skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've TA'd all of Stanford's intro programming classes, including the first course in programming CS 106A, so a few things:

- unlike a lot of other schools, CS 106A is mostly taken by non-majors (90-something percent of undergrads take at least one CS course before graduation, and for non-majors that means 106A)

- the follow up course, 106B, is in C++ and focuses on OOP, pointers, memory, data structures, etc.

- 106J was crafted as a replacement for 106A by in JS. It had limited enrollment, and word on the street is 106J's first offering this past spring was an experiment and it didn't go all that well, so who's to say if it'll still be around next year.

Maybe they should switch from Java to something hipster and trendy, but there's about 10+ years worth of assignments that will need to be rewritten, including autograding infrastructure for the 600-800 people who take it every quarter.

I personally feel like JS is an awful language with few opinions or guard rails, and thus a bad language to teach people who are looking for programming principles. It works for the web but I think for a course almost entirely consisting of non-majors it's not a good first language.
I'm not sure what you mean? Their names are Shrivastava, Pfister, Tuzel, Susskind, Wang, Webb. What are you expecting to find?
That's a good candidate for McMansion hell.
Cool! Thanks for that, guess that my GT and complexity skills aren't that rusty!
intuition isn't taught in schools for the most part, most of my math teachers didn't go into proofs or intuitively figuring out mathematical concepts. It's all to get you the right answers on standardized tests.

I didn't learn this until well after I graduated from college.
I disagree. STEM majors should have to take at least a couple of writing courses as part of a university degree (I had to take two: English Comp and Technical Writing). I'm freaking tired of trying to decipher some of the poorly written documentation produced by my fellow software engineers.
What a disservice for people of color. I get that its NPR and they like to pin a racial angle on many things -- but the need for remedial math, reading and writing education at this level shouldn't be associated with race at all -- its a problem that needs to be solved.

Intermediate algebra isn't particularly difficult but requires a moderate level of attention. It's a basic skill expected to exist for many common career paths, including many in community college. If majorities of students cannot hack that, perhaps they aren't prepared to commit to a meaningful education.
It's not just rich suburbs. Here is a completely random building in Anacostia: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8595932,-76.9871194,3a,75y,1.... If you punch in the address to various providers, apparently it can get fiber through Verizon or Comcast, or gigabit cable through Comcast or RCN.
Writing classes at the college level usually involve some study of literature, which is conceivably helpful in not just daily, transactional communication, but in consuming news and entertainment. I have an engineering degree but I'm having a hard time thinking when I've ever used math beyond simple arithmetic and statistics outside of work.
If you're a STEM person on my team that cannot write in a coherent and precise fashion, I am going to find you and you had better pray you're worth retraining, because this is a non-negotiable part of any technical career you could hope to have.

If you want regular promotions, probably watch your spelling too.
Surprise Echo Owners, You're Now Part of Amazon's Random Social Network
Also remember that the NCAP crash tests are done at 40 MPH, so it's a suicide car even at low speeds.

For that money I'd rather buy a used Toyota with actual airbags.
Thanks! Noted.
Funny, yugo cost that much in the USA 30 years ago. Btw, yugo was an icon, this is shite.
Suspensions for College Students Who Thwarted Free Speech
It took 5 community college students to change 25 light bulbs, how many lightbulbs did each student change on average?

I guess they'll never know...
This shows up a lot (predictably) in actual games, e.g. Hearthstone sells you digital cards, and the randomization specifically guarantees that the time between rare cards is capped [1].

Having unusually bad luck (e.g. opening 100 packs and not getting a single legendary card, when the average would be every ~20 packs) feels bad and probably loses Blizzard a customer, so the solution is to cut off the downside tail of the distribution.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/3z7jyh/pity_ti...
It's a matter of scope. You can build a secure currency exchange protocol: I have yet to hear of a technical issue with BTC that threatens its raison d'être.
But when you're making a distributed, general purpose, scriptable contracting platform at some point you ought to consider trimming the core way down.

Maybe if the contracts had more constrained semantics ETH programming would be less scary, at the cost of some bells and whistles or more verbose syntax.
It would be interesting to silently switch back to a PRNG for a few months and see if anyone notices.
It sounds like California needs to improve its K-12 education. Any adult who graduated high school should be prepared to pass an algebra class. I tutored math in community college back in the day and I saw people of all ages and all majors and while plenty of them just wanted to do enough to meet the requirements, they all could do it in the end. There may be bias in this because I saw those who sought assistance when they needed it, but maybe that's a behavior that needs to be taught too.
Assuming your fellow engineers are college educated, you've just invalidated your own point. The required writing has obviously not helped them.
Because basic financial planning doesn't require math...
Why wouldn't STEM majors take writing courses?

The ability to express ideas, concepts and procedures in writing is a fundamental skill for any professional.
7 of the Most Breathtaking Destinations on Earth
Best summary I've read so far.
Read the article, the goal is to have alternate math courses.

And, to be fair, that's probably a GOOD idea. A standard algebra course is a lousy math course if you aren't going any further.

Schools used to have a course that was "shop math" aka how to do the things you might have to do in construction, machining, etc. This included elements of algebra, geometry, trig, and statistics. It was a much better match for people who were not going forward to more theoretical math or science.
Sensitive Information Exposed via Images Shared on Docker Hub
The sentence before that is:

"It is also the single most failed course in community colleges across the country".

The author is saying that a lot of people that don't need algebra end up failing it, so if we remove it from their curricula we'll raise graduation rates. That's the end goal.

Not as many people fail writing courses, so there's no need to remove those courses as they're not a barrier to graduating.
Awesome code review, even more valuable than the plugin itself. Thanks :)
It's a hard fork. The contract would be fixed. But you could also send the victim's money anywhere, just ask the victim where they want it, there are only 3 major ones.
Yeah, the whining about well-roundedness tends to be humanities towards STEM, perhaps in response to the STEMlord mentality.

FWIW: I have a "Bachelors of Science In Liberal Arts & Sciences" from math.illinois.edu and enjoyed the human sexuality, critical theory, etc courses I took in addition to the math courses.

I have a sneaking suspicion there'd be a revolt if all humanities students had to pass MATH 347[1] to graduate.

[1] http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Bourbaki/Syllabi/syl347.html
Is it legal?

Seems like if you have more than 5 bedrooms for guests it may not be?

https://patch.com/california/mountainview/hacker-hostel-ille...
We found several public repositories which shouldn't have been public at all. If you use Docker hub, please make sure only repos which are supposed to be public are public.
I'm not sure I buy that. At a minimum, I don't think it's obvious enough to stand without some references or reasoning.

Understanding compound interest at a minimum probably provides an immense benefit to those it keeps from making bad assumptions about taking on and getting out of debt.
Re: A high failure rate, it doesn't necessarily mean game of chance, it could mean a challenging game. I'd compare it more to darts:

If 90% of dart throws miss the bullseye it could mean various things:

* As you suggest, a game of chance with poor odds, ie 100% of people have roughly the same distribution of shots, landing only ~10% on the bullseye

* Only 10% of people have the right confluence of skill, experience and a bit of luck to nail it ~100% of the time to make up for the 90% people who land it ~0% of the time. Secret society knowledge scenario.

* Anything in between. It could be 20% of people who land it 25% of the time, and 80% people landing it 6.25% of the time to give you the same output. Some people have figured out some techniques, but can't quite master the challenging problem, and others seem to almost rely on luck. This is where I believe running a company lies.

Taking responsibility is different from "being hard and critical of yourself". You can take responsibility and own failure without feeling like a lesser person, it helps to learn from it and improve (if you don't take responsibility and blame "luck", you have lower motivation to take anything away from the failure). It can be paired with the ability to retain self-confidence, inspiration and motivation while learning from your failures. This is the tenacity and refusal to die that I believe VC's talk about being seen in strong founders.
> ...strong math skills

We're not talking about "strong" math skills. IME most kids who will go on to take AP Calculus mastered at least half of the material covered in a CC Algebra course before even starting high school.

> People are far more likely to benefit economically from strong communication skills than strong math skills

I'm not entirely sure this is true in many local economies. Especially outside of cities, communication isn't as important as competency in skills/trades. And a lot of those skills/trades require a functional understanding of elementary mathematical objects -- understanding ratios, functions, some useful trig properties, and the ability to follow complicated directions (algorithms) precisely are all basic core competencies for most trades.

The article is probably correct -- we could stand to have alternatives to the standard CC algebra course. But an effectively similar level of quantitative skill is required for most trades. And no amount of "pretty talkin'" will prep you for, e.g., CNC machining.
well, you should consider doing actual cryptographic signatures over the document, plus timestamping like via https://opentimestamps.org/
I read and respectfully disagree-- this is college, not high school or trade school. You're not training for diesel engine repair here, you're training for white-collar jobs. Basic algebra is pretty uniformly necessary today, and it isn't becoming less so in the future.
You don't need AI to have a paperclip demon. You just need complex systems that impact people's lives and aren't well understood. Capitalism is arguably the example of the paperclip deamon, and that will not get better with the permeation of sophisticated, fragile, poorly tuned machine learning techniques.
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> neither deserving the name Peerless

Sir that is a prejudicial statement and I want it stricken from the record.
Strong writing skills are more likely to get you a job. This is anecdotal, but in my experience those who are forced to take math classes rarely benefit from them in the financial sense you're referring to.

A financial planning course, on the other hand, would be immensely valuable. People should be forced to take that, not algebra. Knowing how to save money on tax returns, how to calculate a budget, software to manage it all... If school is being used for job training, then I wish it would train that.
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Kratom is a like a cult. Kratom users get very emotional and angry when you tell them it's kind of like an opioid, but especially these subreddits show that that's pretty much the case, even in lower doses.

A lot of countries (Japan for example) already banned Kratom for exactly that reason and I wouldn't be surprised if the US follows soon.
So coding is the new literacy but we can afford to skimp on the math?
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Rephrase that last sentence a few different ways and you'll see the problem:

"Now is the perfect time to close the Suez Canal"
"Now is the perfect time to invade South Korea"
"Now is the perfect time to plunder any ship with cargo"
"Now is the perfect time to take Qatar"

The reality is, America's military presence abroad is a stabilising force. Take that away and other powers will move in to fill the vacuum.
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Keep in mind that the mongols didn't really have the institutions to survive anyway and that the empire was breaking apart anyway.

The plague was a stressor that sped some things along.
The response to low graduation rates can't be to further dumb down the degree. Every functioning adult should understand algebra. I'd actually argue that trigonometry should also be included in this list, but that's probably only useful for adults who build things, and sadly, not very many adults do build things these days.

Instead of removing Algebra, we need to consider better ways to teach this subject to people who do not have a lot of the fundamentals in place already. One of the biggest problems with College Algebra is that it assumes a certain level of math literacy that isn't universal. Algebra simply isn't that hard of a subject to master, but it is something that requires a different sort of teaching strategy than is used at the average community college.

Give me a motivated adult who understands basic arithmetic, and I can help him or her master algebra in six to eight weeks. We can go from zero to FOIL, and quadratic to partial fraction decomposition in that amount of time. The key is to listen and to instill a level of confidence as early as possible in this process. Many adults consider math to be "hard" -- not from the perspective of it actually being hard, which it is -- but from the perspective of "this is too hard for me to do, because I'm not a math person." Break this mental block, and anyone can do algebra.
I remember reading an article by an African bloke in healthcare (can't recall the actual role) who was saying that the West's obsession with malaria is patronising. He said that malaria is like the flu - you get it, you're sick for a little while, then you get over it. Yes, some people die, but they tend to be the old and weak, just like the flu - yet the west doesn't go bananas over the flu like it does with malaria.

Looking at the wikipedia articles for both, it seems he has a point. 300M cases of malaria in 2015, with 750k deaths. 3-5M cases of influenza annually, with 350k deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza

Given those numbers, I'm not sure I'd believe that half of all humans died from malaria.
Our education system is failing! Let's blame the height of the standards.
Modern Educayshun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
Algebra? If you can't understand algebra there is something dreadfully wrong with you mind, your attitude, or your instruction - Questions should be raised and no degree should be awarded.

Ok - I guess it depends on what they include in an algebra course. Here is an intermediate algebra course outline (pdf warning):

https://www.ccsf.edu/dam/Organizational_Assets/Department/Ma...

It goes beyond the basics but certainly should be passable by any ordinary person who works at it. This is one of the major things that a degree (any degree) should indicate : this person can work through learning new things. Removing this makes the degree less valuable.
Liberty Reserve
Well, I majored in both political science and computer science. I don't think the two cases are different at all. I find it very irritating to deal with both political people who don't understand any math, and computer people who can't write a coherent sentence.

However, if I had to pick one mathematical subject everyone should learn, it wouldn't be algebra, it would be statistics.
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I think you are lucky to have a high school diploma if you cannot do basic algebra. I don't think we need to extend this academic leniency to associates degrees in science also.

Most classes in community college have been dumbed down so much that anyone can pass them by showing up and doing mediocre on a few multiple choice tests. You can just memorize a few definitions and get through without learning anything.
Nice. This tool pops up exactly when I needed it!
Oh please. There's no where that's immune to pseudoscience.
This is a smart plan. A 20 year old MB has technology that is now finally trickling into modern pedestrian cars, such as electronic start key, 5 speed automatic, and side airbags.
There's proof that genders exist because society has concepts of "male behavior" and "female behavior". That's easy.

There's proof that sexes exist because people have different genitalia, and reproduction isn't possible without two sexes.

If you're talking about a spectrum, a gender spectrum is obvious. Some people don't behave in totally traditional male or female ways (and don't want to).

No one is arguing that sex is a spectrum because it's a physiological concept -- hence the difference between transgender (people whose behavior doesn't correspond with their genitals, according to social tradition) and transsexual (people whose brains don't correspond with their genitals).

This is widely accepted among doctors[1]. Neuroscientists have also observed physiological differences in trans brains:

> "Imaging studies and other research suggest that there is a biological basis for transgender identity"[2]

Honestly, it's frustrating to have to prove these things to you when you've clearly not spent any time looking at research. It doesn't take long to find it.

1. https://wire.ama-assn.org/ama-news/ama-takes-several-actions...

2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-somethin...
I can't imagine that a STEM degree given to someone without basic writing skills would be worth the paper it's printed on. Both from an academic perspective and from a job skills / industry perspective.
I think its pretty clear and universal what "news of substance" means in the context of news journalism. In fact most newspapers have a separate section for entertainment for this reason.

Your comment and diction seem be the very definition of "insubstantial."
How do you teach statistics in any meaningful way other than with algebra?
And a lot of those skills/trades require a functional understanding of elementary mathematical objects -- understanding ratios, functions, some useful trig properties, and the ability to follow complicated directions (algorithms) precisely are all basic core competencies for most trades.

Which trades are you referring to? Truck driving? Retail? Cashiers? Secretaries? Managers, sales reps, school teachers, janitors, waiters, cooks, customer service, freight laborers, stock clerks, maids, receptionists, construction laborers, child care workers, grounds maintenance?

None of those require a wit of algebra. Yet they represent tens of millions of jobs.

It's not good to divorce ourselves too far from the reality of most normal peoples' lives.
> However, if I had to pick one mathematical subject everyone should learn, it wouldn't be algebra, it would be statistics.

This isn't algebra in the "groups and rings" sense, it's algebra in the "use the quadratic equation", "is this a graph of x or x^2 or x^3?", "FOIL" sense. Think middle school or early high school.

It's basically impossible to do any statistics past a bit of hand waving if your students can't identify the difference between a graph of x and a graph of x^2...
Most reports say it's faster, the experience on my iPhone SE has certainly been just fine. I would consider backing up, wiping, and restoring from backup perhaps.
Settle: Practical credit network implementation
Literally, to sharpen, as in "whetstone".
Do we want to optimize for the number of degrees issued or for the amount of people that know things?
I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but we shouldn't think that the current system and the articles of confederation are the only two possible systems.

There may be a way to transfer a significant amount of the federal government's authority to the states without incurring the sort of chaos seen by the confederacy in the 18th century. Or maybe not, but at least it's not obvious.

Either way, the current system leaves most of us disenfranchised in a lot of ways that a less centralized system would not.
Why do you think that every functioning adult should understand algebra?
I find it hard to believe that the asymmetric design has optimal strength:weight ratio, which means it's not 100% eco-friendly. It looks like it's deliberately wasting material so it can have a distinctive shape that can be design patented, instead of a fully optimized generic bottle.
To be fair, they can’t use your diff without you signing it over as it may be copyrighted
This was the first place my thoughts went to. But a passive device like this seems like it would oppose the gambler's fallacy: after you roll, the weight distribution of the die shifts to be as energetically favorable as possible for that number. Now the die is weighted to roll another of that same number!
What about laws surrounding time off, parental leave, other family benefits, etc.? CA for example allows vacation time to "roll over" across years, but many other countries mandate time off [1].

What about health care costs, or access to quality care? Cost of child care? etc.

Software developers are not single men, and it would be naive to present data leaning towards just that demographic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
To be fair though, think about getting the flu without access to clean water or decent food.

When you're vomiting several times a day, it's necessary to stay hydrated. If you live in a place without a steady supply of clean water, you're kind of screwed and dehydration is a very big risk.

Looking at the symptoms of malaria, fever, vomiting, and diarrhea are all problems. Before the modern era I could see that being very dangerous.
I think they're referring to media incompetence and biases in general rather than the difficulty of subjects. For example, if you follow conservative news, you'd think that pride parades were naked men playing with dildos and humping each other rather than huge corporate and sanitized events with only a minority of that. (the news always focuses on what is the most salient and buzz-generating aspect of things, such as making outlandish claims in tech about AI) See also the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel....
I guess it depends on how much time and money you want to waste.

A team of people spent two years supposedly working on this. That same team could probably have gotten samples from 4-5 manufacturers and selected an Odwalla bottle with a brand design in 2-3 weeks.

It just seems silly and wasteful to me. But hey, it's not my money!
Comparing fatalities per 100k people seems like a pretty useless statistic when we're talking about safety standards. If you look at fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles it's 12.9 compared to 130. So 10x as much. An even better statistic to use would be fatalities per 1 billion vehicle miles. But that data isn't available for India.