MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-28 15:39:02+00:00
I think the article is implying but not proving this statement.

They are correctly pointing out that the test is essentially norm-referenced (by design) and that this matters if you're looking for improvement (it will mask that improvement) but it also doesn't imply that they're making the test harder.

If anything - the flat line indicates that they're keeping it norm-referenced and that masks change in both directions.

It could well be that they're actually making the test easier since covid, again - to keep the line flat and norm-referenced (hard to tell since a lot of the article's data stops in 2021).

---

Essentially - this test is good for saying "How is this school performing vs its peers". It is not good for showing baseline improvement or decline across all schools.

That distinction is important, but I'm also not sure that it matters that much in terms of funding allocation; I'm not deep in the weeds here, so it's possible Texas is missing on some upside, but generally... my assumption is that the "budget" for education is relatively fixed at both the state and federal level, and the goal is not to award states that improve baseline numbers ever increasing budgets, but rather to force states to allocate the fixed resources to schools that are over-performing compared to their peers.

If that's the goal... a norm referenced test makes a ton of sense.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-05-28 15:39:40+00:00
>It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit

I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local.

Now, there is this constant vying for attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across the world, or some new thing that released now like literally now.

I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".
by WalterBright | 2025-05-28 15:39:49+00:00
I would copy what they were writing. The professors had 9 blackboards available, and they'd use them all during a 55 minute lecture, and then some. Some would write with their left hand while erasing with the right (!). It was a heluva time for me. Never before or since have I learned so much so fast. Blink and I fell behind.

In retrospect, I sorely wished I had set up a cassette recorder and recorded all the audio. It would be a gold mine today, as all those lectures are lost to time.

On the other hand, I had no money to buy cassette tapes at the time.
by fernandotakai | 2025-05-28 15:40:10+00:00
kind of of topic, but i had to google to find out which female part rhymed with dolores, because it made no sense to me (as an ESL).

(for people wondering, it's clitoris).

https://seinfeld.fandom.com/wiki/The_Junior_Mint

https://seinfeld.fandom.com/wiki/Dolores
by juancn | 2025-05-28 15:40:15+00:00
The issue is the same as always, once something goes massive, the statistics of human nature start to dominate.

The abundant dissemination of information tends to average society. Note that local cultural differences have been slowly being erased.

You travel now, and it's not as alien as it was 30 years ago, even languages are borrowing more from each other (why does Europe has so many languages? It was hard to talk to people a couple valleys away, not anymore).

So, given that human intelligence seems to be normally distributed (we can argue about the measurements, but they all distribute normally), this averaging process takes us all toward mediocrity.

Even taking algorithmic feedback into account, those also are trying to maximize engagement, and ultimately, that's also an average.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-28 15:40:19+00:00
No different. It is an attempt to prime the pump to stoke valuations. The product is the stock price go up, the illusion of value creation is the work. "Please Use."

If people aren't paying for it, and you have to pay them to use it, what is the value? Russ Hanneman Silicon Valley pre revenue rant meme here
by SilasX | 2025-05-28 15:40:38+00:00
From my understanding: to pose the problem for miners, you hash the block you're planning to submit (which includes all the proposed transactions). Miners only get the hash. To claim the reward, you need the preimage (i.e. block to be submitted), which miners don't have.

In theory, you could watch the transactions being broadcast, and guess (+confirm) the corresponding block, but that would require you to see all the transactions the pool owner did, and put them in the same order (the possibilities of which scale exponentially with the number of transactions). There may be some other randomness you can insert into a block too -- someone else might know this.

Edit: oops, I forgot: the block also contains the address that the fees should be sent to. So even if you "stole" your solution and broadcast it with the block, the fee is still going to the pool owner. That's a bigger deal.
by directevolve | 2025-05-28 15:41:55+00:00
For fast, physically intuitive, flow-of-thought expression, there’s nothing like pen and paper, for me.

I throw away almost all my handwritten notes, because of the downsides: illegibility, unsearchability, physical bulk.

But the qualitative difference of thinking or reading +/- handwriting is huge. I don’t get caught up in editing. I can draw diagrams easily. It slows me down, makes me dwell on an idea while I’m writing it, and thereby physically calibrates my thought process.
by chrisco255 | 2025-05-28 15:41:56+00:00
> I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation > a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man > So, that was my wake up call

Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the internet?

If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what anons on the internet say.

Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly competent people.
by bognition | 2025-05-28 15:41:58+00:00
Models are only as good as the data that is fed into them. OpenAI is paying Reddit 70M for access to the data. So the real value here is the conversations, not the model.

And in the case of Telegram, you will get very intimate data about people. You know in real time who they are talking to, what they are talking about, etc... Its extremely valuable data
by jsheard | 2025-05-28 15:42:08+00:00
It's the next logical step after companies shoving AI into every corner of their own products regardless of whether their users want it - now they're paying other companies to shove AI things into their products regardless of whether their users want it. Genuine user interest doesn't come close to justifying their insane valuations so they have to put their thumb on the scale by shoving it everyones face and then pretending that's the same thing.

See also: Googles AI summaries, which always get top billing so they can tally nearly every search up as an "AI engagement" regardless of user intent, and can't be disabled because that would get in the way of what's clearly the actual goal (to juice the AI metrics as hard as possible, user experience be damned).
by bigtex88 | 2025-05-28 15:42:10+00:00
Even that person is likely being underpaid for the work they are doing. And unless they're the ONLY PERSON AT THE JOB then they're not doing all the work. Everyone is important to make things work. And I guarantee those other people aren't seeing the fruits of their labor either.

Productivity gains going to the top 0.1% since the 1970's has caused the rest of us to not want to work hard, because we don't capture our own productivity gains. I'm not sure how this is hard to understand.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-28 15:42:26+00:00
No it wasn't (or at least that is not stated/proven by the article).

It says they were adjusting the scores, not in any one direction.

If kids were doing worse and you have flat scores, that'd indicate the test being adjusted to be easier.

If kids were doing better and you have flat scores, that'd indicate the test being adjusted to be harder.

Because they've designed this to produce flat scores, it obscures which of those two statements is true.
by no_wizard | 2025-05-28 15:43:47+00:00
The problem with standardized testing in education is the following question: standardized for who?[0]

The ultimate "sin", if you will, is that they tied test outcomes to funding and in practice is used to hold teachers to an arbitrary standard, not to help understand and guide the learning for students.

For example, what could be done with standardized tests is that schools could use them at regular intervals to understand where each student is at, and adjust their learning resources accordingly to help students that aren't at grade level reach appropriate grade level academically, like if a student tests poorly in Math but not English Comprehension, it would make sense to adjust their schedule to give them more time to learn what they're struggling with and assigning resources appropriately, be it an extra half hour of math learning time with a tutor. That would actually make them useful.

Instead, they're used to bludgeon teachers and school districts, and really the student outcomes are at best secondary to the whole operation, and since so much critical funding comes from sources tied to these outcomes, both good and bad outcomes mind you, hence the reason for the deliberate bell curve. Thats the real issue.

In the US, education has become incredibly politicized to the point that I firmly feel it stopped being about actually educating students to be productive members of society and its about entrenched interests using it as a tool to push a broader political battle at the cost of student outcomes

[0]: Not to mention that the pace of learning and aptitudes is varied by individual, some students will excel in X but not Y. This is a related, but for the purpose of this discussion, separate issue. Not to mention how much environment plays a role (a good home vs bad home situation for example).
by kikokikokiko | 2025-05-28 15:43:51+00:00
"That's surprising because presumably they lose all results if they have to reboot the server."

Strictly speaking they only lose all results, FOR SURE, if they have to reboot ALL the servers at the same time. If they implemented a system where the cached results are shared and replicated among all their servers, it can in theory be kept cached indefinitely.
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-28 15:43:58+00:00
I had a XT clone + Hercules at the time (and SIMCGA for games), and the 50Hz refresh wasn't as bad as you'd think - the MDA CRTs were designed with slow decay phosphors to reduce flicker.

I actually had no idea that Atari made a laser printer. Everyone I knew with a ST (admittedly, not many people) was either doing MIDI or playing video games.
by kiselitza | 2025-05-28 15:44:39+00:00
To the best of my understanding, it is exactly what I wrote in the parent comment. It's the fact that the core lacks bits developed in the internal tool but not yet unglued from what will go in the plugins section.

It's not unheard of. For instance, I got another team and devtool I work with, non-related to the API niche, and they are going open source mid-next week. Some teams want to build the core their way, some want to see if it will catch traction before committing to support an entire community and contributions, some have got something else going on, some actually ARE shady and talk OSS for clout, etc.
by XorNot | 2025-05-28 15:45:41+00:00
Vacation pictures are a great use of Facebook though. If that's all it was (and say, cats) then it would be worth using.

I have an uncle who takes interesting holidays and writes great updates on what he's seen as he travels. This is all A+ what Facebook should've been...but not what it became.

Because that entire experience...would be equally well serviced by a group chat bar some interface issues. And that's what Signal actually provides for super short form stuff now - I mostly lament that it can't quite fill that longer update niche.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-28 15:46:15+00:00
>However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth

Yea, showing transforming economies to established economies isn't really a great comparison at all. You have two huge things happening at once. A massive transfer of wealth from those 'rich' economies building new factories to use the cheap labor. This drops wages in the rich economies by shipping the jobs out. In the meantime the people in the rich economies have to move to service style jobs away from manufacturing.

In a few decades the same will happen with China as it converts to a service economy.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-28 15:46:20+00:00
> Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.

I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job, but stay in it purely for the money as very few other careers pay as well as what you can make in tech without advanced education.

Oter "bike shop" jobs I think you'll find in mostly hobby places - photography/camera shops, outdoor gear shops, local/independent bookstores, and craftmanship work - woodworking/hand-made furniture, musical instrument repair, some mechanics.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-28 15:46:34+00:00
Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?

Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.

Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
by ironman1478 | 2025-05-28 15:46:43+00:00
It's not romanticism and it's very important for me too. I spend a lot of my time drawing out what I'm trying to do before I actually try to do it. I tend to work on greenfield embedded projects though for context. Coding and debugging is hard to get good at and are obviously important, but you still need to figure what to actually build and those tools won't get you there. For me, I use a pen and paper to actually figure out what I need to do.
by linkage | 2025-05-28 15:47:44+00:00
No matter how good your offering is, you always need marketing if you are competing against an established behemoth in the space like OpenAI. Even Google has been unable to make much of a dent in OpenAI's daily active users despite having superior distribution and (recently) comparable quality.

Grok 3 is legitimately one of the best general purpose models out there. People don't know about it because ChatGPT is "good enough". And people have no reason to care unless Grok 3 is 5x better or ships a feature that goes viral like Ghibli portraits.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-05-28 15:48:40+00:00
I think it's a great idea!

Even if other people/groups are doing something like this, either now and/or in the future, I don't think there ever would be or could be enough software tools which act as the intermediary between different AI's and perform different value-added functions relative to the AI's so interacted with.

The original author has named a few of these ideas so far, i.e., "The system compares their outputs and synthesizes them", "The feedback loop learns not only from right/wrong outputs, but from what kind of disagreements lead to deeper truth", etc., etc. -- but there are (or should!) exist many many more!

Point is, if there is value to be created in creating software abstractions on top of other software abstractions (for example, container orchestration software, which acts as a software abstraction on top of other software abstractions, i.e., containers A.K.A. "virtual(ized) machines"/"virtual software environments") -- then there's value to be created in creating software abstractions on top of multiple different AI's!

To the original author: I think you've got a good set of ideas going on, and I wish you much success with your ideas and software, both now and in the future!

(Now, I must temper all that I say (in the new age/era of AI) with a generalized reminder to all of the creators/implementors of AI, of Joel Spolsky's excellent essay on "Leaky Abstractions" -- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... -- but I'd also like to temper that idea with the idea that all software is based on abstraction, and software abstractions can add a lot value (Microsoft Word anyone?) while leaking (failing to do what the user wants) very little, or potentially not at all... so there's a fine line between too much and too little abstraction, relative to what users may desire from their software and AI's...)

Anyway, generally speaking, I think it would be great to have some software which performs different value added tasks -- with multiple AI's!
by sprayk | 2025-05-28 15:48:46+00:00
scoop, Choco, and winget are all very different. winget is closest to Choco in that it prefers to just run regular installers. It keeps its own state of installed packages, though, while winget uses the same sources of truth as "Add/Remove programs" (msstore/appx and the "uninstall" group in the registry). Scoop is its own thing that installs everything under its own prefix and manages its own state.
by pavankamat24 | 2025-05-28 15:49:02+00:00
Panto introduces its new Software Composition Analysis (SCA) module for real-time visibility into open-source dependencies. As part of Panto’s unified security platform (including SAST, IaC, and secrets scanning), the SCA module delivers severity-based vulnerability alerts, SBOM insights, license risk reporting, and developer-friendly dashboards. Learn how Panto SCA empowers teams to secure code fast without slowing delivery
by CrimsonCape | 2025-05-28 15:49:34+00:00
I got plantar warts from a climbing gym, and now I make all efforts to never get them again. You should be cautious before wearing used shoes and make all efforts to scrub and wash the shoe interior before wearing. Plantar warts is the HPV virus and cannot be killed with antibacterial methods, bleach, and requires like 30 minutes of rolling boil to destroy the virus. The best you can do is physically scrub and rinse the virus away from where it might find skin contact.

To answer your question, the cost of a used shoe could be the cost of time, despair, and anxiety spent treating a transmissible disease.
by mox1 | 2025-05-28 15:49:42+00:00
There is absolutely an opportunity cost for all of the stuff you own. I won't publish my entire thinking on this, but after seeing my parents collect, hoard and store things for years and years, I place a high value on not having something (I tell myself that I am letting the store hold it for me.)

I still have too much stuff and its a fraction of what my parents had.

(Perhaps this is more of an American thing?)
by juancn | 2025-05-28 15:49:50+00:00
It's fairly common in Argentina in cattle (also in Brazil).

Time for a gruesome anecdote!

My dad is a retired ophthalmologist (eye doctor), he used to do residences in a public hospital specialized on eyes for the Greater Buenos Aires area (several million people nearby, so you see all kinds of weird crap).

Once I asked him what was the nastiest case he had attended and he told me it was one of a drunk guy that passed out and slept with his eyes not fully closed.

While asleep the flies laid eggs on the eyeball, he waited too long to go to a hospital and my dad had to take the worms one by one from the poor dude's eyes.

He survived but lost both eyes.

Normally is mostly dangerous only to animals, there are sprays you can put on a wound that will kill the larvae and help the animal heal.
by stackskipton | 2025-05-28 15:49:59+00:00
>equivalent big successful company describe their polyrepo setup, how they solved the pain points and what the tech around it looks like.

I've worked at big successful F500 boring companies with polyrepo setup and it's boring as well. For this company, it was Jenkins checked out the repo, ran the Jenkins file, artifact was created and stuck into JFrog Artifactory. We would update Puppet file in our repo and during approved deploy window in ServiceNow, Puppet would do the deploy. Because of this, Repos had certain fixed structure which was annoying at times.

Pain Points that were not solved is 4 different teams involved in touching everything (Jenkins, Puppet, InfoSec and dev team) and break downs that would happen.
by jasminebelmont | 2025-05-28 15:49:59+00:00
This hits harder than I expected. There’s a bleak kind of irony in how tech gave us infinite visibility but shredded our ability to process any of it. Stuxnet was a wake-up call. Now it’s just another push alert we swipe past while ordering oat milk.

The caring bandwidth’s not just saturated—it’s been monetized, splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-concern at scale. You’re not a cynical old man. You’re just sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation.

The worst part? I’m not even surprised the BBC article didn’t trend.
by clolege | 2025-05-28 15:50:16+00:00
I agree with many of the comments here, but also feel part of this is caused by the declination of our collective physical and spiritual health.

It's easier to care about your job when you're capable of doing a good job. But the average person nowadays is more likely to be dealing with obesity, hormonal imbalances or a variety of other modern ailments/vices that make it harder to think clearly or perform consistently.

And then social media gives us post after post about how your coworkers are not your family and how dumb you have to be to give 100% to your work. A lot of people seem to mindlessly prescribe to this train of thought that would otherwise have questioned it if they went to a church or had some belief system that emphasized the inherent importance of doing good work.
by wiseowise | 2025-05-28 15:50:38+00:00
People don't have any goal. It's not surprising at all.

110 years ago it was WW1, then it was WW2, then postwar euphoria. Then it was Democracy vs Commies, golden age, space race, rise of Hollywood, disco, fast cars, cheap housing, economy booming.

What is there now? Everybody is scared shitless of war (and for a good reason), economy is not doing good a small guy (only for trillion dollar behemoths), space race is dead. Mindless scrolling, degradation and grinding are the only things left.