skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: A friend is being cut from benefits, what is wrong with SSI?
My friend Mary is about 75. Super nice and super retired. She can still climb stairs, but not for a lot longer.

This is a question about how poor elderly people survive in the USA metro areas.

We are in Oakland. Mary is my neighbor.

Mary has about $3,000 in her bank account, which is barely enough for rent around here. She lives on SSI benefits [1].

But suddenly she got a letter saying she was suspended from SSI.

Plus a $19,000 fee.

The reason they gave: because her bank account was over $2,000.

Turns out, yep, extremely strict, fixed limit. If you go over this limit even barely, you can be penalized. The limit is two. thousand. dollars.

They are saying they overpaid her and now she has to pay it back.

They say she was over the limit for a year, which was true — she could have easily hidden the assets if she were trying to commit a crime. (As if having $3k could be a crime.)

Turns out this limit has not been inflation adjusted since 1970s.

Apparently it is the strictest limits of their kind in the USA. [2]

The strict limit clearly discourages people from saving. I mean, it literally prohibits savings.

And now just when her income goes down to zero, she will get a new bill to pay every month. Absolutely punishing!

She is poor and harmless, she really did nothing wrong and this feels like a life-threatening policy failure.

What can I specifically do to help Mary?

This is devastating for her and may really leave her homeless. It is impossible for me to tell how to approach the SSI bureaucracy. She has no lawyer or advocate, and we don't know what to do except to ask around.

So, any feedback would be welcome from folks who have experience with this or can give pointers to other relevant resources, thanks.

Should we contest the case and what kind of logic would be persuasive to this machine?

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/ssi
[2] https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/the-case-for-updating-ssi-asset-limits
Unless I've missed something, they aren't doing that - the mention of a three year time frame is that you must have made a post on the blog within the last 3 years, this excluding old and dormant blogs
Lmao the Taleb thread is gold as he devolves into an Elon Musk level of maturity with the trolls while chiding Elon.

I think he is partially correct in that extreme risk taking is necessary to achieve extreme success, but I can't think of anyone mostly self-made in the Forbes top 50 who you couldn't argue is far above average intelligence, business acumen, or some skill relevant to their wealth. Risk makes up the difference. E.g. Musk might be top 5% in early education/opportunity, top 5% in intelligence, top 5% in business vision, and top 2% in work ethic, but it's the top 0.01% in risk appetite that results in him not being worth a few million (or wherever 0.05 * 0.05 * 0.05 * 0.02 ranks you in society), but the richest man alive.
IMDB rankings are not popularity contests like the billboard/spotify charts. If you want the comparable website for music checkout rateyourmusic.
It is beyond surprising, it is horrifying.

Also, URI not URL has been the preferred choice for years and years and years.

But the footgun persists, for backwards compatibility
I know you understand this but Google doesn't care about the data insofar as they can sell it to the highest bidder in their literal real-time ad placement auctions. 4th and 5th parties are using thousands of behavioral signals to influence the reality that your father consumes in his regional language news and religious videos over years and decades.
This is inaccurate. Computer is “计算机” （computing machine），while “电脑” mostly refers to PC, even though they are sometimes used interchangeably the latter is distinctively narrower than "computer" while the former is equivalent.
Same in Austrian German (Paradeiser) so perhaps something to do with it the Austro-Hungarian empire.
This would only be possible if you are treated by professionals. An addict whose brain is soaked in nasty chemicals will never voluntarily seek treatment even if it was freely available, let alone come up with a plan by themselves to use psychedelics to sober up.
Related:

A note of reflection after 10 years of “A successful Git branching model” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22496724 - March 2020 (100 comments)

A successful Git branching model (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376841 - Oct 2017 (120 comments)

What is wrong with “A successful Git branching model”? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190310 - Feb 2016 (120 comments)

What is wrong with “A successful Git branching model”? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11059485 - Feb 2016 (4 comments)

A simple git branching model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6456193 - Sept 2013 (157 comments)

A successful Git branching model (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437983 - Sept 2013 (15 comments)

A successful Git branching model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5928979 - June 2013 (3 comments)

A successful Git branching model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966820 - Dec 2010 (11 comments)

Tutorial: How to use Git in a team development environment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826279 - Oct 2010 (26 comments)

A successful Git branching model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063198 - Jan 2010 (44 comments)
And I'm sure you'd be within your rights to add a switch somewhere to toggle the heaters on manually, for instance.

The only difference between some cars power is the ECU tune on the car. Are you entitled to the fastest version from the factory because you bought the cheaper model? I would say no. But you're free to add your own ECU tune via aftermarket methods.
> I wonder how hard it would be to modify this code to run on a 64GB M2 Mac.

It isn't that hard, I was able to run in on M1.
The changes are:

remove or modify multiprocessing - it doesn't work on Mac the same way as in the code;

replace `device = "cuda"` with `device = "mps"`

In this line ` att_idxs = (torch.clamp(torch.arange(context_size)[None, :] - torch.arange(context_size)[:, None], -pos_emb_radius, pos_emb_radius-1) % pos_emb_size).to("cuda")` replace cuda with "mps"

in `optim.AdamW` remove `fused=True` - we can't do it without CUDA

Replace
```with autocast(device_type='cuda', dtype=torch.float16):
_, loss = mlm_head(bert(batch_data_torch_xs[mb_start_idx:mb_end_idx]), batch_data_torch_ys[mb_start_idx:mb_end_idx])
```

with simply `_, loss = mlm_head(bert(batch_data_torch_xs[mb_start_idx:mb_end_idx]), batch_data_torch_ys[mb_start_idx:mb_end_idx])`

replace `scaler.scale(corrected_loss).backward()` with `corrected_loss.backward()`

replace
```
scaler.unscale_(optimizer)
scaler.step(optimizer)
scaler.update()
```
with `optimizer.step()`

It should work.
Agreed. In my teams, I've always implemented a simple model, which hasn't failed me. Main branch triggers deployment, and name rest of the branches <author>/<feature>. Just works.

In some cases, an extra caveat to the above was triggering deployment/build in Main, only when the tag/version number gets incremented.
Instead of unkind words I'll just quote the State Constitution.

Alaska State Constitution Article 8 Section 1

It is the policy of the State to encourage the settlement of its land and the development of its resources by making them available for maximum use consistent with the public interest.
How many bitcoin transactions are for the purchase of goods and services (useful work) compared to the VISA network where that number is somewhere near 100%?
Do you really want power company bureaucrats curating a clipboard of businesses deemed non-essential?
Concerning the production order system malfunction
Pinboard blog shows default Apache page now
I guess this is another one of “What’s going on with Pinboard?” Status checks.
I hope the regulators are not and wish Google would be hit with huge antitrust fees in the EU due to this. We shall see.
I have F13 bound to open KeePassXC on Mac. It works in every application except Firefox. Firefox blocks it somehow. It’s the reason I don’t use it.
I would counter that you have a nonsensical understanding unemployment. You are imagining that everyone unemployed is so by convenient choice and voluntarily holding out for something that meets all their preferences. That is not true.

Socialism doesn't require forcing programmers to be hairdressers. That's a huge strawman.
How do you consider this a loan by the city? They sold the management concessions for a (potentially) fixed fee and in 75 years they'll get the rights back but nothing more. Or you're saying, this concession is equivalent to $1.16 billion lent over 75 years not adjusted for inflation at a rate of 3.2% rate today?

Also, a rough calculation, but I came out with a 13% nominal return per year for the management company assuming they hit that 10x:

1,160,000,000.00 * 10 = 11,600,000,000.00 -> total earned

11,600,000,000.00 / 75 = 154,666,666.00 -> earnings per year

154,666,666.00 / 1,160,000,000.00 = 13% -> annual return

Which does seem like a very, very nice deal for the concessionaire.
Yeah I know, I'm kind of expecting more from Linux in that respect.

But I'm also just genuinely wondering if people more experienced in software engineering would agree that it is better, ideally, to have one clear, right way of installing software.
Your last sentence is where you go wrong: compensation is not a subsidy. If the government uses my land to build a highway, I am compensated because I lose something of value. Subsidies are not an exchange but are one-way.

You are mischaracterizing the payments because you hate crypto.
re: the Nahuatl origin of chocolate, my money is obviously on xocolatl.
Location: Boston(ish), USA
Remote: Preferred
Willing to relocate: SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Chicago, ...?
Technologies: Python, Go, C++, bash, Lua, etc. Terraform, CloudFormation, Chef, Puppet, Ansible. AWS, GCP. Docker, Kubernetes, containerd.
Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11QKYWGj4TbZW_k09ZM2xSVCOg7Hqnq0k
Email: sparr0@gmail.com
Github: http://github.com/sparr

I am a software developer with infrastructure related skills, looking for a role probably described as software engineering, site reliability engineering, or devops. I am most at home working on projects creating tooling used by my peers, acting as a force multiplier for their productivity.
Bitcoin mining has a somewhat unique property among energy demands - it is essentially location agnostic. Bitcoin miners do not care where they are mining, they care only that energy is cheap. This enables their strategic geographic placement ("in the right places" is just as important as "at the right times").

An aluminum recycling plant sounds much more environmental on paper, but does it still sound as good if you put it in the middle of the desert in west TX and needed to ship aluminum cans in on semi trucks?
> If crypto didn't exist, another industry would need to be shutdown.

This makes literally zero sense. Mining adds extra load that wouldn’t otherwise exist. If crypto didn’t exist, the Texas grid would experience reduced load. This should be obvious: if paying these miners to stop has the desired effect of reducing the load on the grid, miners not existing would surely have a similar effect.

> their argument applies to every industry.

Most other industries provide actual societal value, unlike crypto. And to hear off the rebuttal I already hear coming: no, just because it has a market cap doesn’t mean it’s adding value to society. As a trivial counterexample, Mexican cartels are undoubtedly worth billions but I think it’s pretty inarguable we’d all be better off without them.
Don’t use SMS instead of iMessage though. Then all your texts will be sent across the network without any kind of decent encryption. And WhatsApp is almost unusable unless you consent to uploading all your contacts to Facebook. (IIRC this was the red line that got crossed that caused the WhatsApp founder to quit FB post-acquisition.)

Signal is a good recommendation, but you won’t be able to convince 100% of people you need to interact with over text to use Signal. You might convince friends and family, but not acquaintances or random people who might need to text with (like your electrician etc.)

Given the tradeoffs, iMessage is pretty good for day-to-day messaging.
I always thought that a capital X in the middle or end of word would be the greek letter Chi, which is pronounced like ch. So just "search". Problem with that of course is that nobody knows what you are talking about, because it looses all uniqueness from its name, which is why I never actually do it.
Not if you're using ANN. In some cases that will be very similar to exhaustive search but in other cases you'll get results that you don't want. You also need embeddings that distribute things mostly evenly across the embedding space (not all will).
Arc is fantastic. Their product team is really well focused - the PIP view for google meet that dropped out of nowhere has been a game changer for getting through my day.

Going back to the alternatives from Arc for browsing and Hey for email management is always jarring. They aren't massive UX changes, but they sure are well thought out and impactful.
Those seemingly imperfect attributes were placed there by the devil (a Perl dev) to cause fear and doubt.
The catch is: Even with proof of stake, you need to prime the pump with proof of work. Otherwise, you have nothing to stake!

Hopefully we’ve proven enough work already to serve as a foundation and from here on we can scaffold up with staking.
I’ve noticed a lot of things that start going wonky with Lockdown mode on.

Continuity seems to go right out the window for me for one, which is something I really rely on.

Airplay also seems to become really temperamental.

All of this could just be my network but it only seems to have been the case since switching to lockdown mode.

Also, screen time requests don’t work which is a real pain.
There were also some binary DLLs in the repo (in the x64 directory) which get loaded/executed on first launch and then deleted. I didn’t reverse-engineer to see if there was anything malicious inside of them, but it seemed pretty fishy to me.
How? Their inefficiency is tied to their design of having millions of people being employed keeping it afloat. What does hackernews think about the efficiency of 100k+ people orgs? I don't see much positive sentiment on that. Ultimately transactions still just abide by the laws of physics. If you live in Florida and I live in California, I want to trade my potted plant for your alligator egg, we can both walk and met in the middle, the transaction cost being the amount of calories we need to have the energy to walk 3000 miles. Efficiencies are found in bundling, we jump on a train full of people that want to go to Kansas to make other trades, or send a trading representative in a solar powered plane, but have to pay for solar powered plane crash insurance and escrow fee, etc. etc. So ultimately we are looking at legacy finance with massive baked in inefficiency of people, vs crypto with hard coded inefficiency by design. Is bucket 1 really going to beat bucket 2 if the volumes were similar? My intuition is no but would love to see real data.
To avoid brownouts the generation capacity must match or exceed the peak demand.

This is particularly hard when there is a lot of renewables on the grid because their minimum output is very low compared to their average output but the renewables are inexpensive relative to their average output compared to other sources so the utility prefers to build more and more renewables if it can.

To address this, utilities must build generation capacity that sits idle. This has terrible economics. Instead, utilities can take a portion of the money that they would have spent building idle capacity and pay it to users who are able to quickly shut off when demand approaches capacity (or approaches the 'cheap' capacity).

This is equivalent to selling these parties spare capacity at a discounted rate.

So consuming energy but being willing/able to stop on a moments notice stabilizes the grid by (1) making it economical to have worst case capacity capacity closer to the peak demand, and (2) getting out of the way when that capacity is needed.

The key point is that they can immediately turn off on the utilities request. This is easier for bitcoin miners than it is for many industrial scale energy users (though there are other ones who do this too).
As I see it (from largely an outsider perspective), there are two difficulties with embedded software: 1) a large sensitivity to performance, to the point where higher level languages are difficult to justify the overhead. And 2) it is generally difficult to write software for embedded systems because the peripherals are all over the place. There is no “one framework to rule them all”, so you need to relearn how to do basic tasks for every new system you use.

I feel like 1 is getting to be much less of a blocker for a huge variety of applications. Most hobbyists don’t even bother with the dedicated built in “spi” pins, they just do spi bit banging on whatever pins they want to use because they don’t have a performance reason to worry about it.

2 is still an issue, and is largely what arduino was trying to solve (for hobbyists at least), by creating a standardized set of tools and libraries.

From that perspective, there is still a lot of work to be done. Modern languages can offer a huge amount of zero cost abstractions for things like HALs, if you can make it easy enough to write the underlying translation layers so you can actually run on the combinatoric explosion of different software options out there. If arduino can make that kind of thing possible, I would assume they could make inroads into the professional world.
Probably because they have Shogi, which is also fun to play.

They also like Go, which I hate.

Absolutely love Mahjong, though. (Thanks Yakuza series!)
Capitalist view: If they didn't emphasize it, some first-time Apple customers might be convinced by concerned friends and family to enable Lockdown Mode by default, and then might complain to Apple / return their device because it "doesn't do the things it was advertised to do" (because those features don't work in Lockdown Mode.)

Realpolitik view: repressive regimes probably only allow Apple to release devices with this feature available, as long as they don't heavily push it / make it the default. If Lockdown Mode defaulted to "on" in China, and so was used by the majority of users, then Apple would be quickly booted out of China.
Absolutely not. Very rich finance guy/business owner/doctor with a teacher wife is incredibly common.
They aren’t able to gain the benefits of the program.

The same way 1960s Alabama was harmful to the people they refused to serve at the counter.

This program has benefit. Some people can’t apply, thus the harm.
Is riichi mahjong even that popular?
> Why is it ao hard for you to accept that some people might different opnions?

you're passing over a very crucial detail here: this person's opinion consisted solely of

> Have you looked at the team?

they themselves finally admitted it at the end. this isn't so much an opinion as hero worship at best and fanaticism at worst.
I have been developing a "small web" static site, forked and customized a templating engine into a static site generator just for my site. Even wrote a new post recently, last week or so. How can I add it to the list? The GitHub says to make a pull request, is that really all there is to it?

Edit: just saw this:

> Do not submit your own website.

I see. I'm okay with that. Maybe it will show up there one day.
The proper solution is to raise the price of electricity.
Ukraine rips Musk for disrupting attack on Russian fleet with Starlink cutoff
what strain of mushrooms?
Firefox is barely surviving. Skinning Chromium hardly counts as competing with Chrome.

I agree with you that Chrome is even worse than IE ever was. Mostly because Google is much smarter than MS was when it comes to ensuring market dominance. It will be much harder to dethrone Google, simply because Chrome is a much better product.
Not to be confused with the Julia binary building platform of the same name (https://github.com/JuliaPackaging/Yggdrasil)
My understanding is that Mahjong is more of a rummy style game than a tactical game like a chess/shogi/go so not really applicable here.
Look up "hot tenting" on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hot+tent+winter...
I am curious from a constitution law point of view, does a ruling in ICC supersede or sets a precedent in state or federal case? For example, if a ICC or US Federal Court rules synthetic art generated by LLM or Diffusion Models are not copyright able or code is speech protected by bill of rights does it mean ICC can interpret from that in a broad/narrow scope or vice versa as they do in our judicial system?
I’ve been using Kagi for over a year and it just keeps getting better. I really appreciate Kagis user and privacy-centric view of the web, and I love how the quality of the product proves that sticking to those ideals is really a better way to build. I hope they continue to gain enough momentum with non-tech audiences to continue to exist for a long time.
> The observed effect is it’s costing the US $1Bn every year

Given the number of people involved, which, as I've posted elsewhere in this thread, is miniscule (1300 deaths and 77,000 injuries over 17 years, which equates to 77 deaths and 4529 injuries per year), I have extreme difficulty believing this number. It looks like a number pulled out of someone's orifice for FUD.

> The lines are drawn by your elected representatives based on costs and benefits.

Not if they are based on numbers that don't seem to have any relation to reality.

Not to mention the fact, which has already been pointed out by several posters in this thread, including me, that the numbers involved are tiny compared to the numbers for traffic deaths--and automobile safety is already regulated up one side and down the other. Which should give anyone pause regarding the claimed "savings" due to regulation.
Yeah that sounds like what I was thinking of, thanks!
> One thing, if they didn’t exist that would be less strain on the grid period.

No, there would be a corresponding reduction in generation capacity and the strain on the grid would be identical.

> This attracts more miners!

Good. The miner's usage pays to build more generation capacity (acres of solar, etc), but then when there is an imbalance (production down and/or demand up) the miners turn off so the extra capacity they paid to be built is available for others.