skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this is a fair response. Throwing a conditional means-tested $1000 to a drowning man wouldn't save them either. You are grouping in different policies and treating them as if you have to accept a package deal or nothing. The binary choice is a false illusion.

I'd be happy to argue about the value of means-testing. However people who are in favor of means testing can rarely point to a study validating the effectiveness of it, because the reality of means-testing is that it:
a) Increases administration costs, making it rarely cost efficient
b) Increases barriers to access, leaving people who need help behind
c) Tends to create poverty traps and weird distorting incentives.

I'd also be happy to look at data in terms of what services the unhoused need most, and what is the most helpful in terms of ending long-term homelessness and reducing the impact on society as a whole. This is a separate discussion.

In reality though, I think most people on both sides think of it on a local scale, and therefore are struggling to actually come up with solutions that will fundamentally solve the issue. Communities have generally gone with one of two solutions to these issues:
1) Making it difficult for those who are unhoused.
2) Trying to improve the situation of those who are unhoused.

The first approach doesn't actually solve the problem, it just shifts it to other locations. At its worst you see it with cities and towns busing their homeless to other places, but you see it expressed most frequently with the criminalization of homelessness. If this was the approach everywhere we would quickly enter an arms race of who could make things worse, and you would almost certainly see the problem nationally become worse.

On the other hand, you have communities trying to improve the lives of unhoused folks, which is really just a bandaid on the core issue.

The root of the problem is the cost of housing, and unfortunately this is an area which California has struggled to solve. However, this is completely orthogonal to how you treat your homeless populations. You can treat the homeless with dignity AND lower housing costs at the same time.
That's really sad. What a shame cutting down 1k large old oaks for any building at all. It's not necessary these days. Of course they need some wood in publicly viewable areas, but this amount of not only wood but large old oak trees is excessive and concerning.

Is there any indication that they're improving the structure so it will be more fire proof? Or are they simply restoring it to the configuration that already failed?
Apalled to see to many people in the comments not getting the point of the article. You can't optimize because optimizing (for whatever) is an effort, not rest; it undermines the point of rest. It points to the deeply engrained way we (humans, collectively) think, as if rest (or inner peace, or relaxation) was a project, a goal to achieve, or at least a to do item.
Eh, the whole thing seems very coupled to the Google universe, I doubt it would generalize well outside of it.

People really underestimate how divergent the tech is in there. It's really a whole parallel tech ecosystem that's been evolving independently for 20 years.

And I'm not aware of anything outside that ecosystem that has anything close to the level of instrumentation and integration of the entire dev process.
> Were there leaky buckets

Oh, yes. Some samples:

1. https://sfstandard.com/housing-development/city-audit-finds-...

2. https://thefrisc.com/sf-has-fought-homelessness-with-no-bid-...

3. https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-homeless-nonprofit-housin...

This is common knowledge for folks in the Bay Area.
Nicotine and caffeine are both natural products, produced by a wide range of plants (yes, humans grow tobacco, coffee, tea, etc. to get them, but there are a lot of other plants that contain one of these, usually at lower levels). One would expect to find low levels of these chemicals in any sample of ocean water even without human activity.

Since they don't say how much they found (parts per million? parts per billion? parts per trillion? less?), it's hard to even guess whether the levels should be "concerning".
It's not about difficulty (though for the record, I would say that the restaurant industry is much more competitive than the AI industry and the management problems are likely just as hard).

The size of a company is very correlated with the value add between a good CEO and a bad CEO, or between a good CEO and a great CEO. It's the same reason why basketball players make more money than ping pong players. It's not that basketball is harder than ping pong, it's that way more people watch basketball so there is more money to be made by the team that has the best players. Because the CEO's decisions are leveraged by the scale of the business, big businesses are willing to pay top dollar for whoever they think has the best shot at running the company well. Of course, this judgement might be incorrect, because the world is hard to predict.

Just because performance differences are less visible in CEOs than they are in basketball players doesn't mean the differences don't exist, or are less valuable.
My intuition is that the new crop of AI tools is still higher leverage for individuals than for large organizations.

And given how software development historically has scaled sub-linearly with org size, I expect we will see interesting developments as these tools continue to improve. Advancements should magnify the leverage differential.

However, if tools like those discussed in the article can change the equation of how software development scales with org size, then maybe that changes things.

I do agree that large orgs will gain a lot here as well. But I’m not sold that they will gain more than skilled individuals, proportionally.
but when you do the research

Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief.

Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:

- San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime

- Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order to qualify for benefits

- Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like they're from around here
The volume is the real problem, as you mentioned. People are worried about AI content because it’s hard to even review it or accurately detect it. I can’t remember the last time I looked at my email spam folder, even though I’m sure there are some useful messages in there, mostly because it would take too much time to go through it. If the inbox starts being filled with AI content that isn’t quite spam, it might start feeling like a chore to go through too, again mostly because of the volume. We will have to see if the existing mechanics of unsubscribe, report, downvote, etc. will be sufficient to hold back the tsunami.

My guess is the spam detection arms race will evolve into a content moderation arms race and we will end up with advanced AIs filtering and moderating content for us, to varying degrees of success and things like email, forums, and Q&A sites will become increasingly hands off.
As you say, Stack overflow is free to use. ChatGPT isn't and its scraped web training corpus is not available.

So it's not symmetric
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0.02% this year
Minor nitpick: Santa Barbara's desalination plant isn't "new" -- it was constructed 30+ years ago.
What's crazy is that we decide to spend on homelessness in such inefficient ways.

A "housing first" strategy would be more humane, and pretty affordable compared to what we're currently doing. This article says $3.7B for an estimated 115k homeless population which yields around $32k per person per year, or $2700 per person per month, and that's only state money. In SF it may be more like $57k/yr, or $4750/mo. At those rates, we could be renting people market rate 1BD apartments for less than we're spending on inefficient/ineffective services or safe sleeping sites. Cities could be buying up the over-built condos and actually putting people in them.

Yes, drug addiction and mental health issues are important factors, but these are easier for people to get under control if they have the safety and stability of a home. Getting and holding down a job is also easier when you have a safe place to live.

Why don't we do this? I think it comes down to (a) corruption, where organizations that provide 'services' have good relationships with people in government and (b) "fairness" concerns, where a working person paying out the nose for half of an apartment doesn't want their tax dollars to give anyone an apartment for free. On that second point, I understand the frustration, but if the alternative is spending _more_ tax dollars for someone to camp on the sidewalk and make my neighborhood feel unsafe and unclean, then I would rather put them into homes.

https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...
Would love to solve this one day.

Almost positive its a recent phenomenon. Would like to know that as well.

Tesla's father chastised him for reading by candlelight. Thought it would "spoil his eyes".
Microcontent: A Few Small Words Have a Mega Impact on Business
If you build it, they will come.

Turn your city into a homeless paradise, act surprised when homeless people show up.
SEO strategy must be built around tracking positions of key search phrases from groups like branded, root, vanity, competitive, high traffic, high converters, and so on. SERP Tracker Tools help track these specific positions as a marker for your SEO performance.
Did Facebook invest in this. Is that why it's under Facebookincubator?
For those curious about an actual analysis and impact of it skip the article.

It is more of an idealogocal blog post rather than a through review.
> Why would the Air Force even code the simulated capability for the simulated drone to “kill” its pilot?

Maybe I am mistaken, but I had thought lot of the excitement around current AI is the emergent behaviors that nobody specifically programmed for?
Assuming they really are (which as the sibling commenter points out, is open to question): Because it's an intrinsically high-stress role, by any metric. And on top of that, you have massive psychological expectations to answer to.

Including and most especially the most toxic of all: having to shape our lives according to what other people think.
No, it is not boil the ocean. Do we throw our hands up and not fix the leaky solution?

Let me ask you something. Do you keep filling a bucket with more holes with zero attempts at fixing even a single hole?
That's... good, right? You write a report on Friday, and come Monday morning you can just read the points from that very report during the meeting. Zero stress.
> I'm honestly not sure what the moral of this story is.

That people will go with what is easier and works?

That open source and open standards don't win by default? That it takes a lot of persistence and effort.
This stunning video / visualisation features the evaporation of everything. Ultimately everything cools to absolute zero. Time becomes meaningless.

Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

edit: discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33046171
But on the other side, the same accusation, people will reflexively and cynically throw up their hands and say "see it's not working" and give up, offering no real better solutions themselves other than they don't want to spend money.

If people point to clear, concrete, distinct problems that's one thing. But gesturing vaguely at "boy lots of money being spent here" that's another.

Living near the heart of an ongoing unresolved homelessness crisis my entire life the driving force I've seen, despite all the money being spent is 1) largely an insufficient status quo approach and 2) no actual better ideas from those opposed.

So in fact both sides are doing badly.

Regarding point 1 in my jurisdiction, despite all the money being spent, all the ribbons being cut on performative new social housing projects, you can add up the numbers of units and find that over the decades there's actually constantly net loss of housing, as whatever occasionally new is created is dominated by the old affordable units being destroyed.

Despite this clear and provable net loss in affordable housing and an ensuing obvious expected rise in homelessness, critics point out that we spent too much money on homelessness, offering no better solutions themselves but simply to spend less money. Of course if less money was spent, if less homes were created, the net loss of units would be even more extreme, and the amount of visible street homelessness would only increase further.

These [scary big number] amounts of spending sound like waste but more likely that they're just barely enough to band aid the wounds and prevent utter disaster.
Music Pirates Are Not Terrorists, Record Labels Argue in Court
They'd rather you read The Book of Mormon instead.
The whitespace and font size you have now is good. On HN, I have to zoom in to 140% to be able to read comfortably. Just went back to 100% and quickly remembered why I had it zoomed in.

No one is using 480p CRTs anymore, IDK why HN is still formatted that way. Regardless, I like how it is. My scroll wheel is not poisonous, I'm happy to use it.
Guilty of not reading the article yet - even the headline reads like a political ad.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5091001/

>Hand sanitizers are more effective than plain soap and water alone in preventing transmission of bacteria from the hands of individuals. They play a significant role and could be an effective alternative to hand washing to achieve asepsis for all the health-care professionals in outreach program, water scarcity areas, and in routine clinical practice. Hence, stressing proper hand hygiene is an important first-line defense against the spread of multiple infectious diseases.

Maybe looking up studies on this would be a good place to start...

Of course I'm sure that there is a wide range of different answers on this that vary over a huge number of factors and illnesses in question.
"Government spent X on Y and it does not work"

I guess this is a theme.
This has been the policy at every boring non-tech company I've ever worked at. You get hired with a certain amount of PTO, and that number starts to grow after some initial waiting period (e.g. 3 years). It's not uncommon for company lifers who have been there for 20+ years to have doubled or tripled the PTO they had when they started.

That being said, I've never heard of a place that _literally_ ties PTO to tenure -- if you join the company in a senior position, you can always negotiate to start with a similar amount of PTO as someone who worked their way into that position internally.
The problem is that some groups have no problem taking facts and distorting them into untruths.

We truly are living in an age of alternate facts.

I’ve read papers put out by research groups that were easy to debunk. Most people won’t go to that effort and will take the glossy material and legitimate sounding author as being truthful when in fact every conclusion made in the report is a lie.
It's only 7% and for gains above $250K. I shouldn't be, but I'm shocked they had to defend this initiative.

For contrast, in Canada, capital gains tax rate is 50%, regardless of the amount.
#10DaysofCodingChatGPT
Recently, I was invited to the University of Oxford to deliver a series of lectures on how ChatGPT works.

On Monday, I’m going to start "10 Days of Coding ChatGPT", where I will share detailed notebooks that highlight the code underpinning ChatGPT.

I'll go through:

Day 1: Programme Overview & Essential Machine Learning Concepts and Programming Skills
Day 2: PyTorch
Day 3: Neural Networks
Day 4: Pre-trained ML Models & Fine-Tuning
Day 5: Intro to AI for Text Data
Day 6: Generating Text with RNNs
Day 7: Seq-to-seq
Day 8: Attention
Day 9: Self-attention
Day 10: Transformers, BERT & GPT

The material is free and accessible anytime for you to review and make use of. Sign up for the series using the link above.

Harry Berg
AI Educator
If those people bothered to actually vote instead of just complaining online then the problem would be less severe.
Ok, it makes more sense now. But you need to consider the significant incremental benefit to the model training process when creating labels exactly where the model underperforms.

The baseline you mention is already an issue that is being debated hotly.

My comment was that humans reviewing and fixing new AI content is exactly not what should be done in the current circumstances.
Will this have some similarities to what Mojo is trying to solve?
TB is quite a bit more than just "a cold that scares us".

How many people do you want her to have the opportunity to infect while we wait for definitive proof that she was the source of infecting at least one of them?

> im criticizing the judge here because the facts don’t back the judgement

BS. Your false belief that TB isn't infectious and deadly is distorting your view of the judge and his ruling. You're wrong; the judge and the epidemiologists are right.
> My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.

THIS ^^^
> isn't the most lasting effect pitting one group against another?

I honestly just don't see it.

> People who believe one thing are also reading this article in resentment and despair. You don't think about them, but they are out there

Again, I struggle to see that. Saying "but they are out there" doesn't mean they actually are.

Look, I just don't get what you're saying. I know when my mental health problems kick in the world starts to distort and I can feel, to a lesser degree, something like what you're saying. It doesn't mean it's universally true, or even predominantly true. And I'm not saying you're wrong either, but... you leave me baffled. Are you seeing through a glass darkly?

(For the record you're worrying about methanol contamination – for the past 3 years I've been using methylated spirits as a hand sanitiser; 90% ethanol 10% methanol. I haven't had any problems)
you don't need a metaphor here. the world's largest communications platform is using content generated by journalism organizations to make money, and those orgs are now asking for a piece of it. it's that simple.
> Those "very few" people very prominently include Yudkowski himself, or so I understand.

I don't think that's true; he's stated before he doesn't and didn't believe it was true. His reaction was more about the stupidity of posting information hazards on public fora rather than that specific information hazard being credible. However, he could be lying post-facto.

And I do agree that it kind of sucks that Yud is the "face of AI risk" because it doesn't even matter how correct he might be; a lot of people just don't like him (I'm indifferent). There shouldn't be a "Face of AI risk" because there won't be a single person that everyone like. The idea is bigger than him.
There could still be value, if ChatGPT is right 60% of the time, there is still value in someone filtering that down to the correct answers.
> It's hard to say of course, we don't have all the information, but I can tell you it was very resource intensive, and at the same time the core product (newspaper/website) was bloated and burdened with ads.

> Honestly to me it felt like the historical newspaper model just simply stopped being as effective, and rather than face that reality, downsize, and innovate, these companies sold their souls to the devil (advertisers).

What now? Are you somehow suggesting the newspapers shouldn't have been running ads, or decided to run fewer ads, when their other revenue was likely drying up (e.g. classified ads)?

The historical newspaper model has always been to use news to get eyeballs, them make money showing ads. If that's selling "their souls to the devil (advertisers)," they were doing it from the start.
Because certain areas of the country have better services for homeless people, because certain areas are livable/hospitable year-round, because some places bus homeless people to other areas? Probably mostly the first 2 reasons but the third doesn't help.
They've been "betting on AI" for the last two decades.
Victoria, Nanaimo etc. also have significant homeless issues, and I fully support out of province homeless people moving to Vancouver for whatever reason they might have. Freedom of movement is important to democracy.

But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the bucks, the federal and provincial government are pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This is simply not possible.
context: java
We are doing exactly what you propose. Many communities have "housing first" homeless strategies. Some people do in fact get off the street.

But we also have some "service resistant" homeless populations that do not want to live in your rule-based housing, they want to live without those rules even if it means living on the street.
Substantiate a negative? No.
Just build more housing ffs.
A fond farewell to Flutter and Dart
Even if it is caused by other states, is it valid to complain about that? What is the solution to that? Borders between states (while having no borders between countries)?

Edit: I dug up some data:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians.

> “This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years.

CA considers you a resident for tax purposes if you live in the state for a year but in homeless studies they consider you a resident if you live here for more than 10 years. Really shows the bias.
> were all locked down in their cabins and COVID didn't care at all, managing to infect people all over the ship essentially at random.

I wonder how much of this could be explained by multiple day incubation times and an asymptomatic infection being spread to cabin-mates.

> This is only possible if it is able to spread long distances via the air

Or people infected others filtering in and out of the same close quarters that are poorly ventilated (e.g. elevators and public bathrooms). Doesn’t even require you to be in there at the same time if it can float around for a few hours.

My (still valid) joke about the pandemic is to always be upwind of whomever you’re in contact with. 6’/2M apart didn’t matter.
New links found between personality and cognitive abilities