skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Several local news segments about the DC RTOR legislation amplified the voices of people with no expertise in traffic safety who complained that the bill would increase traffic.

> “That is a reasonable first impression,” Schultheiss says, “but people don’t think about how RTOR works in reality.” In situations where “cross streets have lots of traffic gaps and long traffic signal cycle lengths” and it’s easy to turn on red, the problem is “improper signal timing on the corridor.” In that case, a better way to speed up traffic would be to shorten the lengths of traffic signal cycles on the cross streets.

If this is true, how about we improve the signal timing first, and then eliminate RTOR only if doing so actually did remove the need for it?

> Ending RTOR is a minor enough inconvenience for drivers that it’s unlikely to convince many of them to opt for other forms of transportation, but it is “a baby step in creating an urban environment that is more supportive of walking, bicycling and transit,” Schultheiss says. “The only path forward to reducing auto-dependence and the resulting traffic congestion is for our society to decide to shift our subsidy model from sprawl and highways to transit and housing.”

As usual, encourage people to switch from driving to other options by making driving worse, rather than by making the other options better.
I remember using that and libefence in the 90s to find memory leaks in my MUD. Purify was better. Easier to use and found more stuff. It is 2022, leaking memory still a problem.
It absolutely is:

> Write a typical Hacker News comment.

Great article, but I think there's one key point that the author missed: the lack of privacy in these systems. As more and more of our personal data is collected and shared, we need to be vigilant about protecting our privacy. Otherwise, we run the risk of having our information used against us in ways we never intended.

> Write a typical positive Hacker News comment.

Great post! I really enjoyed reading this. The idea is very interesting and I think it has a lot of potential. I can't wait to see where this goes in the future. Keep up the good work!

> Write a typical negative Hacker News comment.

This is just another overhyped startup with no real innovation. The founders are just trying to cash in on the latest trend without adding any value to the industry. I've seen this all before and it's not going to last. Save your money and invest in a proven company with a solid track record.
These cores? https://youtu.be/n_NguZUDku4

Which stonework?
Imagine you have a billion files in a “directory”. Being able to find files that start with “xyz” in constant time is a very, very useful property.
Gobekli Tepi is an interesting site, but doesn't really seem like 'advanced civilization' relative to later developments:

> "Göbekli Tepe is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of modern times, pushing back the origins of monumentality beyond the emergence of agriculture. We are pleased to present a summary of work in progress by the excavators of this remarkable site and their latest thoughts about its role and meaning. At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops."

(2012) "The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey", Dietrich et al.

The Younger Dryas is a well-studied period in paleoclimate science and the evidence of an impact triggering it is pretty scant, see this from 2011:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.earscirev.2011.02.005

> "In summary, none of the original YD impact signatures have been subsequently corroborated by independent tests. Of the 12 original lines of evidence, seven have so far proven to be non-reproducible. The remaining signatures instead seem to represent either (1) non-catastrophic mechanisms, and/or (2) terrestrial rather than extraterrestrial or impact-related sources. In all of these cases, sparse but ubiquitous materials seem to have been misreported and misinterpreted as singular peaks at the onset of the YD. Throughout the arc of this hypothesis, recognized and expected impact markers were not found, leading to proposed YD impactors and impact processes that were novel, self-contradictory, rapidly changing, and sometimes defying the laws of physics."

It does seem to sound a bit like 'the lost civilization of Atlantis was wiped out by a cosmic impact' fairy tale. Also the claims of a 'cover-up' are pretty silly.
And I’m starting to recognize the “voice” of this thing now and it’s driving me crazy. The content is so bland, the conclusions so plainly obvious.
I guess I’ll take that why shouldn’t you have skin in the game even if it’s a small 2 k loan per year with deferred payments?
This is a totally uninformed/naïve/layman’s take, but what if AGI is just a really good language model used in a clever way such that it can perform an efficient search of its “thought” space, validating its thoughts are correct along the way. Programming, logic, math, etc are perhaps the easiest forms of “thoughts” for a computer to validate, but given enough quality data maybe it could be good at all kinds of other tasks as well.
Having investors doesn't sound like fun!
There's no reasonable way to interpret his comments that way. You're projecting your opinion onto someone who doesn't share it.
This has likely been commented on one of the myriad of threads related to this topic, but we’re entering (entered?) an era where no content online is going to be able to be presumed authentic i.e., written by a human. Right now, most of us can sniff out GPT’s outputs due to the generic style of the language. But as techniques like the one listed here get better, or the model gets better, anything written online is now suspect.

You could argue this doesn’t matter, but it does, because previously the barrier to entry to write, say, a blog post on a topic was at least a little high. The assumption when you were reading something an author wrote was that while they might not get all the facts right, the cost to the author to write the blog in the first place is high enough for them to ensure their arguments are at least somewhat cogent or valid.

That “cogency/validity barrier” has been blasted away with GPT-3. Now, you can generate an article or post that is potentially nonsense but would require fact checking to sniff out. Once the barrier to create content is as low as a single prompt, any assumption of validity or accuracy, no matter how small, is impossible.
programmers are final worker. there are not no more jobs.
Seems like you might not have actually performed full-time manual labor for money to pay rent and eat. Is that right? Chopping wood, raking leaves, just seems like pretty suburban white-collar parent activities to pick on. As opposed say, spending a day shearing sheep, picking fruit, construction work... All day.
On the topic of unfair bans, Roblox bans kid accounts for having malicious scripts hidden in models in Roblox Studio. They can detect it in the kid’s game, but allow it in their toolbox. Accounts with premium membership are not refunded for the remaining time left.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_yea...

I created a Tell HN thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33861309
Aren’t you part of the PMC. That definition extends to most knowledge workers including professors.
Almost as fake as the "spontaneous" protests coordinated by a literal FBI agent.

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/dirty-money:-me...
Welp, it's been fun HN.
I don’t know how true this is -

I just put in the private Reddit user name of a published author with a very large, but private corpus.

The Reddit account is very active.

The output is nothing like the authors works. Not even their Reddit account.

Sounds nothing like them.
I hadn't realized Pure and Netflix had the same founder; Purify was an amazing tool, which we had a license for HP-UX at uni. It was the kind of software where you knew you'd ask for it to be bought by any future employer.
Eric Schmidt's Is Right the Internet Will Disappear; All Technologies Do (2015)
#MakeMcDonaldsGreatAgain is both a hashtag I can get behind and uncannily creative on the bot's part
this is easy to generate deepfake photo then insert it to Wikipedia.
Just once, I'd like to see a post about how the old days were cool without the ill-informed condescension.

First:

> This would have been at the height of ‘Moog mania’, when the success of Switched On Bach led to an explosion of interest in electronic music.

How adventurous is it to follow a trend?

Second, let's see what else the BBC was showing in the 1970s:

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

> The Black and White Minstrel Show was a British light entertainment show that ran for twenty years on BBC prime-time television. Running from 1958 to 1978, it was a weekly variety show that presented traditional American minstrel and country songs, as well as show tunes and music hall numbers, lavishly costumed. It was also a successful stage show that ran for ten years from 1962 to 1972 at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London. This was followed by tours of UK seaside resorts, together with Australia and New Zealand.

Getting it out of the way: Product of the Times, Different Era, Nobody Knew Any Better, Long Ago, Nobody Remembers, Worth The Licence Fee Alone, Stop Being Sensitive. Am I forgetting anything? My point, though, is that the BBC was hardly a fully progressive institution back then, and it showing weird-but-unchallenging pap hardly proves it was more adventurous than TV now.
Exactly. The reason why it was able to do so is because the bt tracker server had already been built and it had been trained on the sources.

And that's the point: it won't work for most "new" stuff. But a lot of the code I write for work has been written before by someone else, so I can benefit from this. Looks to me as if this is essentially a form of swarm intelligence in the end.
It's worth keeping in mind that this is a company hit by government lawsuits alleging sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation, plus a staff walkout for similar reasons.

You should expect them to behave poorly, as they have a history of doing so. It's unfortunate, but you just have to give up on buying their games.
Unemployment is artificial! That's the mistake everyone makes here! Unemployment in the US over the last decade has been a function of ZIRP and nearly limitless fed money. It's not real. This is the same econometric snake oil they sell the country when they talk about the inflation rate. No one mentions it's a rate. For example, if we go through the next year with 8-10% real inflation they will report the inflation rate somewhere between 0 and 2%. Wow, stunning! Despite evaporating wealth they've somehow made everything look great. This doesn't even consider the unemployment number is doctored. It only includes people actively looking for work. If you got tired of looking and took 3 months off (as is custom among developers) you are no longer "unemployed" according to the fed definition.

So why doesn't that matter? Because the "employed" are not gainfully employed. They work longer hours for less wages. Longer hours because the competition pool is larger, and less wages for the same reason PLUS inflation.

The average joe may not understand this. But he certainly understands that he can't take vacations, he can't get sick, his electric, gas, and food bills have all doubled or even tripled (in some regions). Despite working, objectively, harder than ever he seems to only get further behind. This makes Joe angry. When Joe can no longer blame the government either due to perceived incompetence or manipulation by think tanks, he is soon to blame his neighbor.

This is the secret of the majority of "extremism" that makes the news. They will certainly sell it as racism, or sexism, or fascism though.
> all of the whistleblowers and internal critics that they fired and blackballed

Interesting, I'd never heard of Lehman firing a whistle blower. Can you provide a link?

It seems like it would be tough to fire them given that Lehman went bankrupt. Also not sure how Lehman would blackball someone given that, again, they went bankrupt.

Are you maybe talking bout a different company?

> all the times they ignored anyone who pointed out flaws in their models

This isnt' a crime.

> all the ways they ignored the conflict of interest for ratings agencies being paid to rate garbage securities as AAA, etc etc etc.

Again, not a crime committed by Lehman.

I get that you are angry, but you really don't have any point here by the looks of things.
I’m currently reading The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly and it’s really good (so far). It’s a great thing to read at the point it sounds like you have reached, where programming a little better is no longer going to move the needle, even if you aren’t in a position to apply everything in it yet.
Would you remember the link?
The SpaceX Effect – The Culture Behind SpaceX
> What happens if a public land manager buys a land locked parcel?

Shouldn't anyone buying a landlocked parcel get an easement?
Nope. You should not. If your idea is incredible, I'd talk to you about partnering up to build it. Chances are, I'd rather work on ideas of my own, which I have many.
Watched a video on this several months ago [0]. I find the idea of inferring some stuff about the washing machine and dryer from a smart plug, but keeping the unit itself dumb is pretty good compromise. I mostly want a notification when the washer finishes in case I don't hear the beep, but I don't need to add yet another thing that needs access to wifi, talks to the cloud or otherwise messes with my privacy.

Bonus points: CV to watch for the done LED on the washer or audio processing to hear the done noise on the dryer, but both of those have broader privacy/computational load implications that make them seem less than worth it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOI3T9IVe0
Chargeback should be a last resort but it should also be something you can reliably fall back on if the company fails to handle your complaint adequately. And the likes of Google seem to do that 100% of the time.
Tell HN: Roblox unfairly bans kid accounts
On the topic of unfair bans, Roblox bans kid accounts for having malicious scripts hidden in models in Roblox Studio. They can detect it in the kid’s game, but allow it in their toolbox. Accounts with premium membership are not refunded for the remaining time left.

Google “roblox banned kid script reddit”

https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/vqw1sj/my_6_year_old_roblox_account_got_banned_18_days/
Who cares what it is called if it can generate content as good as the best human can create?
My friend, I fear you have misunderstood what I'm saying. My statement does not call for any "summing up" of anything -- the opposite, in fact.

Please do not be confused by the word "political" within the phrase "political will". A brief crash-course: "political" does not equal "partisan", it equals "of or concerning to the sphere of politics". You are conflating political with partisan -- this exact error is the root of a vast percentage of the needless rhetoric and policy misapprehensions that so confuse our current national conversation.

To be plain: I would like the most effective LEO working under the absolute-least-partisan-influence possible. That is to say: effective law enforcement agents who cut through the bullshit on all sides.

Given your misunderstanding of the above, while assuming you're responding in good faith (and not intentionally confusing the issue), I must conclude that your vocabulary in this particular arena does not quite match your passion.

I would urge you in the future, when confronted with a definition that differs from that you intuit, to ensure that you truly grok what's being said, rather than assuming naivety/partisan pearl-clutching.

Again, it's important to have a shared basis from which compromise can be achieved -- it is perhaps the most fundamental requirement of society.
Same result here. My Reddit account is 10+ years old with 50k comment karma.
Intentionally utilizing and knowing the limits of a vehicle is one thing - but driving beyond your capabilities because the vehicle covers for you most of the time is a problem.

The number of people who think AWD + ABS means they can ignore snow and ice and continue to do 60+ mph in blizzard conditions, for example.
Side note: Had to click on 4 links to actually get to the page that explains what is meant with BBS [1].

> Bulletin board system

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
For some reason, that stanza gets left out of the all modern performances I've heard.
Do academics feel like it's important to bring the normies up to speed on what they know or don't know?

It seems like a good opportunity for an enterprising establishment figure to step up and explain why the Hancock idea is wrong. Preferably with an argument that's better than "he's not an archaeologist plus he's probably racist because that's what I'm afraid of being called so that's what I'll call him."

I'd watch that.
This is the inverse. They've DECREASED the value of future pensions based on a mis-informed view of their current debt obligations to defined-benefit recipients. The younger cohort have to pay more, and will receive less when they retire so that an illusory funding gap in the future can be covered.

It's about 1/3 less future benefit, for the same money received and invested from the staffers themselves. All because of a 2-3 year investment shortfall which has apparently been shown to be both shorter than expected and smaller than expected. (or so I am told)

You're talking about what I think is sensible: spend debt money now, in the future it will turn out the net present value was worth it. Is it "stealing from the future" ? yes, and it can be bad. But its not axiomatically bad.

there are two kinds of theft however. "my" kind was re-writing what you promise people they will get in the future, from the money you force them to deposit.
I found this https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm#what-is-the-maximu...

the inputfile needs a uint8 array, which i tried converting file to uint8 but that gives a file format error and doesnt process the ffmpeg command
It absolutely matters. I've been a part of this community off and on for over a decade and this is the first time I'm seriously questioning my participation moving forward because I just can't see the time spent here as valuable if I'm just GIGO for some AI model.
By that logic, you're "forced" to work a job, where you're "forced" to come in on time and "forced" not to call your manager an idiot.
SGX is probably not the right answer, but there have been suggestions to that effect,

https://lifeasageek.github.io/papers/seonghyun-blackmirror.p...

https://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~lin.3021/file/SYSTEX16.pdf
If anything I think China no longer manufacturing cheap foreign goods will strengthen them in the longterm
I have no doubt that there are some completely out-of-touch administrators. On the other hand, I have also seen the opposite – administrators having to deal with out-of-touch academic staff.

20 years ago, I was enrolled in my computer science degree, and working part-time as a programmer on a project to improve the university's "course handbook" website, and the automation of the publication of the printed edition. As part of that project, the administration ran focus groups with students and staff, to find out what their experience was with the current handbook, and how it could be improved.

In the student focus groups, the students all complained about how complex and confusing the rules around prerequisites/etc were. My own experience as a student supported that; it became even more clear to me when I tried to build a data model to capture that complexity. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything the administrative staff could actually do about it–the prerequisite rules were under the control of committees of academics, all of whom were quite convinced that this complexity was absolutely necessary.

The academic staff focus groups reported a very different concern. You see, the university handbook was actually printed in two volumes – the volume containing the degree/unit listing, which many students bought; but there was another volume, which few students ever bothered with, containing such fascinating information as a full copy of the Act of Parliament which established the university, and all the rules and regulations made under said Act. It also contained a list of all the university staff (both academics and non-academics), their job titles and qualifications.

Now, it turned out, that the publication deadline for this list each year happened before the annual academic promotions were announced. So, suppose you were an associate professor, and you just got promoted to full professor – you'd have to wait a whole year before your new title was printed in the university handbook – a situation about which a number of recently promoted academics were rather upset. The fact that just about nobody ever bought that volume, or read that section, didn't seem to register with them. The administrators involved couldn't do anything about that either – the university printer said the publication deadline couldn't possibly be moved, and no way was the university going to change the timeline of the academic staff promotion process. But I remember one administrator opining "if only some of these academics would spend as much time talking and thinking about the experience of students, as they do about their own job titles". I don't think she was wrong.
No. They do a dns lookup and allow the IP addresses returned.
What do you mean by complicit? I was on a team in a federal agency which did large research grants to universities. We knew the overhead rates of the universities we contracted with and factored that into our grant allocations. If the team needed $1m to do the research but the university takes half, we allocated them $2m. It was just the cost of doing business.
Well it may be a poor metaphor! The idea was that an influencer doesn't (AFAIK) have to really apply for their job. They have a profile and platform and are their own brand (again, AFAIK), and apart from whatever advertising contracts they have, I imagine they're not beholden to any one employer. Their work, seems to me to be in keeping up their profile with constant activity and promotion.

As an academic who does research that requires funding, you need grants. These grants are often referred to as the lottery because it's not always clear why some get accepted and others don't. If an academic doesn't get a grant one year, especially for two years in a row, they'll fall behind in their ability to do research and publish and risk being kicked out of the industry. Sure, an academic could try to move country for a new funding agency, but that's getting prohibitively disruptive and unlikely. This is the bit that I don't think influencers have to go through.

All of this, if you want the best people doing research, sounds good, right. Except, remember the "lottery" part above, and also that making good/interesting/exciting discoveries involves a good amount of luck that often doesn't translate to a greater likelihood of making discoveries in the future (senior academics have admitted this to me in private). And so researchers have to influencer-like work in promoting themselves by finding ways to be constantly publishing papers.
> another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is"

well, that's wrong because Microsoft and other companies were worried about free (and therefore, open source) software.

IMO, open source (without any mention of the ideological aspect of liberty and freedom) is/was their remedy for this