skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the chance of being a Boltzmann brain is zero if you can write down "I'm human" on a bit of paper, paper in the room, go to another room and then return to the original room and read the paper saying exactly what you initially wrote. Whilst the memory of writing it may well be false, the paper will not be.

Now, a Boltzmann universe would cater for that - spooky thoughts at a distance :).
Niña Prodigio
Venture returns from tech vs. biotech “decacorns”
The open source equivalent of the rage-quit hehe.
> Job automation underpins the explosion of economic growth we’ve seen since the 1830’s industrial revolution.

What underpinned the explosion of economic growth in the 1830s to 1850s was opium money we stole from china and whale blubber. What underpinned economic growth since the 1850s was oil and population explosion along with dumping large populations in small areas in order to boost consumption.

We know for a fact that automation doesn't underpin economic growth because if it did, Japan and most of europe would be the centers of economic growth. Why has automating Japan lagged so far behind china or the US since the 90s? Their population has stagnated. While China added 300 million more people and the US added 100 million people in that time, Japan added hardly any.

Here are the list of the fastest growing economies. Automation isn't the first word to come to mind when I think of many of these countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

Economic growth is essentially population growth + moving that population to cities so that they can consume more efficiently. If automation truly underpins economic growth, that list of GDP growth rates would be led by primarily america, european nations and a few east asian nations.
A Rust to WASM story featuring wasm-bindgen
Unofficial subreddits are hard to reason about. Within the context of reddit, they are still the most official place to talk about a thing they like. And even worse, those are the people likely to only interact with the "community" on reddit, forming an echochamber where they think the unofficial subreddit's opinion is some sort of majority.

In rust's case, it probably is worth diverting some of the existing manpower for moderating online discussion to reddit. I think that the harsher this moderation is, the less attractive the subreddit will be to the reddit-only echochamber, as an added bonus. But this is only possible because you already have people involved with online discussion on other sites. In most cases, if reddit or twitter keeps talking about you and keeps saying dumb stuff, you just have to ignore it. This is how r/competitiveoverwatch is treated; everyone knows that the stuff they say there doesn't matter, and that they don't represent more than a tiny fraction of the people watching the OWL matches. Even some of the people posting there know it. The players and casters still seem to read it, but for the most part just laugh about how dumb their opinions are.

In this case, I don't know why the maintainer took some redditor's comment so seriously, when they said that they should not write rust anymore. This is just a separate issue that anyone with "fame" has to deal with, ignoring critics who are idiots, nothing to do with reddit really.
It didn't kill jobs in aggregate -- unemployment is at its lowest in decades.

The bank teller jobs might be disappearing over time, but they'll get reallocated.

The point of the article is that that reallocation process can be painful for those affected and increases inequality.
Word, I didn’t take it as a negative either. I just want to eliminate those pain points so you never feel the need to migrate. Do you move to cost-optimize early if a project seems to have legs?
I actually think that basic deep learning is well on its way into the plateau of productivity. It's not going to be used strictly as AI though, just a more robust type of model fitting than traditional ML which required cleaner data and better extracted features.
Great question, and there are multiple explanations that can work, although I disagree with the previous poster:

There is more than one hierarchy of competence. For each occupation, hobby and skill there's it's own hierarchy.
So if there's ~30 hierarchies, approximately half of competitors are going to be in top 2% of at least one.

Edit: and if we're talking about purely monetary measures, have a read: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704409004576146...
There's a reason why downtown Houston has an underground tunnel system for people to walk between buildings to avoid going outdoors.
It's based on glob paths. I think you can specify it at whatever level you want. Also you can use wildcards.
Similar thing happened in Italy after WW2. There's a small wiki entry for it [1] but for those curious I guess a quick google search will reveal lots of related articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Italy#Cold_W...
There is also the tech cycle. When is the last time you heard of a doctor suddenly losing 40% of their salary? Medicine is a licensed field with an artificially constrained supply. So is Law (to a lesser extent). Everything is cool in 1999, not so much in 2002.
Flux – Litigation Markets
They not only don't vote them out, but they double down on their voting patterns.
> The engine miscalculation does not reflect a lack of theoretical understanding - China has been putting people in space for almost two decades. But it does illustrate the national aerospace manufacturer’s lack of experience in designing and building commercial aircraft.

Does this line in a Reuters article suprise anyone else as editorializing? What does COMAC's theoretical understanding have anything to do with the Long March rocket's manufacturer CALT (China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology)?
I'm not sure it's harder. More countries have successfully shot stuff into space than have build an airliner industry (US, Canada, France, Russia, Brazil).
I don't doubt it. And at a statewide level, you'd have to look at news like the small-minded governor excluding legal refugees (something that other very red states like Utah haven't done).

But look up San Francisco's racial makeup vs Houston's and... you can make the case that there's at least a place in the same city for a lot more people in Houston.
So you want to create a upper middle class transient population that is mostly tech workers?

Because if prop 13 is repealed..after 15-20 years of work, the retired tech employees can’t afford annual increase in taxes either.

Or is this just to get seniors to leave Bay Area by making it unaffordable for them?
Nice work as usual BeeOnRope

Now if only I could actually use avx512 in a desktop, been waiting what feels like 5+ years..
For one thing, the post implied that being indoors came with the higher humidity in Texas. But assuming that the poster really did "accept a life spent indoors in air-conditioned spaces" as you reflexively assume, what is this extra high taxation paying for in California that the person wasn't taking advantage of?
Curious, what areas did you find most inciting?
never use the phrase "AI Winter" again. never.
The case for cities that aren't dystopian surveillance states
That's just consumer culture, of which Amazon is an acute representative.
As long as no Prop 13 gets voted in it should be much better than California.

Everyone complaining about policies in California make it sound like Texas is perfect. I'm pretty sure it could use a lot of improvements on its policies. There are some large factors that have had a disproportionate effect on the housing problems California faces and one of those is Prop 13 so it is much better to focus on avoiding repeating those mistakes than making general blanket statements.
Thank you for this comment. We run our startup on DO and seeing news like this always make me wonder if I should start looking for plan B, a new server provider. Your service is outstanding and a transition of 30+ large droplets to some other provider would be painful so I really hope you guys are doing well.
Pope L: Crawl [video]
But I still see people from all different backgrounds interact more in Houston than any other city I have ever been to.
Yes, but I experience meaning independently of those effects.
I think that most people think those effects are what create the experience of meaning.

Boltzmann brains experience meaning too. Not that is does them any good in the way that it does for biological system.

It's not like we have a planet rich in meaning and then the sun swallows the earth and all that meaning retroactively disappears. It just exists in the past, not the future, and I think that is sufficient.

I always thought it was funny when people thought that the heat-death of the universe had moral implications. Like that killing someone means they never existed, or something.
If one can afford to live here I get it - sorry writing during short breaks at work. I don't understand how someone who is young and in an entry level service industry job could make the decision to live in Sonoma County, however with my wife supervising 10-40 seasonal interns a year (shes worked in different sized wineries) I have become friends with a lot of them. I wish them the best but more often than not I see them give up after a year or two and move home. This has led to a lot of well loved restaurants slowly decreasing in quality and closing, or offering limited menus (I eat out only a few times a year so I am not decrying the loss of restauarants, but rather pointing out a visible expression of the rising cost of living).
VR cubicles
You can write a minikanren program that will generate quines.

> We will teach attendees how to use the relational (logic) language miniKanren to write several relational interpreters and reducers capable of automatically synthesizing recursive, symbolic programs, including quines (programs that evaluate to themselves) and fixpoint combinators (such as the famous Y-combinator).
https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2014/program-synthesis-using-...

- miniKanren, live and untagged: quine generation via relational interpreters (programming pearl) (http://webyrd.net/quines/quines.pdf) by William E. Byrd, Eric Holk, and Daniel P. Friedman
That's not necessarily an argument against daycare, it is an argument for high quality daycare.

Studies show that boys with working mothers are less sexist and have more positive relationships with woman in general. Picking up behavior patterns goes both ways.
Go Austin!
If you read my original post it was a straightforward statement about my preferences for myself, and nothing about what I thought the right thing was or what other people should want. That wasn't an accident. I think your heuristics for judging people by their statements might be misleading you about who I am and what I think?

It's a little disorienting to have you relating to me as though I'm deficient in perspective taking, mainly because perspective taking (and teaching others to take perspectives) is literally my profession.

My best guess is that your main point in the last thing you wrote is that I am not thinking of my own relatives and loved ones when I say I want a warts-and-all style obit for myself--that if I took their perspective, and realized it would hurt them for me to receive what I want, then I might change my mind, particularly on the grounds that the obit is actually for them, not for me. Let me know if I got that wrong.
I'm combining servant and Yesod into a single WAI app so that I can serve a web app and provide an API from the same server. For DB access I'm using persistent.
> In fact, Amazon's margins decrease when it pushes prices down.

Exactly. That’s why this guy sounds butt-hurt and far from having any meaningful antitrust evidence.

Retailers always have the leverage that comes from rightfully owning their distribution channel. Amazon, Walmart or the little store in the corner are all in the business of sourcing products and they can set all the conditions on how those things are sold on their side. Pushing prices down isn’t hurting the final customer, so if PopSockets feels that their product is not profitable due to Amazon pricing policies they should not sell there.

This guy is basically saying that he doesn’t like how Amazon treats his business, and to be fair Amazon is probably treating them poorly. But besides that, there’s little to argue.

As Amazon said in their statement he is free to stop selling with Amazon and go somewhere else. His customers can buy the product through other channels.

You only have an antitrust case when you can prove that customers are being hurt.
Pushing prices down and sourcing similar products is not evidence for monopolistic behavior, at least not until you can prove that they are doing this to put your business out and then raise prices on that type of product you produce.

Problem is that this product is so useless and easy to copy that even if you can prove that somehow, it’s hard to imagine a way to claim in the bigger picture that Amazon is building a monopoly on “pop-sockets”. That’s just as ridiculous as it sounds.

...and definitely not defending Amazon here, but this is a very weak angle/evidence to prove that Amazon is engaging in shady anticompetitive practices. There's probably a stronger case somewhere else.
> But I don't know if they continue voting Democrat "to bring back" their old laws and lifestyle so much as they're just used to voting a particular way and continue to do so.

I think the way people vote tends to reflect their beliefs. And generally, beliefs don't change often or drastically.
A lot of products these days are intentionally poorly designed with no longevity. "Planned obsolescence" is the term. Part of moving everything to as-a-service model :)
Not if the rejection is made so difficult, or impossible, or inaccessible, or incomprehensible, or ambiguous, that the consent fails to meet the standard of freely given consent.

Clicking the "ok I consent" button does not count as consent under the law if the user believes they have to click it to use the service, assuming what is attached to that button isn't technically necessary for delivery of the service.

And holding PII for marketing and tracking purposes does not count as necessary, despite any economic argument that it pays for the service. That argument is disallowed.
Elsewhere in the world, it would only affect beachfront property as the coasts recede. But South Florida is literally built on water, a swiss cheese of porous carbonate rocks such as limestone. As seawater pushes through the porous rock, a process called salt-water intrusion, it dissolves the limestone — causing rampant sinkholes all over the state that already are a big problem today — and raises the water table. The Netherlands model will never work for South Florida.
Reminds me of the Chinese milk scandal where people were literally poisoning babies by selling fake milk for a profit of a few cents apiece. This is why you can't just say it's just everyone's responsibility to be careful what they buy, no one has time to run chemical analysis on every single item they take home from the grocery store.
OP didn't say that the wildfires were caused by the homeless. There have been three small fires at an encampment between Santa Rosa and Sebastopol in the last few months: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10578855-181/fire-crew-re...
Interview: How I Saved My Customers over $20M in Telecom Expenses
This is hilarious, yeah in SF the 55 percent taxes i pay really do provide me great public transportation
At least SaaS as a business model is a lot more palatable to me than the OG unicorns' ads and data harvesting.

Generally I don't see why customer-facing technology is supposedly objectively better and sexier and more "real" engineering.
This too was my thought. Does the benefit of publicizing and honoring the firefighters’ effort outweigh the potential damage from increased visits?

> People are urged to not look for the groves, as they might trample young plants.

Let’s hope we’re wise enough as a species to respect this request.
> Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate.

Could you operate at a profit if you wanted to?
> Having grown up here I just see all the traffic and density and lack of breathing room and want to head for the hills.

And that's why so many people live in those WUI areas (wildland-urban interface) which is one of the factors why the amount of property damage (and human lives) has increased from fire risk over the years.
> Now don't get me wrong, we've made a lot of progress, but I wonder if we can get these things to a place better than humans before the next economic recession.

I don't think it's necessary to completely solve superhuman performance to achieve automation of great economic value. Some of the most famous AI achievements leverage a fairly modest intelligence improvement with massive amounts of classic automation. E.g., the AlphaGo policy/value networks, combined with MCTS.

It may also be possible for automation to reliably determine when it's encountering a situation it's going to fare badly in, and then hand off to human telepresence control. It wouldn't surprise me if the first self-driving systems worked that way.
Sonoma county needs to clean up. Rampant drug abuse, crime(prop 47) and homeless encampments everywhere. I can’t even begin to explain the hassle I had to deal with my farm there. My farm business is literally trashed due to Sonoma county’s lack of law and order.
Gray market = not using official supply chain.

This may mean not buying from official distributor for a region, but sourcing from another (ie because another region is cheaper) or bypassing local distributor - this is not uncommon for camera lenses for example (see Adorama).

In this context he seems to imply "any source providing the goods without looking too closely if they are counterfeit or not"
I first heard of this phenomenon the other day from a coworker that lives south of Atlanta, near the major movie/tv production area. People, from what are typically blue areas, are moving in and radically changing the political landscape according to him. He wasn’t necessarily against liberal ideas but his complaint was that they seem to vote for taxes just for the hell of it because every tax proposed is still significantly less than where they came from.

Either way, interesting times.
We moved from San Francisco to New York City after having kids mostly due to housing and public schools.

We miss the city and our friends, but couldn't see ourselves there long term.

New York City is expensive, but there are areas of relative affordability that feel much more accessible, comfortable, and safer than the Bay Area.
Bay Area native here. The cost of living here has always been high, there have always been a lot of homeless people, and crime used to be worse.

The tech industry has metastasized, overthrown the culture, and drained the soul out of the place. The ethos and pathos of the tech industry have undergone a transformation from creation to extraction. We shot for the moon and got surveillance capitalism and the "gig economy" instead.

Now everybody here is "the right type of people". You can be whoever you want, so long as it's sustainable and organic.
> solved tasks are the least interesting tasks.

Yeah, but they also tend to be pretty profitable.
> You can’t really do multiple layers of tunnels with cut and cover.

Sure you can. I ride such a line every week day.

True about the most direct route, but having uncontested right of way tends to make a big difference in travel times. And in grid layouts, where you want to go is closely aligned to how you get there.
I live in Henderson, NV and can at least anecdotally confirm that what you're describing is true. People moving from California, many of whom cite 'safety' reasons, maintain pro-regulation and anti-gun stances, despite Henderson's murder rate being 1/5 that of Oakland, 1/2 of LA, and 1/2 of San Francisco.
Can you give some examples of applications that you think will have big impacts? I see places where current AI techniques can make incremental improvements but I just don't see any applications that really seem game changing. The ones that come closest tend to be dystopian unfortunately, like most applications of facial recognition.
AI is capable of solving complex problems in theoretical physics
What is your bar for 'average users'?

If we're talking project-wide repos rather than entire-org repos, I'd wager the vast majority of projects can use monorepos without special git tooling, and will retain huge productivity benefits vs app/package-per-repo organisation.
Minor note: in footnote [15], the 1974 and 1986 CIA report links both point to the same pdf.
> When the state-of-the-art is 97% on a task, there's only so much room for improvement.

When models commonly achieve 97% on a task, it means it's time to define a harder task, as it's long stopped providing any useful signal.
Difference between 97% and 99.99% in perception is huge for autonomous driving purposes. 300x less likely to cause an accident.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and would say that many folks living in the expensive parts of California aren't even leveraging the majority of what makes it so expensive to live where they do.

I lived in the SF bay area for over a decade, and when employed by the tech industry and spending all my free time outdoors it was very worthwhile.

But whenever I stopped working in the lucrative positions there, the math stopped making sense, even spending all my time outside.

I'm still in California, but a much cheaper part: Joshua Tree. Bought a sizable property in cash, my cost of living is very low and I can still access all the excellent California produce and the coast is only a ~2 hour drive away.

People tend to only talk about the most expensive pockets of CA as if it's representative for the entire state. There's a lot of more rural parts of CA that are very affordable, still beautiful, and not even that far from the ocean.
Exactly. Even if wealth is shared, and all humans technically receive everything they need to live life, that does not mean the world is avoiding assorted moral hazards, such as "human zoo" condition. Nor that the human condition on the whole is optimal.

Also relevant, this short story is a favorite of HN:
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
> Equally, someone gets hit by a car while crossing the road. I don't owe them anything to go help them but society, morality and being decent are these unwritten rules that kind of do force you into owing something.

In most countries they actually have written laws which require you to help in such a situation though.
This is awesome! I want more in Europe as I love Pinball! I'll add the one I know tomorrow (especially there is a nice pinball museum in Rotterdam, NL)

For the maps feature I'll be happy to discuss with you using https://dokomaps.com we're making a platform for anyone to create communities of place sharing!
If you have the money I can’t imagine much better places in the world than Sonoma, Marin or Mendocino county.
Just because you use a computer algorithm to choose the product that your company recommends does not mean you haven't made a choice.
Why not? The only reason I work on personal open source projects is because it's interesting to me. Otherwise, why would I bother?
What if the degree is thought of more like a SAAS software license. While pair and up date, the license is extended. When not, it’s not. Might also be an interesting way to change how degrees are paid for and earned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_the_Living_Planet
Flavors of Kubernetes