boeing that pressured him until he committed suicide.
So I wrote "concerning safety culture of engineers". Your interpretation is a complete misunderstanding. At least the points voted on my above comment indicate that your interpretation is not the majority. Hence, thanks to the many supporters, my above comment received many votes and was moved to this thread and this thread was eventually returned to the top page.
We must not remain ignorant or indifferent to unsafe working environments.
Dang, it would be nice of you if you at least addmitted that the front page as opposed to /active is heavily curated and hand-picked by you and other moderators. Anyone who has been on HN long enogh can see this, there is no point in phrasing it otherwise. And I guess people will be ok with this as long you guys are transparent about it.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN, and especially not as a way of working around moderation.
If a comment is in some state that you think it shouldn't be, you can ask us to change that and we can at least have a conversation about it, but just reposting it is not ok.
I don't know why you start making such belated arguments but the upvotes for that comment indicate that it was much more helpful to the viewer than flagging it to make it unreadable. And it does not avoid any moderation. What moderation was done? Here the flag serves only as censorship. It lacks objectivity and impartiality. Most people can't read what was written, they can only read your argument.
Moderation isn't driven by upvotes; it's there to compensate for the failures of the upvoting system. If HN could operate by upvotes alone, that would be great—it would be so much less work. Unfortunately, it can't.
A lot of the things you're complaining about have been established practice on HN for many years. If you want to learn how HN works, I'd be happy to help with that. But it's time that you stopped posting off-topic complaints and trying to stir up drama about these things. 18 of these comments in one thread is quite enough.
So what is the avoided moderation and the failures of the upvoting system? Your rebuttal has too many irrelevant new arguments.
All I am saying here is that if some statements can't be read, others can't read the argument. An argument where others can't read one side's statements is not an equal argument. You must at least be able to make every comment you have conversed with readable. Otherwise it is just your speech.
I've replaced it with 'media' at the top. When I say something like that, I just mean the big media websites and they way they cover often-sensational stories.
Excuse me? MSM, a common acronym for the widespread and uncontroversial term "mainstream media", is now a "far-right dogwhistle"? I must have missed that memo.
I can only imagine the bubble you must live in if you think that the "far right" are the only people who see reason to distrust mainstream media.
I am a deeply liberal American. MSM is not a far right dog whistle in the US.
Words are indirect references to ideas and don't have any meaning without a receiver. All of these words have to be contextualized based on the speaker and receiver.
The right are known for lying with the truth which makes a good amount of their rhetoric stick.
Washington is a swamp, almost any American will agree no matter which side, that's why the statement is powerful and effective.
The MSM in the US is irresponsible. Again regardless of which side you are on, you generally understand that US Media is owned by billionaires and corporations or at the very least people who don't have your interest at heart and want to manipulate you rather than inform you. It is not a far right dog whistle at all so much as a statement towards the general non-quality and lack of journalistic integrity in American's most prominent media. The left acknowledges the existence of "MSM" and blames them for giving the previous president attention and therefore power. The real difference is what MSM is actually referring to. One side generally means "all cable news but fox news" and the other generally means "all chiefly advertisement supported news you could find a newspaper of or see on cable."
Woke is a word that around the times of George Floyd meant something to the effect of "waking up to the idea of systemic racism and acknowledgement of it's generational consequences." Now it is largely a word used to describe "politically correct" policies or social policies that are contradictory to radical fundamentalist Christianity.
I think you are probably thinking about the previous president's fake news and lying press rhetoric which I don't think is a dog whistle because I don't think most conservative Americans are educated enough to tie that to its Nazi "Lügenpresse" heritage. You generally won't hear someone on the left say "fake news" or "lying press" unless it's in a mocking way.
Contextually all these things can be shibboleths based on context, which is probably more accurate for what you mean than dog whistle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Democrats are known for lying for sure. Establishment democrats like Pelosi, definitely. If that's what "left" references OK, I don't really disagree. AOC and Bernie, Stewart, and other progressives are not generally known for lying.
> which is why both sides are constantly bitching at each other.
No. This is some weird false equivalency thing that is popular with "enlightened" people. Some of Americas top brass (Mattis and Milley) have nearly explicitly said that republican dogma is to divide and conquer.
Mattis accused the president of pursuing a divisive strategy.
"[he] is the first president in my lifetime who does not
try to unite the American people— does not even pretend to try.
"Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences
of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the
consequences of three years without mature leadership," he said.
If one party explicitly tries to drive division, you are going to get it. It's no different than Ukraine's lack of unity with Russia. Of course there cannot be unity. Of course they are "bitching at each other." One is attempting to dictate to the other how it is going to be.
> reputation destruction
This is a load and a bad faith argument.
For one, it conflates reputation harm with reputation destruction in order to justify actions that should cause reputational harm. Second, when there is "destruction", it usually follows doubling down on the anti-social behavior that caused the reputational harm in the first place.
A world where reputations can be harmed is absolutely a better world. You can argue that sometimes there is non-proportional harm, ok, but that's not the usual argument. "I am against cancelling" is too often equivalent to "I am against consequences."
The very same people against "canceling" will turn around and claim that a store theft or car window smashing should be punished progressively disproportionately until it is a real deterrent to crime including death. Reputational harm until it is a deterrent to the thing that caused the reputational harm is the very same principle.
It wasn't. The downvote told me that here is the place to be careful about saying thank you. Well, those who downvote against thank you will downvote anything.
No one has claimed that the term "mainstream media" has its origins in far right politics. The claim made upthread is that the term "mainstream media" is a dogwhistle term often employed by the right wing.
I will not be providing evidence of that, as ample enough evidence for that can be found easily with a simple internet search.
I really try to avoid getting sucked into political arguments online, but what you're saying is so absurd and deranged that I can't let it go.
First of all: what exactly do you think the term "dogwhistle" means? Are you suggesting that when RWers say "mainstream media", they really mean something else? To what are they referring?
Secondly, you're going to have to tell me what terms to search for because I just performed several "simple internet searches" and I see no evidence of what you're claiming.
Thirdly, what can be found easily with some simple searches is that "mainstream media" is an extremely common term that's widely used by everybody left, right and center.
E.g. here's Bernie Sanders talking about the "mainstream media":
Here's the Morning Star (a far-left newspaper that was originally founded by the Communist Party of Great Britain) talking about the "mainstream media":
>First of all: what exactly do you think the term "dogwhistle" means? Are you suggesting that when RWers say "mainstream media", they really mean something else? To what are they referring?
No. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite in my comment. Although the term was popularized by the right wing in reference to their belief in a vast leftist conspiracy controlling all forms of media (the thesis under which Fox News was born and the premise by which it claims to be the only valid news source for the right), obviously not every instance of every right winger using the term uses it within that context. However the context does exist and is often employed in right-wing speech.
But given your tone, the fact that you obviously didn't bother to read my comment in good faith, and your personal insults towards me, I won't be engaging with you or your comment any further.
That source doesn't match your claim at all. In fact it completely explains the observed behaviour?
> Most tech related submissions with a hint of political partisanship will quickly be flagged to death by users (or die a slow death due to the inevitable flame war).
Reading the cited Cloudflare blog, it seems that the main purpose of this technology is public randomness, and timelock is one of its applications. Since timelock is not the essence of this technology, it is not surprising that the usefulness of timelock is unclear.
> it’s become a reliable and production-ready core Internet service, relied upon by applications ranging from distributed file storage to online gaming to timestamped proofs to timelock encryption
If I'm understanding the Drand protocol correctly, then isn't the following quote from the Cloudflare blog misleading?
> Each organization contributes its own unique source of randomness into the joint pool of entropy used to seed the drand network – with Cloudflare using randomness from LavaRand, of course!
It leads you to think that the each round's random value comes from "combining" local sources of entropy that each node contributes, but skimming the actual Drand protocol used, isn't it closer to something like using AES-CTR as a PRNG, except instead of AES it's some particular threshold-signature scheme. From another cloudflare post
>To instantiate the required threshold signature scheme, drand uses the (t,n)-BLS signature scheme of Boneh, Lynn and Shacham. In particular, we can instantiate this scheme in the elliptic curve setting using Barreto-Naehrig curves. Moreover, the BLS signature scheme outputs sufficiently large signatures that are randomly distributed, giving them enough entropy to be sources of randomness. Specifically the signatures are randomly distributed over 64 bytes.
So "real-world randomness" only is mixed in during the very initial distributed key generation phase, and after that everything is purely deterministic right? Or put another way those fancy lava lamps are a non-sequitur since this scheme doesn't seem to rely on their values beyond the initial key generation?
Hi, I'm one of the authors of the Cloudflare blog and maintainer of Cloudflare's drand nodes.
You're correct -- after the initial distributed key generation, the values produced by the drand network are deterministic (this is one of the properties that allows for timelock encryption). The security properties of drand rely on a threshold of nodes remaining uncompromised, but mixing in fresh randomness isn't necessary. (Although you could imagine having some drand chains that incorporate fresh randomness for properties like post-compromise security.)
> isn't the following quote from the Cloudflare blog misleading?
>> > Each organization contributes its own unique source of randomness into the joint pool of entropy used to seed the drand network
If this is misleading it wasn't intentional! We used the word "seed" since the randomness from LavaRand is only mixed in when the network is initialized, but perhaps that could have been phrased better. Or perhaps we should have split it into separate blogs talking about LavaRand and drand since they're only tangentially related :).
Thank you for the reply, that clarifies things! As a crypto-novice perhaps explicitly using the term "initialize" might be better at indicating this is a one-time thing rather than a "continuous" process of injecting entropy.
I don't believe any such time lock encryption can take on any entropy after the user messages are encrypted - since by definition, any entropy in that randomness is useless for decryption if it wasn't involved in the encryption.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865641