skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
27 million people live on a continent the size of North America!

Australia’s geography and climate plays into the housing crisis. We have concentrated our population density in only a dozen or so locations (ie; major cities like Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane) as Australia is only habitable at scale along the coast.

Australia has also doubled in population size over the last 40 years without corresponding investment, putting significant pressure on the housing market.
Mitsubishi Motors to launch Minicab EV electric commercial vehicle in Dec
It does increase the net options of the wealth holder.

The home owner can always sell, move to a smaller home, or, shudder, start renting.

The options of somebody with a massive amount of housing wealth are so much better than those without the housing wealth.
This seems like a natural result when you combine democracy and a growing population with the persistent nature of younger generations having less permanent living arrangements and a lower dedication to politics due to the psychology of youth. It is a "the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury" situation in which the older generations build a political environment around real estate prices always increasing which causes them to increase more consistently and to a larger degree. The longer that is allowed to persist, the more difficult it becomes to change. The older generations now rely on that implicit social contract of increasing prices as their primary savings vehicle and the younger generations lack the political capital to interrupt the cycle, at least in part because they don't have the literal capital because of the ever-increasing cost of real estate.

Is there a single growing democracy that has been able to avoid this trap?
There are many types of backups (e.g. replication, point-in-time replication, periodic incremental backups, periodic full backups) and not all of them project against the worst kind of issues, e.g. a software bug that accidentally deletes a whole bunch of data.
People consume newsletters?
Why do half of Internet users click random answers to stupid questions?
Culture might lead to logic, but the pursuit of logic is not, itself, logical.
Why won't they afford to own a home? Is the population skyrocketing suddenly anywhere in the Western nations apart from Israel? They already own one. They could pass houses down to their children.

And yes, zoning and NIMBYsm exists only as long as (slightly) more than 50% of people are satisfied with their housing situation (and thus want prices to grow to fund their retirement), as slightly less than 50% are not (and thus want prices to fall to be able to afford to buy). This equilibrium will of course, self-preserve because zoning rules are not national but change based on locality, so there won't be a single nationwide crash anywhere.
The trade off, I think, is that using a device allows for audio and video, which may be more compelling to kids than books.

Personally I think I would start with paper cards and then switch to a screen (Anki) after a couple years.
I had something similar happen to my paid, enterprise tier Google Workspace account. One day, the entire drive was as if I went in a time machine back quite literally ~six years (I've had the account for a looong time). Dozens of gigabytes of files gone, and dozens of gigabytes of old files I've 100% deleted in their place (though, I don't linger too much on the "is google actually deleting things" theory, because it is a Workspace account and maybe I have some kind of "never actually delete data" setting enabled, I don't know and haven't looked, the Workspace admin UI requires a PhD to figure out).

I wasn't too worried, as I sync everything to a local NAS. It was actually quite an interesting trip down memory lane. The next day, it was back to normal.
Clone llama.cpp project from GitHub. Download LLM models from HuggingFace. TheBloke user posts lot of models in GGUF format. GPU is not needed to run these. 13B models should be fast modern computer CPU. llama.cpp offers batch mode, interactive chat mode and also web server mode.
This is one of the highest quality comments I have seen here in a long time. Ironic that it complains about "quality."

First, you caught my attention by dropping a powerful and memorable term (eternal september). Second, you followed up with an entirely accurate indictment of the problems with this site.

However, you lost your way a little bit at the end. Is it really that hard to recognize that Reddit-tier comments are uniquely low quality content? For at least a decade, that whole site has been overrun by angry people posting comments that not only do not contribute to any sort of intelligent discussion, but actually deter more thoughtful and reasonable people from even bothering to try to contribute. How is this at all controversial for you?
How frequently do they back up to tape? (if this is something you can share)
We are obviously in a simulation, at least two layers. The fact that we are built up from a set of consistent rules and atoms, basically pixels, rather than an open and free canvas, is direct proof of one of these layers. The second is that every single experience a human has is inside the brain rather than "out there", as it's a model synthesized from raw sensory data. You can't directly experience "out there".

The question is not whether we are in a simulation, but rather is there an experiential reality outside of this simulation, or did the simulation pop into existence from nothing.
This whole simulation thing is fun, but that people genuinely believe that baffles me. I guess this is why religions exist.
>They are also dying out very quickly and have no immigration to replace dying out people.

I think I get what you mean but keep in mind that Japanese cities are severely overpopulated. Their country is returning to a more normal population level. It's ok to not have Bangladesh levels of overpopulation, and they don't need to be "replaced" by immigration in order to maintain the current population density. Also housing in Japan is not cheap outside of the cities (where no one lives) so your point doesn't really begin in the first place.
Biggest outcome: I'm no longer surprised when Web-searching a problem, getting to a Reddit post that might have the answer, and... the top-voted comment on that post has been deleted (or replaced with some text about protesting Reddit policy changes).
For a 286, that's damn compact. Unfortunately, there's little room for expansion. Add an Intel or 3com NIC, and now there's no room for a sound board. That's why this was mainly used as a terminal.
What do you define as edgy here? I would expect most of HN userbase to be atheist/agnostic. So religious topics would probably be considered edgy.
"most advanced country" is only something someone utterly ignorant of real america would think.
GPT-bots are doing wonders for my research. I've been trying ResearchGPT for the past few days and it's much more efficient than I had thought. The conversations are pretty illuminating and i get redirected to the papers directly to verify the sources. Let me know if there are similar GPT bots available.

ResearcgGPT: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-NgAcklHd8-researchgpt-official
> I tried to teach my kids reading when they were 3, after hearing about early readers on HN. I gave up after a few attempts because they didn't seem to grasp the difference between the letters I started with. I felt like they just weren't ready.

More likely that they were ready, and you weren't :-)

It's important to establish the routine and to never deviate from it. It's also important to ensure that the child never interrupts the lesson with something distracting (I always say "We're still in the lesson, we will look at that in a few minutes"). This is important, I found, as once you reach a specific tempo/cadence during a lesson, you don't want to disrupt that tempo.
Maybe someone can advise me here but what are you supposed to do with kids that start reading and doing math early?

My three year old is reading and doing all the math I can throw at him and I was a dumb kid growing up so I have no idea what I'm supposed to do (ie private school, tutoring, testing, music lessons, educational psychologists, just chilling out and hiking with him etc)

Anyway loved reading about this guys method but was hoping for more guidance. If anyone has any thoughts or advice Im super curious / feeling lost.
I lost all my emails around this time and presumed I’d been hacked. Now it makes sense.
> put in a bunch of regulations that made it harder to build things.

Is it regulations? Or is it home-owners and realtors voting against expanded housing projects?

The problem is if you build more houses, there's entire tranche of people whose "investments" will be worth less. And for some reason we're afraid to tell them it was a mistake.
Usually it's labour cost but it depends wildly on location as sometimes it's materials.
You need to look up k at the labor cost and time taken to building a brick house in addition to material cost. My GC took a week to get the concrete foundation but did the sub floor and framing in a weeks time. It is incredibly fast to build and very efficient use of labor. The homeowner benefits as the labor cost is lower.
This may sound contrarian - I think memorisation work with young children is great but reading is more than memorising it involves decoding and mapping sounds and meanings in a very complex process that restructures the brain. There seem to be a few children who just make the leap to reading very young but most western education pushes very early reading when I believe many children are not developmentally ready and it is a type of mental torture that leads them to hate reading. Parents who read to children often transfer a great deal of knowledge of language, culture and whatever areas you read about. It also typically transfers an interest in reading. I’m not in any way advocating for withholding reading instruction from children who are interested but to not be caught in the drive for early “literacy” that seems to lead to so much pain and so little good in those very early years. I am not a professional educator - I had a very different path to literacy and have walked through that with my children and seen this in others.
Not all stock markets generally go up. Some go sideways, some underperform, others are speculative.
...which is most likely the other half. Combine the two and widen the definition of "God" to include "BOFH" and you get a near 100% of believers on the 'net.
Old conversation I once witnessed online years ago:

"It won't let me see the article without filling out a survey."

"I enjoy being a 19 year old Black woman with a PhD on such surveys." -- Male with PhD in his 50s, either Caucasian or ethnically Indian (as in the country), iirc.
The argument this article makes is that Australians as a whole are not richer thanks to higher home prices, which is natural if houses a viewed as non-productive capital.

Therefore "rich" can't be the problem to solve for, it's fairness and equality. Culturally "a fair go" used to be the equivalent of the American Dream, and I think it's fair to say both are dead to most of the unlanded classes.

I've also spent a lot of time in Japan, and in many ways culturally they at 10-20 years ahead. For many life became unfordable there for different reasons, and I buy into that this contributed to the plummeting birthrates.

Societies come under evolutionary pressure, just as life does. It's entirely possible that unsustainable societies will simply die a quiet death while others take over.
Just detonate the nukes high enough to cause an atmospheric EMP that reverses the stratosphere’s polarity and attracts the ions in the water vapor. That should slow down the exowater cycle enough to cool us down a bit.

(I’ve been reading r/VXJunkies)
If we're in a simulation, wouldn't that simulation run in a universe that may have different capabilities than our simulated one, such as a different maximum density or even a completely different set of physical laws that governs it?
Every other children? Sure, it’s not a report in Science, hence the apostrophes around test.
Theoretically possible, but (super super super) unlikely. I'd also think that when a user "permanently" deletes their data, it would still be on Google servers for a specified time (maybe a week?).

Again, all guesses. But if someone offered me a bet, I'd wager 1:10,000 that the data is permanently deleted. Extremely unlikely.
Spent a lot of hours in Civ V and Civ VI, sadly the big Civ V mods don't work on Mac :(
Construction is expensive because it requires labor, and labor is expensive.
One interpretation of this: back when only 10% of the US population had a college degree, the elites gave their children's country clubs, aka colleges, a tax exempt status. Now that almost 40% of the US population has a college degree, the policy has a more serious impact than ever before, and feels even less fair than in the past.
You're not alone though. Many many American cities are similarly awful, it's just that SF being the symbol it is gets the punching bag treatment more than most.
Podcast with the author on same news outlet:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2023/nov/25...

Cannot be stressed enough how much of a pernicious and destructive force housing policy is in Australia.

I am working class background and my boomer parents have not been as fortunate as some of their peers with housing driven wealth creation. I am lucky enough to own a home. All my siblings will probably never ever own a home.
I think the problem with that assumption is that a simulation would have to represent every bit of information under simulation. From the perspective of a human being, most of the universe could be simulated only at a very high level of abstraction - there’s no need to maintain the state of every subatomic particle in a star in a neighboring galaxy, for instance.
Well, that’s an argument against using file formats that are locked in to a cloud service.
In Australia, the solution is to remove all taxes, fees and charges on new builds. Some 40% of the total cost of a new build goes to taxes, fees and charges.

If you bring down the new build cost, supply will explode and prices will come down. Of course this would also crash the property market and ruin a lot of boomers' retirement plans so don't expect that to happen any time soon.

My favourite Real Estate investment analyst Chris Bedingfield said it because when he said that Australia isn't in a "Housing Bubble" any more than it's in a "Cigarette Bubble". The reason that both houses and cigarettes in Australia are so comparatively expensive is that they're heavily taxed.
Not everything got more expensive proportionally. Somehow apartments go up much slower, and so do rural home-on-a-hectars.
Many people seem to have invested in leveraged 2-3 urban properties, they don't need to move out from them, they can just reap their 3x growth over 10 years, pay out their loans and retire.

I'd say the whole thing is a failure on legislators' behalf. Capital gains tax discounts (up to 100% if you've lived a year in each of your houses), unquarantined tax deductions for interest and upkeep, low land taxes, probably many more. All that while importing ridiculous quantities of low-pay workers.

But hey, how good is GDP growth.
I'm not sure that anything you've said describes something resembling a solution, except in the very narrow circumstances of the sort of people who insist on living in cities where the cheapest apartments rent out for $4000+/month.

Yes, if the developers were allowed to come in and put up some high density something somewhere, those prices would ease back down under $3000/month (if only a little below), and the sort that's well into the six figures in six figure incomes would rejoice.

But we wouldn't see any difference anywhere else in the US (or, for those of you in other high cost of living countries, I dunno, London maybe?). No one living in Terra Haute, Indiana would be better off. No one in Boise, no one in Richmond, Virginia.

Nor is some nationwide laissez-faire policy going to do the trick. The flip-side of "housing costs too much" is "oh shit, the builders built way too much" and then the economy craters when that does more than just cool, but freezes over for a decade. If you wanted the blue collar folk to howl in agony, just wait til that happens. Or, just maybe, you think you have some special insight where you could perfectly regulate just how much construction occurs, so that there's no excess at all.

What if we've somehow gotten ourselves into a mess where there are no solutions at all? Like, mathematically. Like, if we had an extra century to work out the problem, we could prove there is no solution? What if there are too many people who need goods (homes, of course, but other things too), but who can't ever have viable livelihoods no matter how much low-quality education we stamp on their foreheads with C+ grades? What if UBI doesn't work, because in the part of the economy that is actually worthwhile, there's just not enough excess to tax away and send to them as welfare? What if we're still 150 years away from the technology that would give you your Star Trek post-scarcity utopia?

What would that look like? Could it look something like this? Like some really bad imbalances that, with a naive-enough outlook, seem as if they might still be re-balanced if someone were brave enough to make the hard decision?

A long time ago, before even some of you reading this comment were born (and for the rest, we were all still in school), someone decided that the United States was not going to make things anymore. We'd all be manicurists and day traders and lawyers and hip-hop recording artists. This is the result. Nor was it a good thing for places like China, where that's all they do, they're about to hit a wall too, and it's no longer clear Winnie can postpone that either. I don't think cannibalism will be widespread, but a few years from now you may wake up to realize that you haven't heard a dog barking for several summers at that point.
Only a robot could have this much patience...!
Yes, this is key. This idea that humans also require sequences to think was popularized by Jeff Hawkins even before all the LLM hype.

He was able to show that the equivalent of place cells (normally used to determine one's physical location) fire sequentially when humans perform tasks like listening to music or imagine feeling along the rim of a coffee cup.

The think step-by-step trick might just be scratching the surface of the various mechanisms we can use to give LLMs this kind of internal voice.
Ah yes, and drive up the costs for the local Filipinos…
I basically stopped using reddit when they came up with the new web UI, and then pushed me to download the app on mobile. They obviously don't care about users.
Understanding Chromes Coverage Panel
It looks like I've "lost" all of my paid gsuite account emails prior to Oct 13rd if I look at "all mail" and Oct 5th if I look at "important" mail. My free account appears to be missing emails prior to May 10th if I look at "all mail" and Apr 2nd if I look at "important" mail. Searching for terms I know are included in tons of emails going back years returns even older results.

Given that I can see older emails when filtering or searching, I'm hopeful none of the messages are actually gone, just unreferenced.
Ask HN: Who sells a decent HDMI quad-viewer?
There are many [cheap] HDMI multi-viewers. I am lucky to work from home right now. I want to connect both my laptops (personal + work) to the 4k UHD TV on the wall mounted over my desk. The goal is to use my high-resolution OLED TV like 4 separate monitors, with various layouts.

See here: https://pixelpitch.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/HDMI-4x1-Quad-Multi-Viewer-Support-PIP-Seamless-Switcher-1.jpg

I can find many quadviewers, but they're missing modern things.

It also needs to support:

- 120hz output (from 120hz input on 1 or more inputs)
- HDR output (again, from 1 or more inputs)
- ^ necessitates 10-bit color
- EDID (so the connected devices is aware of the output res it's getting on the overall screen)

Nice to haves:
- Login to the device to configure the layout of the outputs in a web GUI
- Go 4-to-1, 3-to-1, 2-to-1, or 1-to-1 configurations. Ignore or turn off certain inputs selectively, with decent layouts for each.
- Sound mixing from all inputs to 1 output, or select 1 individually.

I can find HDMI viewers that support EDID, but not 120hz, HDR, or higher color spaces.

Help?
Are there any other options available? Like, what is it all if not a simulation?

Religion can be seen as a special case of God’s simulation
> otoh for the typical present-day software project you don't want to re-create an identical build result as someone else got six months ago

According to whom? I absolutely want to be able to do this.

> if it's a JavaScript project then Node is going to be two versions out of date and probably full of security bugs from that time

Sounds like building on something as unstable as Node is a significant drawback. That's a Node problem. (I missed how we got to talking about Node, anyway—you said "JavaScript project". NodeJS does not have a monopoly on JS. It's not even a great example of a particularly good JS runtime; for the reasons you mention—instability—it's actually a pretty good example of a bad JS runtime.) Fortunately if you're doing JS, there's an incredibly stable set of interfaces available for you to program against, and the best part is you don't need to download anything extra because every computer already has a JS runtime installed.
For anyone who has been paying attention, the obvious next step in drone warfare that is going to happen, is that Ukraine is going to develop ai terminal guidance for their drones to counter Russian point defense electronic warfare.

The Russians are putting a lot of jammers on vehicles which disables fpv drones when they get too close so they can’t land an rpg hit. The obvious counter to Russian EW is not needing a radio connection in the first place.

I would assume once they have terminal guidance figured out they will keep on trying to extend the range and ability of the system to detect its own targets so that Russian area denial ew is also rendered ineffective.

By the time they have that figured out, you have a lethal autonomous weapon.

So I’d say, anyone who is concerned about the ‘hard decisions’ of lethal ai is living in the past, we have the means, the technology and with the existential nature of the war in Ukraine, every incentive to build these weapons, so we will.
I don't understand that but feel confident that if there were anything to understand I would understand it, and it makes me want to quote Billy Madison.

Edit: I don't understand the argument that if many good simulations exist, we must be in one, either. It seems bizarre to me. So having a bit of an odd suggestion about information density is as good of a response as any.
OP asks: why so many people are now convinced that we are living in a simulation?

Not whether we think we do or don't.

Which is a quite different question.

For my 2 pennies, whether or not it makes a difference (as mentioned in simulation argument) does itself not matter, all that matters if people think it matters (it is, after all, entirely in our head at this point). Does it create a disassociation effect where counter-intuitively a constructivist approach allows is to see the world more positively (positive, as in positivist). And if not, are poll answers blunder or is there no disassociation of self determination.
Because we do.