HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

gault8121

448 karma · joined April 9, 2013

Executive Director of Quill.org, an open source nonprofit developing free online learning tools to help low-income 3rd-12th grade students become stronger writers. We support more than two million students, and students have written and received feedback on more than 400 million sentences.

http://www.quill.org

We're a Rails/React stack and are always interested in connecting with engineers interested in education. You can reach me at: peter at quill dot org

submissionscomments
gault8121··on Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
So sorry to hear that. I'm providing caretaking for my mother, who has GBM now, and we've been lucky to get to month 15 now. It's such a difficult disease to grapple with.
gault8121··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
gault8121··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
Yes but all of the commenters think this is a fake site created ironically. It isn't. It is a company doing the evil thing it is mocking.
gault8121··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
gault8121··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
gault8121··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
This site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
gault8121··on Malus – Clean Room as a Service
So this site is not satire. You can actually pay on Stripe and it will create code for you. The site is written with satirical language but it is a real service.
gault8121··on San Francisco to pay $212M to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks
The headline here is manipulative.

> The $212 million contract includes support services from Hitachi for "20 to 25 years,"

The $212m is a 20-year service contract for the new technology and the costs of installing it, not a one-time cost to remove the old floppy disks.

gault8121··on Ask HN: Asperger, How to Get Funding?
The video game market doesn’t seem like a good market for raising venture capital - there is a ton of competition, and it seems that the folks who can raise money have a track record of previously successful games. With the 5% interest rate, you’ll very likely need to bootstrap your first game to break into the industry and then you could raise for a future game.
gault8121··on The Password Game
The Chrome Inspector Color Picker does not return the right hex code! You have to go into the properties to get the right value.
gault8121··on The Password Game
When you break the captcha rule, you can re-select the captcha. You want to keep re-rolling till you find a low number combo. There are a few rules where you can re-roll to get a better random number. In general, it gets harder and harder to stay under the 25 limit as you progress.
gault8121··on The Password Game
How do you solve the time issue - does it lock in the time at the moment you complete that rule, or do you need to keep updating the password with the new time? Also, is the time UTC or time zoned?
gault8121··on The Password Game
Got to rule 33 after like two hours! The cap on adding up to 25 becomes really tough with the later rules.
gault8121··on First Republic Bank files 8-K – Tech only 4% of total deposits; no sector >9%
There are three articles about this on the front page of the New York Times right now. It’s going to be widespread knowledge very soon.
gault8121··on DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection
How does this compare to GPT2 output detector?

I created AIwritingcheck.org to provide teachers with a user friendly interface for this model.

gault8121··on Ask HN: Help with Gusto? 2021 payroll being double reported to IRS
Gusto has horrible customer support.we switched to JustWorks, which isn’t perfect but much better. Gusto had good customer support when they launched, and it got much worse over time. For high stakes tax work they need professionals who take this work seriously, not a ticketing system where every ticket is completely disconnected from every other ticket.
gault8121··on Groundbreaking marks start of work on Penn Station Access
The four extra stations in the Bronx can't be hooked up to Grand Central - they are along the line that runs into Penn Station, and for folks in that area of the Bronx, walking to the station and then taking a slow local train into Manhattan is extremely slow. You could possibly have 25k-50k new daily passangers who can now get to Manhattan far faster. -- Penn Station is like a 15 minute walk from Grand Central, and it's not underground. Commuters from Connecticut can now go directly to Penn Station as there are a ton of office buildings in the area, including all of new office space Hudson Yards and the planned redevelopment of Penn Station. While return to office is low in tech, Finance and Law seem to be returning to 100% in office, and so there is a chance that will create real time savings and generate a postive ROI over say 100 years. -- I'd definitely prefer progress on the Interborough Express in an either/or scenario between the two, but given all of the federal funding available now for infrastructure, it might not be an either/or scenario but rather a time for both/and.
gault8121··on Ask HN: How much longer will we have free access to ChatGPT?
As a standard of Ethical AI, all AI companies should require age verification as a pre-requisite for access and mandate blocking services that provide cheating via an API. Some may/will opt-in voluntarily, while others will not. The voluntary opt-in will set a precedent for legal action to mandate it for those that will not. Ultimately, running these large language models won't be trivial, and so you can gate keep access at the API level to prevent unethical usage.
gault8121··on Ask HN: How much longer will we have free access to ChatGPT?
It needs to be put behind a paywall. It will unleash a massive wave of cheating among students, harming hundreds of millions of students' educations by making cheating super easy and undetectable. We age restrict cigarettes because they harm a children's health - ChatGPT beckons hundreds of millions students to go on autopilot at the expense of learning and growing. A pay wall and age verification is the moral choice. If you want to use it, spring for the $10 a month fee and pay for it.
gault8121··on ‘Shark Tank’ Startup Is Making Vegan Bacon Out of Seaweed
I've had this and I've had seaweed. It tastes much more like bacon than seaweed.
gault8121··on White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight
So I am having trouble finding this source now, but I have perviously read from the main team researching Calcium Carbonate, SCoPEx (https://scopexac.com/), that the intention is to spray the calcium carbonate high enough in the atmosphere so that it does not float down to the ground but rather dissipates into space. There is a specific height in the atmosphere where it needs to be released, and yes, if it fell to earth, this wouldn't be a viable solution. I can't find where I read this, but this is one component of the current hypothesis.
gault8121··on White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight
Yes, exactly - it's an interesting idea worth researching. Thanks for adding this idea!
gault8121··on White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight
Yes, and so that's why we need to study these things now. These aerosols dissipate - you need to continually add them to the atmosphere every few months. The point here is that this a temporary measure to bring down the temperature to prevent additional deaths caused from global warming. If it ended up causing more harm than the co2 alone, this could be stopped. However, when faced with the impossible situation all of humanity is in now, applying a tourniquet to stop the bleeding buys time for decarbonization to happen.
gault8121··on White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight
The article fails to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

> Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...

> "The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

gault8121··on White House is pushing ahead research to cool Earth by reflecting back sunlight
The article failed to mention a really important idea - Sulfur Dioxide is not the only aerosol that can be injected, and there are other options that seem much more promising. For example, using Calcium Carbonate may actually help restore the Ozone layer while also reducing the temperature.

> Source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...

> "The chemists think the solution could be calcium carbonate — the stuff of chalk, limestone, marble, and seashells. It may be less harmful to the ozone, and it’s not a big health concern. The team is studying how the substance affects chlorine and nitrogen oxides, which also exist in the stratosphere — largely due to man-made emissions — and speed ozone destruction. The researchers think the calcium carbonate might help to lower levels of these gases."

gault8121··on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
Exactly - The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45. This still scores as "Difficult to Fairly Difficult." It'd be interesting to see what the readability scores are for different amendments. > "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

gault8121··on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
Yes, exactly. You can draw whatever conclusion you'd like from the data, and many text scoring systems have issues, but there is still a clear pattern here where this text is far outlier.
gault8121··on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
Exactly - The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45. This still scores as "Difficult to Fairly Difficult." It'd be interesting to see what the readability scores are for different amendments.

> "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

gault8121··on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
The Flesch Kincaid gives you ranges, and it's reasonable for amendments to be within a certain range. For example, in Florida, all life insurance policies must have a Flesch Kincaid score of at least 45.

> "The text achieves a minimum score of 45 on the Flesch reading ease test as computed in subsection (5) or an equivalent score on any other test comparable in result and approved by the office;"

https://www.flsenate.gov/laws/statutes/2011/627.4145

gault8121··on Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
Here are the text complexity scores from different measures for this text.

Flesch Reading Ease score: -24 (text scale) Flesch Reading Ease scored your text: impossible to comprehend.

Gunning Fog: 40.7 (text scale) Gunning Fog scored your text: EXTREMELY difficult to read.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 35.7 Grade level: College Graduate and above.

The Coleman-Liau Index: 13 Grade level: college

The SMOG Index: 25 Grade level: graduate college

Automated Readability Index: 41.7 Grade level: College graduate

Linsear Write Formula : 57.5 Grade level: College Graduate and above.

Page 1 of 6Next →