skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When reading teardowns of Effective Altruism, I always find them light on substance and preferable alternatives.

I see two typical failure modes. Half of the time, they fall into a

> cannot separate the man from the idea

trap of “someone with a corrupted moral compass once believed this, ergo the idea itself is bad”, which doesn’t follow.

The other half does engage with the idea, but seemingly only ever half of it. They tend make the first step successfully,

> People can use a veneer of charity and rationality to ignore ethical issues

Which is definitely true, but don’t seem to actually take on the ideas purported main thrust, that “if one intends to give charitably, one ought to bias their choices towards causes that give money as effectively as possible at meeting your goals”, which frankly seems pretty air-tight

I think the core is that a lot of people have a problem with admitting someone they dislike had a pretty sensible idea.
There's also ASCII. How many characters can you fit into 7 bits? Compromises get made.
I will never cease to wonder at how so many people can blame so much on people trying to take a rigorous approach to world improvement, up to and including "a narcissistic con-man claimed to do trying to do X, and I can imagine a scenario
where someone could justify doing the shitty things he did to justify X, so therefore everyone trying to do X must also suck and be complicit in fraud and assorted sins".
When I last went in for brake pads I got to chatting with the manager and he said they’ve phased copper out of brake pads for environmental concerns.

This EPA announcement says reduce to <5% by 2021, which to me means there wasn’t a little copper but rather it was a major ingredient.

https://www.epa.gov/npdes/copper-free-brake-initiative

If the copper is bound to the hull paint well enough, maybe it’s fine? Or maybe fine in fresh water.
Those books you read were copyrighted.
I only tried F# for few days, but it was a pleasant experience on both macos and linux.

dotnet CLI should take care of build process, it can even generate self-sufficient executable (that bundle parts of .NET in them). The infamous required XML boilerplate has also been cut down to near-zero.

My biggest gripe is that Microsoft's debugger is closed-source and proprietary (though free for users of official VSCode builds). There is open-source netcoredbg by Samsung, so you can use VSCod[e,ium] with https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp , but YMMV.
I don't know the historic reason why it wasn't included in the original spec, but at this point it doesn't matter. JSON is entrenched and not going to change.

If you want comments, you can always use jsonc.
Selling rooftop energy for residential rates isn't economically sustainable, and has already been eliminated in California unless you are grandfathered in.

This is because only a small fraction of the residential rates goes to production costs, and the rest go to distribution infrastructure and operations. Distributions and infrastructure costs/ kWh go with more residential production, not down.

Think of it this way. With commercial power you might pay 0.10/kWh production and and 0.30wh distribution. You can make your own rooftop for 0.35/kw, but the grid still costs the same or more, so that gets added to your bill.

Residential rates for rooftop solar only ever made sense as a huge subsidy for early adopters.
Could you be more specific as to what it is that breaks your mental model?
That's a lot of words to say "I don't know."
Is it really ironic if every time he touches AI it ends up causing the opposite of what he tried to do?
BVO has other consequences not mentioned in this article. I consumed Mountain Dew daily from ages 15 - 35, and quit cold-turkey after I learned about BVO's link to memory loss, since I had started to struggle with remembering words I didn't use frequently.

The effects lasted for about a decade, and I still occasionally have to do an association memory exercise to pluck out a word. It's rare now, and normally only happens when I'm sleepy or I've been drinking.

Pepsico poisoned me, happily filling their drinks with chemicals that have been banned in Europe for my entire life. But boy they had some fun commercials.
i guess 'possibly' the holy grail could be the laraval/rails/django mental model of serving routing and page behavior from the bandend, however using the same language for back as front and having things linked up in a typesafe way. wouldnt be perfect for every situation but would have a good mental model when youre developing a web app type of product where there's little distinction between front and back and theres only one client in mind for consuming server behavior.
My point still stands, depending on the price of say a book with the same text, etc which a celebrity with their millions of fans or tens of millions of fans can sell them and claim as their own.

Either way, they can make millions out of it, even if you are the original author and don't need to give you credit.
> Michael Lewis, along with a cadre of others, have astonishingly aligned themselves with the EA bamboozlers, steadfastly standing by their erstwhile idol

I read his book and some interviews and this is hyperbole. And poor use of “erstwhile”.
Babybjörn or similar carrier and a backpack for accoutrements is imo often superior to a stroller once your young one can sit up.
> On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”.

From Scott Alexander’s post on why, as an EA, he donated a kidney. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-left-kidney
Except, the “books” in this case is the code/content that people might like to get paid for in the first place. Also, AI companies aren’t “buying the books”
> My guess is that AI will lead to some fake news that will be used by automated bots to buy or sell stock.

This already happened in the past where one fake tweet led to a stock crash:

* https://business.time.com/2013/04/24/how-does-one-fake-tweet...

I think these HFT algorithms only follow specific white listed accounts. They will not read random accounts. Still it leaves the door open to hacks and if an official account retweets some fake news.
With climate, there is a significant time delay between cause and effect.

Maldives are already lost due to our actions, it just will take quite a few decades to materialize. The current actions will determine how large the change will be, nobody is really discussing ways to stop or prevent it (the time for that was in the last century), the discussion now is about limiting the growth of the change.
Higher heat means there's a more robust steam layer, but then that means you either need to be stirring or flipping or adding some water and a lid for steaming.

To heat the pan I turn the electric range to high for a bit and then down to 4 (of 10), and then I turn it off before the eggs are done, as the thick cast-iron pan and the glass and coil has enough residual energy. Same for popcorn, same for pancakes, etc.
> Minivans are not small, if you have problems with the SUV size then why is a minivan suddenly okay?

Forward visibility for one. There's a meme going around that even main battle tanks (and semi rigs) have better forward visibility than some pick-ups trucks:

* https://carbuzz.com/news/the-abrams-m1-tank-has-better-visib...

And for all that external size, how much internal storage space do you get in a large SUV like the X7? If SUVs are allegedly for carrying stuff, how much stuff can you get in (with and without folding down seats)? How easy is it for people (esp. adults, and not just children) to get back to the third row, and how comfortable is it back there for them?

> Toyota RAV4

Now we're talking about a different class of vehicle than SUVs. Will you also compare it to the glorified hatchback (not even station wagon) that is the BMW X1?
But the trail never ended at "one ought not critique my critique", so who are you responding to? If anything, saying that something is character assassination is a statement on what's off-limits for debate.
The nature and nurture of network evolution
Simplest teardown of EA: it's heavily derived from/based on utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that very few people actually believe in and one that leads to monstrously evil results if followed to its logical conclusion in certain circumstances.
Does cloud-native have to mean FaaS platforms with their proprietary APIs and vendor lock-in? Or could it also mean running containers on something high-level like AWS App Runner or Google Cloud Run?
There are a lot of double standards when it comes to AI generation.
"A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems."

So "where is Elon Musk's plane" will get a correct answer. Neat.
They could if there wasn't government interface. NYC subways were built by the private sector and made money until the 1920s when the city didn't allow them to raise fares to cover inflation. Also most private railroads have to pay property taxes which goes to subsides the roads they are competing with.

If you go full libertarian the government should not build roads private rail competes well, but I don't see that happening.
S.F. home values are now lower than those of this East Bay city
My understanding is that TPMs have vendor-embedded certificates/keys, so I guess eventually all discrete TPMs' keys will no longer be accepted by remotely-attestable services to protect against this attack - fTPM will be the only way.

This is all theory though - workable TPM-backed DRM would require so much vendor cooperation, secure programming and break legitimate use-cases that it won't happen any time soon on conventional hardware. It would be cheaper for the media industry to just sell streaming boxes or exclusively target more locked-down platforms (iOS, Android) than try to make it work on generic Windows PCs.
Many types of plastic are also sponges for other nasty chemicals, like PCBs. So if you eat plastic from your environment you might not just be getting a dose of plastic. You might be getting a little transformer fluid, transmission fluid or dioxin in the bargain.
> His actions made perfect sense from his utilitarian Effective Altruist worldview.

They don't. Everyone in EA (AFAICT) has been pretty clear about this. Lying and undermining trust and institutions does tremendous lasting harm.

I am also tired of "people are very concerned about X and think that it's important, so they're basically a cult".
1. They're talking about all energy (cars, heat, and electricity), not just electricity.

2. Demand is up in this scenario, not supply, because of all the things being electrified.
Like lakes, for example.
[author here] Darnit, you're right. Correction added. I guess it must have been H.263 and who knows what for sound, probably MPEG-2. But given the video was probably 320 lines at most, it should still fit on a CD if only at "wow this is possible" quality.
Most widespread obfuscation methods are solvable with a bunch of regexes. They have never been more than a first line of defense against trivial bots.
Does Alberta or Canada depend on glacier melt for their water supply?
Austin Texas has 1 million people living inside city limits, but 1.8 million people in the metro area and therefore more than 1 million drivers.

Large vs small vs tiny is an arbitrary separation, but Chicago is the 39th largest city in the world. Auston is so far down that list it’s a small city IMO. By comparison Terre Haute, Indiana with 60k people can be called a city, but it’s a tiny city.
JetBrains Rider is really excellent until you start getting up to like the 30-project mark. Stdlib is very extensive although has a bunch of annoying quirks due to being like twenty years old and due to having Linux retrofitted onto it; I have personally had to reimplement parts of its API from syscalls, but if performance isn't super-important for you then it's OK. MsBuild (the build system) and NuGet (the package manager) are both absolutely cursed, but if you are doing totally vanilla things then they're usable out of the box. The `dotnet` command line tools are weirdly inconsistent, sometimes buggy, and full of edge cases even in the places where they are self-consistent, but again if you're doing something super-vanilla then they should be fine.
Yes. Instead of escaping, let's solve the problem instead.
Im not sure why you are looking at the minimum solar costs instead of the average.
Probably anywhere that requires parsing large JSON documents. Off the shelf JSON parsers are notoriously slow on large JSON documents.
Most philosophies fail in the execution, typically because the execution is handled by humans.
Is it really appreciably different from "transpilation" with TypeScript?

Like, I have seen a little of both (I've used a lot of TypeScript, but who actually looks at the output JS lol), and while I agree the JS output from Fable seemed surprisingly verbose, I'm not sure I see how it practically matters unless one is worried about bundle size or something.
you're not buying books when going to a library
Ahhh, I get what you're saying now.

It's like in the US we divide the rainbow into "ROYGBIV" (red orange yellow green blue indigo violet), which was quite different from how I learned it in grade school in another country. But in both situations there are still a variety of other color names in common usage.*

So it's the same there. Maybe "brown" (brun?) is common, but it just wouldn't be used as a broad grouping. Thanks for clarifying.

* After learning the rainbow in one language/culture, we then learned about the spectrum in science class. Only after that did I learn the US divisions, ROYGBIV seemed as arbitrary as any other division. I guess there's many ways to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_color#Spectral_color_...
> Maldives

"By 2021, 90% of islands in the Maldives experienced severe erosion, 97% of the country no longer had fresh groundwater, and more than 50% of the national budget was being spent on efforts to adapt to the effects of climate change" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Maldives
Not economic, historical. It's purely because both were things before the puritan movement (which still greatly impacts society today) and people are already familiar with them. If alcohol were discovered today, there's no way in hell it would be legal
How is he defining "rich" - because AFAIK his algorithm didn't just take money from the whales to give to Alameda - and when things are settled, it's almost assuredly the whales that will get paid out first. So he's almost assuredly taking from the middle-class-at-best to give to his own personal pet projects.
https://transitcosts.com/ has a lot of data, but that focuses on underground while this is mostly elevated. Spain has built fully underground subways for less, but most of the world is a lot more expensive.
See above, 95% of parents could use an on-body carrier. Baby in the carrier and older kids walk, they'll drag your speed down a bit but you'd probably not stroller for hours on end.

Plus you don't need that huge SUV to fit that stroller and awkwardly park it in the entrance of restaurants and so on.
A few points to demonstrate why your comment might be seen as unpopular:

1) Dietary (exogenous) cholesterol has been shown to have a lesser affect to the total cholesterol levels in the blood (70-80% of all the cholesterol in your body is produced by your body endogenously by your liver and other tissues).

2) Eggs are an affordable source of various fats and proteins that are essential to metabolic health.

3) There are a group of people who assert that correcting hypercholesterolemia is best done by understanding the root cause of the overproduction of endogenous cholesterol.

4) We are beginning to understand that not all cholesterol is the same, and that high total cholesterol alone isn't a sufficient biomarker for predicting heart disease. Advanced lipoprotein fractionation tests looking for the ratio of small dense LDL to normal LDL, and HDL cholesterol is a better test; small dense LDL is bad and is a biomarker for inflammation and artery calcification, which can lead to heart disease.
LazyVim the distro is different from lazy.nvim the package manager. Both are written by folke and are excellent. Not sure why parent comment says these are extra layers of complexity. LazyVim is written in a way you can selectively disable or enable the plug-ins it uses. I can't imagine why 80% of these plug-ins would ever make their way into neovim core.
It’s not that it “can’t”, more like it “doesn’t”. Douglas Crockford prioritized simplicity when specifying JSON. Its BNF grammar famously fits on one side of a business card.

Other flavors of JSON that include support for comments and trailing commas exist, but they are reasonably called by different names. One of these is YAML (mostly a superset of JSON). To some extent the difficulties with YAML (like unquoted ‘no’ being a synonym for false) have vindicated Crockford’s priorities.
There is a feud between CloudFlare and the person/people running Archive.is/ph, where they blame each other for X, and people using CloudFlare's DNS gets sent into some redirect loop or something when they try to access the website.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 "Tell HN: Archive.is inaccessible via Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)"
> You would let a small child just run around in the forest?

Yes of course! My entire childhood was spent running around in the woods. Bears and mountain lions are rare and most of them are more scared of you than the other way around. No more than a small handful of people are attacked by those across the entirety of North America, the last time a child was killed by a mountain lion was about 25 years ago. There were only two or three fatal mountain lion attacks against kids in the 90s, two in the 80s, and three in the 70s.. there are less than 20 of these kind of incidents in the entire 20th century across all of North America. Why the hell would you bring up such an unlikely risk? And fatal bear attacks are only marginally more common, they're still incredibly rare.

Your kids are many thousands of times more likely die from choking on food than by getting attacked by an animal in the woods, do you ban grapes in your house? How did you become so cowardly? Forbidding kids from playing in the woods is absolutely pathetic, reading your comment left me with a feeling of visceral disgust.
This is mentioned in passing in TFA but the fundamental problem of EA, and all charity in general, is that it ignores and often even perpetuates the societal structures that create most of the problems that charity tries to patch up.

Of course if it would try to address the structural problems, it wouldn't be charity but politics. And politics are bad because it could change the structure.
Despite the books being copyrighted that doesn't give the authors any rights over the code I have written.
The only future for that I can think of is state or large institution owned stablecoins. But that is so far removed from absolutely everything crypto and web3 promised, I wouldn't even put that in the same category. No public ledger, not decentralized, not an alternative to banking, etc. I still don't understand the difference between having $10 in PayPal vs having 10$ in PYUSD.
> You're talking about sudden short-term variance in supply, which is easy to deal with- just build more renewables.

Easy as in simple, but I think this dramatically skews the price viability. If I need 2x overcapacity then the price to the consumer is 2x per MW of base capacity, and it’s no longer viable to use solar over gas.

> It's definitely not a tech problem

I disagree. I’m aware of some existing options, my claim is that with a bigger delta, more options become viable to research and implement. For example there was a thread recently where we discussed modulating energy usage in aluminum smelting, which requires a new design for the furnace to keep the temperatures stable. (This tech already exists, but AFAICT it’s not cost-effective to deploy widely.)

There are lots of industrial processes which could conceivably modulate their power consumption, but it’s not currently cost-effective to even design these improvements at current levels of peak premium.

Tech is downstream of incentives, is what I am saying, and price signals can be a good incentive; many claim that 100% renewable is not viable because of the cost of closing that last 1% of daily variability, I am hypothesizing that the system as a whole could, with appropriate price signals, build the tech to make the demand curve much more mutable.

This gets at seasonal variability; if we have a week with lower energy production, then the peak-premium goes up, and maybe we turn off the marginal industrial, residential, and commercial consumers.
So you're saying that in a country that has been organised around the personal automobile for the past 70 years (going so far as to actively undermine public transport in certain cases), there are few cities with good public transport? Yes, I think we can all agree on that
As of this writing my parent comment is downvoted, so maybe the difference between the three sentences is less obvious than I thought. While all three sentences assert that I didn't steal Sally's necklace:

• The first version implies that I acquired Sally's necklace via other means.

• The second version implies that I stole someone else's necklace.

• The last version implies that I stole something else from Sally.
In other news, real communism has never been tried
The article doesn't have a plan for storage, and relies on a plurality of energy from floating offshore wind, which has never been relied on at any scale. There are 4 windfarms in the world generating just 193MW. You are going to bet humanity on that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_wind_turbine
You won't see me defending EA often. Or ever, actually.

But the fact that a few extremists would take an idea way beyond any measure of reason is a human effect, not an EA effect.

I can't think of any good ideas that haven't been distorted by a few. That's no reason to abandon them.

My personal opinion is that EA is mostly worthless navel gazing, but that doesn't mean that we should dismiss it over the SBFs.
> The amount of downvotes

2, 2 downvotes?
AFAIK almost all charred compounds contain some amount of carcinogens of some kind. The question is just whether it’s worth it to you.
This article makes a fundamental mistake that many who have written about EA make - by treating the philosophical and real-world application of EA as the same thing. EA is such a new philosophy and movement that the philosophy and application of EA are not sufficiently divorced from one another, and the people at the core of "philosophy EA" are also involved in "application EA". So this is an easy mistake to make.

There are people in rooms discussing whether "the ends justify the means" (though I don't think anyone is seriously arguing in favor of SBF-type means). BUT THESE ARE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSIONS.

If you asked 1,000 effective altruists if they think what SBF did was acceptable (or gave a hypothetical ends justify the means at 10% of the severity of SBF), I would wager that 0 would say it was acceptable. SBF used EA as a shield to hide his fraudulent behavior, and EA (both the philosophy and application sides) have taken a hard look at what EA argues for, and to think that EA (even philosophy EA) would approve of SBF's behavior do not understand EA at all.

---

I study EA and so I am loosely connected to the movement, but I don't consider myself an effective altruist.
Siccing police on landscapers using leaf blowers is like trying to get rid of a hornet nest with a napalm bomb. Fining the property owner is far more appropriate.
2026: npm in pure css