skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have no ‘claims’ to make; this is public, easily accessible, free information.

CDC running vaccination dashboard:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...

CDC Breakthrough Case Investigation and Reporting
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...

As of 9.7.2021, of approximately 178M Americans fully vaccinated, there have been 14,115 breakthrough cases requiring hospitalization or who died. I’ll leave it to you to calculate that percentage.

For those familiar with the usual limitations of data collection, it’s clear there is no ‘perfect’ count of breakthrough cases, so hospitalization/mortality are the most concrete data available.

However, there is reporting beyond just those two categories, so the CDC estimates .04% of those fully vaccinated develop breakthrough cases.
If they have feelings indistinguishable from humans, as you've put it, then that is not an unconscious AGI. Quite the opposite.

It's not clear to me that you've understood the distinction between conscious and unconscious AGI.
> I think the really salient point here is that we have no idea what "consciousness" is and thus we have no idea how to create it.

We have no idea how to even detect/check for consciousness, let alone create it. Is a piece of rock conscious? A flower? A tree? Bugs? Animals? Other people?

With other people, we assume they are conscious, but we cannot be absolutely sure.

We have no idea and more importantly no good objective scientific way to check/prove that any entity does or not does not have consciousness.

Without a way to check for it, how can we be sure whether we have created it or not? Maybe my phone is conscious, who knows..
Source Code for iOS App to Record Daily Sun Intake
Giving more power to those abusing it is not going to create trust.

Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.
I doubt. Forget citizenship, the US is not processing permanent residency for its employment based applicants, many of which are MDs working in hospitals. The backlog spans more than a decade and if the applicant passes away, their family is subject to self deportation. The backlog is due to antiquated per country caps which result in prolonged waiting times for populous countries (I am personally waiting for the last 11 years). Forget citizenship, forget changing legislation to give them green cards faster, the agency (uscis) is poised to waste 100,000 of such green cards this year (which cannot be recaptured without legislation next year). These numbers would otherwise be useful for applications whose petitions were approved up to 2013. Truly dystopian.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-100-000-green-cards-at-ris...
I wouldn't compare Blablacar with Uber. Most drivers use the service once a month to cover fuel cost and meet people during occasional trips.
What defines something's "moral value"?

What is "suffering"? Is it not just a signal that triggers certain pathways in the brain? Could it not be built/simulated? Is suffering necessary for something to be considered conscious?

What does it mean to "experience" something?
One thing I've struggled with is some devices like to use this connection metric to determine when to switch from wifi to cellular, or switch wifi networks, or disable it completely (Android, iOS, Windows.) There have been many times where I'm actively doing maintenance or troubleshooting my network, and the loss of Internet access will completely kick me off my LAN.
Books for Ambitious Young People
Solidity isn't actually that bad language in practice; it's a very simple language.

The EVM on the other hand is harder to justify. :)
I also remember the article. I think he smoked in an airport and said nearby people overreacted (his words paraphrased) like a woman clutched her child. And maybe the airport security came too?

I really want to read it now. But can’t find it by Google.
Less machines, less maintenance, less pollution, less taxes.
Garbage collectors are explicitly mentioned in the article and the original article in French.

I'd like to see data to back your claim that it is hard to recruit for that job in France. I'm far from convinced and in fact in some French cities it is a very coveted job because it is well paid taking into account the low number of hours (famously source of a long conflict in Marseille where they are paid 35h per week but usually work 15h and go on strike when attempts are made to increase number of hours actually worked...)
The quails were punishment. They complained about not having meat to eat even when God was sending them magical bread from the skies. So he sent them a plague of quails, so to speak.
I maintain an account only so nobody can impersonate me to others.
From the first article:

> “The chambers are secure and there is no danger for the personnel or the local population,” Vattenfall said in a statement released on Thursday

I don't see how that has... anything to do with anything. Proper inspection revealed this problem and it's been rectified. Mission accomplished.

> the infamous old picture of a loader dumping barrels into a pit in the Asse II salt mine

> while this happened decades ago

Right, again, I don't see how this is relevant to modern nuclear handling. That's a cleanup effort from poor procedures from decades ago, and it's been pretty well contained. Compare that to the current cleanup efforts of decades of fossil fuel burning, and the effects that has had.

I don't see how any of this is an argument against nuclear.
I dont actually see a reason to believe that _any_ of them would be telling the truth _ever_. There's no incentive to be honest and there's plenty incentive to not be.
> Even more disappointing is not that they're doing this but that nobody is taking these platforms to court over it in a meaningful way.

Average citizens don't have the money needed to fight big corporate lawyers.

FTC, FCC, SEC, etc are all neutered in will and in budget.

Will nobody rid us of a corrupt collusion between government and corporation?
As programmers or office based workforce, the worst hazards might be carpal tunnel syndrome, bad back from bad posture and maybe an upset stomach from a bad coffee.

I have known plenty of young guys in the UK who went on these fly in fly out jobs on gas or oil platforms in Australia, as it's a relatively uncomplicated way to get a well paid job (the only good thing about it) due to easy access to Australia, being commonwealth etc.
Some of them turned into literal cripples within 2-3 years, others half cripples requiring re education or placement in a less physically demanding job.
It's not the same doing this once for a weekend and then classify it as "not so hard" and go out there, work in 100 deg heat or sub freezing temperatures every day, rain, wind etc.
It grinds down a body slowly.
> Your resume should be submitted as a .pdf file, nothing else is acceptable

Given how I have seen that pdf-to-text ATS systems sometimes generate a completely blank set of text out of a text-rich pdf, no. A docx is perfectly acceptable.
Microsoft just forced all of their office suite file extensions to look at their MS Office... which I don't (shouldn't) have installed. I happily use LibreOffice. But suddenly things are going to different apps!

User Friendly, as long as by "friendly" you mean "actively sabotaging"
Well that's the question of solipsism. You don't know that I'm conscious and I can never prove it.

However, I can offer you a reason to believe I am conscious, which is that my brain is very similar in structure to yours. That's not conclusive evidence, but it might be enough to persuade you.
Completely agree. Universal healthcare would empower a lot of entrepreneurs, make it easier to attract talent for smaller companies, and free me of a completely ridiculous amount of paperwork and oversight each year. If someone told me, as a business, I could just pay a tax and know my employees had access to the same quality of care as everyone else, I'd sign up in a heart beat.
> You are no longer used by social media, you start to use the tool.

This is the key. Either you use technology intentionally or it uses you. You don't have to quit altogether, but it's important that you use it as a tool.

I wrote about this from a different angle - in my view, the problem can be isolated to feeds[0]. They encourage consumption over action, take you in unwanted directions and induce FOMO through overchoice. If you can eliminate them, these services magically become tools rather than escapes.

[0] https://suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
And the military is the pawn of a corrupt State Department, national security elite, and military industrial complex, which renders moot the mostly honorable conduct of people in the military.
> for garbage collectors?

If these people stop showing up for a month, you'll find out just how essential these people are. If it is hard to find people to do this domestically, then offering citizenship to attract foreign workers is a good idea.
I feel the same, for the most part. I quit social media during the pandemic early on and didn't even post to say I wouldn't respond anymore. I didn't delete my account, I just deleted the apps and I no longer visit any of the sites. I never blogged about it, and while I'm open about it and have told a few people directly so they would use alternative paths to contact me, it just doesn't seem like a story I need to share widely. I realize the irony in saying that while writing this comment.

Point is, I found that social media was mostly feeding a need I had to be "on display" or "performing" that I used to get in person pre-pandemic by "holding court" in group settings and leading interesting conversations. After making that realization, it caused me to rethink the behavior altogether. I still comment on HN and read HN daily, but this is basically the only site I go on now that's akin to social media. Blogging about quitting social media would have just been me doing this same behavior in another pathway. To a large degree, I feel like that's the "point" of social media. To make us crave attention and to act out specifically to get attention and it's bled into everyday life and in-person interactions.
I see this statement repeated often but I have never had this happen - not even once. I use Windows Pro and don’t do anything special either, I just apply Windows updates. If this is happening, I wonder why it is not happening to me.
I'd hoped there was a system in place where Google only locks down the account until the user turns 14 (with the birth date info kept), but... they just locked them down? Man.
This is why NFTs are a fundamental scam and just like the artwork that is stolen, NFTs can be 'stolen' by saving the image on the web-page.
I recall Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon to have lied a ton.
> Or sometimes more commonly

You're describing the same thing I was :)

> Imagine having to choose between loading mouse drivers, or loading sound drivers.

Indeed. This is why I don't get when people look back to DOS and say "wasn't it great".

Also the hell of having to configure sound card drivers. The commands that needed to be entered precisely with no clue about why things don't work if they don't. You'd often end up spending hours, days or weeks just getting something simple working. And most people didn't have internet access then so you couldn't just look up the problem on Stack Overflow. People moan about Bash scripts being hard to parse, autoexec.bat was a thousand times worse to work with.
> even Wikipedia as well

In my case at least browsing Wikipedia is an assumed guilty habit, just like coffee.

What usually happens is that I browse /r/soccer or something similar and I get to the wikipedia page of a specific (mostly European) football league, like the Dutch Eredivisie or the Norwegian first league. Once on that page I click on a specific team (let's say Utrecht, Molde or Groningen) and before I know it I end up reading about the Hanseatic league or about the Spanish dominions in the Low Countries in the 1600s.
Hard to design a policy that is beneficial to all possible folks affected by that policy, especially when the interests of some stakeholders are in conflict.
Always worth linking to Aaronson's teardown of IIT:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

That said, the authors are probably not ignorant of IIT. Even if they don't yet make testable predictions, I expect they're just building the conceptual scaffolding needed before they get rigourous. We'll just have to see if it amounts to anything.
it's been neat to see the trend of languages moving toward allowing more compile-time code execution stuff like this
Yeah I gave up reporting. I’ve reported some people being extremely racist in comments, no action in either case. It’s either moderated by racist people, some poor AI or “rand()%2==0”
France is a nice counterexample to this. Nuclear is usually used as a buffer for needs and production variations.

In fact, modern Combined cycle natural gas plants are less controllable than nuclear ones.

(That being said, given that the cost of a nuclear plant is mostly independent from its energy output, why would you build wind farms if you already have nuclear plant? Except for political reasons of course)
I recommended it in a similar discussion before, but Cal Newport's "Digital Minimalism" offers reasonable ways to introduce intermittent fasting patterns into your social media consumption vs quitting cold turkey.

Some sample strategies to adopt:

1) Mobile sites only, never apps. Always log out when done to increase the friction of subsequent logins. The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet.

2) Even better: computer access only, never mobile. Your phone is always around, unlike your PC. Set a time slot (20 min or so) when you know you're around your computer. Social networks really excel at this pattern of usage. You'll get the most important stuff, fluff relegated to the bottom of the feed, which solves the FOMO and shield you from the rest. This can be daily first and then cut down to whatever pattern you feel like (Newport himself claims he catches up on social media once a week).

I am sure I am butchering some of his advice, so worth reading the book.
It is, but it's wrong.
Not true. My brother in laws wife is Costa Rican and was able to get a job doing similar work. She’s here legally and a permanent resident but not a citizen.
This is reasonably straightforward if you're dealing with a robot that is indistinguishable from humans but I think it can get complicated as you get further from our place on the evolutionary tree.

Why do humans (generally) treat mammals (especially those selected as pets) differently from, say, insects? People think nothing of swatting mosquitos but most would find wonton killing of pet species as morally abhorrent.

If it could be proven that, say, mollusks or insects have every bit of consciousness and capability of subjective suffering as humans, would that change the way we think about the above? I would say it probably would in part because of how we use consciousness/suffering to define moral value. The difference being we mostly use rough heuristics now to gauge the consciousness of other animals rather than a scientifically defined method.
What purpose does citizenship actually have?

Why does it need to be such a huge deal, and why is it's difficulty to attain (unless you accidentally got born there) such an important aspect of it?
The Wikipedia page is a hit job. I looked at these supposedly "ad hominem" criticisms. Basically they are about a guy on Twitter ("Health Nerd") and boil down to these claims:

- He calls himself an epidemiologist but is actually a student (no PhD) who has barely published anything.

- The guy's criticisms of Ioannidis' work aren't technically valid.

- He is a columnist at the "American Council of Science and Health" but doesn't report that as a conflict of interest.

Despite this, Ioannidis goes out of his way to say nice things about the tweeter, like "The Twitter account has interesting, smart content with strong advocacy, often supporting worthy causes".

This dispute seems fairly typical of the science world. Things are in one moment totally unacceptable and terrible, like "armchair epidemiologists" commenting on things they aren't specialists in, and in the next moment pointing out some rando on Twitter isn't a qualified epidemiologist is "unusual" and an unacceptable ad hominem attack.
SpaceX doesn't really use carbon fiber much just FYI.

And of course literally any company is based on the whole history of technology.

You might say that SpaceX only exists because rich people in China wanted to see fireworks (and there was likely state involvement).

But equally does SpaceX depend on a long existing private market and centuries of private investment into manufacturing, incremental improvement in all related technologies and millions of experiments and different things tried.

This arguments are kind of tiered by now.

Its true that the way European state bureaucracy works makes companies like SpaceX unlikely. Its equally true that part of US ability to have such company is based on defense spending over the last 100 years.
> Scientific consensus is "when almost all scientists in this speciality believe this" and takes a lot of time to reach.

Scientific consensus also happens via peer reviewed summaries of research in a particular domain.
A Photo-Booth Portrait of the Artist as a Young Nincompoop
Which is really smart because those people will remember they were valued by the government.
Why can't users moderate the post so that Facebook does know about the animal torture? -5 Animal Torture
Because of its network effect. Removing facebook, in a way is removing members of our connection circles.
It is exactly what you would expect from such concentration of power and influence.

What is actually surprising, are the number of people who aren't aware of this fact or more likely find it appealing because the tech giants enforce their point of view most of the time.
This is 100% the case in Sweden. Since Uber is a ride service/taxi they are just like any other taxi company, of which there are hundreds (Taxi has one simple definition and it's to offer rides to the public for money). Since there are no artifical caps on number of taxis such as medallions, all that's required to run a taxi is to have a special drivers' license and a certified vehicle.

So all Uber drivers are taxi drivers and all Uber vehicles are taxi vehicles. Simple.

If Uber tried to somehow do taxi services without their drivers having taxi drivers licenses or their cars being registred taxi cars, they'd be laughed at.

Everything is really really simple once there is no taxi monopoly or medallion system.
> I was a smoker for many years and the sociability is a huge factor that doesn't get much attention, and is the only thing I miss about it.

The best part about having to go outside for a smoke is you end up standing next to people outside of your normal work hierarchy. You get to have 1v1 conversations with OTHER managers, and people higher than you - whoever at a very casual level. The benefits of this is enourmous. I certainly talked more to our director of IT by smoking than I ever did with my own boss.
Same, I've reported a ton of death threats only to be told they're not in violation. Only for my mum to cop an autoban for calling someone a spring chicken.

Their moderation is a complete joke.
That movement was in reaction to populzaried science denial. This could include climate change denial and vaccination efficacy denial (remember, this was all long before COVID).
I put all of the companies you name in pretty much the same basket, and avoid them as much as I can. I don't shop on Amazon, I don't use Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter. I don't use Apple products. I do use Android and Google Docs/Drive/Mail but my next phone will probably be an open one and I could drop the GSuite stuff without too much pain, mostly laziness that I haven't already.
Spotting things the author missed is a low bar for code review. I believe the author assumes a context of high quality, well-tested code (e.g. "added a feature using an established pattern"). Unfortunately, for many teams code review is the only opportunity for improving code quality. If code quality is treated separately ("focus your efforts on activities that build trust, such as training, team discussions, or ensemble programming") then the importance of code review could be lessened.
In secular countries, citizenship often is considered to be something of almost sacred value. Citizenship also comes with very tangible benefits such as the right to vote or - in many cases - entitlement to social security benefits.

That's not something that should be handed out lightly. That said, the current at least partially time-based requirements for naturalization in most countries probably aren't exactly perfect.

The question is: How would one approach such an individually impactful decision differently and more effectively? Immigration authorities often already are unable to adequately cope with applications for naturalization as is.

Further complicating matters by individually assessing if someone is likely to stay in a country probably isn't particularly helpful in that regard without a wholesale overhaul of the bureaucracy involved.
Some of the actions are automated based on some NN algorithm score, and then the appeals are human-powered. They have large third party content review offices that are operated like call centers in which humans review these things. I understand they're real meat grinders to work in.

I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards. I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated problems with this process.
Completely agree. It's not even close! The scythe (when used by an experienced mower) can knock out twice the area as a weed wacker can in the same amount of time, without the noise, smell, most of the maintenance hassle, and it runs on breakfast or lunch.
The bulk of what I do is still, essentially, 'deploy to a folder'. There's some build steps, and a symlink swap from old to new, but that's still what it's doing. And I can still go edit a single file in a folder some place if I need to test/debug something. That's rare, but there are times when production is the only place an issue shows up (or... the only place you can replicate it - usually you can figure out enough from that to replicate locally later).
> the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military

Only in certain quarters. The US military has been subject to deliberate infiltration by both evangelicals (especially Air Force), white supremacists, and proto-insurrectionists for decades. More recently, there has been a seemingly endless parade of officers committing public acts of insubordination, or even incitement to mutiny/sedition. At this point, trust in the military is mostly limited to people who share those agendas.
it seems like the design philosophy of zig is such that it's not going for feature creep/bloat, it's keeping the language very simple and eschewing unexpected complexity