skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This feels a bit straw man like in that proponents of longtermism appear to be aware of improbable outcomes and of discounting and things like that.

One of the problems seems to be that even if you agree that the utility of unlikely but great outcomes for humanity in the far future is something like (very small probability of perfect scenario) x (very small discount factor) x (very large utility), people might disagree fundamentally about the order of magnitude of all three quantities, which will lead to vastly different judgements?
I'm curious whether this sort of argument is too naive, too, and whether there are convincing arguments why this ought not to be the case that are prevalent in the longtermist community?
> We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors.

Comments like that will kill web3 on it's own. No need for anti-web3 people to get involved.
I can say with certainty that failure to be systematic about idea generation has led to many failed projects that otherwise could have been great successes. These projects were, in hindsight, "almost hugely successful", had we had the correct idea to pivot to. Sometimes only a tweak or an additional feature was required.

Also, a separate comment to this thread:

Edward De Bono's "Six Thinking Hats" is an alternative way of approaching innovative idea generation.

https://www.debonogroup.com/services/core-programs/six-think...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats
Great ideas comes from individuals; But a combination of ideas as a team effort is what usually solves sizable problems.

There may be narrow use cases where the overhead of brainstorming doesn't add any value; but otherwise, I still believe brainstorming is a good way to consider alternatives for open-ended problems.

Collective >> Individuals or 1+1=3
I've made personal contact with various people on HN over the years. I'd be glad to bounce ideas around about your current career or other options, just share your contact info in some way and we'll set up a call.

I was freelancing when I made the move to real estate, so in that regard I was already comfortable in a self-employed role. Many people in tech (myself included) are excessively introverted. If this describes you, you'll want to consider how you feel about a career move where lots of contact with the general public is necessary, and how you'll cope with that for yourself.

Yes, the licensing is straightforward - I'm licensed in two states and am considering getting my license in a third. That said, it's a lot like how we talk about the 10x engineer in software - there's a huge gap between having a license and actually being a skilled professional. The average US agent makes something like $60K a year, whereas the top earners (and of course market matters...) make many multiples of that. Real estate is not a monolith - there are many different directions you can take a career. If you aren't comfortable with being an entrepreneur / self-employed person, you'll have a harder time of it.

Again, happy to talk more about licensing, how to choose a brokerage, finding your niche, etc. Likewise, if you go down that path I'm happy to introduce you to mentors, contacts, etc where possible.
It's amazing how much I have built my career around psychological safety (one tends to admit these things a bit more as we get older)

So yes. If anything can improve your work experience, your productivity , it's psychological safetry

Taken to an extreme it would be sensible to give teams a annual bonus at the start of the year. Give them FU money and so be fairly confident they will say FU when it's needed
yeah, well, I would argue it was a populist movement that brought France, and the US the bill or Rights and the constitution. So it worked at least sometimes.
Not that I disagree that sometimes it did not work out for the better. Pol Pot being an example.
The SD card is on the BOM (it’s on the bottom) but agree that the price for it looks optimistic.

Looking on AliExpress there are lots of unrealistically priced SD cards (1tb for $7!) so I wonder how many of these are just scams where they are formatted to appear bigger than they are, and also if that’s a realistic price that they are using.
No offense my friend, this wasn't directed at your post in particular, I was just venting my frustration for this annoying trend. Besides, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was actually russian :D
We are almost there, Facebook and TikTok have destroyed the reality of many people today, especially teens.
But if we let people decide for themselves, they might decide wrong! And our position is clearly and obviously right! But people are stupid and will listen to lies, so we have to remove the possibility of them being exposed to those lies!

/s, in case it wasn't obvious...

People are more certain of their own position than is warranted. This is true in politics (as C. S. Lewis said, in practice no policy can be more than probably correct). It was true with Covid ("trust the science" when not enough science had been done yet; people talked as if the correct course was obvious and certain, and they were often wrong in hindsight). And it will be true again, and again, and again.

And from that false certainty, people regard contrary opinions/interpretations of the data as not just false, but morally wrong. And then they regard people believing the "obviously wrong" position as a sign that people are stupid and not to be trusted with the facts. (Unlike themselves, of course, who clearly can be trusted with the facts, because they reached the right answers!)

And people don't see the dichotomy between "people are stupid and evil, and can't be trusted with the truth" and "we (who are also people!) can decide what is true, and can be trusted to only tell them the truth". When you point a finger at someone, four finger point back at you...
Abstract: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04272-x
I'm genuinely curious what you mean by this? Is there some nuance I'm missing here?

My take is that he was originally happy with his contract with Spotify, but he now disagrees with how their platform is handling a certain issue, so he is ending his contract with Spotify?
Likely and soon isn't actually doing it. It seems they are kicking this turd down the road hoping that just the threat would make things turn around.
Including this one, ironically.
> If the result was correct but if they didn't like your preferred procedure they would lower your scores. They never could offer a sound reason for their demands. Perhaps they did have a sound reason. They just didn't bother to sell us on it.

The reason was always "because the goal is to see if you've learned this technique, not if you can solve this specific problem". Which is a perfectly fine reason that I sympathized with, though I agree some were poor at articulating it. Where I had issues was when I didn't know what technique they wanted me to use, and then lost points for not guessing it correctly. That part is what always seemed unfair - if the goal is to test a technique, it should always be clear what the intended method is, and they need to explicitly specify it in the problem when it's unclear. The exercise is supposed to be in math, not ESP.
Get outta here. Is it a controversial marketing headline? Brainstorming is a fantastic tool, just use it wisely.
It's not swarmed with bots yet, but I've found reddit to be less reliable in the last year with quite a few suspicious comments popping up for various products.

Reddit is still better but I worry in another year that will no longer be the case.
I think the article’s missing an important trick: Brainstorming establishes a shared understanding (depending on the group dynamics, you might call it a fiction) that the group, not any individual, came up with the idea. That sense of ownership is psychologically important for aligning the group during the execution phase: People are usually a lot more motivated to implement a plan that they came up with, and if anyone challenges the idea, much more eager to defend it.
I would suggest the explanation is similar to the supply chain.

In the interest of profits we have wrung every ounce of every part of the system that runs healthcare. And at the end of all of those elements are human beings. Such systems are unstable. They work but are not fault tolerant at scale because no one ever really looks at the whole system they just look at a part of the system they control. I’m okay if healthcare is more like an a320 as opposed to an F22 because the F22 needs 50 man hours of maintenance to fly and the a320 does it’s thing in a much more germane fashion. Jwst can have 184 single point of failure actuators because it’s the bleeding edge, healthcare needs to have -184.

The problem is we see humans as humans. A machine breaks, it is not perceived as having agency, autonomy, or humanity we don’t blame it. When people die waiting in an er or healthcare personnel are short with patients or quit in droves there is a person whose actions and motives we can question and blame. We understand that experience slightly more and can find ways to question it.

It isolates the problems from view. When no one’s looking at the whole system (and being listened to) no one can shift course. It was not efficient to build capacity for truly abnormal events, so it didn’t make financial sense For anyone to do so. And now nurses are testing and isolating…and. Not just. And.
I think I’d read your biography.
Check the source html, sometimes cmses put dates there
Because most school is forced knowledge work on problems that don't fit the person's problem situation.

When people are free, they learn the math they need for the problems they are trying to solve.

Traditional, compulsory school forces children to solve problems they don't have. See Karl Popper's idea of the bucket theory of mind, or David Deutsch and Taking Children Seriously.
That exactly is the trust problem. Why would trustworthy people even try to gain power, if the public assumes that those in power are untrustworthy and corrupt? And why would those in power remain trustworthy when the incentives are clearly in favor of abusing your power and the public assumes that you will do that anyway?

It's a vicious cycle, but a virtuous cycle would also work in the same way. Reality shapes people's expectations, and people's expectations shape reality.
The Soviet Union has achieved very little since 1991.
Uh, there is a carpenter with a Web site that uses the "3, 4, 5 rule", of course, the Pythagorean theorem.

The first order ordinary differential equation initial value problem

d/dt y(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) )

can be use to model viral growth. Once it kept two crucial FedEx BoD members from walking out and saved the company.

Similarly for the law of cosines for spherical triangles for finding great circle distances.

Linear programming (LP) gets used right along for actual, genuine LP problems and also as a means of approximation for problems that are not linear. The problem of minimum cost flows is a special case of linear programming.

If want to sort keys, e.g., for some positive integer n, if want to sort n numbers into ascending order by comparing numbers two at a time, then heap sort does that in worst and average case in O(n log(n)) and, thus is the fastest possible -- this is from a cute counting argument, the Gleason bound, A. Gleason.

Statistics is important and parts of it are awash in math, not all of it trivial.

The design and operation of the Webb telescope is awash in math.
Who is he even arguing against, Hari Seldon?

It's common for people concerned about an impending AI apocalypse to use this sort of "longtermist" argument. For example this article:

https://oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2019/08/25/is-ai-safety-ra...

If we reduce existential risk by mere one-millionth of one percentage point, it will be worth more than 100 times the value of saving a million human lives. The expected value of any other good actions­ – like helping people here and now – will be trivial compared to even the slightest reduction in existential risk.

Similarly, the recent book The Precipice argued that the most important risk for humanity is AI risk because the badness of AI destroying all humanity is much worse than, say, climate change killing off 99% of humans.
I find this sentiment profoundly confusing. Admins are also just mods. Being angry at mods and admins? Not confusing. Being angry at neither? makes sense. Being angry at one but not the other? I don't get it.

Maybe it's because I run a few websites off of a machine in my basement, and those are where I say the things I want to say. If another website wants to ban me then fuck 'em I'll say what I want from my own IP/domain. I have never felt particularly entitled to say whatever I want on other people's in-house implementations of vbulletin. I understand that platforms are different, and commented elsewhere on that stuff, but <img src="old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg">
Sounds a lot like this saying that’s been going around the last few years:

“Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.”

Side tangent- I tried to find the author of that quote thinking it has to be a ‘wise man’ of the past (given that it’s not a gender neutral statement), and it looks like that it’s actually from a post apocalyptic book from 2016 that soon after became a meme.

Source: https://www.slanglang.net/memes/hard-times-create-strong-men...
A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden
The term is "churn" and honestly I shouldn't have to explain how encouraging churn is different from having a time limit.

I'm not defending the churning tactics in any way, they're very morally wrong.
Show HN: Thor-Event, like Redux but with events
Army spouse uses Apple AirTag to track down shady moving truck driver
> That said, one prevelent trend is that whatever is in vogue is probably being over used.

This is a great rule of thumb, and could likely be applied to itself even, if it become a widespread sentiment.

It's not quite the same thing, but I think there might be a relationship to Goodhart's Law. It may also partially explain why Agile has gone so wrong for so many companies.
Republicans have faced fewer accusations because they have not implemented as many of the restrictions that public health experts have called for.

It's hard to break rules that don't exist.
It would be nice to have. One thought I can't shake is how wasteful the world is with perfectly good hardware that's "obsolete". For instance, I have an iPhone 5C that I practically can't give away which is way more powerful than the idea presented here. But because the hardware is undocumented and locked down and it's stupid difficult to replace the battery, there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to turn it into a cheap computer, even though it really should be possible. (To be honest, I'd probably still use it as my phone if it still received security updates and I could replace the battery)
Yeah, there's something to be said for playing an online game in which everyone has the same exact hardware (mostly). This is coming from a person who occasionally plays competitive games on a 2012 Thinkpad and comforts himself when he loses by saying, "it's ok, their computer cost as much as a used car. Don't feel bad about losing".

Happy 10th birthday T-530, 1 decade and still trucking!
I don't get it. You're saying there were a bunch of happy, well fed people back then, just kicking back and relaxing.... and not having sex?
Monzo is another company which does this incredibly well, and wrote a public document on it:
https://monzo.com/tone-of-voice/

I'd love to read more on this topic - how companies learn to do this, and then go about establishing it internally, so that it becomes part of their brand and culture.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm#

If people want to explore some "crude" (CDC's word) data by age group. Cherry-picking some data, there were 10-15 times more drug overdoses then covid deaths in 2020 (Q2-3) for 25-34. Similar ratios for 15-24. And I'm sure it'll be the exact opposite for higher age groups or if you focused on people with comorbidities. Yet these demographics are grouped together without any nuance when it comes to mandates. Note this is pre-vaccine and pre-delta so not really representative of current state of things.
Due to budget cuts the only prize I can offer is back pain and a vague sense of nostalgia for a time when modems made a weird noise and your wierd aunt wasn't on the Internet.
The maps themselves are fantastic if you live somewhere covered by the latest round of updates. I think the business data will always be trailing Google Maps though. Google has their entire search engine to grab data, they crowdsource data via app notifications, and in cases where businesses are updating their own info it wouldn’t surprise me if they do it on Google Maps and just don’t bother anywhere else.

Siri does continue to be lame though. Driving is the one place I would want to use it for anything beyond timers and reminders, but I don’t dare because I can’t check to see if it’s doing anything dumb. Last time I tried to text someone while driving using Siri, it got picked up by my Apple Watch, which worked great, but also my phone, which picked the same message up and promptly sent it to a totally different contact.
> Tesla makes improvements at a much faster rate than conventional car companies

Is that really the case? I heard their motors are pretty good. But the batteries are mostly Philips and there is a lot of innovation happening thorughout the industry. The software is in parts miles ahead, but their latest UX dicisions are getting dumber and dumber.

> shown that agility and shipping quickly is a better practice than waiting for perfection.

I would argue there is a sweet spot, which Tesla is obviously missing.

> You might say "well agility is great, except in my self-driving car" but I would remind you that people said the same thing about security software, infrastructure, etc. and were wrong every time.

Except for example with the 737 MAX development or the whole "a package got deleted from npm and broke everything". There is a reason for LTS-versions and thorough testing, especially when lives are at stake. My best counterexample to your argument would be Teslas "Full-Self-Driving". It's next year for the last five years, totally insecure and unpredictable, killed people and isn't even better than what the competition has to offer.
The wit of this comment is underappreciated.
Bill Ackman's Pershing Square purchased 3.1m shares of Netflix
So much of modern math education, especially once you get into high school, is centered around _computation_ instead of _reasoning_, so you get a lot of kids who spend an entire year doing random integration problems or charting a bunch of useless functions/conic sections instead of really understanding fundamental structures, reasoning, problem solving, etc. It's just rote computation, but we have computers for that now.
Following Recipes
> traditional media

I see this distinction made all of the time when this topic comes up. The mainstream media is untrustworthy. Corporate media has an agenda. Legacy media is corrupt. These qualifiers all imply that there is some non-traditional, non-corporate, non-legacy media that does not have these problems. Yet whenever the people making these distinctions are asked who/what these superior alternatives are, the answers are always underwhelming, or outright laughable.

So who are these beacons of truth you allude by contrasting the "traditional" media?
I can understand the average person not using the math we learn in school, but it’s crazy to me that even the average engineer doesn’t beyond basic arithmetic. I don’t mean this in an elitist sense but I feel like I was the same way a couple years ago. Until one of my mentors kinda guided me through the thought process and understanding the math is extremely powerful and useful.
> Producing novel observation platforms is going to be expensive regardless of which platform, because of launch costs.

This is exactly the point: launch costs are coming down, and there is widespread anticipation that they will start to plummet as the next generation of launchers comes online. If/when Starship (a) becomes available + (b) has any significant competition, launch costs could plummet by an incredible factor.
Yes, it's the major institutions. And it's the mainstream media (I guess those count as major institutions). And it's social media.

I object to your trying to paint it as if it's only mistrust of major institutions. It's untrue to the article to limit it like that.
Think depends where. I got lucky used a 16" MBP spec'd out and XPS 15 spec'd out.
I don’t think this is specific to Apple - I think it’s the practice of the entire industry.
Nick Bostrom for example who seems fairly respected with some money behind his institution.

Ideologically 'longtermism' functions the same way as arguments about 'existential risk'. They're often highbrow ways to justify authoritarian stances. To give you a concrete example, Bostrom's writing contains a lot of arguments along the lines of "if there is an infinitesimally small risk of some terrorist making a bioweapon that wipes out life on earth, it's worth to introduce widespread surveillance measures".

I'd agree that it's not a particularly common belief system and it's not like the government will be full of draconian longtermists but it has gained some traction.

https://cherwell.org/2019/04/27/mass-surveillance-could-save...
Are we blaming traditional media companies for the content overload shitshow we now find ourselves living in?

If NYT could provide a remedy, what would that remedy even look like?

Wikileaks' ascendancy was on the narrative that traditional media is broken and untrustworthy. At the time I brought into that and the premise that they were disrupting this traditional industry and remaking it better. Now I realise like alot of IT focused disruption (including disruption I've worked on directly myself as an IT practioner), all they achieved was recreate the very thing they sought to disrupt, but poorly and generally worse version of it.

Older and wiser now and I realise personally that the trust problem is something much more than something for 'others' to step up and fix, but substantially in how I myself consume content.
I came to the same conclusion. At my job I learned that one of the important disclosures in his leaked documents wasn't true, it simply did not exist and there was no possible way for it to exist, pretty conclusively*. While this doesn't prove he was a foreign agent, it is certainly very suspicious.

I'm not willing to say more, and I don't expect my comment will convince anyone here. But I assume there are a fair number of other HN readers working at big tech in positions where they can look into some of the claims in the leaked docs themselves, and draw their own conclusions.

* well, assuming no functioning government quantum computers a decade ago, and assuming P != NP.
This was long requested from the security community, so hopefully they keep it up going forward! This would probably go a long way in terms of rebuilding their developer trust.
I like the strategy Adam Savage follows: Buy the cheap tool! If it breaks, throw it away and buy the expensive one instead.

This is a self-optimising strategy where he has cheap tools where it doesn't matter, and expensive tools where it does.

While this kind of approach can work very well, it doesn't translate well to the world of "corporate drone doing software development on company equipment" because:

1. Development don't have a nice clear "break" signal, they just introduce friction. Lots of small frictions, each maybe just a fraction of a second, too difficult to measure.

2. The entire problem is that unlike Adam working in his own shop, in charge of his own tools, most corporate developers get very little choice in their tools.
That doesn't explain the order