skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- "...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor..."

I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite.

The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart.

It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that.

*(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor).

(The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).
> I think you'd have to work at it to be a successful grifter.

It might take work to be get away with being a fraud, but you're not doing work that's helping anyone you're working with.
Copyright and patent are legal privileges (specifically a time limited monopoly on a work or invention), not natural rights.

The US Constitution proposes them as a way to “promote progress in the useful arts” and specifically calls out their time-limited nature. I think that “authors life + 95 years” arguably stretches “limited time” beyond reasonableness, but I digress.

There is a real cost, both to the society the law serves, and in the operation of law enforcement and judicial infrastructure needed to support copyright and patent enforcement.

Even if you 100% believe in copyright and patent, it seems like a reasonable thing for the direct benefactors of copyrights and patents to substantially bear the cost of enforcement. A one-time filing fee (for patents) and nothing (for copyright) seems low.

There is also a societal cost in suppression of innovation by allowing these to last long periods of time, so it seems reasonable that the cost structure should be (1) related to the value of the work to the creator/inventor, and (2) incentivize shorter times, especially if the values involved are low.

I don’t fully grok Harberger taxes but it seems to me that they try to satisfy both my proposed criteria, but are flawed in that the value is stated by the inventor/author without proof. Maybe I’m misinterpreting but I see other comments to that effect.

My proposal is to make the fee structure impute the value, by increasing over time. For example, we could require a fee of $1000 for issuance of a copyright or patent (separate from the application fee). The term would be for one year. The patent/copyright holder can extend for as many years as they want, but the cost goes up 10x each year. If it’s a valuable asset, you’ll keep paying until the cost of extension exceeds your perceived value. Now the value is established by the most informed party in the market.

This is my proposal. You can of course tinker with lengths and amounts and increase factors.

In sum the idea is that for valuable works (a Marvel Avengers movie or the patent on the RSA algorithm or a cancer drug) the copyright/patent holder will keep paying for many years until it’s not profitable anymore. For works that have little market value, they would fall into the public domain quickly and be able to help improve other works or inventions, and inhibit rent seeking. It practically eliminates the incentive for patent trolling, or for suing an artist decades later for having a beat similar to a song 40 years ago, or for establishing huge defensive patent portfolios. The economics aren’t there anymore.
Now they're all gonorrhea.
Some people have diminished auditory capabilities.
>LLMs cannot truly adapt to novelty because they have no ability to basically take their knowledge and then do a fairly sophisticated recombination of that knowledge on the fly to adapt to new context.

I find the semantics to be very misleading and, I believe, intentionally so. The LLM does not have any "knowledge". It has data to which software applies statistical algorithms to predict the next token. However, the software is incapable of "understanding" in the sense that "knowledge" would require. The failure of these types of discussions to address this issue is troubling and is why I believe it is intentional (e.g. because billions of dollars have been invested into LLMs upon the thesis that LLMs are indeed a form of AI - when in fact there is no "intelligence" whatsoever).

>>“I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about biological systems versus systems made of other materials that would, in principle, prevent non-biological systems from becoming intelligent.”

I don't understand how a scientist could make the above statement with a straight face. Science has been unable to understand human sentience and consciousness - yet this scientist wants me to believe they can create build something to duplicate a brain they themselves don't even yet understand? It's laughable.
This is to own an apartment or condo. What your mortgage is a month is going to be different for everyone depending on what they put down.
You can make highly accurate predictions of what contrarians will say by assuming that they define AI as "whatever computers can't do yet."

LLMs aren't truly intelligent. [No True Scotsman fallacy...] They don't really reason. [A distinction asserted without giving a falsifiable definition of reasoning...] They're just next token predictors! [Which must be mutually exclusive with intelligence, I suppose?] Etc, etc, etc. Find your favorite pretext to dismiss modern AI, ignore the holes in the argument, and satisfyingly conclude that it's all smoke and mirrors.

Consequently you see hilarious takes from skeptics, like comparing today's enormous investment in AI to when people sold blockchain cartoon monkeys. Or claiming that modern models aren't useful for anything, as if they exist in an alternative reality where hundreds of million of people don't use them daily, and there's no incessant firehose of new tools/products/results discussed in news/social media constantly.
To me, keeping a world state in sync with rapidly changing external state is the most compelling application. Something like dockercraft: https://github.com/docker/dockercraft
Its inherently difficult because LLMs are necessarily probabilistic and even worse, for any practical use the key step irreversibly discards most of the probabilities
And are they there ... illegally? Or legally?

In France, if you are illegal, you get free healthcare.

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aide_m%C3%A9dicale_d%27%C3%8...
What happens to company shares that are traded on pisces if after the 5 year sandbox experiment the scheme is scraped?
realistically there should just be some kind of homestead exemption for one primary residence. several states already have such a system, where you get reduced or frozen property taxes, and protection during bankruptcy.
I can agree that there's people who preach tolerance but don't actually seem to mean it, yeah. Have yet to see egotistical egoless-ness, but I'd suppose it'd just look like empty speech in a smilier fashion.
Why It's So Frickin' Hard to Stop Driving
I think this is great. I've certainly had companies where I believed in the mission and others where I was just doing the work to help along the project or advance my own career experience. But I wasn't ever there to deceive people or fraudulently misrepresent myself.
That's why I used the German ß, because ipv4 decomissioning might be either boomer or zoomer behaviour.

The Zoomer, young, would advocate for IPv6, which in turn is young. This can be seen as a progressive or reckless advocacy. Typical of new generations that want to change the status quo.

However the Boomer, having lived through the IPv4 era, might in turn advocate for the disestablishment of IPv4 with deep knowledge of it, its failings, and the risks and merits of its contender and its migration plans. Newer generations might be resistant to change something they don't understand, but the generation that created it, can understand it and more safely come to the conclusion that it can be deleted.
HN in particular has a deflated view of the economy because our sector was going through such a big bubble from 2014 on, which got even bigger for a brief window around the pandemic. We in particular had a long way to fall back to reality, so our personal economic outlook is worse than it's been for a while, even if the rest of the economy is looking up.
> OTOH, creating a computer game is not a trivial task, and I don't see a good way to do it for 6 people Face-to-Face with some hidden information like a card hand.

I've long thought the "Jackbox Games" model would be absolutely perfect for board games. The board goes on a TV, a tablet, or for the really dedicated a screen built in to their gaming table and each player's hand/deck/whatever displays on their phone through a browser-based client.

If I were a frontend programmer I'd have taken a whack at it.

> but think you may be underestimating serious gamers' ability to play complicated games correctly and still have fun.

My experience fits with something mentioned in the article, a lot of serious gamers are not in fact playing their games correctly but they just don't know it. I said this in another one of my replies but I'll repeat it here, I have rarely played a complicated (read: more than a page of rules to be understood for proper play) game with my partner's board game crew without discovering some way that they were playing it wrong half way through the game. These are people who meet every week at a board game bar to play board games, go to board game conventions, and a few of them even make and sell their own games.
>China and India are just burning the coal for everyone else.

The actual effect of this is far less than you think. While it's true there's some amount of "exporting" of emissions from rich countries to china/india, the effect is small. Consumption based emissions (ie. accounting for imports) for US is only 11% higher than territorial emissions. Meanwhile the difference for China is also 11% (in the opposite direction, of course).

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
Good luck, Victoria has a navy base!

Alberta's advantage is being landlocked (and not a natural habitat for rats). They managed to keep the rats that arrived at the ports from encroaching inland.
When was vDOM ever called DHTML?

I was around for DHTML days, and as I recall, it was just a generic term for the ability to manipulate the actual (not virtual) DOM programmatically from JS.
This is literally me. I live paycheck to paycheck but also have a six figure sum of money I can tap into if needed.

How I got here is living way below my means in my twenties, saving up tons of money, and nowadays living at my means while still maxing retirement. I also have almost all that saved money invested, which just grows the pot as it sits. I also have zero debt besides a 3% mortgage.

So basically I spend all of every paycheck, after retirement has been deducted, but if I lost my job I could maintain my current life with zero income for a few years before running dry.
I don't know if it's possible for iCloud's security to go any lower: https://www.xda-developers.com/icloud-windows-photos-from-st...
Dude, flying snake is my favorite. I've had a pretty bad week, and this really made my day. I miss the weird internet, with sprites and CMYK bright green. Great job.
In some form or fashion yes. Theres a reason why there are so many homeless tent camps everywhere. These people are not choosing to be homeless. They just can't afford a place. But remember a lot of them still have jobs. At Walmart, Amazon Warehouses, etc.
The average apartment in a moderate-cost area is 5833 per month? Where is that number coming from?

The average rent for an apartment in the United States is between $1,559 and $1,748 per month, depending on the source (google AI). This would be $21000 per year in rent.
> English and Spanish

Part of the causality is the other way around: The largest language communities attract the most monetization. Europe being compartmented into 24+ languages is one reason that it’s harder to monetize.
I don't think it requires a remarkable level of insight.

The overall cost for the Chinese government is probably very small in the grand scheme of things. And it makes a lot of sense from a geopolitical strategy.
So, we should consider materials dangerous because of aesthetic feelings, not evidence, and that lack of evidence should be taken as evidence they are dangerous?

I don't think you realize you've descended in self parody here.
Single payer literally meant that all citizens are subscribed to the same government operated health insurance.

If the entire "single payer" program was completely optional and offered at cost, they totally missed the messaging on that one, because I was paying attention and that wasnt my take away.
Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, unpacked [video]
> The tone has shifted in a way that people who would have never be considered violent, are out buying weapons.

I think that's what happens when people feel a peaceful discussion is going nowhere. The frustration only increases while available non-violent solutions appear to shrink. The Black Panthers, Palestinian terrorism... There's nothing good about it, but I find it entirely unsurprising.
I caution against trying to compare homeless statistics internationally.

The definition of who is homeless and how they are counted varies dramatically between countries to the point where comparing headline numbers is largely useless.
Ths stock market is not considered in GDP. So by that measure it does not directly impact "economic growth." I can see an indirect relation that says that US investors (primarily through pensions and 401Ks) are the primary benefactors of a growing US stock market which then translates to more investment and opportunity of US citizens, but that is a pretty long trail to account for our economic path right now.
More specifically, they would use the default font, which IE in particular had set to Times New Roman, so that is what most people saw. To add insult to injury, there was no way to configure it for a very long time.

To this day I wonder if this particularly strange choice of a serif font that is very clearly intended primarily for printed documents rather than on-screen legibility is why this entire notion of using user-selected fonts for web pages has largely withered. What if they went with, say, Verdana instead?
> No, you really, really, really don't.

You do.

Believers are too inflexible and will kill the project eventually because of it.

Coasters won’t work enough to deliver the project.

Grinders will eventually burn out and devolve into coasters, or start divert the project into unrelated territory (focusing too much on optimization, testing, accessibility).

Grifters are the only ones who can lead projects, because they understand where the wind blows.
I agree, but

>if you train your model on thousands of hours of video games

What if you train the same model on thousands of hours of sensor data from real, physical robots?
The Emperor is not necessarily the guy to go to for the man-in-the-street view from China.
Very plausible, but as a user, I don't care at all about the why. I'll just use somebody else's model.
You’re forgetting lots of people rent. Lots of people can’t afford to own, and almost all of them rent. The other factor is dual, or even 3+ incomes in families living together.
>Which one is the original? Say we aren't making a computer copy but duplicate of your body. And we might have messed up the labels.

Reality doesn't care about the labels. One of the two pre-existed, which is the original.

>How do you tell which one is the original? Atoms don't have labels.

That's a problem regarding our knowledge. There's still an original, regardless if we know which or not.

There's an original even regardless whether the original has a way to prove to themselves they are so (as opposed to simply believing they are, which the clone would believe too).
> The thing about the US is that it's very unevenly distributed. So it depends on what you'd be doing and how much money you'd be making / already have.

The Veil of Ignorance, anyone? Even invented by an American.

People here need to consider the state of a society without spending 80% of the bytes on the what-if of being a 135+ IQ individual with a passion that coincides with the work tasks of amazingly successful megacorporations based on the West Coast. At least when we’re supposed to be talking in the abstract.
Polars in Aggregate: Faster I/O, inequality joins, and much more
That's not a measure of an economy though. Housing and especially dense affordable housing isn't widely built in the US and the supply is artificially constrained, usually by NIMBY politics.
> periodic ragebait articles

Somewhat offtopic, but I call these articles "parading the idiot". Where a newspaper or other media outlet runs an article interviewing a person where the subject is clearly out of step with everyone else in their assumptions.

See also articles where a property investor complains about how hard they are doing financially because they have to sell one of their eighteen investment properties.
This is actually why I don't use Gemini. I've notice that it gets nonsensical when it gets into what I assume is sparser latency space. Claude and ChatGPT will stay coherent/consistent within the context of what they're saying (even if wrong). Worse, when Gemini starts doing this, it seems mostly irrecoverable, like the "nonsense" poisons the context window.
Thanks, finally some good news from them for once
> Chipotle also acknowledged higher food costs that came as it responded to viral online complaints about shrinking portion sizes.

They're far from the only ones, and that's one of my top reasons for eating out so seldom. At least grocery stores have to 'fess up on the labels when their "half gallons" of ice cream shift to 56 oz. ... 48 oz. ... 40 oz. ... 36 oz. ...
https://steamcommunity.com/app/333640/eventcomments/43387350...

Doesn’t look like it, unless something changed since that comment.
Can someone ELI5 this, please?
How often are you buying iPhones and Toyota Corollas? PPP conversion rates are based on what people actually spend their money on. Easily tradeable goods, like iPhones and cars, make up only one component of GDP.
Fixed pitch fonts and ASCII art are outdated; not even Dwarf Fortress relies on them anymore. You can sort of line up numbers, but you have to be careful to use U+2007 FIGURE SPACE (not U+0020 SPACE) and U+2212 MINUS (not U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS) to match the size of an Arabic digit. Code indentation only needs to be visibly bigger or smaller, and lining up words and formulae are jobs for TeX.
Is securing old mines a good job for (remotely-operated (humanoid)) robots?

Old mines can host gravitational energy storage.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778721 :

> FWIU we already have enough abandoned mines in the world to do all of our energy storage needs?

"Gravity batteries: Abandoned mines could store enough energy to power ‘the entire earth’" (2023)
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/29/gravity-batteries-...
> In some form or fashion yes

Can you clarify? Because I'd find it hard to believe that half of Americans are literally homeless. It might make more sense if you're referring to home-owners.
Not sure why, but the image of a 4-stroke engine came to my mind when I read your comment.
> That means about 50% of the US can not afford a place to live.

And yet, they do. I don't think your numbers lead to your conclusion.

Being single and wanting to own your own home is going to be the closest situation to your conclusion. 50% of those folks being unable to achieve that dream sounds plausible.

The median rent is $1621. One bedroom and studio apartments will be on the lower end, and a $60K salary is likely to be sufficient.

For everyone who wants to obtain housing for themselves and a significant other, they have $120K to work with. Now the house looks achievable.
It's explicitly mentioned in the section "Back to the seventies", right near the top of the article.
The Romans didn't need to get it from the water, they directly used it as a flavoring called "sapa." Apparently it was one of the first artificial sweeteners and is actually pretty delicious.
I think it's because there's no business model in the pure "DB browser" product. People don't seem willing to pay enough for it to build a good business around it.

Everyone I've seen either pivots to a Retool competitor or a BI tool.

Source: I've tried it twice.
I do all of my NetHack gaming via ssh to Hardfought[1]. They offer the current vanilla and previous ones all the way back to 1.3d. However they specialize in variants. My favorite variant is xNetHack[2]...

[1] https://www.hardfought.org/
[2] https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/XNetHack
Hn has a highly inflated view of the economy because we only see the top of the economic pie. I shop at cheap ethnic stores because I grew up with that food and the prices that poor people see are two to three times what they were 5 years ago. Telling this to someone who buys premium organic free range eggs is like trying to explain to a fish that a flood doesn't benefit everyone.
Proving that quantum entanglement is real (2022)
It's less about complaining, more about explaining that it's still very loud.
Right. I was born in Europe and am still struggling with North American cultural assumption that "place to live" == "own property".

Back to the original post I think there are several statistics that apply to different geographical areas or demographics in the same post, leading us to conclusion that half the continent is out on the street, and demonstrating risk of back of the napkin calculations on policy decisions, even if we assume good will and honest effort :-/