skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that we have zero awareness about the edge cases in the world of general intelligence doesn't give us right to think there aren't any. The world of the minds isn't necessarily simpler than physical world and we know about it even less.

For example think of all cognitive biases and myriad of illusions we have to struggle very hard with when we apply out minds to any problem and want to have any hopes of achieving even remotely useful results.

AI alarmists speak of human minds as if they are some perfect tool of progress completely forgetting that those minds failed to achieve any significant progress for tens of thousands of years and what pushed us forward wasn't more intelligent mind. Just a practice of how to deal with shortcomings of our minds.

Another thing is resource cost. Look at how much it costs to run a single instance of semi-retarded LLM. I'd say we are lucky if we are only one computational revolution away from AGI like the one we got from discovering semiconductors.

Humanity dreams of golems for millenia. First we made them out of sticks and clay. Now we are making them out of iron and silicon which is a significant progress but I'm not sure how many such technological jumps we'll need to enjoy or suffer the creation of actual golems.
Most artists can’t actually make a living from their work, it’s only a tiny minority that can.

I think a future with UBI is inevitable, and then (most[1]) copyright laws could be erased.

[1] maybe they should apply when they protect an individual against a company
Except in manufacturing, getting your yield up and tuning a process is basically 'just work'. You define a space of parameters you want to explore and then you brute force it by building samples at each parameter step and then analyzing it.

This can be pipelined and parallelized to some extent, but then you have to convince enough PhD level employees to do night shifts, because each process step is basically a miniature physics or chemistry experiment that has to be monitored and tuned constantly (at this stage).

It's one thing to make one perfect transistor, it's a totally different ballgame to make 10 billion perfect devices with better than 90% tool uptime, and an essential component of closing that gap is brute force experimentation.
Yeah but it's bad satire, it's the same kind of material of "calculate your carbon footprint and see how you can help fight back climate change", it's the kind of satire that deep down blames the general populace that apparently when it comes to housing has all the power but in other context is just powerless, I understand this is satire, but I sadly also see that it is a common citizen blaming satire, I think
GP is talking about housing appreciation in excess of inflation — the terms they used “real return” and “purchasing power” are specific economic terms that mean inflation-adjusted rate of return or price levels respectively.
> The fact of the matter is this: it’s so important that new housing is affordable, because there’s no way in hell I’m accepting anything less than a 20 percent return on my own home.

That’s the issue. I don’t think homes should appreciate in value (less inflation). It causes massive inequity. Houses are depreciating assets too. Just decaying/breaking over time.
When you send new goods to Amazon to sell, you can tell them not to comingle. This way if someone buys from you, they are guaranteed to get the item you sent them.
No it doesn't, because Japanese companies aren't Korean, Chinese, or Taiwanese.
Different breeds, and different dogs within those breeds, have different drives.

I know some well-trained dogs that will still gleefully run away and explore the woods if given the chance... and then return sheepishly 20-30 minutes later. If they ever do get lost, or someone else "finds" them, etc, it'll be a tragedy.

They also tend to come back covered in thorns, with cut-up paws, etc, etc.
I disagree - the parent only said that these people disapproved of the plan and acknowledged that people who live closer to it will obviously care more than other people (the latter being an inoffensive truth that it is unreasonable to persecute people for). That information isn't enough to determine whether they are being unreasonable or not, and "NIMBY" colloquially refers to people being unreasonable about what is built near them. You're falling into the trap of "it sounds like these people are a member of a group I dislike".
Competition for land could be structured as 30 year leases (give or take), rather than perpetual ownership. Then A. prices don't reflect an asset premium and B. the surplus accrues to the public, rather than to rich people.
There's not one monolithic group of "deniers".
My personal next step with LLMs is to use them as completion engines versus just asking them questions. Few shot prompting is another intermediate skill I want to incorporate more.
Looks like a lot more than a word to me. Also, do you respond to car crashes by saying we should get rid of speed limits and drunk driving laws?
How about this alternative explanation: Unlike a real commodity such as fruit, people compete for houses and look carefully. This is because houses are in different locations, generally unique, limited and perhaps most importantly because they are the largest expense most buyers will every have.

Because there is competition a certain premium is paid. And if we assume further economical growth, the premium that an individual is capable of paying likewise should increase. Therefore, all things being equal, the prices should increase.
Yeah well that's just not how any of this works.

Gensler makes the rules, and the courts will adjudicate any challenges.

There's no homework to be done: most crypto doesn't pass the Howey test.
Well, I guess people can start burning peoples houses down, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably not an ideal solution.
Real returns from home price appreciation are sustainable to the extent that only some homes see such real returns. And indeed, national housing data shows that averaged over time and distance, U.S. home prices don’t climb faster than inflation. Even though some hot markets do.
So true - this is why we should include the price of housing in inflation statistics and basically manage them to be level by increasing interest rates.

A house is not an investment and it should not increase in value when discounted by inflation.
Ask HN: Book / resource about numerical computing
Context: For both work and side-projects, I use Python libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, and PyTorch. While I am able to apply them in practice, I lack knowledge about their core functionalities and implementation details. I am curious to know if the algorithms for large array computing and auto-diff are already solved problems or if ongoing research is being conducted in these areas. For instance, if I were to implement a NumPy-like library based on WASM that could run in a browser, would the algorithm used be similar to that of the core NumPy, or would there be differences (excluding the runtime and hardware specifics)?

Question: I'm interested in spending some time implementing a simplified numerical library in C or Rust that mirrors NumPy, and possibly JAX, depending on its complexity. However, I'm not sure where to start.
No... China doesn't want TSMC they want Taiwan... and thrusting the world into the technological dark ages for a decade by blowing up the leading semiconductor factory isn't a favorable political stance to take.
I have no idea.

I guess it will be something like guaranteed availability and privacy options. I'm speculating.
Young people (late 20’s/early 30’s) own homes at the same rate as people did 40 years ago. There’s a lot of misconception about home ownership. It’s similarly accessible as it has been for decades. At the same age millennials own homes at a rate higher than Genx

If you look at home prices and can’t believe the prices it’s because you’re looking for homes you can’t afford.

https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...
I’ll believe it when I see it. Heard this sentiment 100s of times.
Also housing is really only out of reach ina few highly desirable places. Many of the places that are now super desirable weren’t that great when the previous generations were moving into them (SF, Santa Monica). Maybe the new generation needs to create a community and develop it themselves.
> They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right.

I guess this site could be of interest to some, to have a look at some of the products: https://killedby.tech/

Google has a separate site here as well: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Microsoft also has a site like that: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

I tried looking up one for Amazon or AWS projects, but only unrelated news articles came up.

I don't really have a horse in the race, though, since all three of the big platforms (and others like Oracle Cloud) are outside of my price point and all my personal projects run on smaller simple VPS providers. From what I can tell, there is not a single large corporation out there with the commitment to never kill a product of theirs and support everything in perpetuity.
Physical space in desired locations is limited. Aka each marginal spot will be higher in price with the last spot having a price of infinity.

So yes as long a location is desirable (think Manhattan or Shanghai) , sky is the limit in terms of prices.

Skyscrapers can help a bit by making this 2d problem to 3d but still there are limits.
How long ago did that happen?
Yea this article makes it sound like the loophole is the primary reason but I don’t think it’s even a significant contributor. Anyone can google the top 5 SUVs sold in 2022. None of them are over the 6,000 pound gross weight limit to be counted as a track. All of them over grown significantly in physical size over the past decade.

American family sizes have steadily dropped for many decades so the editor’s mention of millennials and family sizes contributing to demand for large vehicles is nonsensical.

Americans just love big cars and that desire vastly trumps and concern over environmental impact.
My Years as a Metaverse Warlord
For the last few years, I had several thousand people at my disposal, part of a global group, operating 24/7 that would do my bidding. A simple post on Slack or a brief voice chat was enough to hurl them into action, ready to spend hours warring against our foes. Various teams coordinated our real and virtual infrastructure, the military led our battles, and my diplomats dealt with the incoming drama.

In short, I was a Warlord in the ur-Metaverse.
At this point, the contours of the argument you're trying to have here are abundantly clear. You'd like me to believe that the term NIMBY doesn't mean "opposition to new things being built in proximity to people's houses", but rather "only the bad kinds of opposition to new things being built in proximity to people's houses". OK. I get it. I disagree. It doesn't seem clear that there's a rich vein of curious conversation to be mined out of this semantic dispute, so maybe we just leave it here.
I thought I heard that as well but I had another person disagree so I’m not sure who is right.
“America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests” ― Henry Kissinger
I mean, I'm not about to run any tests but I think you're underestimating how much work the human eyes do to iron out the little inconsistencies. I've done a lot of work with processing digitized images, and algorithmically converting a brand new 600dpi industrial flatbed scan of well-preserved black-and-white typed page into a 1-bit black-and-white tiff would often yield noisy, and sometimes unusable results for relatively clean looking images because our eyes see right through artifacts that most algorithms can't. I'm sure you could easily do the first 90% algorithmically– which is probably good enough for most developers— but for an artist to get the accuracy he was looking for, that last 10% would almost certainly take longer than the few hours he put into it.
> Below is a list of some known non-speech sounds, but we are finding more every day. Please let us know if you find patterns that work particularly well on Discord! [laughter], [laughs], [sighs]....

This is likely a reflection of the data used to train the model - TTS models are trained on labeled audio, one form of which is subtitled audio streams. In subtitles / closed captioning, bracketed words are frequently used when there is something audible that is not speech.

Based on this insight, it should be possible to inspect the training data and extract a set of non-speech sounds the model is likely to generate well - but that doesn’t drive engagement of your users like asking them to experiment themselves does ;)

For example, closed captioning adds music notes (♪) when music plays or when people sing. According to the Bark docs, adding ♪ causes the model to output things as music.
The interesting thing that a lot of people forget about is that many people are “stuck” in their homes because of this.

For example, an older couple whose kids have left could downsize, but often can’t afford it due to that generation trying to maximize ROI.

So, the system is broken even for folks who want a different home, and the incentive to fix it may be that flexibility for existing homeowners to get a better fit for themselves.
I don't want to go into detail of all my APIs as most APIs are very expensive for commercial use and I see getting a really cheap one as a business secret.

I also created multiple libraries for fetching business data from official government sources (e.g.the SEC)

I try to get most of the data directly from the source and plan to launch a different product which will resell it.
No longer receiving feature updates. Monterey is still receiving security updates.
Far and away the main cause of house price inflation has been zero-interest rate fed policy.

Demand for 1m houses was high because people could afford it.

It will take a while for people's expectations to normalize, but if rates remain above 5 for years the market will return to earth.
> never been seen before

Hong Kong just did it. They weren't successful.

Brazil a decade ago was also driven by cost of living and they won.

US? I don't know. Occupy Wall Street was eradicated with terrifying efficiency. I'm not that optimistic about social movements here.
A primary input to the pricing function of a commodity is location. This applies to fruit, and it changes nothing about housing.

Source: career hedge fund commodities trader.
this would be dependency of new structure, on founding structure, and methods.
a plan is developed early,and departure from that initial architechture, is a scorched earth style revision, versus patching old proven fixes,on new hardware.

its a tendency of biological systems to innovate one step at a time, as persistence is a demand, so the system is not overhauled large scale, that would be tantamount to major negative selection, thus non-persistent properties.
Stripe 2023 insights report [pdf]
The Earth doesn't feel anything because it is not sentient. Anthropomorphizing topics causes us to treat them emotionally.

The OP has an excellent point which you didn't address them: most methane in the atmosphere is from natural causes. When the amount due to humans is removed, the effect on heating is not very significant in comparison of our CO2 emissions.

Stated another way, the OP is warning against premature optimization focusing our energy on issues that are an order of magnitude away from the main process.

If this were a conversation about a C loop, we wouldn't be emotional about it and we'd could argue better (for example, methane production also releases green house gases)
I can't get it working.
> And when they ask "why?", it feels awkward. If I tell them all the reasons, it will influence their perception of their situation (which might be quite positive)

I find this on itself to be a dysfunction. In well functioning team, they would be able to guess, because they would know your general opinions. And their positive opinions would be known too.

As in, this happens only because the communication within the team or within the corporation is dysfunctional and people dont talk in the first place.
I recall reading that cannabis use was supposed to inhibit this communication between the hemispheres via the corpus callosum.
Ask HN: Limitations for Paid Android Applications
It's well-known that Google is not too fond to forgo its "rightful" commission on any purchases for paid applications.

But would anyone know the exact details here and where that could be found in the millions of line of fineprint? :)

What exactly are applications on Google Play not allowed to do in the context of users purchasing paid applications?
you have the proper concept
No I don't think that's strange.

A better analogy might be: would you think it strange that someone teaching a C programming class has never compiled a program?
I'm interested in metaverses that work. The NFT industry has crashed and burned [1], and Facebook/Meta has bombed in that space [2]. With the clown car out of the way, it's now possible to make progress.
The lesson of these failures is that there's not much of a role for ads or brands in the metaverse.
They're distracting and don't fit in. The successes, from Roblox to Fortnite to Second Life, charge users a modest fee each month.

A metaverse is not a game. Games can be built within it by users. This has been done in Second Life, but the games are 1) sluggish, and 2) space-constrained, because land is expensive. Those are scaling problems which can be solved.

This requires solving the scaling problems that led to the original article here. You can't just download everything in advance. There's too much stuff in the larger games.

Open Simulator is an open source re-implementation of Second Life servers, written in C#. It's been around for a while, and now it's getting a bit more developer attention. There are multiple federated grids of Open Simulator servers, and content stores where you can buy items, all under different management.
Land is much cheaper than in Second Life, but servers tend to be under-resourced and slow. There are some people working quietly on trying to improve the Open Simulator technology to work better.

Other attempts to solve this problem include Improbable's system. Improbable managed to blow through $400 million on the scaling problem, producing a system that's too expensive to run.[3] (They're funded by SoftBank.) Some good indy games tried to use their system, but the server bill was too high. Their approach is a general-purpose distributed object manager, which seems to be the wrong tool for the job. Otherside uses Improbable, and they only turn on their world maybe twice a year for a few hours for special events.

[1] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-metaverse-horizon-worlds-z...

[3] https://www.improbable.io/

[4] https://www.ft.com/content/3508bec7-a2f8-414e-8059-7b96b2700...
Probably tied to local economical growth/wages.

Which means it could still be relatively affordable for people who live in the area (minus income inequality issues) while also being a good investment compared to national average.
Yeah, I was referring to dialogue style interaction, like ChatGPT. It DOES have an internal state depending on version of from 4000 to 32000 tokens. It’s wiped clean between sessions, like a Meeseeks ceasing to exist once its task is finished.
Corporations of any type should just be banned from buying most domiciles. Should be a legal name on the deed. Will never happen though.
> It's worth noting that Telegram's backend is also closed source, yet its supporters often overlook this fact.

Backend is never verifiable. It's a moot point. Signal's backend is open source yet they always release the sources late. Their servers were running entirely different code for a year and they even injected some cryptocurrency related features which weren't reflected in the source code.

Backend is always unverifiable, open source or not.

> Decompiling and inspecting mobile apps is relatively simple

Not so much when WhatsApp obfuscates binaries on purpose.

On top of that, the T&C clearly forbid you from doing it.

> As for Telegram, its messages are stored in plain text on their servers

Absolutely false. Telegram's cloud encryption algorithm has already been audited by independent researchers.

Calling symmetric encryption as "plain text", is disingenuous.

> This means that if Russian secret services were to gain access to Telegram's backend, they could easily read all the messages.

I guess Russia's telegram ban doesn't matter then? Nor Durov's fight with the Russian government. He actually moved to another country to stop the Russian government from having access to the servers.

It's totally fine to understand your security context and the security your messaging medium provides but it's not good to misrepresent facts and use terms that mislead people.
Feels like a rhetorical trap. It's easy to brand someone "a nimby" because by nature people will care more about the building of things the closer they are to them. However it's just pointless dunking that doesn't engage the core issues of why people might disagree over what is being built and where.

For instance, ones reasons for opposing a landfill being built nearby are morally very different from opposing high density housing.
In essence it's all about getting results, and specialisation might yield better results. Just because people think it sounds cool to call it 'prompt engineering' doesn't mean it's not a specialisation (or optimisation), even if the terminology is based on nothing.

I do think that it's not broad or deep enough (right now) to merit a completely separate area of expertise on its own, but it can be too big to fit within the minds and areas of expertise of people who already have their work cut out for them in their existing workdays. Think about most desktop computer users, they really have no clue how the computer works, and even asking them to change a resolution on a mirrored display might be too far removed from their knowledge base (and that is fine). This also applies to tokenisation prompt inputs; it might take too much for someone to simply tack that on to what they already do and know.

This is then were we get job postings and those need to be easily identified, so people can search for them, and this is where we get nonsense terms used to distinguish the desired applicants from the pool of work-seeking people.
When the Boomers die off, won't there be a glut of homes and thus a crash in prices?

Or maybe not. Maybe Big Corp will buy them all and make the younger gens renters.