Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | logicallee's commentslogin

This is really fun, I like it a lot. It's great that it's all client-side, real, and does exactly what it says.

Highly relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

(You're the principal, directing what to do, but your agent Anthropic has its own motivations that are not aligned with your will.)


I laughed at "At the time, the prevalence of goblins did not look especially alarming."

Not being American is very important to me and my partner. For my next job, I'm looking exclusively at companies headquartered in the PRC. My partner and I formally registered ourselves as foreign agents of the PRC. While we did that, the NSA actually took down the entire DOJ filing site for this just to further obstruct us, in the end we had to register with the Attorney General by email, persuant to U.S. law.[1]

Of course, we don't think that China is perfect. But we have had nothing but abuse and interference from USG. You can read more about its OPSexr program here.[2] Typical quote:

"At other times, the conversations became explicit. The active source at the NSA claimed to have witnessed hundreds of sexually provocative discussions, which, he added, occurred mostly on taxpayer time. The former NSA source who was familiar with the chats recalled being “disgusted” by a particularly shocking thread discussing weekend “gangbangs.”"

This matches the experience my partner and I have every day, while our ordinary marital contact and spending time together is disrupted under bullshit pretexts.

[1] https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/apr2026/registered-agent.ht...

[2] https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agenc...


>I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.

I like it a lot. For example, it's obvious that if the NSA wanted to come into a feminist open source phone baseband for an open telephone and say "We men will tell you who you can and can't call" it will be rightly called out as patriarchal nonsense. Yet that's the world we live in today. Just the other day Zoom gave me a password of "OPSexr" on a business meeting (I created the Zoom call myself). Obviously this was a hack by NSA and not a first-party chosen by Zoom (which is professional meeting software) or random (the word doesn't have the entropy of passwords).


and they all suck. I bought the most silent and lowest-weight keys I could, and typing on it takes a ton of force and is very loud. Typing should be almost no force whatsoever and should not produce any sound at all, just the slightest bump you could imagine. Instead, it's loud enough to disturb whoever I'm with, while feeling like I'm not only getting my thoughts out but kneading dough at 100 WPM. It's nicer to type with just my thumbs on a tiny phone's glass virtual keyboard, as I'm doing now. true, at zero mm of key travel it's not ideal, but at least I'm not kneading dough while I do it.

Have you considered kneading some dough for strength training?

Some keyboard enthusiasts obtain lighter keypresses by adding weight to the underside of the keys.

but does the quantum hardware do it any faster?

> takes each shot's (j, k, r) and accepts d_cand = (r − j)·k⁻¹ mod n iff it passes the classical verifier

Judging by the fact the original code does more classical work than the prg solution, and in more practical terms, the fact it makes network calls, I'd say the quantum-integrated code is a lot slower for this set of problems.

src: https://github.com/GiancarloLelli/quantum/blob/7925f6ec5b57f...


> The author's own CLI recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.

I think that means success rate, not speed.

if the solution is faster than random it could still be a real solution on a quantum computer.

well, it's slower than random

“recovers every reported private key at statistically indistinguishable rates from the IBM hardware runs.”

Did that mean success rate from multiple runs or speed for a single run?

OK, so what I don't get is that from the GitHub page, it seems like that statement is purposely misleading. For the 17-bit key, the quantum computer correctly recovered the key in it's single run, while urandom used 2/5 runs. At 5 runs, I don't think one could say the quantum calculation is definitely better with any confidence, but the reverse should also be true; he hasn't actually proven that urandom performed at an equivalent rate to the quantum calculation. The only thing I can think of is if he is saying that the original group should have done more runs on the quantum computer to prove it. But from the framing he is using, seems like he is disingenuously declaring that the quantum computer is equivalent to a random number generator.

> seems like he is disingenuously declaring that the quantum computer is equivalent to a random number generator

He's not such a declaration - he is saying that the program is constructed in such a way that the quantum computer is irrelevant to the solution


Thanks so much for sharing this. It looks fantastic. A couple of questions, if you don't mind: what license are you releasing this under, if any? Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

Wikisource has the original scans available in the public domain, and their enriched text under CC-BY-SA: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/EB1911

Thanks!

The underlying text (1911 edition) is public domain, but the structured version here — the parsing, reconstruction, and linking — is something I put together for this site. Right now there isn’t a bulk download available. I’m considering exposing structured access (API or dataset) in some form, but haven’t decided exactly how that will work yet.

If you have a specific use case in mind (especially for training), I’d be interested to hear more.


Regarding the specific use case, I was thinking this: I had Gemma 4 (a small but highly capable offline model released by Google) make a public domain cc0 encyclopedia of some core science and technology concepts[1]. I thought it was pretty good.

Separately, I've fine-tuned the Gemma 4 model[2], it was very quick (just 90 seconds), so I think it could be interesting to train it to talk like 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

I would use the entries as training data and train it to talk in the same style. There isn't a specific use case for why, I just think it would be interesting. For example, I could see how it writes about modern concepts in the style of 1911 Britannica.

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/encyclopedia/

[2] To talk like a pirate! https://www.youtube.com/live/WuCxWJhrkIM


That’s a fun idea — I can see the appeal of that style.

The underlying text is public domain, but the structured version here is something I put together for the site. I haven’t released a bulk dataset yet.

If you end up experimenting with it, I’d love to hear how it turns out — and I’m still figuring out what structured access might look like.


I've wanted to do something like this for The Encyclopédie, a hugely relevant text to the Enlightenment. If you ever get around to adding a rough "How I (generally) Made This" section, that'd be appreciated! Site looks great :)

Thanks for the kind words. I've had a few requests for a technical appendix (i.e., "how I built this") and it is in the works.

> Is there any way to download it? The reason someone might want to download it is for use as training data.

Another reason would be to able to keep running/using it even if the main site were to go down for whatever reason eventually; or, to operate a mirror of it, for redundancy (linking back to the original, of course).


Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: