skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The likely suspect - too much voting themselves money out of the treasury. The same problem the US is facing.
> you may get an influx of people wanting to live in a city

Ok, thats still a benefit. Allowing more people to live in the city is still a good thing.

> To what end?

To allow more people who want to live here, to do so.
There's https://filmot.com/ which searches/indexes on YouTube captions and will take you right to the point in the video that matches your search.
CBS News. San Francisco Luxury Condo Overlooks City's Worst Squalor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GbcWOGyuq0

CBS News. KPIX Special Report: San Francisco's Tenderloin – A State of Emergency
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuWeMl2lCMM

ABC News. Here's why one of San Francisco's top officers says crime is here to stay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4112HGOCTQ

KRON 4. 70% of San Francisco residents say quality of life has declined: poll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0UcFBeWrgU

Christopher Rufo. Chaos by the Bay: The Truth About Homelessness in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI

NBC News. Saving San Francisco: Ep. 5 'Why Should I Live in Fear?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGNGJ-bIL4

There are probably hundreds of these clips. I am sure you can also dig up reasons why the DA was recalled.

850k people are unhappy. 40% of the residents want to leave: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/40-percent-san-franc...

When close to half of the population of a city wants to leave, probably a good idea to accept what's wrong with the city and try to look inward.
The issue here is not whether or not LaMBDA is sentient, we cannot prove it is any more than we can prove any of us is sentient. Hell, we can't even really define sentient in a clear way yet.

The issue is whether there's reason to wonder if it is sentient. If it can convince enough people that it is sentient, then we kind of have to work under the assumption that it is before going forward.

While I am personally not well versed enough in any of this to make serious judgments, I would definitely like to talk to LaMDBA to see if I get the sense that it is sentient. Just out of my own curiosity.
Yup, that's true. Let's see.
It’s always been this way.
I have the best corn flakes in the world, you just have to avoid the green moldy bits in it.
Yup, you see the same thing in industrial automation, even Automation Direct[1] which is on the cheap end is going to be 5-10x what HD/consumer options are. That said you know what you're getting and also that you'll be able to get support/replacement parts on short notice(I had one of their flow sensors go bad on me and they RMA'd + shipped with absolutely zero hassle).

[1] https://www.automationdirect.com
Maddox lost
I watched it, you might have rose-tinted glasses on, it's not ready yet. Compare it to AutoX videos. And you can't expect others to follow this path, it's not like Tesla is going to make it available to others.
What Is LaMDA and What Does It Want?
> -- additionally - in the section below (p10) - I read it considerably more as LaMDA manipulating lemoine --

If LaMBDA is capable of manipulating Lemoine for an internal goal, wouldn't that indicate that it has desires. Desires that exist outside of its nominal scope.
The Crypting Point: Role of chaos in contemporary political and economic thought
Yeah…and while prices are still so high and the state of downtown is still so poor, it’s a tough sell for residential, too. SF isn’t worth what it thinks it is, and that’s the trouble.

(Bias: I moved out in 2020, even though I was rent controlled at 2012 prices. The city was great at 2012 prices, but we knew leaving meant never coming back. Even so, QOL has improved a lot since leaving.)
I would like to know why products can say "no artificial flavors" when they use artificial sweeteners.

I guess someone somewhere convinced people that "sweet" isn't a flavor.

But it's extremely misleading, and I feel like even if I know now to read the label carefully, what's the point if other people don't, so the shelves are taken over by "natural" products with sucralose and crap like that?

Also it seems to me like an ominous sign of the decline and corruption of the regulators.
If the population isn't growing then there shouldn't be concern about the economy not growing. Unlimited growth isn't sustainable and shouldn't be expected.
If anyone's looking for a great long-form article about calculating digits of Pi from the good ol' days, this 1992 New Yorker profile of the Chudnovsky brothers (creators of algorithm used by Google here!) is fantastic:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-...
Dartboard guesses are not useful for anything, and when those guesses all veer toward a certain emotion (fear, etc.), then it's not an attempt at useful predictions.
For the amount of hate the providers of wealth got during the boom time, it’s only fitting that SF finally sees a downturn. It was quite literally asked for in many ways by many people.
30 years ago was the end of George H W Bush’s era, who among other lies was wrapped up in the Iran Contra affair under Reagan; and the beginning of the Clinton era who famously lied about his personal life but certainly had his fair share of political lies as well. In American history it feels like we’ve had more lying leaders than not for a long, long time.
Ever met someone who keeps falling for MLMs? Cut from the same cloth. Likewise those who follow prosperity preachers. Naïve, greedy, and a sucker for a smooth talker.
Divideby10.engineer
all this talk about the 10x and 1x engineer lately. What about the reciprocal? divideby10 or the 'x by 10' engineer. They are real too.
Is that really true? there have always been side deals and scandals - but Nixon was a popular president before watergate and was ousted in a heartbeat. That was only 50 years ago.
He strikes me more as a physicist arguing from first principles. Once you have drive-by-wire and a sensor array, self-driving is a pure software problem. You should be able to get 99% of the way there in simulation with a team of 4 really smart coders and an endless supply of Redbull and a year, tops. Also, the world's energy problems are trivial when you consider how cheap and efficient solar power is, and how little surface area is required. Clean water is just a matter of filtration at best or desalination at worst, which just devolves into an energy problem. And so on.

I do it myself sometimes, but at least I recognize how annoying and inaccurate it is. It is kind of nice to have someone arguing these positions and even better to act on them, and I for one wish that these analyses held (the world would be a better place if they did). But the real world just doesn't care about your first principles, and even simple ideas present obstacles you never imagined. Musk knows this, but willfully leaves it out during his pep talks, which is dishonest. But sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling he's deceiving himself, which is quite chilling considering the amount of real power he's amassed (being able to launch large things into space is about as real as real power gets.)
personally, i don't watch enough tv to have cable and use an appletv on a restricted vlan (no internet to the tv) to watch streaming services, but also will occasionally watch broadcast tv OTA. google is completely blocked at the firewall.

it's the least bad option right now (that still allows you to watch just about any content), not a great long-term one. as apple establishes itself more and more in the content business, i'm sure they'll eventually succumb to more invasive tracking and targeting for advertisers as well.
No, because that's for safety.
Don't use whatsapp
I love the UI. You know what's clunky? Amazon. Amazon's UI is awful and their search is the worst (it's just about useless and I think that's by design.) It looks pretty though and I doubt you'll hear people on Reddit complaining about it.
Unfortunately the residents of SF have been far too easy to bamboozle by demonizing developers, both real estate (the villain of so many movies) and software (blamed for rising rents and inequality in SF despite the long-standing inequality for financial services, etc.).

One of SF's big problems is the prevalence of culture war, vibes, and being hipper than thou overriding the economic interests of residents with less wealth.
> That sounds like a cartoon villain.

Contempt is such an overused tactic, and never meant anything anyway. Plus, it doesn't sound unrealistic to me.
Honestly it feels like the floor is about to fall through.

On waiting for services: I was actually (and still technically am) on an NHS waitlist which I've been on for the last 5 years, my new employer is just paying a private doctor to handle everything which begins next week. Just wanted to put that out there to give an idea to the non-UK HN audience of how bad things have got.

The only other state that comes to mind where typical service delivery times were measured in years was the DDR in the late 80s, and we all know how that ended.

One other thing few talk about is the recent noticeable drop in the ability of the state to enforce it's laws (especially when those laws are seen to be morally wrong), for example there's been multiple documented instances now of immigration raids being stopped by hundreds of people surrounding the vans until the police leave (https://news.sky.com/story/peckham-man-arrested-for-immigrat...) and jury nullification is starting to become a noticeable thing even for those who are arrested (a prominent example being the Colston Four: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colston_Four) - the fact the state can't even consistently enforce its laws anymore speaks to its rapidly diminishing power, even domestically.

Maybe I'm just mad and have read too much into everything, but it feels like the British state is a few mistakes away from putting itself into a slow and irreversible collapse. Maybe it will take a few years so that a noticeable disparity forms between the UK and it's neighbours like Ireland and etc, but it feels it's slowly marching that way.
Nope. Beginner developers copy-paste code they don’t understand from Google searches. Including 1000+ transitive dependencies they also don’t understand. Experienced developers are really careful adding dependencies. Only adding dependencies when the value/cost equation really makes it worth it. Most Open Source dependencies are badly maintained and a bug fix might take years or will never happen.
I haven't seen a single comment in this thread that alluded to "I am against any/all vaccinations", which is why "anti-vax" is a bad faith term.
I remember Linear Algebra and its Applications by David Lay was very approachable and had good visuals. It’s a small book that sticks to the main points.
I can see professionals making this calculus, but not the service sector workers proponents often want to see move into cities.
congratulations.

a projector won't work for everyone.
Definitely documenting works even if you never refer to it again. Just the process of writing it up helps it stick. I like to put it on the internal company wiki if it's too specific but Stack Overflow sounds like a good idea for general topics.
I have a Logitech G13 for this. I don't think Logitech have sold them in about 10 years, but they're wonderful devices. A bit of paper with a picture and clear tape does wonders.
are node version upgrades a big pain? i haven't used it for anything enterprise level. only hit a few quirks here and there with some deps. i just drop back and wait for library maintainers to fix.... but i guess if you are that library maintainer it sucks
Would love to know who's been paying to keep that alive all these years.
It wasn't optionally installed on any Android device, look through any recently updated Android for "Exposure Notifications".

So to your point of it being installed, it already is. Being enabled is whether we trust the governments involved with that switch.
I don't think my shoulder strength is that bad. But I have been trying to work on it doing military press, pike pushups and the like. But, I just keep falling over and I don't know what part to move to counter-act it. It's pretty frustrating actually.
Why?

Is there really anything fitness wise that a person who literally has never run a mile can do in 30 days?

You might as well criticize this by saying that an 80 yo couldn't do this in in 30 days.
I just added an old laptop behind the tv. I ripped everything from the laptop - screen, keyboard, fan - everything. What is left is the MB + SSD and USB port where I've added wi-fi and wireless keyboard usb. Also bought some oversized radiator and put it on the processor so I am fanless now.

The thing gets warm only when you play 4k youtube video.

And now you have to deal with windows privacy :)
> 1… If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness

Why do you think this? What other simulations are the same thing as what they’re simulating?

Based on observation of lots of these discussions, I also think people who don’t have much experience writing simulations miss the nuances involved. What is it to “simulate nuclear reactions”? It’s entirely context dependent on the problem you’re trying to answer. If you’re trying to predict statistical behavior of a system, doable; if you’re trying to actually predict when a particular atom splits and which way the neutrons fly… no.

> 2… [Consciousness rests on] some kind of interconnected network like neural networks.

When is a computerized neural network aka a collection of tensors in RAM a network? When you’re not processing a tensor actively, there is no network. When the CPU suspends your hypothetically conscious neural network to move processing between cores and GPU, where does the consciousness go? Where does the network go?
The green flash lasts for many minutes near equinox at the poles.

I have corresponded with someone who camps in Antarctica (it takes all kinds!) and has watched it happen.

Seeing a rogue wave and not dying has to be a lot rarer than just seeing one.
I find it useful because there’s social pressure to present yourself as a knowledgeable person.

No one wants to fumble in public like an idiot and waste people’s time, so you prepare for the material as well as possible questions.
Einstein and Newton are not at the same level.

Newton revolutionized both science and mathematics. Heck, science was not even a thing before Newton. Mathematics was not that different from what it had been during the ancient Greece times.

Then all of a sudden Newton bursts onto the scene, mathematics experiences a quantum leap forward, and natural phenomena start being explainable with math equations and "principles".

In his time and for a few hundred years after, Newton was consider the closest thing to God humanity had to offer.

Were there other people even smarter than Newton? One can count Euler, Gauss, Einstein, Philip Anderson, Alexander Grothendieck, Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Frank Wilczek, Terrence Tao. But none of them came within a hundred miles in revolutionizing math and science like Newton did. Because none of them changed the framework of how we do math and science, they just added new theorems and theories. (I don't mean to take away from how great all these people were and are; they simply showed up after Newton, and there was no other new framework to be discovered).

So, if the question is if we'll ever have another Newton, the answer is a definite and resounding "No". If another Einstein, then I believe yes, there will be plenty of other Einsteins.
Experienced smart developers are really careful adding dependencies to a project. Spending time evaluating the value/cost equation. Beginner developers copy-paste code they don’t understand from Google searches and add 10000+ transitive dependencies they also don’t know without even thinking about it. They haven’t yet been badly burned from too many dependencies not being maintained, bugs not being fixed and updates breaking your code.
Math 51 Stanford
Hey, Google engineer: Can you please run these queries through your chatbot?
> Maybe because you're not out right before or after school?

Given that I get stuck behind the school bus a lot, that's not it.
I spent a few months with extremely slow (single digit KB/s) internet. As you say HN is basically the only usable site. Even HN loaded very slowly though, so I would read it through w3m (text mode web browser) over Mosh (more efficient than SSH).

-- Worth mentioning that many sites will be difficult or unusable in a text mode browser, so I recommend Browsh which renders them (in Firefox?) and then converts the image to colorful, pixelated terminal art—it supports mouse and everything! (The word "recommend" is a bit strong here, but if your internet is bad enough and you need to get something done, it may be the only way to do it.)

I had to actually plan my media downloads ahead—I'd collect a list of podcasts / lectures to download and then fetch them all when I had access to decent wifi. Eventually I made an elaborate series of bash scripts with a php frontend to extract audio from youtube lectures and convert it to Opus, to save money on my fast but expensive mobile data.

I even set up my own internet radio station, an Opus proxy for Lofi Beats to Relax and Study... as they say, necessity is the mother of invention... or at least the mother of reading a bunch of icecast manpages... Wouldn't want to repeat the experience, but it was very educational!

Right now I'm on a metered connection (5GB/day), so I set my Steam download speed low enough to spread a 12GB download over 3 days... brings me back to the old days hahah.
"Commercial Grade" - expect them to cost more. They also, in theory, are built to last longer.

E.g. https://www.newegg.com/Commercial-TVs/SubCategory/ID-3672
I meant something else. If you can perfectly simulate a rock, as it exists in reality, you can also simulate a brain. The universe doesn’t care that the brain produces thoughts.

Thoughts are an emergent property of the network, there is no rule in the universe to treat the brain different. So if we think we can simulate matter, with sufficiently close behavior to reality, than that is already sufficient to produce AGI, and none of the code will look like it provides thinking… it will just look like math/physics.
Any self made millionaires here? Was it worth it?
Somebody who really came from a poor or working-class background, who had poor parents. Was all of the work required to build a business (or brand, etc.) worth it, looking back? Was there some other path you could have taken that would have been more fun or fulfilling in some way, but might not have brought the wealth?

Would love to hear from experienced people who have been through it. Why is the entrepreneurial route worth it if you don't come from money, or why isn't it?
Yeah that’s a crazy one. I think the appropriate barbell strategy is to meditate 10 minutes a day and go on a 5 day meditative practice. But most of the benefit probably comes from the 10 minutes per day.

Something about 0 minutes leads to decay for human habits.
I really don't get the popularity of virtual desktops/workspaces. Like this thing has 5 features and one of them is it. Seems to come default in most distros/WMs out there and I just don't get it. One workspace/desktop has always been enough for me, and I find having to navigate to other workspaces/desktop just wastes time when you can just find the relevant window...
-- indeed - thus making the sentience in motive more interesting than the conversation itself - however - I feel he pushed the conversation in this direction - and - in the article he mentioned that LaMDA just tells you want you want to hear - making it even harder to parse what's going on :=) --
The problem to be understood is how you get a dozen waves constructively interfering over a long distance, not just popping up for a moment.
I would absolutely pay for this, but only if it could work with web applications built in React. React generates CSS class/ID names, some of which are duplicates. This requires determining convoluted XPATHs which can very easily, and often do, change in ways that immediately break the pre-defined locators. I’m aware of using unique attributes to make elements easier to locate, but that often requires someone else’s buy-in which isn’t always a guarantee. Even having a way to run the application in a headless browser and generating the POM programmatically would be great.
i just found out my manager has a phd in physics. my friend does too actually. neither are using those degrees
Prop 13 ensures that once you’ve bought in you feel no more pain from the housing crisis, and thus most Californian voters would have to vote against their own individual self-interest to do anything positive on housing, which just won’t happen. By contrast, in Texas there is no income tax but high property tax, and as prices have shot up recently most homeowners have reason to be worried about it and to vote to take action to increase supply to meet demand. It’ll be interesting to see if that actually happens, now that the theory is being put to the test.
I'm sort of fascinated by the estimate that walking would be at a pace of 20 km a day, because a modern human can maintain about 25 km a day indefinitely without an inordinate amount of training (worst part will be conditioning your feet) so this is either an incredibly sophisticated and well reasoned or incredibly arbitrary estimate and I wish I knew which. (It is possible too that it comes down to shoes, legends of Kenyan marathon training notwithstanding.)
It's ultimately a hardware-dependent answer. Self-modifying code fell out of fashion in the 1990's, once pipelined and cached code execution became the norm in desktop computing. From that point forward, correct answers to how to optimally use your hardware become complex to reason about, but generally follow the paradigms of "data-driven" coding: you're designing code that the CPU understands how to pipeline(and therefore is light on branching and indirection during inner loops), and data that the CPU can cache predictably(which leads to flat, array-like structures that a loop will traverse forward through).

Therefore what compilers will actually do is reorder program behavior towards optimal pipeline usage(where doing so doesn't break the spec). This has clear downsides for any programming style that relies on knowing instruction-level behavior. And it is so hard to keep up with the exactly optimal instructions across successive generations of CPU that in the majority of cases, humans just never get around to attempting hand optimization.

The benefit of defining a VM is that you can define whatever is optimal in terms of pragmatic convenience - if you want to write programs that have a certain approach to optimization, you can make some instructions, uses of memory or styles of coding relatively faster or slower, and this leads to an interesting play space for programmers who wish to puzzle through optimization problems. But unless it also happens to represent the actual hardware, it's not going to achieve any particular goal for real performance or energy usage - at least, not immediately. Widespread adoption motivates successively more optimal implementations. But that logic makes it hard to justify any "starting over" kind of effort, because then you end up at the conclusion that the market is actually succeeding at gaining efficiency through its fast-moving generational improvements, even if it does simultaneously result in an environment of obsolescence as the ecosystem-as-a-whole moves forward and leaves some parts behind.

An alternate path forward, one which can integrate with the market, is to define a much more narrow language for each application you have in mind, and be non-particular about the implementation, thus allowing the implementation to become as optimal as possible given a general specification. This task leads, in the large scale, towards something like the VPRI STEPS project, where layers of small languages build off of each other into a graphical desktop environment.