skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we can look at this in two ways, how to support the current homeless and how to prevent future homelessness.

Having worked in a soup kitchen, I've observed the current homeless are in their positions for many different reasons. Some had a long string of bad luck, some had one huge bout of bad luck (in terms of an unexpected bill, layoff, heath issue, etc.), some are homeless because of addiction/mental problems, some have addiction/mental problems because of homelessness, etc. So, all these different categories have to be addressed in different ways. There's no one size fits all solution, and pocket change is certainly insufficient in all categories. It's a tough sell politically to spend resources on this, and while religious and charity efforts can certainly "momentarily defer discomfort", they simply can't address all the underlaying issues all of these folks are having.

In terms of preventing future homelessness, that would require policy changes, like cheaper housing, a stronger welfare system, easier access to health care and more modern drug addiction treatments. Addressing these will be helpful for everyone, so hopefully it is easier to at least throw some political weight behind it for the future.
If a government “says”? These large companies actively campaign, draft, and lobby for the legal frameworks and loopholes that they exploit. The government and the companies are the same and are fighting for the same pot of tax money.
Amateur radio astronomy has a storied history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Reber
GameGen-X: Open-World Video Game Generation
I would not like to go on being a slave in perpetuity but I guess to each their own. Or maybe I'm being too idealistic now but when facing up close I'd do otherwise, I can't tell for sure.
I've never heard this before. Though I'm from the UK which might explain it
All quaking aspens can reproduce through their roots systems (as well as by seeds); you typically see them as clusters in the forests they reside instead of peppered around like other trees. Pando is unique because it can only reproduce asexually as well as its huge size. Most aspen colonies are not nearly as big.
Can Large Language Models generalize analogy solving like people can?
if that’s your argument on this, you can help by buying from people selling things in the street, they often are the homeless people that are trying to get out of this situation.
I have walked by homeless people in sf who I think probably don’t have much longer to live. I have done this. And I’ve watched dozens of people around me do the same thing.

I walked by several people like this for probably about a week. Then those people disappeared. I assume they died because who would spend the money to give them care?
I think charity has been abstracted into a kind of grandiose and removed act, even a matter of institution. But charity, from the Latin caritas, is an act of perfect love for the other in which we act for the good of the other, not as a means for our own enrichment (though we are enriched spiritually by it), not for the sake of domination and control, but for the good of the other. This can mean helping an elderly person at a store carry groceries to her car, or spending extra time to tutor a child, or buying a homeless person a meal and talking to them (if possible; they might not want to). It is also manifested in our relationships with loved ones: our spouses, out children, our parents, our friends, etc, such as when we show patience with an aging parent who is losing their hearing or memory, or a spouse with a temper, or a child struggling at school. Charity is kind of habit, a virtue, a gift of self that increasingly becomes part of who you are the more you engage in it. In a way, charity allows you to more fully become who you are.

I would claim that if people practiced more genuine charity, they would become less miserable.
What's wrong with panhandling? The social dysfunction that gives rise to panhandling won't disappear if the panhandlers do.
You're absolutely right. Lifestyle creep and keeping up with the Joneses is a real thing and once you can shift the clients perspective on what's actually important the rest is pretty easy.

Healthcare bills are just another debt. Health providers are almost always willing to work out some kind of payment plan and we tackle it the same way we would a credit card or student loan. Additionally, there are things like HSA contributions that can help you save some money on healthcare bills. Usually in the range of 10-20%.
uBo is really the only one that I consider vital.
That's why I wonder if these raids are really more for show, can't they do this pretty much already?
> And your comment is?

Merely expression surprise at your statement, considering my experience is so different. I have no experience of 'luxury' yachts though, just regular sailing boats. So maybe those superyachts are different?

> The fact is that marine engine exhaust systems in good repair are not down-flooding points and certainly not on the yacht in question, where it almost certainly was below the waterline.

Well I agree with that, but because, again in my experience, sailing yacht exhaust systems tend to have an S curve where the exhaust goes relatively high up. Whether the exhaust opening itself is just over or under the waterline doesn't really matter for downflooding.
Emily moves from Paris to Rome and then this happens. Coincidence?
GPU are optimized for number crunching. Do they get used at all for string processing? I ask because I develop data wrangling software and most of it is string processing (joins, concatenations, aggregations, filtering etc), rather than numerical.
Here's a charity that does it in the US: https://www.foodrunners.org/
Now there is a familiar tune!

> Few people know Ruby and if you ask a company whether they want to hire PHP or Ruby guys, PHP wins because there's just more people who know it.

https://board.phpbuilder.com/d/10312349-php-frameworks-which... (First example I found, but was a common trope back in the early days of Rails)
I don't know how it works in other countries, but in the US you likely still need to provide a real address for many purposes (tax, immigration if applicable, etc)

The police could just find the correct targets and raid their home instead.
The best way to become homeless is to not ask for help when you need it. Your notion that asking for money from strangers would be a natural response suggests you are unlikely to ever become homeless.
I'm not dismissing that Pando is old or interesting. I'm saying that clonal reproduction is not especially uncommon in the plant kingdom and that we typically don't consider the resulting plants part of the same collective organism.

The same type of vegetative reproduction is happening every time a potato or garlic clove is planted, for example. Asparagus is an even closer analogy to Pando.
There was a graduate statistics seminar program in Pyongyang for a bit.

https://community.amstat.org/sspa/communityblogs/blogviewer?...

http://www.the-psi.org/psi-in-the-news.html
That's the crux of the problem, isn't it: should you want to?
To your last point: it’s neither the language nor the packages but rather it’s the ABI.

Python isn’t fully ABI stable (though it’s improved greatly) so you can’t just intermix compiled dependencies between different versions of Python.

This is true for many packages in your distro as well.
All trans-oceanic cables carry an electric current in addition to light in fiber(s). Electricity is what powers the optical amplifiers of which there needs to be one every hundred or so kilometers.

For short-ish cables (a couple hundred kilometers), driving the amplifiers via light (interestingly this can be done from both the data-sending and receiving end!) is possible, but not for trans-oceanic distances.
It is an immediately available solution for most if not almost all white collar workers. COVID was proof that it worked. However, the incentives and goals are not aligned with both employers and local governments.
Equip your machines with whack-on-LAN so you can remotely reset them by the same mechanism, and you've got a reasonably complete remote management setup!

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

https://www.i3detroit.org/reset-on-lan-an-ethernet-aware-rem...
>Well, yes. To think otherwise is to give up on empathy.

Please expand on that. How are you becoming less empathetic by not assuming things about other people?
The sad truth is that I live in the city with the most homeless people and I see the same thing everyday with not just me, but everyone who lives in the city. They walk by homeless people and not care.

Sociopaths are something worse. What I describe is normal people.
The EU is just as corporatist as the US. The corporations just aren’t as big, but they control their local/national politics effectively.
It depends on what X is.

If X is "install solar panels" or "provide affordable housing" or "reduce greenhouse gas emissions" then X is very likely moral.

If X is "lie to us about where your revenue came from" then X is very much immoral.
Sure, I have no doubt they'll materialize any day now.
For Apple specifically, you have to act as if you do not have unified memory because Apple still supports discrete GPUs in Metal and also Swift is reference counted - the CPU portion of the app has no idea if the GPU portion is still using something (remember that the CPU and GPU are logically different devices even when they are on the same die).

When you are running your code on an M- or A-series processor, most of that stuff probably ends up as no-ops. But worse case is that you copy from RAM to RAM, which is extraordinarily faster than pushing anything across the PCIe bus.
Those policies, if they include means testing, need rational means testing.

For example, it can't be all or nothing. You shouldn't be kicked out/lose all support by getting a job or a raise. Assistance can be reduced, but it should be something like pulling back $.5 for every dollar earned over since level.

Whatever limit should also be index to inflation.

An example of how to do everything wrong is what we did with SSI and Medicare for people with disabilities. Means test set in the 70s, no inflation adjustment, and all or nothing.
The map is current cables, for reference :) https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

AFAICT this post isn't "false" as much as "speculation". Given the news that a cable will be spanning the Atlantic ocean with an end goal of South Asia, South Carolina -> Africa doesn't seem insane. Though it looks like there's no cables there right now...

I was coming in here to complain about "encompass" vs "encircle", but now I'm fascinated by this map. Cool webdev, too!

EDIT: My biggest takeaway is that we should conquer/buy/steal French Polynesia. Also, huge shoutout to the Leif Erikson cable, connecting Oslo with the absolute middle of nowhere[1] in Canada. Oil rig thing, maybe...?

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Z5CEWt16NzHP2QH3A
Yes! I have never struggled with drug addition, but I have had personal experiences that showed me how sometimes in life "getting through today" takes a higher priority then "fixing the underlying problems". Looking back at my life, several unexpected highlights came from the kindness of random strangers who helped me out when I did not deserve it.

Giving a homeless person $5 will not fix any of their underlying issues, but it might be the thing that gets them through the day.
"As an aside- I'm also an academic and resent this sudden nonsense push to 'embrace AI' from people that have no clue what it even is."

Follow the money.

If you're used to "follow the money" and have done it a lot, you may find this money trail doesn't lead to the usual places. But look at the size of the AI bubble. There's a lot money available to fund PR and push "influencers" to run around telling people that they need to get on board or get left behind... because if people don't get on board that AI bubble is going to pop. And I think people underestimate the amount of control a donation to an educational institution gets the donor, unless they are very cynical.

I do not claim or believe that "AI" is useless. I do firmly believe that on top of the foundation of useful stuff that it can do, some of it if anything underutilized and understudied (I agree with an article in HN a few days back that embeddings are really underutilized and studied versus all this generative stuff which is a lot less interesting than meets the eye), there is a staggeringly enormous bubble. And with that bubble, a lot of well-resourced people motivated to keep it inflated, as there always is.

You'd think by 2024, the techno-fetishist "If it's NEW technology it's GOOD technology!" would be dying down in the general consciousness. Tech is not automatically good and helpful just by virtue of being good.
Trade-Offs in LLM Quantization
> but your answer is more attainable.

It's also just institutionalizing homelessness rather than trying to address the cause of the problem: refusing to give (or subsidize sufficiently) people who need houses.

> The best homeless shelters have programs targeted at helping people graduate into apartments.

The capacity and cost of this is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the problem with homelessness we face today. It's nice, it's good that there are some resources available, but it's not going to lessen the overall problem of homelessness.
I don't give to the homeless because I had a crap upbringing and I cling to my finances. My finances bring me a feeling of security. I don't know if that's selfishness. I wouldn't call it evil though.

What's the point of throwing around labels anyway?
I think they're more than bold claims. They're utter BS.
It's because of the government regulation and how localized it is so you can't pick a fight with just one regulator to force them to stop doing stupid, you need to pick fights with tens of thousands of local regulators (and their tens to hundreds of thousands of unionized government employees). On top of that, building is super capital intensive with long lead times to profitability that are fully controlled by said regulators so you can't pull an uber and just operate on a moderate sum of angel investor money while you also earn money from your service and flip the bird to the regulator. You don't make any money until you beat the regulator into submission, which makes beating the regulator a bad investment.

On top of all the above, you have teh general populace, of which a significant portion own housing they want to see go up so you won't ever get to the point where everyone sees the light and overwhelmingly supports you like uber got to, there will always be significant push back from the populace who want to abuse supply constraint to increase their personal benefit at the severe cost to all of us.
I always wondered: why make it so difficult to turn on? Is it a security issue? I mean, an off-by-default OS setting and an off-by-default BIOS setting? How dangerous is this thing??
Maybe people are "fine" and surviving but not flourishing. For example, if you are deficient in magnesium, you could have reduced energy levels, poor sleep, anxiety, depression, heart issues, etc. If you have reduced calcium, you develop osteoporosis down the line.
Yeah it was several lines long and directed to single me out as completely different and evil. It was trying to make me feel alone by saying no one is like me.

Said comment pissed me off. So I replied with a pissed off comment. Then he edited it. So yeah…
> Home office nudges towards isolation and lack of physical activity

You say this as if it's a fact, but with an extra 1-3 hours of my day freed up, it's a lot easier to get into the gym or visit my friends and family. Personally, I was more active and less isolated when I worked from home.
This is functionally equivalent to voting to reduce the value of investor property portfolios. Building enough housing for everybody = building new supply = reducing the value of existing homes.

Since American political parties are utterly financially reliant upon donations from investors with property portfolios, you're rarely if ever able to vote against their interests as a group.

If the US were democratic like Finland rather than being an oligarchy then it might be possible, but at the moment, 60-70% of US voters craving single payer healthcare isn't enough to make that happen and that would only hit a specific group of investors. A finland style "housing for everybody program" is a political pipe dream given the damage it would do to donor portfolios.
I'd expect it to something along the lines of "sorry Mario, but the princess is in a different castle" bit of shell game. "no no mister Revenue man, we have that information you want, but it's in a different office".
> I would feel shitty about myself that I got taken in by a scam.

Sorry, what are you referring to?
My favourite thing about Quincy Jones was how he would get himself into a liminal state, somewhere between awake and sleep, to have all his best ideas. He called it the Alpha State. Mentioned here: https://www.clashmusic.com/features/in-conversation-questlov...
Eusebius wrote his church history around 300, and is widely viewed as an excellent source. He quotes extensively, and is not uncritical of his sources, although sometimes he is overly credulous. He is the only source for many of the documents he quotes, including some imperial decrees. (He doesn't talk about the dating of Mark, I'm just correcting your apparent impression that he lived after 1945.)
Modern tools like Zoom and Google Meet allow us to blur or completely replace our background in real-time video, creating a polished and distraction-free environment regardless of where we are. This is possible because of advancements in machine learning.

In our blog, we'll explore how to achieve real-time background blurring and replacement using TensorFlow's body segmentation capabilities.

Read more: https://www.bigbinary.com/blog/video-background-removal
I thought book quality started going downhill circa 1990.

I am a fan of the old mass market paperbacks. These had a reputation of being low quality books back in the day because they are cheap and not super-durable but I think they are high quality from a Deming point of view because they are made by a process that is highly repeatable. Circa 2000 I thought my 1970s paperbacks were in great shape, but 2010 they were seriously yellowing.

I just looked at my bookshelf and found a '59 James Blish anthology that I bought for 50 cents maybe ten years ago, it is in "poor" condition and will probably crack if I read it without taking great care. Next to that I found a copy of Galbraith's The Affluent Society from 1958 which is perfectly usable except I'd be worried about the cover coming off. A Frank Herbert book from '68 is stained but in great shape other than the cover also being at risk. A '74 Herbert book is a touch discolored but has no problems at all.

(My collection includes not just science fiction of that era but also both self-help and serious books on psychology as well as books about science, politics, social sciences, etc. Government reports about inflation or race relations would be published as mass market paperbacks. You could get Plato and Sartre and Freud and the rest of the Western literary heavyweights)

The construction, materials, process, and such were repeatable enough that they even fail consistently. Not permanent, but 50 years is not bad. The right size to go in a purse or side pocket of a backpack (e.g. part of the loadout of a bibliomaniac who has 12 books in his backpack) I've got to find a good way to reinforce the cover (adhesive tape?)

Those are no longer produced, today it is trade paperbacks. There is wide variation in the dimension, construction, materials and processes for these. You sometimes find a trade paperback that is beautiful, strongly constructed and printed on acid free paper. Others you pay $50 for and the binding breaks the first time you lay the book open on the table.
I have volunteered for a decade, religious and non-religous organizations in the NYC and Philadelphia area. I have helped serve tens of thousands of meals. When the temperature drops I get called in for the code blue response.

Every single expert I have spoken to, people who have actually saved thousands of individuals from the cycle of mental health issues, addiction and homelessness shares this view. In fact, I used to think like you prior to meeting them. I have learned that I was wrong.

Your act allowed him to continue begging, this allowed him to obtain more of his drug of choice and only prolonged his battle with addiction. It did not help him, if he didn't get help like I previously described he is likely dead.

You meaned well, you aren't a bad person, I just ask you to understand what the experts in the field have to say and perhaps consider that they know more than you.
> Advertising is just attempted demand generation for otherwise weak product offerings

Just like money is just a vehicle for abuse and fraud.

Advertising is disseminating information about a product. The rest is you describing how advertising is abused, which I already addressed in my first comment. Yes, it is also used for malicious and abusive purposes, just like everything else is also used for malicious and abusive purposes.

If we talk about things that can be used for bad stuff, how about we start with E2EE comms and cash. The amount of evil, abuse, violence that they directly enable simply drowns out any potential downside of ads.

I guess either you want to ban it all, in which case there is no more argument to be had, or you can acknowledge that the world is not black and white and something that can be used for evil can also be a crucial part of an ecosystem.
For some reason, I found myself unreasonably upset at the suggestion that I should avoid a word solely because people will assume it indicates malintent. But after taking a step back to reflect, I realize it's not a big deal to avoid one word. I'm perfectly capable of condescension without having to rely on any specific word.
Being homeless is a state of mind and your money won't help anyone. Unless you found rare occurrence of homeless man who don't want to be homeless but some serious incident in life which did that to them.

In the past I was homeless for a month. I was young at that time (18 years old). After a very depressive period of 2 weeks I started to act so I won't be homeless any longer. Today I have 3 kids and a good job. It went well for me.

But usually, you will find people who are homeless and they like it. Or they don't want to change anything in their life to make a difference. For example, here where I live there are shelters for homeless people so they can find a place to sleep, take shower and wash their clothes. Also, they can get new clothes. But most of them don't want to go there as it is forbidden to be under influence of drugs and alcohol.
Also, here is easy to find a job. Even if one has no special skills, there will be always something to do on the constructions. After one month of work and sleeping in the facility which I mentioned you can easily rent something and live normally. But being homeless, you don't need to work. That's it.
The author has jumped through many hoops to render himself into exhausting inaction. He isn't doing anything about a problem that bothers him, which includes the meta act of feeling bothered about his smug feeling of having thought about this problem in such detail.

It is really not complicated. It is not difficult to be generous at all levels to the extent you can. Give to the panhandler, give to a shelter, give to and volunteer at a soup kitchen, volunteer your time to public policy meetings. So many options that need neither your guilt nor gloat.
Sting's "The Soul Cages" from the same year is also relying quite heavily on Q-Sound (or it could be RDS, the alternative competing technology from Roland, I don't remember exacly).
Does Emily store all of her boxes of important documents in the spare bathroom too?
Improving LLMs with Synthetic Data