skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My point is it has no more depth than "I will earn money and give it to causes that make the most good", which is just "do good" with a materialistic twist.

This is just one particular angle some folks take. It's not by any means the only, or even primary, path EA advocates for. It is of course the one you'll find high earners parading around as an ostensible reason for their wealth creation given it allows self-interest to appear altruistic (which is not wholly unreasonable, those are not opposites and have some overlap, but it also is likely touted far more than exercised).

> If every member of EA has different approaches and opinions, and some of its biggest proponents are scammers, what is EA really bringing to the table?

Its biggest proponents are not scammers, there are just scammers who happened to have claimed to be part of EA. The biggest proponents are probably William Macaskill, Toby Ord, and Peter Singer, none of whom I've ever heard called anything close to a scammer (given how they live their lives that'd be a hard claim to make).

What it brings to the table is framing a more methodical and deliberate way to help others. People generally gravitate towards bleeding-heart altruism when they feel called to (disaster response, someone you know, etc), and various charities and causes are wildly different in the efficiency with which they use the resources given to them. This is to say nothing of careers one might choose for a multitude of reasons. This is all well and fine, but the point is one can also approach these things using informed objectivity to maximize contributions (by giving to charities where dollars go the furthest, to causes that are neglected, etc) rather than relying on subjective compulsion (which is going to be scattershot in efficiency).

Of course EA doesn't have a patent on this, it's just a label, but its one that helped popularize a mode of giving that would've largely remained hidden without it. The problem, as I've mentioned, is group mechanics end up co-opting the label which distorts the intent it originally carried. I truly mean no offense, but it seems from your comments you're just aware of the scandals of SBF or similar, not of the tenets of the actual founders of EA or its various missions outside of the aforementioned "earn to give." Perhaps peruse their site a bit: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
The poster wrote that research shows that poorer people are typically (or in general) more ethical than richer and your reply is that there is evidence to the contrary without any evidence just a hand waving argument. That doesn't show anything.

You can indeed question the research of less ethical behaviour by richer people however you need to bring some evidence. This [1] article for example talks about a study which didn't replicate the behaviour. It's actually a well balanced discussion of the overall evidence.

[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/are_rich_peopl...
I feel like I generally know when I’m being productive. I have my own definition and I know when I’m not focused.
There certainly are a lot of less effective places for protesting. If protesting in front of a politician's personal residence is what it takes to be heard that's where people are going to do it.
Based on my understanding[1] about the board, essentially it's all "I know a guy who knows a woman who knows a guy" situation. I.e. a conflict-of-interest minefield.

Also, none of them seem to have the temperament either (they are all relatively very young) to be able to handle such a complex topic as AI.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38350890
I am a reluctant convert to tailwind. I've been doing HTML since the 90s, before CSS was even really usable for things like page layout. I mean, we didn't even use div in those days - it was table based layouts and spacer gifs.

CSS appeals to a programmers mindset. Cascading seems like a good idea. Having classes that are reusable seems like a good idea. Complex selectors seem like a good idea. These are all forms of abstraction, almost like functional composition but not quite.

But after decades of fighting with it, I have to admit that it just doesn't work. The myth that you could change an entire site design just by changing the CSS is a complete myth. I've been party to more than a few whole site redesigns and I can assure anyone unfamiliar that it involved a heck of a lot more than updating CSS (and more than HTML in almost every case as well).

In fact, almost all advancements in CSS (including Sass and Less) seemed to tend toward isolating the effect of changes. Pretty soon most projects had a compenent.html/component.scss pair for every fragment and naming conventions like BEM [1] became the norm. Reusability for things like fonts and colors were handled with CSS variables.

Tailwind is proof to me that isolation is more important for visual design than abstraction/inheritance/cascading. Inline styles would be the same advantage but they are way too verbose.

1. https://getbem.com/
A lot of it happened after the war, but the Nazis had their own nuclear program that was highly infiltrated by the CIA, and whose progress was tracked against. Considering how late Teller's mechanism for detonation was developed, the race against time was real.
Does anybody have a theory as to why Seattle's startup ecosystem is so bad compared to all of its other metrics?

I moved here a few years ago and it feels like the culture nudges people away from defining their life based on their work (compared to SF/NYC at least), but that feels like a generally handy-wavy explanation. Presumably there's enough MS + Amazon money floating around to get a decent angel/venture scene started.
Wondering how this tool got named after the Dutch verb for seek, I found this quote on its github page [1].

> "Zoekt, en gij zult spinazie eten" - Jan Eertink

> ("seek, and ye shall eat spinach" - My primary school teacher)

[1] https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt
How many of those Seattle roles are for Amazon and Microsoft?

What's missing here when selecting the "Best City" is what sort of variety is there in the market? Surely you don't want to feel as if you have to stay at a company just because there aren't many other options in your area.

In the last table there needs to be a line item for: # of Unicorn Companies, or # of Publicly Traded Tech Companies.
This thread only exists because you did feel it was appropriate to comment. My point was simply that you assumed one of the worst options rather than something more charitable.
People make crap decisions all the time. So long as the board can claim it was their belief it was the best decision for the company/mission, is there a precedent for taking the team to task?

That being said, everything is securities fraud.
The direction of progress is the direction of increasing accountability

good book about that - https://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-Financial-Accountability-Ri... tldr thesis is that the invention of double entry bookkeeping is the thing that has caused modern prosperity, not capitalism. we can only cooperate to the extent that we can detect cheating. Consider a 1600s merchant – without the ability to detect fraud, how can you give your goods to a shipping company? Capitalism is only possible if you can count your capital! a memorable example was a French king (Louis XV?) who bankrupted the realm because he didn’t know how much money he had.
This article, and especially point 2 (Fear and silence) is a great rebuttal against the flaw of the Radical Candor/Manipulative Insincerity framework; which considers apathy towards issues in the workplace as tantamount to being manipulative without considering why people resort to this behavior in the first place.

It is not easy for an single employee to change deeply embedded negative organizational behaviors, and therefore it is better for the employee to work with the goal of reward maximization (through a focus on total compensation and hitting numbers) and feigning ignorance or not bothering to report issues that cross ethical lines, which may backfire and cause trouble for the employee (constructive dismissal, smear campaigns, lawsuits etc.)
But the main point being asserted that “people eat what grows locally” is invalidated by the prevalence of chili pepper in various Asian cuisines.
Your statement is not logical as all progress definitely is not through laziness.
Blue balls are being washed up on UK beaches
They use a custodian like Coinbase or Gemini.

The ETF then takes out an insurance policy incase the custodian loses they BTC they hold on the ETF's behalf.
I would argue that holding someone to a standard, ethical or otherwise, requires some sort of accountability.

And yet, in the US, we have congressmen/women who regularly engage in insider trading and accept bribes in the form of lobbying and cushy jobs after they leave office, we have multiple sitting Supreme Court justices accepting bribes, and we have a former president who isn't even held to the same standard we hold our children.

I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any examples of a high-status individual being held to a higher standard than the rest of us. Sure, there's a lot of belly-aching on social media from time to time, but in most (all?) cases, it's for falling short of a standard we're all expected to satisfy, and there's almost never any real consequences.
I agree entirely with this. These so-called "auditors" are harmful.

It's a shame that these people are destroying the ability of citizens to use these facilities without risking exposure.
Call me unscrupulous, but I’m tolerant of stuff like that. It’s the willingness to do things like that that makes the difference between somebody reaching the position of CEO of a multibillion dollar company, or not. I’d say virtually everybody who has reached his level of success in business has done at least a few things like that in their past.
>>Yes and it's perfectly obvious that he did this without the consent of the board and behind their backs. A bit absurd don't you think? How would that even work?
i don't know, i don't have answer for that. but meta open-sourced llama-2, did what openai supposes to do.

>>Why are you so certain most other people on the OpenAI board or their upper management are that different? Or hold very different views?

at least they have the guts to fire him and let the world know about Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.".
Yes, this is super important! And, at least initially, stopping to walk is perfectly good too. Whatever pace and time it takes to not feel bad during or at the end of the run is what you should go for.

And you will be surprised how quickly you scale from wherever you begin.
How would that help children? You want to make it easy to get into. I think imperative is simpler than functional. Let them learn to crawl first.
A common refrain in AI safety circles not to engage in "Sci Fi"[0], or outlining a specific bad scenario. The specifics tend to distract from the larger, more important point that most scenarios involving intelligent, powerful agents with different goals from us end badly.

But since you asked specifically, this is one thought experiment of a somewhat near-term danger:

Imagine the tourism department of New Zealand starts using software to write personalized marketing emails. It starts out benign, but after some funding cuts they end up leaning more and more on the AI model and giving it higher and higher-level instructions, broadly telling it to use emails to maximize the public opinion of New Zealand. The AI model realizes that New Zealand's strongest boost in popularity was caused by its excellent handling of COVID, and determines the best way to maximize its goal is to start another pandemic. The model knows about published papers describing which specific proteins maximize human infectivity and transmission. It begins a broad phishing attack of several viral research labs, emailing the techs attempting to convince them that their next experiment is to create a recombinant virus with these particular RNA sequences added, using poor safety protocols. Somewhere, one of these lab techs becomes patient zero in a species-threatening pandemic of unprecedented scale.

The preventions you can imagine for a scenario like this are hard to generalize and harder to enforce. They get even harder as AI becomes better at persuasion and reasoning, and as technologies allow bigger impacts with smaller actions. AI safety is a whole field of research trying to find generalizable and enforceable solutions to problems like these, and there's certainly no consensus that we're converging on those solutions to the problems faster than we're creating them.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVIqp_lIwZg
How about this?:

- You're on the south pole, and the single supply depot becomes off-limits to you after a personal dispute with the attendant.

Also, I am curious about what you'd suggest as an alternative to YouTube for the content creators that thrive there presently. TikTok doesn't do long form videos.
Imagine being a competitor and then finding out the company that is crushing you had a secret deal to pay nothing while you struggled every month to pay royalties and were told over and over by the parent company that “it was the best they could do.”

Imagine not being able to figure out how they were so successful while you are struggling to turn profit and make payroll.

These kinds of walled garden ecosystems seem to be very bad for creating healthy competition, and this news is just adds to the *massive* mountain of evidence of shady behavior by every company that controls one.
As someone who both experienced childhood trauma (refuged to another continent at the age of 4) and has received a fair share of blows to the head (many years in martial arts) - this does kind of resonate. Mood disorders and ADHD like symptoms are things I've dealt with but which I'm learning to control with age. It did take several decades and much introspection to introduce some sort of self-control and awareness about when I'm acting irrational though.
Exactly. But if two ten minute stops in Barstow and Baker was all it took to make it possible with a cheaper electric car, a lot more people would consider it. Anyway you'll need to stop for a piss.
XMR and BCH have been working great for a decade and in my mind are the ONLY Cryptocurrency projects that are not outright scams or digital ponzi schemes.

It's odd how clear the picture is but how many people have been fooled by fakes. What other industry is 99% scams and only 1% legitimate?
Typical burnout change IMO.

Switching from ‘must do good’ to ‘good is impossible, make as much money as possible’ can happen really quick.

The 80’s Era of ‘greed is good’ followed free love and the hippies pretty closely for a reason, IMO.
There is a day when ‘affordable cars’ gets in the agenda but it won’t be 2024 as Biden badly needs the UAW vote. (Even though unaffordable cars may be a big reason why people perceive the economy to be bad and probably are a headwind for Biden.)
> doubt many people would, for instance, murder for comfort

Individually, no. But we have a remarkable ability to adapt group ethical systems when resource needs demand it. The conflict arises when these adaptations occur in too-small a group, e.g. at the company level within a country, or a country level within an integrated continent.
Epic is an extremely weird case.

I knew someone who worked at a company that was contracted to be a support provider; they had at least one nervous breakdown.

Also interesting to note that the wikipedia article for the company mentions that in some European countries, moving to Epic was a huge pain that caused doctors stress.

OTOH apparently their actual corporate campus is some whimsical Alice-in-wonderland world with no expense spared.
And many people were scammed and lost their savings to BTC and other crypto schemes. It's funny how the Ponzi promoters always forget that part when touting whatever cooked-up reason they promote crypto for.

But sure, in a sector where most of the biggest names are fraudsters, some people still manage to be adherents.
The accepted wisdom is still that it's a bubble and you should not buy it, the price going up does not necessarily mean that the price isn't higher than it should be. Projecting everybody who disagrees with your viewpoint as somebody who is angry they missed out is simply a quick way to hand-wave away people who disagree with your crypto-is-the-future dogma. I wasn't in the early adopters per-say but I did do some crapcoin trading back in the day and made a decent sum at the time, and yet I still hold crypto and blockchain technology as a whole as almost entirely pointless. I have still yet to hear any real valid use of the technology that is better than existing/alternative solutions. It speaks volumes that the people who would know the most about the technology (software engineers, who are prevalent here), are the ones who (outside of the general public) believe that the technology is largely pointless, if not downright idiotic.
They tried to, by limiting outreach, which they felt they had lost, via the same channel. Channel gave the bird. They feel stirred. There is a feedback loop in action. Which stirs up even more shady things to emerge. Which is satisfying, because once emerged, for all to be seen, there is no denying, that one side is unclean.
The weather? Not as many solid universities compared to Bay area?
Fair enough. A compromise might be a stable job plus open-source contributions. There are a lot of valuable OSS projects!
A big portion of Spotify's ownership is held by the big music companies, including Sony. I learned this from watching The Playlist on Netflix. (It's way over-dramatized but you can learn a thing or two)
Generally Common Lisp is agnostic to the development style. For production, there are also batch compiler. Image saving/starting is also not supported by all implementations (not supported for example in ECL and ABCL).

In early Lisp I would guess it was more often to save an image. There is one system which works mostly like Smalltalk: Interlisp-D, now called Medley. https://interlisp.org It also manages the code, in some ways similar to Smalltalk. Interlisp was provided by Xerox PARC, like Smalltalk. It originates from BBN Lisp, from the 60s.

Other than that, most Lisp systems store code in the file system.

> its not unreasonable to have someone ship a "ball of mud"

That's also relatively common (!) in Lisp.

In Smalltalk we often see variants which can ship images and run them on different architectures. In Common Lisp images are mostly tied to a certain architecture & OS.
What was the hand-waving? A better approach is just to be intellectually curious and ask. Besides, snarkiness is against the HN guidelines. This article [1] has a lot of references that support that claim, and it's a higher quality of rigor than a magazine article. FWIW, I'm not saying the original claim was wrong, just that we should be cautioned against strong claims when there is mixed evidence at best. Likewise, I would caution against extrapolating too much from studies that use cars as a proxy for wealth. Car model != socio-economic status for a variety of reasons. I'd argue that original (and replicated) study from your link is pretty flawed to begin with.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42204-z
It can:

Read and change all data on all websites.

No thankss.
There are whole industries built around pushing that button.
The money largely funds consumer protection products such as when chargebacks have to be executed on fraudulent or other disputed transactions on your card. Zero liability guarantees that the card network infrastructure offers consumers come at a cost which is found here. Think of it as an insurance policy paid on every transaction which explains why it has to be a %.

Crypto offers no protections so no fees need to be taken.
Are we forgetting that Google is the company that seems to kill more products than any other [1]? Just because they got bought by Google doesn’t mean YouTube gets a free ride with guaranteed support.

Back before the acquisition, YouTube was losing hundreds of millions of dollars. They were burning so much runway the company was essentially an all-in moonshot to get acquired by one of the big players (Google being the most likely buyer).

Since then, their costs have only grown and rather dramatically at that. They are far larger in terms of users and the videos far higher quality than they were back then.

So why do people continue expecting Google to subsidize YouTube and run it at a loss?

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
Not watch it? Let the artist know you’d like to pay directly if they don’t already have some alternative options?

My point is simply that continuing to use YouTube helps maintain their market share. If you don’t like them, you have to stop helping them.
CTRL+F did not disappoint. Thank you.
I'll try that line at the checkout next time.
> Probably because parents cuddled their kids to sleep during the lockdowns as a stress reducer for both of them, rather than turning out the lights and leaving the room.

That's a good thing. Child has a need, Parent meets that need. That is a healthy relationship. But... the parent should have worked to ween the child from this behavior back to a normal sleeping situation.
Microsoft's Altman 'acquisition' stokes fear AI control is consolidating
OpenAI allows the same via API usage, and unlike Claude it *won't dramatically degrade performance or outright interrupt its own output if you do that.

It's impressively bad at times: using it for threat analysis I had it adhering to a JSON schema, and with OpenAI I know if the output adheres to the schema, there's no refusal.

Claude would adhere and then randomly return disclaimers inside of the JSON object then start returning half blanked strings.
Yup. In B2B in particular, everything is negotiable. The sums of money are large so there's a lot of wiggle room. There's also a lot more strategy involved. It could be the end of the quarter and the someone needs sale or they just want to improve the relationship for the next deal. It can also be as simple as the competition is against companies that hate each other and they'll happily eat a worse deal to get it done to spite the other. One of the fun parts of the business side is coming up with creative ways to get a deal done. Not dissimilar from coming up with creative ways to solve engineering problems.
There were reward halvings in 2012, 2016, and 2020. I thought the 2012 halving was the most uncertain, as it was the first and the market had little liquidity.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/b...
We Don't Do TDD Often
But then OpenAI wouldn't be where it is today. So was it good or was it bad?
> "We have all the rights and all the capability."

This statement could be interpreted as a thinly-veiled threat. When viewed in conjunction with Satya's efforts to hire 700+ OpenAI team members in bulk, any attempt at intimidation may constitute an illegal practice known as a workforce raid.

Described here https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1726981483032977791
> To front-line employees, the line between right and wrong is very bright. Something happens to people as they climb up through management, she said. The bright line seems to fade.

This doesn't seem like a mystery to me. In my experience the more you climb up through management the more you leave the realm of clear-cut choices and enter a world of nasty trade-offs. Do that enough times, and get your head spun around enough by trade-offs you don't know how to navigate but have to deal with immediately, and you'll get a kind of "trade off numbness".