HackerDigest

Overwhelmed by endless Hacker News feeds? Get the lowdown fast with HackerDigest. We serve up the latest in tech, condensed into quick, easy-to-read summaries. Stay in the loop without the time sink. 🚀

View on Github

Stories

The pro-Israel information war

11 hour(s) ago

The article discusses the efforts of pro-Israel groups, including J-Ventures, to shape public opinion and silence pro-Palestinian voices during the ongoing conflict with Palestine. These efforts include social media attacks, attempts to censor pro-Palestinian content, and pressure on media outlets to provide favorable coverage of Israel. The groups also use tactics such as targeting specific groups of people and coordinating with government officials and tech industry figures to promote pro-Israel narratives.

Top three comments:

### The commenter is reminding others to follow the site guidelines when commenting and to make sure their comments are thoughtful and within the guidelines. They also mention that comments should become more thoughtful and substantive as the topic becomes more divisive, and that there should be no flamebait, name-calling, or snark in the comments.

Author: dang

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is discussing the disparity in online views between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli perspectives, citing statistics from various platforms such as TikTok and Twitter. They suggest that these platforms may prioritize pro-Palestinian views and potentially create anti-Israeli sentiments. They also mention that the majority of US views skew towards pro-Israeli, but the younger generation (GenZ) is more evenly split. The commenter also notes the larger population of Muslims compared to Jews and the absence of pro-Israeli

Author: jdross

Posted: 10 hour(s) ago

### The comment discusses the efforts of a pro-Israel WhatsApp group to suppress pro-Palestinian views and potentially violate US laws on political discrimination. The commenter suggests reporting the group to the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force and mentions the requirement for foreign agents to register when attempting to influence US policy. They also provide links to relevant laws and databases.

Author: Animats

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

Author: anigbrowl

Num of comments: 1122

Score: 692

Verizon fell for fake "search warrant," gave victim's phone data to stalker

6 hour(s) ago

Verizon Wireless mistakenly provided a stalker with a female victim's personal information after receiving a fake search warrant. The stalker was arrested and charged with stalking and fraud, and Verizon has not yet responded to inquiries about the incident. The company is working with law enforcement and offering a weekly email newsletter to address the issue.

Top three comments:

### The commenter explains that forging a judicial order is a simple task and that it is difficult for companies like Verizon to verify the legitimacy of a subpoena. They also mention that there are various ways to obtain a subpoena, such as through federal courts or small claims cases, and that these methods are becoming more common as people become aware of their ease and lack of security.

Author: pseingatl

Posted: 3 hour(s) ago

### A fellow hackernews user shares a humorous comment about Verizon's response to a recent incident involving law enforcement. They suggest that Verizon should have adapted their response in this particular instance and shares their own experience with dealing with legal requests at a small community ISP. They also suggest that Verizon should adopt their procedure of verifying contact information from a trustworthy source to avoid situations like this.

Author: eqvinox

Posted: 2 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is surprised by a detail in a news story about a hacker who stalked a woman he met on a porn website with dating features. They were unaware that these types of dating features were not scams or phishing attempts.

Author: forthwall

Posted: 6 minute(s) ago

Author: Shank

Num of comments: 64

Score: 185

Paving the way to efficient architectures: StripedHyena-7B

9 hour(s) ago

Together Research has introduced the StripedHyena models, which are new efficient architectures for sequence modeling. These models have been evaluated on various benchmarks and have shown competitive results, with a hybrid architecture of multi-head attention, gated MLPs, and gated convolutions outperforming homogenous architectures. The team is continuing to develop theory and synthetic tasks to understand this phenomenon and hopes to push the boundaries of architecture design and scaling laws with further research and development.

Top three comments:

### The commenter is discussing a new architecture that is slightly stronger than Llama 7B and slightly weaker than Mistral 7B for short context tasks. They are impressed with the performance of this new architecture, especially considering it was trained on fewer tokens than Mistral. They commend the team at Together for their impressive work.

Author: kcorbitt

Posted: 7 hour(s) ago

### The commenter notes that in most industries, it is common to release negative news on Fridays and positive news at the beginning of the week. However, with the rise of Twitter, the ML ecosystem has shifted to releasing work whenever it is ready, rather than trying to find the best day of the week. This may be because they are now targeting weekend hackers who can implement improvements released late in the week on Saturdays and Sundays.

Author: icyfox

Posted: 6 hour(s) ago

### The commenter believes that the use of Hyena, which is considered an older version of Mamba, has answered questions about the scalability of SSM. They also mention that the transformer has found a competitor.

Author: bratao

Posted: 7 hour(s) ago

Author: minimaxir

Num of comments: 43

Score: 174

American Chestnut Foundation Ceasing Distribution of Blight-Resistant Seeds

9 hour(s) ago

The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) has decided to stop supporting the development and deregulation of the Darling line of American chestnuts due to poor performance in field and greenhouse tests. They will instead focus on other methods, such as traditional breeding and a new genotyping method, to increase blight tolerance in American chestnuts. TACF remains confident in finding a safe and effective solution for restoring the American chestnut tree and encourages planting of wild-type chestnuts.

Top three comments:

### The commenter clarifies that the headline is misleading and provides the correct title of the article. They also explain that the American Chestnut Foundation is still working towards their mission, but have discovered flaws in a specific line of seeds and will no longer be pursuing it.

Author: dzdt

Posted: 5 hour(s) ago

### The commenter expresses disappointment and curiosity about why a gene insertion went all the way to field trials despite being on the wrong chromosome. They summarize information from a study that found the OxO gene in Darling 58 trees was inserted into a different chromosome than expected, causing a deletion in a known gene. This resulted in performance issues and potential lethality for offspring. The commenter questions why the gene insertion was not verified through sequencing before investing in field trials. They also wonder if the cost of sequencing tree genomes

Author: gwern

Posted: 6 hour(s) ago

### The American Chestnut Foundation is stopping the distribution of blight-resistant seeds due to flaws, and the title of the article should reflect this.

Author: Modified3019

Posted: 5 hour(s) ago

Author: cnntth

Num of comments: 43

Score: 165

Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman's ouster

9 hour(s) ago

OpenAI leaders' concerns about CEO Sam Altman's alleged abusive behavior led to his firing, which was later reversed after employees threatened to resign. However, there are doubts and allegations of peer pressure to support Altman's return, causing turmoil within the company and jeopardizing a lucrative investment deal. Altman's future at OpenAI is uncertain, but he has publicly stated his support for his return.

Top three comments:

### The commenter shared a gift link for others to enjoy: https://wapo.st/3RyScpS.

Author: c5karl

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

### The commenter shares the seven signs of ethical collapse as outlined in a book by Marianne M. Jennings. These signs include pressure to maintain numbers, fear and silence, a young CEO with a larger-than-life persona, a weak board of directors, overlooked conflicts of interest, a company that prides itself on innovation, and a belief that goodness in some areas can make up for wrongdoing in others. The book was published in 2005 and written by a professor of legal and ethical studies in business

Author: INGELRII

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is skeptical of the claim that there was no coercion involved in the signing of a letter by OpenAI employees. They point out that the company was offering a cash out of 3x and that long-term employees likely have more power and influence within the company. They suggest that the employees may have felt pressure to sign the letter in order to avoid being seen as an "enemy" by the CEO, who has a history of manipulative and retributive behavior. The commenter also mentions

Author: vlovich123

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

Author: c5karl

Num of comments: 73

Score: 108

QuIP#: 2-bit Quantization for LLMs

6 hour(s) ago

The article discusses the challenges of large language models and introduces a new method, QuIP#, which uses lattice codebooks and incoherence processing to achieve efficient quantization. The use of random orthogonal matrices and the E8P codebook based on the E8 lattice are explained, along with the benefits of using even integer vectors and smaller codebooks for decoding. QuIP# was successfully used to quantize Llama 1 and 2 models, showing promising results for language modeling and zero-shot tasks.

Top three comments:

### The commenter is seeking clarification on a paper that discusses a new method for running Llama 2 70B with significantly reduced VRAM requirements. They confirm that the output is comparable to the original model on certain metrics and slightly lower on others, but the progress made by the authors suggests potential for further improvement in the future.

Author: SeanAnderson

Posted: 2 hour(s) ago

### A fellow hackernews user shared that the text generation feature on oobabooga has been working for a few days now, with a link to the relevant GitHub issue. They also mentioned that there are a few extra steps needed, with a link to a pull request on GitHub.

Author: lxe

Posted: 1 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is expressing their enthusiasm for a paper they recently read, stating that it is one of the best they have read in a while and has the potential to be significant.

Author: bongwater_OS

Posted: 3 hour(s) ago

Author: jasondavies

Num of comments: 19

Score: 100

'Greedflation' study finds many companies were lying to you about inflation

5 hour(s) ago

A study by IPPR and Common Wealth found that companies were causing inflation to rise higher than costs in 2022, leading to "greedflation." CEOs were using rising costs as an excuse to increase profits, but inflation is now starting to regulate and some companies are even lowering prices to help customers.

Top three comments:

### The commenter shares a link to a study on inflation, profits, and market power, noting that it is an easy read.

Author: didibus

Posted: 3 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is sharing a link to an archived version of a webpage, using the website archive.ph.

Author: abdullahkhalids

Posted: 4 hour(s) ago

### The commenter shared a link to an article about corporate greed causing a significant increase in global prices. The post received 218 points and 172 comments, and the same source was shared in a different URL.

Author: gnabgib

Posted: 2 hour(s) ago

Author: safaa1993

Num of comments: 89

Score: 88

E.U. Agrees on Artificial Intelligence Rules with Landmark New Law

7 hour(s) ago

The European Union has reached a new agreement on regulations for artificial intelligence, marking a significant step forward in the development and use of AI technology. The new law aims to balance the benefits and risks of AI, with a focus on protecting human rights and promoting transparency and accountability. This landmark legislation sets a precedent for other countries to follow in regulating the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence.

Top three comments:

### The commenter shares a link to the official press release from the European Parliament about the Artificial Intelligence Act, which outlines comprehensive rules for trustworthy AI.

Author: Lariscus

Posted: 6 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is expressing concern about falling behind in a technological race and suggests that the best solution is to not participate in it at all.

Author: sakex

Posted: 5 hour(s) ago

### The commenter expresses concern about the potential negative effects of AI being released, but also believes that the current hype around it may be exaggerated. They suggest waiting and observing before making any major decisions about AI.

Author: schrodinger

Posted: 5 hour(s) ago

Author: localhost

Num of comments: 71

Score: 84

Wine 9.0 RC1 – Run Windows Applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and macOS

3 hour(s) ago

Wine 9.0 RC1 is now available, featuring bug fixes and new features such as upgraded vkd3d and support for DH encryption keys. Various issues with different software programs on WineHQ have been addressed, including crashes, rendering glitches, and missing functions. Changes and updates have been made to various components of the Wine software, including libraries, drivers, and functions, with contributions from multiple developers. Additionally, fixes have been made to memory leaks and other issues found by Coverity.

Top three comments:

### The commenter learned that Solaris, an operating system, is still being actively developed and had a recent release in mid-September. They provide a link to the Wikipedia page for more information.

Author: notamy

Posted: 1 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is asking if the software Vivado is compatible with Wine or MacOS.

Author: resters

Posted: 1 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is a dedicated Windows fan, but they have been impressed with the advancements of Linux and are considering making it their primary operating system.

Author: 0xDEADFED5

Posted: 1 hour(s) ago

Author: neustradamus

Num of comments: 17

Score: 69

Tesla Cybertruck's stiff structure, sharp design raise safety concerns

5 hour(s) ago

Tesla's new Cybertruck has sparked safety concerns due to its stiff stainless-steel exoskeleton and unique design. While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has expressed confidence in the truck's safety features, experts warn about limited crumple zones and potential harm to pedestrians and cyclists. The truck's heavy weight also raises concerns, with the European Transport Safety Council cautioning about its potential danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Despite this, Musk claims the truck has passed regulatory review and has already been released to buyers.

Top three comments:

### The commenter is discussing the lack of regulations for pedestrian and cyclist safety in relation to vehicle design. They mention a search for "pedestrian" in the FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards) returns no results and suggest that automakers are not to blame for prioritizing sales over safety. They propose implementing new regulations and mention the new USPS truck as an example of optimizing for pedestrian safety. They provide links to the FMVSS and an article about the new USPS truck for reference.

Author: FriedPickles

Posted: 4 hour(s) ago

### The commenter believes that there is not enough awareness or action being taken to prevent humans from being injured by cars. They suggest that the recent hype around the Cybertruck may bring attention to the issue and potentially lead to a change in public opinion on automobile-pedestrian safety.

Author: throwworhtthrow

Posted: 4 hour(s) ago

### The commenter believes that the criticism surrounding the Cybertruck is exaggerated compared to the potential dangers posed by other large, low visibility vehicles currently on the road.

Author: xnx

Posted: 4 hour(s) ago

Author: dev_tty01

Num of comments: 82

Score: 68

Google announces April 2024 shutdown date for Google Podcasts

10 hour(s) ago

Google is ending its podcasting app, Google Podcasts, in April 2024 and suggesting users switch to YouTube Podcasts. Users can transfer or export their subscriptions, but YouTube Podcasts may not have the same features. Pocket Casts is recommended as a simpler and cross-platform alternative. Prior permission from Condé Nast is needed for any use of their content, and Ad Choices is mentioned.

Top three comments:

### The commenter is discussing Google's history with podcasting apps and how they have a short lifespan, with the latest one, Google Podcasts, being shut down in favor of a new app, YouTube Podcasts. They predict that YouTube Podcasts will also be shut down in a few years.

Author: ForkMeOnTinder

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is frustrated that there is not a seamless transition between Google podcasts and YouTube podcasts. They believe that clicking on the Google podcast icon should automatically open the new YouTube podcast page without any additional steps.

Author: mupuff1234

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

### The commenter questions when people will stop investing in Google's ecosystem and doubts their ability to gain market share in the AI space. They also mention avoiding Google's products due to a lack of faith in their longevity beyond search and email.

Author: strict9

Posted: 9 hour(s) ago

Author: MBCook

Num of comments: 68

Score: 68

HashiCorp Vault Forked into OpenBao

2 hour(s) ago

The Linux Foundation is supporting the creation of OpenBao, a fork of HashiCorp's Vault project, which helps developers manage secrets. OpenBao is being incubated by the Linux Foundation and is led by IBM developers through LF Edge. The project is not officially endorsed by IBM yet, but it is expected to meet certain criteria before graduating. OpenBao was created in response to HashiCorp's decision to put Vault under a competition-limiting license, and it is being developed under an OSI-compliant license to ensure continued access to the technology.

Top three comments:

### The commenter is excited about the creation of a community fork for Vault, as they believe it will allow for contributions that were previously blocked or stalled due to internal politics at HC. They hope that the fork will encourage others to add features that HC was hesitant to include, such as blocking queries and a TPM seal. They also express dissatisfaction with the current Vault plugin model and suggest that the fork could improve it or create a better abstraction. They mention that managing plugins, especially in container deployments, is currently

Author: candiddevmike

Posted: 39 minute(s) ago

Author: geerlingguy

Num of comments: 1

Score: 62

GPS-Gaussian: Generalizable Pixel-wise 3D Gaussian Splatting for Human Synthesis

8 hour(s) ago

Researchers from Harbin Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University have developed a new method, called GPS-Gaussian, for generating realistic 3D images of human characters in real-time. This approach uses Gaussian parameter maps and depth estimation to synthesize high-resolution images without the need for per-subject optimization. The method outperforms existing techniques and can be trained jointly, making it highly efficient.

Top three comments:

### The commenter points out that the title is missing the term "real-time" which is important in the paper's title. They also mention that optimization was a major issue and this new technique will allow for faster reconstruction on various hardware more efficiently. They also mention that GS is a great compression technique and that Meta has referred to their avatar as a Codec.

Author: heliophobicdude

Posted: 7 hour(s) ago

### The commenter believes that the topic being discussed would be beneficial for virtual reality.

Author: ilaksh

Posted: 8 hour(s) ago

### The commenter is wondering where the source of the training data being used is coming from.

Author: nextworddev

Posted: 4 hour(s) ago

Author: rbanffy

Num of comments: 8

Score: 62