plants

This is awesome! StreetEasy is how many New Yorkers find apartments. In the past few years, it has been flooded with AI-staged apartments. The AI stagings warp the room to fit furniture that would 100% certainly not fit there. It’s deceptive, and I’m glad it at least requires disclosure now (although I wish it were fully banned)

plug to my blog post where I did something similar a few years back! https://willbeckman.com/wordle.html :). Not sure if this is an identical solution, but it was a fun little project.

Wow, thanks. I’m even coming up with 500K chatGPT queries for the amount of energy consumed as a KG of beef, though I might have moved a decimal place somewhere - feel free to check my math :)

“average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours of energy” - or 0.00034MWH

Using this calculator: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc... - in my zip, 0.0002KG of CO2 per MWH. (Though, I suppose it depends more on the zip where they’re doing inference, however this translation didn’t seem to vary much when I tried other zips)

Then, 99.48KG/0.0002KG= 497,400 chatGPT queries worth of CO2 per KG of beef?

Thanks for sharing!

Those are incredible stats. As a vegan who uses LLMs at work frequently, I would love to have the source as well :)

This is really neat! I work in machine learning but still feel imposter syndrome with my foundations with math (specifically linear algebra and matrix/tensor operations). Does anyone have any more good resources for problem sets with an emphasis on deep learning foundational skills? I find I learn best if I do a bit of hands-on work every day (and if I can learn things from multiple teachers’ perspectives)

Recommendation of profiles that you may like is a solved technical challenge at Tinder level and at mostly any dating app today.

It’s hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this!

I’m in the shortest-shorts camp too. Less about the UL-value of the shorts, more about the mobility to lift my leg as high as I can (specifically to reduce friction going uphill). When you take literally millions of steps on a thru-hike, even the smallest things start to add up.

This is great. Found myself on 5/30/22. Looking forward to catching up with photos of people I hiked with. Also love the pics from ‘79 - total time capsule! Short-shorts never went out of style in the hiking community.

I’ll bite. I worked at a very large Fortune 500 company for a few years. Through some twist of fate, I ended up on an overfunded ML organization that was under no pressure to produce anything of business value. The executive in charge of this operation let this fly for about a year before they realized they weren’t getting anything valuable out of it. They put pressure on the VP of the org to start producing business value or else.

Fast forward another month or so and there are six hastily thrown together initiatives in which our organization is contracted to other organizations to “help them out”. The team dynamics were atrocious - our team was met with skepticism as to why we were helping out (was the other team not doing their job well enough?), and people on our team were often clueless on the business subject matter that we were supposed to be consulting on.

I was assigned to one of these initiatives, and upon digging into the business problem, our team realized that the feature importance was completely contained within a single categorical feature in the model. All other features in the model were comparable to uniformly randomly generated features. In the selfish interest of being able to claim that they “solved their problem with ML”, it was clear that either the model developer or the team at large had obscured this fact.

In an effort to save face, the VP kept us on the project, despite the poor relations and lack of useful features to improve the model. We didn’t improve the model and eventually, the VP ended up being “pushed out”. Last I checked, this VP is currently the CEO of a startup that recently raised a $100M seed round.

I imagine that’s just about the starkest within-US move you could make with regard to bike friendliness. I once made the mistake of visiting Houston without a rental car, and it was bleak. Welcome to NYC!

This is such a good idea, I wish I’d thought of it. I have trouble maintaining consistency in journaling, but this makes it a heck of a lot easier. I just signed up - good luck!

This is great. I remember finding another really good resource on the Bernoulli bandit that was interactive. Putting feelers out there to see if anyone knows what I’m talking about off the top of their heads.

I’m in a bit of a privileged position, but I took a fair bit of time off to pursue personal goals. I got extremely burnt out after 6 years of full-time work at big corp (simultaneously being in part-time grad school for the final 3 years).

I found it took me 3-4 months of absolutely nothing to not feel burnt out. It took much longer than that to get to a point where I was able to pick up my computer and have fun programming again. I’m now working on a webapp that I intend to turn into a business. I have been pouring myself into it in a way that I haven’t done since I was a new hire.

Hang in there. Maybe ask your boss if you can take an unpaid sabbatical. You will ultimately be much more productive if you get a break, and the time off will give you a chance to clarify to yourself what it is that you want.

I’m unemployed in NYC right now - so, zero consistent income. I’m one of those people with the very worst marketplace health plans. Here’s what I get for $640/mo (with a $120 tax credit, oh boy!): - Visits to my general practitioner (but not so fast! no diagnostic tests or ANYTHING else - those are 100% out of pocket until my $9,000 deductible is met) - Pregnancy care (it’s currently a biological impossibility for me to give birth)

Everything else is entirely out of pocket until my $9,000 deductible is met. My coverage is basically a $6,000 guarantee that I won’t be completely bankrupted if I get run over by a garbage truck and live to tell the tale. Otherwise, it’s completely useless. Something’s gotta give.

This is what infuriates me the most about healthcare in the US. I give someone my card, they enter the numbers with no indication of whether or not everything will be covered by insurance (they assume you just know).

Then, a month later, I receive a bill indicating a routine procedure that I assumed out of ignorance was covered by insurance (since they took my card and entered the numbers without saying anything to the contrary) for $500 (or, god forbid, more).

If I knew a salad at a restaurant were $200, I probably wouldn’t order it. There is no basic transparency in medical billing, and that needs to change.

Specifically for A/B or A/B/N testing, you can use a beta-bernoulli bandits, which give you confidence about which experience is best and will converge to an optimal experience faster than your standard hypothesis test. Challenges are that you have to frequently recompute which experience is best and thus, dynamically reallocate your traffic. They also only works on a single metric, so if your overall evaluation criterion isn’t just something like “clickthrough rate”, this type of testing becomes more difficult (if anyone else knows how multiple competing metrics are optimized with bandits, feel free to chime in).

Can you point to a book or other resources that support this claim? Interested in learning more. Always looking for another reason to hate cars as a New Yorker

As someone who lives in New York and has seen the episode you’re referring to, it is not embellished at all. New York might be the hardest city to find a public restroom that I have ever been in. Sometimes buying something isn’t even sufficient grounds for using a bathroom - a business might only have an “Employees Only” bathroom in the back.

This is so funny, I was just doing this with ChatGPT to apply for jobs. If you make me fill out a bullshit form where I fake being passionate about your company, I’m going to get a chatbot to write it for me. End of story. I just need a job, why do you care if I’m passionate about building CRUD apps for you?

I have also been out of work for ~8mo for various reasons, and while I’m sorry for your situation, it’s heartening to hear I’m not the only one. I’ve only actually gotten one tech screen in which I was asked a LC “hard” question, which I didn’t pass (I’m pretty good with “easy” and “medium”, but come on, hard?).

So far, I have one other interview from an internal referral, but haven’t heard anything back from the ~10-15 other applications I’ve sent out. I’m getting a bit discouraged and feel similarly as you - it would be nice to take more time off (maybe I don’t actually love working in tech?), but I have the same worried as you. Feels good to vent in this thread, though :)

I didn’t listen to this, but the essay is full of straw men and contrived arguments about how utilitarianism is a bad moral philosophy. While utilitarianism is not perfect, this essay just regurgitates others’ criticisms of it and provides no useful alternative. As an aside that bothered me (but not related to the content directly), the tone of the article also wants to be scholarly so badly, which made it really long-winded and hard to read.

> Indeed, this very essay, which I’d long planned to write some version of, is coming out now because the same effective altruist organization is offering a $20,000 prize to whomever gives the best critique of effective altruism this month.

I think this sentence tells you everything you need to know about this guy’s philosophy. The article also ends with him suggesting, as an “alternative”, to give a money to fundamentally utilitarian/effectively altruistic sources (AI safety research) and to fund projects that he’s interested in under the premise that these underfunded scientific fields are “awesome and epic”.

Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive at all. It‘s very possible for the algorithm to get content to be amazing while still posing massive national security concerns.

I’m sure not everyone came here to hear tech book recommendations, but I will add another vote for Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppman. It’s one of the best tech reference books I’ve ever read. It manages to explain SO much while requiring so little prior knowledge from readers.

Another book that is relatively new that I loved was Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen. I worked in productionizing ML systems for 3 years and this book equips you with exactly what you need to do so. It does a great job of explaining the whole ML modeling pipeline and some of the commonly overlooked nuances that can cause your models to fail spectacularly in production. I will be referencing this book for years to come.

Awesome list, thank you for sharing! Curious, though - how do you structure your weeks so that you can consume 50 books a year? That would take me a while!

Holy shit, I’m hiking with this guy right now on the AT!! This was a two-year COVID passion project that Andy made with his brothers (one coded it, the other made the music, he designed all the pixel art).

It’s SO cool to see this on here. I’ve been tracking him using it when we get separated. Andy, if you see this, hello from Deadweight :).

This is incredible - I remember seeing this project at a hackathon back when I was in college and thinking it was so cool! So funny to see the actual author of it posting about it on HN now :). Really such a cool project - would love to see this become more mature.

Without actually looking through the code, I have a few questions:

1. How slow is it loading webpages? I think SMS would be a little sluggish since each message can only contain 160 characters.

2. How do you guys manage out of order text messages? Is there some sort of metadata that governs the order of a multi-part SMS?

Thanks so much for posting this - really a blast from the past.

This is really nice. It sounds a lot like a waterfall or whitewater. Very soothing.

My favorite restaurant. Lots of fun clip-art graphics :) https://www.thaidiner.com/

Some of my favorite fiction books and short story collections in no particular order:

1) Collected Fictions by Borges

2) The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

3) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

4) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

5) 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger

6) 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme

7) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

8) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Wow, hiking the AT is currently my quitting plan as well, but for 2022. Excited to see that you aren't experiencing extreme post-trail depression - I know it can hit hard for some people :). I hope to be in a very similar place/state of mind as you next year.

Do you have any advice for an AT hopeful for next year? I have done a fair amount of planning and have completed a ~250 mile thru-hike this past summer, but would still love some advice from a veteran (i.e. tent vs. hammock, how many sets of each type of clothing you ended up using, etc.)