skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's great that the US Economy is performing so much better than the rest of the world, but what good is that if people don't feel like it's going well?

> The most recent report found that, from 2019 to 2022, the net worth of the median household increased by 37 percent, from about $141,000 to $192,000, adjusted for inflation.

> An important caveat to the wealth statistics is that much of the recent increase came from the surge in home prices.

These are two sides to the same coin. Rising home values are a zero-sum game. It makes people look wealthier on paper, but there's nothing good that comes from gains in housing prices.
May be I'm ignorant but how does anyone go about estimating this, much less doing so in a realistic fashion? The article states AGI will be developed by these people by 2027, but we've heard all the estimates that we'd have self driving cars by now and most people wouldn't drive, while self driving cars are becoming a thing, they missed their target year by years now.

Unless I'm mistaken, even GenAI hasn't really changed anything worthwhile. Most of the changes I see are a) most of the scummy and creepy internet ads are now AI generated b) endless spam is now AI generated and c) the latest round of tech layoffs used GenAI as an excuse. Has there been an actual revolution I've missed?

...and so, if GenAI hasn't lived up to the hype, how am I supposed to believe that this industry will make actual existing AGI?
Shameless plug here, but, for different reasons, I have to have bluetooth disabled on my iPhone at work, so I can't use AirDrop. Instead, I'm using WireDrop to transfer files via USB. I made the app only for this specific purpose.

[0]: https://wiredrop.app
Also have the same experience with MO DMVs being slow like DMVs commonly are. I think being for profit also makes the quality of the locations inconsistent [1] and that is mostly due to no state funding.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ozarksfirst.com/news/why-so...
I see in the costs that a substantial portion of the costs were advisory/contract work. I'm assuming that was mostly through the GSA based on the mention of the US Digital Service?

It's honestly really nice to see the GSA getting relied on by agencies to do infrastructure and web design because they have gotten really good at it (and an overwhelming majority of their work is heavily open sourced).

It was also interesting to see the comments made that they are considering eventually open sourcing tax computations. That would be massive.
Both are transferring risk. If I insure against political risk, is that any different from betting on the presidential election? No, it isn’t. The distinction between insurance and gambling is cultural, they’re both just risk swaps.
Don't forget it's gonna cost you a fortune for each step of that process, plus the overhead of making sure you stay in network.
So is this like in the Netherlands where you just file online?
FreeBSD hasn't use CVS and P4 in decades. FreeBSD uses git internally, and has a github mirror. See https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/

The unintentional ordering change being fresh Colin's memory was really helpful, as he quickly realized that he'd actually changed the ordering and sent me a patch to fix it. If it had been 3 years in the past, I suspect he would have been less responsive (I know I would have been).
I am so tired of these meaningless warnings.
> It's incredible that the information necessary to create a human is just about 750 MB

Have you not been playing with LLM's in the last year or so ?

They seem to compress a sizable chunk of human knowledge in about 7 Gig

And, when they find a gap, they lie through their teeth to provide a reasonable answer.

I wonder if there's some sort of similar process (hallucination) going on when the final human is rebuilt from the 750MB.
I do want to stress that I didn't suggest any major cash transfer above -- for one reason, most 30-40-something "million dollar" couples probably haven't had their 20-30 year-older parents pass away and leave them any "inheritance" yet, if any is coming.

What I said was: get a job at dad's business. Some similar situational advantages: buy parent's not-a-lemon old car at a sweetheart rate, get a little help with tuition, live for a few years low rent or no rent with family, get a job at a friend of the family's business, get a referral from a connected family member or friend of the family, grow up in a neighborhood with lots of green space, play sports and hang out with kids whose parents are comparatively rich, be white and have had orthodontics and health care for your childhood, have the time and energy to do extracurriculars as a teenager, have a decent school music program, or a good local library, take time to do a "travel year", have the security to know if you fail at a business, you can 'just move home', etc.

The point here is, the list of "legs up" some people get that they don't necessarily recognize, let alone control, is very, very long, and every one of these is a mild additive push toward relative life success.

Having an internal locus of control is certainly beneficial in dealing with the things life throws at you and in seizing opportunities, but I contend that one's surface area of luck is not made up solely or even mostly by attitude.

I didn't even list any of the negative things that might totally derail an otherwise focused, high potential kid above, and that list is probably much longer.
yes and and what we've seen here in the states, also children and their partners.
> Yes, this is what YOU want.

Precisely. I don't want to work for you, you don't want me to work for you, so it's a win-win: I'll keep doing good work for a company that appreciates what I can do and is happy to give me the flexibility that I need to do it well. You keep hiring people who don't mind being interrupted by a boss who values their physical presence over all else. Everyone's happy!
This makes me miss the original Text Twist, I would love if someone knows how I can play it still.

In the original Text Twist, the shorter words were all in a specified order relative to the word order in the final word. For example, if the word was BIOPIC then TOP comes before TOPIC comes before TIC comes before OPT comes before POT. BIT would be the first word, and COT would be the last.

(technically it was exactly opposite that, they were sorted in reverse of the order in which they appear in the final word, but that's harder to explain)

With Text Twist 2 I guess they decided that was a bug not a feature (it was definitely a feature not a bug) and the order of the smaller words is now randomized. That one small change took the game from something I'd spend hours on to not even a little bit fun.

Anyway to me this was pretty easy, I got all 23. I thought the letter order was very revealing on some of the later clues (like KINGDOM was almost entirely in order already) but maybe that was deliberate, anagramming a 7-letter word in 30s can be a bit hard

One big piece of feedback, though: pressing enter should always clear your current letters (as in text twist)
Let's put that in context: we cut back on sulfur emissions because acid rain is terrible.

https://www.adirondackcouncil.org/page/acid-rain-86.html

https://www3.epa.gov/airmarkets/progress/reports/acid_deposi...

I don't believe anybody has suggested this policy was a mistake.
This is just "wouldn't it be great if everyone could program" but with extra kinematics.
Ask HN: Analytics Software – Self Hosted or Not?
Yeah, but think about how much money you'll have when you finally sell your house and live as a woods hermit.
Since it says it’s “federal taxes”, how are state taxes filed when using it? The two are quite linked.

The link says they’ll open it up to all states that want it as an option, but what does that mean if it only supports filing federal?
DuckDB: Native Delta Lake Support
Newspapers have a long-standing tradition of exactly the same disconnection from reality that LLMs get flak for.

https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/19-14.53.05.html
You don't see any benefit to having a trained/licensed professional taking vitals and making a diagnosis--even if that diagnosis is basically "you'll get better"? And the inhaler was actually helpful. And if the other option was to spend the day in a NYC ER I'd probably have passed.

I'm not a hypochondriac and maybe in a pre-COVID world I'd just have assumed I was "fine" but having a second opinion seemed warranted given the option.

I've also been in an ER when the diagnosis from an infectious disease specialist (after some really bad lab work and high fever) was basically go home, rest, and drink plenty of fluids when his assessment (of a fairly serious tropical disease) took a month to be confirmed from a lab in Paris.

So we just basically self-diagnose and assume it will all just get better?
Looks like knowing simple statistics isn’t a requirement at OpenAI.
>The reproductive strategy of cuckoos is based on deceit, quite fundamentally.

Is that deception, though? Lying? It might look like deception as far as humans are concerned, but the cuckoos just want other birds to raise their chicks.

>I'm sorry that you've had such terrible experience with other people.

It's not so much that as it is all humans are two-faced to some degree of non-zero value. Human society is also structured in a way that honest, one-faced people finish dead last. It's tiresome, downright exhausting even when there are no negatives involved.

I never so much as have to care about that if I deal with animals, they are honest to a fault including when they "lie". What you see is what you get; animals are a breath of fresh air compared to humans.
> state news agency PAP was hit by what authorities say was likely a Russian cyberattack.

Yes, it’s russians again.
It probably describes all Mondays before too; it just seems that today is worse, because suffering is fresh.
Rob Griffiths interview from GET LAMP:

GET LAMP: Rob Griffiths

Rob is a perfect example of the benefits of not going just for "names" in a documentary about a wide-ranging subject - nothing on his resume says he was a big text adventure game player or person who was at the beginning of Zork. But there he was, a kid who had gotten into the MIT lab and seen early Zork being played and the effect it was having on the students and computer lab users. He was articulate and provided a wonderful dash of emotion into the descriptions which I used liberally in GET LAMP. He had a number of printouts which I also filmed (but didn't use). Many documentaries wouldn't count "just a player" as worth interviewing - Rob is proof that approach is short-sighted indeed.

https://archive.org/details/getlamp-rgriffiths

"I believe on one trip we were touring the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and we saw some people gathered around this terminal. And we inquired what they were doing, and out of that came this game Zork, and my friend, since he was at MIT, had us get an account, and we were able to log in and figure out what to me looked like an extremely arcane set of commands to actually get this game running. From then on we were pretty much hooked from the first time we actually saw it. I believe we saw it when we were walking through the MIT AI Lab. I was a guest. Even back then there was some pretty amazing stuff in there. To see all these students and professors huddled around this terminal. What are the doing? They had all these incredibly cool Lisp Machines with big gorgeous displays, and a bunch of people were huddled around a machine that's got text. And we were sort of intrigued. I believe that was the first time I actually saw the game, so to speak. You know, I never got names, so I don't know. I was a petrified little 15-year-old kid walking around the MIT lab, so it was a bit of a feeling of "Am I supposed to be here?", and if I am supposed to be here, I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to talk, so perhaps I'll just be quiet and observe."
I'm a tech worker with a simple W2 and 401K and a student loan I'm still paying off every year and this Direct File experience was my favorite.

It was so clean. So simple. I could understand every single step of it, even the helpful breakdowns along the way. Bonus: No bullshit screens holding you up while it "checks the accuracy" or "finishes things up" like other tax prep software does if only to make you feel like you're getting your moneys' worth out of it when it already computed those numbers 5 hours ago.

I had one (major) snag with the NY filing side which was fixed revolving around data transfer (and I suspect I was filing early enough in the program I caught it 'first' so it took a little longer to fix), so I hope that helped everyone else in NY that got to use it!

I legitimately cannot wait to file my taxes again next year with this system.

EDIT: Here, I know it's silly, but here's a (redacted) screenshot of my whopping $73 refund from the government: https://i.imgur.com/9FoxRts.png - nice, simple English breakdowns are... so good.
I believe the word you're looking for is 'credulous'.

Yes, there is a general question of why do otherwise smart people believe ridiculous things. There is a common refrain that because they're smart they can more easily rationalize their beliefs but I don't believe that is true.

I think diminished ability to ameliorate stress leads to stress aversion behaviors and a strong attraction to rules, structure, and authority. I think when the effect of that is greater than their intelligence they become prone to believing many untrue things but once intelligence goes over a certain threshold that effect is lost. I think that's why a lot of the bell curve memes ring true to many people where both the very smart and the very dim share the same beliefs but for different reasons.

Historically speaking most of those people, generally considered hypochondriacs, did have the conditions they complained of. Historically medicine has been literally blowing smoke up peoples asses, draining their blood, and feeding them mercury.

I think it's a bit weird that you're using evidence from the same medical system you don't trust to get covid and the vaccines right to unwittingly gaslight on their behalf.

You are simultaneously dismissing others personal anecdotes while providing your own as evidence. I believe you are reporting honestly of your observations, just as I believe these wine drinking suburban moms do have the conditions they complain of. This stuff does affect women worse than men and for the aforementioned stratification reasons those affected are more likely to be in the upper middle class and above.
Had a similar experience with a Tuxedo InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen 6.

In my case I spent 1,850€ (~$1,990) and ended up buying a ThinkPad P14s, couldn't be happier now.
In which case, why not just have humans write the text we need instead of firing all our writers in the first place?
Not a single mention of the Toledo family ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28337064
I have a regular camera. No phone-sized "regular camera" is anywhere near the quality of a phone.
Prove it.

The open letter this article is based on still cites, "existential risk."

Define what AGI is. Show us evidence the technology is on track to implement it.

This whole "AI safety" scene is becoming a circus for conspiracy theories and speculation.

As far as I can tell we're reaching the point of diminishing returns in training LLMs... which is already rather destructive.

What's telling is that we don't see similar "safety" committees there trying to protect water in distressed ecosystems, regulate building/zoning of data-centres, energy usage; protecting workers used in alignment and training; protecting workers displaced by the technology and poor policies, etc.
elsevier isn’t paying authors a dime lmao, the authors are the ones paying here.

A publisher would never deign to pay an academic. They get “paid in exposure”, and again, actually they have to pay for that exposure in the first place. Elsevier sits in the middle and skims the authors when they publish and the readers when they read. Peer reviewers, of course, work for free. Nice work if you can get it - billions of dollars a year for running a static website and providing a latex template. You could run the whole thing off a single server and cloudflare with some http basic auth lol.

(and if you’re asking “why don’t you start your own journal then”… that’s why arxiv and others are taking off like crazy over the past 15 years.)
> it would be just as easy to say that the universe cannot have curiosity; that the universe is just things playing out according to some preset rules.

Behavior/dynamics depends on structure, and structure is scale dependent.

At the scale of galaxies and stars, the universe has a relatively simple structure, with relatively boring dynamics mostly governed by gravity and nuclear fusion.

When you zoom down to the level of dynamics on a planet full of life, or of a living entity such as a human, then things get a lot more interesting since at those scales there is far more structure causing a much greater variety of dynamics.

It's the structure of an LLM vs the structure of a human brain that makes the difference.
You’re paying them to take the higher variance end of a swap. That is exactly the same transaction as insurance, complete with the same pricing model.
Is it 13" and fanless? If so, goodbye MacBook Air :) (maybe...)
ICLR 2024 Best Papers and Talks
> Saying anything more about that process is just anthropomorphizing.

Take "this LLM is more curious" as a shorthand for "the output generated by this LLM mimics the kind of behaviour we would describe in a human as being curious".

> It just sits there until you ask for output.

That is indeed a property of the current interfaces. But this can be very easily changed. If we choose to we can just pipe in the clock, and then we can train the model to write to you after a while.

Or we can make a system where certain outputs from the LLM cause the execution environment fetch it data from outside sources and input it into the LLM. And then there would be model weights which make the system just sit there and do nothing, and there would be model weights which browse wikipedia all day. I think it would be apt to call this second kind a "curios" model while the pervious one is not.
This also eliminates another possible data breach source. Some tax filing makers even sell your data.
Excellent point. Some experimentation might be required for the optimal tool for site ripping, depending on presentation layer.

If there is room for improvement in grab-site, please open a Github Issue.
To be honest, I hate chats. In the past I just had to worry about emails, and they probably weren't that important if they were emails, but now I have to split my attention onto chats because we have remote workers that need help. If they were in office, they could just come ask me a question when its important, and I could focus on my work otherwise. Still doesn't stop people from randomly just not replying when pinged.
I like quick low-stakes browser games like this, something fun and fast to wake up your brain with morning coffee. If interested, here are some others I've come across -

Linxicon - build bridges between two words (https://linxicon.com)

WhenTaken - use clues to guess where and when a photo was taken (https://whentaken.com)

Angle - guess the exact arc angle (https://angle.wtf)

Metazooa - deduce the animal species (https://metazooa.com)

Tradle - guess the country by its exports (https://games.oec.world/en/tradle)

Globle - find the country by proximity (https://globle-game.com)
+1 for Alacritty! I've been using it 4 months now and am quite happy with it. I made the switch after I found my default Pop!_OS terminal had some noticeable latency issues.
> Rising home values are a zero-sum game

US Home Ownership Rate: 65.6%. It may be a zero sum game (debatable) - but 65% are one side of the coin with a huge pile of cash and 35% are on the other with a lot less.

As a wise man once said - the good of the many outweigh the needs of the few
In a collision in space (no friction against the ground causing the pieces to stop), the combined center of mass of all the objects involved keeps moving at the same velocity at all times.

Two approximately round space rocks of exactly equal size and density have a center of mass that is halfway between them. If one is moving 40 mph (according to the observer's frame of reference) and the other is catching up to it in exactly the same direction at 50 mph, then what it means is that the center of mass between the two rocks is moving at 45 mph. If the rocks collide in such a way that they clump together (inelastic collision) and no pieces fly off, the combined double rock will thereafter be moving at 45 mph.

Vehicle collisions are more complicated because of cars skidding and rolling. In the milliseconds after the main impact though, those effects don't matter that much, I think. E.g. if you hit a parked car that is in neutral with no parking brake, versus one that has its transmission and brakes locked down, and this happens at 100 mph, I suspect those factors hardly make a difference.
Or you could take a dose from two separate classes of drugs to adjust screen brightness?
I'm a youtuber and software developer with a small but determined following.

Almost all of that has been gained, not through the quality of my work, but the degree of enthusiasm I showed for it. It's on me to make sure I'm still going in the right direction, because my audience will be swept up in the enthusiasm.

Joy is not only valued, but it is marketable. So is anger. Cynicism is considerably less marketable, and stoicism isn't really observable at all: you're probably thinking of expressions of woe implying great burden and suffering.

When you specifically say on an interpersonal and cultural level that "joy is not valued", and "only cynicism and stoicism are acceptable", that's a screaming red flag that you aren't hanging out with the right people.
FWIW, wasn't the apartment in "Friends" on rent control? IDK how that works exactly, but maybe it explains the plot hole away.
I thought “surely this title is a typo or clickbait.”

Nope, it is correct. Pretty wild, albeit still very much a POC.
It's an MVP for that.

Eventually the goal is that it pulls in all the different forms and edge cases of the tax code but it's not there yet.

Currently it's just basic "W-2, (maybe a 401k), and basically nothing else" but the trial was also intentionally limited to a small portion of the tax base to keep the project from biting off more than they could chew for the first year.

But yes in the next ~5-10 years as long as the next admin doesn't cancel it, this will probably be a default "public option" for everyone.
I've thought a lot about the analogy with Steve Jobs and the iphone, but it's also a bit misleading to me because academics doesn't even credit things the same way as in business.

The iphone is made by Apple after all, and we can get into discussions about how much credit Apple even deserves for the iphone or whether Steve Jobs deserves credit for whatever portion of that we give.

But in academics we still act as if it's just "Joan Smith" doing their research and hiring people to get things done, and acting as if they're brilliant for doing so, when in fact many other people probably have the exact same ideas, or happened to be in the right place in the right time, or know the right people in the grant agency, or whatever; or their grad students or postdocs are the ones with the ideas, etc. etc.

I keep thinking about a colleague of mine who, whenever someone like a grad student would have an original idea, but required his grant money or whatever to pay for it, he would take credit on papers saying "ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the work involved getting it to happen that matters." But if there was a paper that was the result of a relatively unoriginal idea that required a lot of RA, grad student, and postdoc labor, it was always "it's the idea that counts, and not whoever follows through with it."

I feel like that's the atmosphere in academics now.