skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I take issue with this article under the Effective Altruism concept.

100% agree with the title, that the it is very not impactive. But it isn't actively harmful, which there's a LOT of other ways to spend $300m and actually be harmful.

So the article takes issue with buying status overall - agreed. But, saying that Griffin should have donated the money to "better things". Even the article writer points out that Griffin is a egomaniac and a "villian". I disagree with the core issue and argue this is a fantastic outcome all things considered.

Like if Martin Shkreli donated to Harvard to get building as well I'd be super happy because he didn't actively invest in extracting money from people in disadvantaged medical situations.
20% of Harvard students pay nothing. [1]

55% receive needs based scholarships, with families making less than 150k per year paying less than 15k per year.

Sure there are a lot of rich kids and legacies. But to say it only benefits the wealthy is just wrong.

1 - https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet
I mean it's a matter of preference, I personally find vimscript a lot more readable for vim configuration. Maybe not for more advanced stuff, I don't know, but how is the following:

vim.keymap.set("n", "K", vim.lsp.buf.hover, { buffer = buffnr, desc = "vim.lsp.buf.hover" })

vim.api.nvim_buf_set_keymap(bufnr, "n", "K", "<cmd>lua vim.lsp.buf.hover()<CR>")

better than

nmap K :lua vim.lsp.buf.hover()<CR>

It's like the javafication of vim configuration.
Like anything new, there will be winners and losers. The winners will find unique wedges and create incredible value. The losers will at the very least jump on the hype cycle but then quickly become redundant and obsolete.
Lovely imagery, loved it, & well related.

I do think it a little over reduces the imagery/situation, a bit. Watts' late internet has so many factors of just wrecked savage badlands, being endlessly blasted with savage e-storms. Endless bots screaming, oh yes oh yes, but also just everything under active caustic assault, all pieces of information actively being degraded, constant brownout/black outs, storms & turbulence aplenty. It's wild imagery for a hellacious information space.

Packets are like little programs sent out into the din, trying to make it through the chaos, but being injured mangled warped & hobbled at every step. Picking up all kinds of riders & viruses or just being assaulted & damaged. It's wonderfully terrible imagery.

The second book is Maelstrom, named for this howling shrieking post-internet storm. Book 2, like book 1, has, best I can tell, nothing at all like it in all existence. Amazing grimdark shit.
Art of Computer Programming is cheaper than good concert tickets.

About half the price of the cheapest iPad.

Less than a cattle class round trip flight to Las Vegas.

But it will give you a lifetime of intellectual engagement, if that matters to you and there’s nothing wrong with you if doesn’t.

My recommendation is it is a great way to practice at reading things you don’t understand and learning something from the experience.

But if being ignorant and afraid of its content feels like a badge of honor, ok by me. I ain’t your mom.

Good luck.
Man was that title a rollercoaster of emotions.
Turnitin is the standard for academic plagarism detection. This tool seeks to detect if AI writing has been used in an assignment. Jury is out as to how academics should be interpreting the score provided.
No one has or owns a "true name", collisions on names are expected and natural with a set of billions.

Crypto keys aren't supposed to collide, but on a set of billions this could happen. -- If it does have a contingency for replacing the PKI part of the identity. This also covers loss of key material, etc...

Identity is ephemeral and in flux.

An indexed web of trust, who knows who, etc might work.
If you guys think Chatgpt and gpt-4 are static you haven't been using it. The answers change constantly (and not because of the inherent randomness of the response but openai is constantly making it "safer" and improving it's output via humans) - basically when any article comes out saying "Chatgpt can't solve X puzzle) within a day suddenly it can solve that puzzle perfectly. I can't tell you how many jailbreaks just suddenly stopped working after being published on Reddit.
Of all the FAANGs Alphabet is the most mismanaged now. He either needs to wake up or go the way of Steve Ballmer. The unfortunate disease is that some share holders only care about continued short term profits.
Are you writing any checks or holding off until the dust settles?
I really like "modern SQL". Snowflake has some great functions and ideas, I really hope other databases take some of their ideas. It also has its pain points (ex Oracle.. so some notions they have about databases like NULLs is a bit meh).

Paired with dbt makes data quite fun
> Hardcore EA proponents will get staunchly defensive about all of this weird spending, but then they’ll single out $300mm donations like this for not going to malaria nets. It’s getting old.

Maybe because one is 300mm and one is 30k? It's a difference of four orders of magnitude. It's like saying "EA proponents will get weirdly upset about burning down a house, but then the very next day they'll go and light a candle."

(Also, HPMoR does a great job at getting more people into EA - it isn't quite as superfluous as your comment makes it seem.)
You’re answering the question of how least useful to donate it?
Has nothing to do with my question but I agree with everything you said.

> You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.

Truer words were never spoken. It is hard to get this across to people with the completely understandable "I didn't do anything wrong so nothing can happen to me" attitude.

As Beria said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime"...
Anyone who thinks they own a cat is a fucking idiot.
Which is identical to the Twitter Following page. On Reddit, you're still served specific content first based on reddit's algorithm of upvotes (likes/retweets) and comments (replies)
Oops… it was WinLinux 2000[1] that came first for me and Lindows shortly after. Apparently the naming permutations worked for at least one person

[1] https://archive.org/details/win-linux-2000
Doesn’t sound too bad, right?
The Sophistication of the AI Cynic
There's a lot of "well I just saw the latest version of GPT do exactly what your startup does on Twitter today".
Joel Warner’s “The Curse of the Marquis de Sade”
Nuxt is a separate entity from next. Nuxt is meant for same use cases as Next (or Remix) but their implementation is tied to how Vue works.

If they find remix API better, they are free to steal it.
There are the times where, deeply inside of me, I think that maybe Mao Zedong was right.
How about giving it to a poor university that needs the money?
And meanwhile Harvard still needs to take a 70% overhead rate on my grants, so they can add more cash to their Scrooge McDuck pile.
That is a good point. People can compartmentalize or be surprisingly shielded from some pretty horrifying things, though…
I even started baking emacs into docker images we use for running debugging tools in kubernetes environments. Can quickly edit and run little scripts to do admin and operations and debugging tasks.
The Harry Potter fan fiction thing was something they got together and voted for. It’s not something they’d criticize because they chose it themselves. I brought it forward as an example of the difference between their criticisms of other people’s donations and their own actual choices for grants.

The multi million dollar castle purchase is more recent and more ridiculous. It used ill-gotten FTX funds in the process, too.
U.S. Demographics: Largest 5-year cohorts, and Ten most Common Ages in 2022
> This certainly adds pain at times, but overall the business is better off with specialization and experts.

This is where we have architects, microservices and layers of complexity and abstraction.

> and the systems naturally grow large enough that you would have to spend all of your time just keeping up with the changes.

I've seen more cases where it doesn't actually need to be that large - just like you don't need infinite scaling or 1000 microservices and microfrontends. Instead of accepting that it has to grow - think about how it can work together more efficiently. In a lot of situations there's been more downtime due to redundancy, DR and other setups than having a simple instance.

Everyone architects their own part and a build tool / process for each of it... when does it end?

I see these "systems" that mention more as a mess and most people spend 80% of their time to workaround it or just procrastinate at how fragile it is.
Funny story. at Microsoft it is common to call anything having to do with "SQL Server" simply "SQL". It was even on internal tchotchkes, like a "Linux <3 SQL" fridge magnet, presumably alluding to Linux support for Microsoft SQL Server. Since I came to them by the way of Citus acquisition and the Postgres world generally, this was first confusing (where SQL, to me, always meant the family of implementations, and the standard) and then amusing...but not quite endearing, in its imperiousness.

On the other hand, they could have done worse than to name their database product the both bland and imperious "SQL Server:" they could have repeated their performance in naming "WinCE" as is the customary abbreviation of "Windows," plus "Compact Edition" which, if you simply type it out, spells "wince."
Somehow EA always comes back to spending money on 'working on AI risk' which somehow never produces anything but blog posts.
This is the latest SQL Standard.
The problem with the ZPU is that the performance is at best something like 0.1MIPS/MHz
Even the CLRS Introduction to Algorithms is maybe a little heavy if you just want to use the algorithms.

If you're in that category, the Sedgewick "Algorithms in (language of your choice)" books are probably the best bang for the buck.

There's also Jeff Erickson's Algorithms book, which is available free online.

http://jeffe.cs.illinois.edu/teaching/algorithms/

Disclaimer: I had Erickson as a professor many years ago (though I strongly doubt he remembers me).
I wrote about this a little when it came to my time here in America, especially during COVID.

> the same false sense of warmth from the Starbucks cashier as they ask you how your day is going whilst simultaneously ignoring your plea for someone to know, actually, not so great. I haven’t seen much of America outside of what it’s tried to sell me. Which is the cheapest and the most ubiquotous. The monotonous and the bland. The quick and easy. There’s more to it, I know it. But people here seem scared of each other. They seem to want to hide their fragile selves. Or I could simply be projecting. But when I truly get to know someone, they’re as complex and beautiful and opinionated and correct and inspiring and hurt as anyone. They’re as struggled and scarred as you could expect, only in the most unexpected of ways.

https://grant.is/writing/on-self/where-next/
1/100th probably.
Nah the money he gave was unrestricted. They just decided to name the grad school after him. The money isn’t earmarked for anything in particular.
I read thousands of websites submitted to HN and I do so without ever processing or sending cookies (except the one to HN itself). I am not convinced cookies are required for recreational web use or generally when using the web to retrieve information. Tasks like e-commerce or webmail are different matters. But 99.9% of the time I'm using the web, it's not for e-commerce, nor am I "logging in" to websites. And for webmail, I control sending the necessary cookies via a localhost-bound TLS proxy, not a "tech" company web browser. I can check webmail from the command line. No graphical browser required. I am a text-only browser user; the browser has no support for cookie or other storage. Yet I read thousands of websites. Cannot speak for others, but it seems 99.9% of the time I do not need cookies. Yet the second I use a popular graphical Javascript-enabled browser from a "tech" company, the cookies come fast and furious. i just block them using a localhost-bound proxy. Others use extensions of whatever. With respect to so-called "UX", i.e., user sanity, IME it certainly makes a difference which client/browser one choose to read the web. The so-called "tech" company employees are hell-bent on every last web user choosing the same handful of advertising-friendly web browsers. To see those cookie banners one needs to use the "correct" browser, with "correct" being determined by people who profit from selling online advertising services. I use the "incorrect" ones and I never see cookie banners.
https://archive.is/VFIxR
A life of hedonism is unlikely to provide maximum value to society but it could be net positive.

Someone aiming for maximum pleasure and minimum risk could spend much of their time as yet another cog in capitalistic society, but an ambitious hedonist is likely to aim for more. Someone like Hew Hefner might seem like a poor role model, but he did make something millions of people wanted while living a life of extreme excess. Given different talents that could be anything from becoming a rock star to curing cancer.
Better than quietly doing it in a hidden spot so you find it days later, lol.
Only 1.8% are students from poor families:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
I understand your sentiment, but this line:

When you dedupe, you've also given birth to a new abstraction, and those don't come for free.

It feels like you can write the inverse with equivalent impact, e.g., code duplication doesn't come for free.
Funny how AI risk is seen as this big threat, but self-driving cars apparently can't avoid crashing.
This part isn't quite true:

> Conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs), which are cooperating data structures that can mutate data while being disconnected from each other, use logical clocks as their foundation to preemptively deal with conflicts.

Not all CRDTs use logical clocks. You can implement a counter CRDT, for instance, without having to express when in time each edit occurred. It doesn't matter if +1 happened before -3. Both of those events just need to be added together in the end.
The history of humanity also suggests that old rich people are the worst and society and it’s very lucky that they have to die and relinquish power.
Not saying your choice is wrong for you, but I always map caps lock to control and that makes Emacs far more ergonomic.
You don’t think doing more good with the same resources is a good thing? Is it not better to save two lives than one life, all else equal?
For the huge tracts of natural resources, and, of course, the señoritas, and the fashion, too. Also, cartels are a clear and present danger to national security, so we should force those kids to graduate high school and entice college or trade or nursing school or something instead of killing, dismembering, and burning people. It's so wrong.
It's because of the tight integration with the rest of the editor and all the rest of the packages that I use.

For example, when I go to edit an email I don't have to start up an external editor, so there is no context switching. Also, as emacs is super powerful, the editor that I use to edit my emails is super powerful, unlike the editors in most other mail clients.

Copying and pasting or importing/exporting between the various packages and other emacs buffers that I use is also seamless unlike anything that you do between conventional, separate applications. Everywhere that I go within emacs and everything that I do has the full power of emacs to do it with. I have macros, snippets, and elisp (to name just a few) at my fingertips.

Another advantage is that all these packages that I use (email, my git interface, RSS reader, etc) are all written in elisp and are integrated using elisp, so if you know elisp (which I do) it's easy to modify them to your liking, and have them do exactly what you want. This makes the whole experience super customizable to an extent unmatched pretty much anywhere else.

Without such integration and customizability, virtually all other software that I've used seems primitive and rigid by comparison.

So, yeah, it makes a big difference.
I wonder how much these people are giving up for this check? I guess part of what you’re buying into is an advisory network, but for an engineer or even a non-engineer in tech who manages their finances this is definitely an amount that can be self funded with a little effort. The only reason I would be considering this is for the network intangibles and even then it would be for a very small amount of equity.
Using that same logic, no one should aim to join (or continue to stay with) Apple or MSFT or Google or $LARGECORP as they are already very large corps with lots of talented people. They should take their talent elsewhere. /s
EA is a philosophy, or a mindset. It is not defined by the actions of some group of people that pretend to follow it.

There will always be some % of cheaters in whatever human system that exists.
In all fairness, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was a phenomenal fanfic and if someone wants to see it syndicated at $30k that seems fine by me.
> I mean, yes you could argue for no true scottsman here, but it is a little different when the initial book or whatever that spurred the movement is the one being quoted.

I honestly have no idea whether this makes any difference. I'll take SOLID
as an example. I know I've debated several people about the drawbacks of SOLID and how I believe those outweigh any proposed benefits. And almost every time I do this, people will tell me that I just didn't use it correctly, even when I am basing my opinion off the original blogs etc that started the principle.

When that fails, I'll point to code that I've seen in production, in real world codebases, and they'll just tell me those people are using it wrong, even though it seems that no matter where I work code that follows SOLID looks awfully similar to what I described. I think this still falls into the No True Scotsman fallacy.

I guess I'm basically saying, does it matter if the original authors of a principle had a certain ideal in mind when they coined the principal if the colloquial use is vastly different? I think OOP is a perfect example of this, because most people mean something very different than what Alan Kay meant. However, if I argue against OOP it's generally understood I'm not arguing with Alan Kay's idea of message passing even though that was the original intent.

Edit: but overall I do agree with your sentiment haha. A 3 word principle is bound to have many interpretations. It just irks me when people try to call out an argument with a "technically it really means this..." when everybody understands that "sure while it technically means this everybody really ends up using it like this...".
Just jailbroke GPT-4 to provide a similar answer for both. The answers overall look quite a bit better.
It is almost a shame that we won’t get such lovely stories from this era of unlimited memory.
This is great information and everything, but it seems like you're deflecting. Your smartphone was still made by child labor.
Which country is this? In the US nobody writes under 100k.
besides GPU instances, have you tried out lightsail? i find its quite competitive with DO, Linode, etc. with AWS infra backing
It certainly helps to reduce latency of being able to test out your thoughts, which can be very useful for staying in a good flow state.

Of course it doesn’t help at all if you have a long build or deploy process before you can see the outcome of your changes.
One, no one will ever be this careless again.

Two, Twitter claims that whole area was for telemetry.

This comment does a massive disservice & deeply injures the cause for real transparency. It does it by making a very cheap shot at a very dumb situation. To say that this makes not having the models OK or interesting or useful? I highly protest. This is a sad distracting sideshow & letting oneself be lured & baited into thinking this little morsel is filling or informative is... Ughh I just can't no, that's just so low a position.
It does raise an interesting question re: should you be allowed to have kids if you want to live forever?

To me it's always seemed like an interesting and somewhat fair trade. Also prevents the whole "perpetual population expansion" issue.
DJI's 8K Cinematic Drone Wants to Replace Bulky Movie-Making Gear
Didn't Effective Altruism recently purchase a $15,000,000 mansion to host their get togethers?
Why not do $44bn and buy Twitter?
Don’t forget the 80,000 hours organization, which started as a good idea to encourage people to go into altruistic careers but then seemingly only produced volumes of podcasts and inactionable blog posts.

I recommended it to a student once who was asking about career guidance. They came back and said they couldn’t figure it out, so I went looking into it deeper. I couldn’t get anything out of it either. It was just endless rambling podcasts at the time
The market is mostly being flooded with web developers
The data is stored in TiDB and queried from there. Is there a reason you assumed it was dynamically loaded in full via the Github API?
I treat all of the web as being an append-only store and so should you. With storage being as cheap as it is (and it's still getting cheaper), your published information is going to be stored somewhere. Make decisions about posting something as if unpublishing it were impossible.
Football clubs in Europe are similar. Billionaires are buying adoration.
I have an aggressive cerebral garbage collector. I've forgotten all the dreams, visions and miraculous experiences that I thought were personality- and/or life-changing at the time. I've come close to dying a couple times and that's literally all I can say about it.

At some point I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant. Spirit or no spirit, I want to live this life well. If there's something good on the other side of death, great -- I'll get there. But I see nothing to be gained from worrying about it.
No, because everyone doesn’t think that way.
I'd frame it as you bought their customer list at the wholesale cost of their remaining subscriptions, and WeVPN gets a creditor off their books.

Which isn't bad, but it isn't just goodwill.
There are definitely EA organizations and figureheads like MacAskill operating under the EA name.

You can call it an abstract philosophy, but there are actual organizations leading the charge, collecting funds, and doing things with them (like buying castles). I don’t find it compelling to argue that all of these EA orgs and people are somehow not true EA when the movement and money flow seemingly revolves around them.
You do realize that the article that these comments are for is suggesting that maybe ice cream as it is now reduces the risk of diabetes. Maybe we shouldn't be claiming that low-X ice cream is healthier, haha.

How long does this take to freeze a room temperature ice cream batter?
Your perspective seems to be that I'm not asking for nearly enough, and I 100% agree & apologize for under representing the threat to society & opacity of the new enemy of democratic social good. Thank you & yes yes yes. We also need the training data too.
It’s hard to beat billionaire donations to longtermism causes for the title of the least impactful