Lukeas14 (u/Lukeas14)

Lukeas14 commented on How many high school stars make it in the NBA? (2019) pudding.cool/2019/03/hype... · Posted by u/throwup238

HarHarVeryFunny · 2 years ago

There are 100,000 high schools in the US.

The NBA drafts 60 new players per year.

Chance of being drafted in any year is 60/100000 = 0.06%. IOW once every 1666 years the best player in your high school team may be drafted.

If you're, say, top-10 in your state, then your chance is way better. Once every ~10 years a kid in top-10 might expect to be drafted (60/500).

What am I missing ?!

Lukeas14 · 2 years ago

The chances stat is missing that NBA draft picks are not evenly distributed between high schools. Some high schools don't have a basketball team, most don't have teams good enough to produce NBA talent and a few have great basketball programs which will attract the best talent and produce more NBA players (ex. Oak Hill Academy has sent 33 players to the league).

Lukeas14 commented on 12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed arkeonews.net/new-discove... · Posted by u/khole

derefr · 2 years ago

Is there some way that we could "scan the Earth" to find other long-buried sites like Göbeklitepe?

Would it be possible to do something from imaging satellites — something akin to ground-penetrating radar / laser range-finding / ultrasound — that might not be good enough for much, but which would be "just good enough" to find any other gigantic cities with walls built of dense stone, hidden under 10-50ft of dirt or sand?

Lukeas14 · 2 years ago

Yes they've been doing lidar scans throughout central america to detect ancient Mayan pyramids and cities that are hidden under foliage. They've identified thousands of structures but other factors have limited their ability to unearth them (# of archaeologists, funding, politics).

Lukeas14 commented on Reddit is OpenAI’s moat cyberdemon.org/2023/06/14... · Posted by u/dmazin

duxup · 3 years ago

> There is no question that Reddit is extremely valuable as training data. How often do you append “reddit” to your searches?

Is it?

When I worked in networking, and later web dev work I found Reddit to be a TERRIBLE place for Q & A type situations.

Answers on Reddit are often skewed by truthy answers from people with limited perspective in the industry who are surprisingly sort of militant about a given topic.

For example the networking topics often were “small shop” focused and users unaware of very common enterprise level practices, and when they saw someone mention it they would react really poorly. The result was advice tailored to small shops that have limited staff, so you got ideas that “work” but would perform poorly at scale (at best) and at times could present security risks, miss opportunities where more performance was needed, better solutions were available with a sizable staff and planning. They weren’t wrong, but the answers were skewed.

Subreddits are weird, they might be about a topic but the community often moves that topic/ has a specific pov within that topic… people without those views tend to abandon those subs and those who remain aren’t necessarily “right”. Reddit isn’t stack overflow where being correct is at least on the surface valued where we can run code and see if it works. Top answer on Reddit could be wrong and anyone taking issue with it may simply not answer. Heck there are whole subreddits dedicated to wallowing in misinformation…

Now I don’t know if Q&A is the start and end of LLM training (not my area of expertise at all, I am open to the possibility that what I’m talking about isn’t a problem at all) but Reddit as a source makes me wonder what the results would be.

Lukeas14 · 3 years ago

That's really only an issue for technical topics. Stack Overflow would obviously be a much better source of quality training data for the kind of questions you presented.

But for most things outside of that Reddit is by far the best online source that actually represents answers you would get from real people. Questions like what is the nightlife like in x city don't have a single true answer and thrive due to Reddit's the diversity of thought.

Lukeas14 commented on Californians may tax the rich more to subsidise electric cars economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/samizdis

ahelwer · 3 years ago

> absolute personal freedom

This association between personal car ownership and personal freedom is one of the most absurd things to me. Think of this the next time you're sitting in traffic - is that freedom you are feeling now?

Of course, this situation of waiting for other people in cars to move (by far the most common situation by quantity of time for people who drive in cities) is not found at all in any car ad. Nope, it's all empty city streets and beautiful roads in the forests. It's one thing to be sold something and realize you've been had - quite another to persevere for years afterward that no, the beautiful experience you were sold really exists!

Lukeas14 · 3 years ago

Owning a car gives me the freedom to do a ton of things I simply wouldn't be able to do if I relied on public transportation / ubers / rental cars:

- Last minute or long term road trips.

- Get my 3 kids to 3 different activities in different parts of the city after school.

- Pick up cheap furniture from Craigslist/ FB Marketplace as soon as it's posted.

- Camping

- Coach youth sports and transport all the necessary gear to practices/games/tournaments.

I vote pro public transportation every time and use it for day to day work commuting. But it's really not hard to imagine ways that personal car ownership equals freedom for a lot of people.

Lukeas14 commented on Bye-bye, Bitcoin: It's time to ban cryptocurrencies thehill.com/opinion/cyber... · Posted by u/turtlegrids

Lukeas14 · 4 years ago

> But dollars, euros and yen are backed by nations’ respective treasuries. If someone invents a cryptocurrency, any value is based solely on convincing others it has value.

They lost me here. Most countries indeed have currency that is backed by their nation's respective treasuries. However, those treasuries are filled dollars, euros and yen. All fiat money no longer backed by gold or anything tangible and whose values are based solely convincing others they have value.

Lukeas14 commented on The real reason to end the death penalty paulgraham.com/real.html... · Posted by u/tosh

ludocode · 5 years ago

I agree. Some of the most violent criminals can't ever be re-integrated into society, so the only alternative is life imprisonment. I've seen many arguments that this is preferable to the death penalty because "We will accidentally execute some innocents", as Paul Graham's here, as well as "It costs more to execute someone due to the higher standard of proof required".

In all such cases the corollary is "We can accept a lower standard of proof because we're not actually killing them. We're just locking them in a room forever and waiting until they die." I don't honestly see much difference between these outcomes. Why is one so morally superior to the other?

There are much better arguments against the death penalty. One is that if the death penalty exists, it's much easier for the state to execute political dissidents. If the death penalty is abolished (and there are strong controls on extra-judicial killings, like police murdering civilians during arrests), it's much more difficult for the state to silence critics. Even if they are locked away in jail forever, they will still have a voice.

Another good argument is that if the death penalty is a possibility it gives criminals nothing to lose which makes it more dangerous to apprehend them. If you want your police to be able to more peacefully arrest criminals, it makes sense to abolish the death penalty.

Lukeas14 · 5 years ago

I agree that we shouldn't accept a lower standard of proof. However, life in prison isn't absolute in the same the death penalty is. There's always a small chance of the evidence changing and the justice system being able to rectify the mistake. There have been several convictions overturned because witnesses changed their story or were later found to be not credible, sometimes decades later. Once the death penalty is carried out, there's no going back.

Lukeas14 commented on A case for using punctuation in Slack blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/y... · Posted by u/dontmitch

bszupnick · 5 years ago

Something the author didn't mention (or maybe it's simply a specific case but I think demands explicit mention) is that it lowers the barrier of entry for new employees.

I started a new job ~2 months ago and things that everyone thinks everyone understands I simply did not. These weren't documented acronyms but rather "socially understood" acronyms that meant each time I didn't understand something I had to message someone asking.

While onboarding the amount of times I message people asking for help is so much that it gets uncomfortable (for me, at least) so minimizing the acronyms would be super helpful.

As a counter-point, though, it could be that each culture/tribe needs their own language that only they can understand and it creates this feeling of comradery? Just a thought.

Lukeas14 · 5 years ago

When you're new to a job everyone expects you to ask a million questions and not know what internal acronyms mean (although it would also be nice if they were documented). It'd be suspicious if a new employee didn't ask enough questions. It may be uncomfortable but you should never feel bad about it.

I personally start to struggle with this after the first year when the grace period to ask "stupid" questions is over.

Lukeas14 commented on Show HN: Discover live streams and virtual events stayhomeandchill.tv... · Posted by u/Lukeas14

Lukeas14 · 6 years ago

Hi, project creator here.

With the huge increase in live virtual events I figured it'd be useful to organize them all in one place. Youtube, Instagram, Twitch and Facebook are full everyday with livestreams hosted by DJs, dance teachers, art teachers, etc. However, discovering that they exist and promoting them is tougher than it should be.

My brother and I built this side project to help people quickly find live events they're interested in. Check it out and discover what's going on live right now. Or if you're hosting an event, submit it to the site.

Lukeas14 commented on Bahamas Company Registry Leaked pluralistic.net/2020/05/2... · Posted by u/samizdis

valuearb · 6 years ago

Believing you should have the right to own possessions, a home or a business doesn’t put you on the right, it places you firmly in the vast center.

Lukeas14 · 6 years ago

He's not arguing whether or not we should have property rights. The question is which is more important, property rights or human rights. There are times when these rights clash and we as a society have to pick one or the other.

For example, if a huge natural disaster (like hurricane Katrina) wipes out the livelihood of millions of people and the government hasn't provided aid yet. Should a person who is hungry and lost everything be able to go inside a store and take food? He has a human right to live but that store also has property rights over their products. Some (not all) conservatives would argue that the hungry person should be prosecuted for stealing, while most people on the left would argue the opposite.