skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dream of material that would explain some advanced (for a regular person understanding of the word) math concepts using Python. Maybe it's because I've programmed more in my life than did math, but the "language" we use to write it is absolutely crazy: one letter variables everywhere, no structure, thousands of custom notations etc. I'm not criticising it, I realise it exists this way for a reason and if I wasn't so lazy I would have learnt it in school. But with my 31-year old brain oriented for looking at a sequential flow of code, it's quite difficult to learn math now.
Right- law and order when it comes to corporations are what's needed, which isn't incompatible with democracy. It is incompatible with the values held by much of America, unfortunately.
yeah, and none of those are remotely anywhere the size of the above mentioned countries.
democracy is not a spectator sport
> never has the electoral college gone against the outcome of that vote

That's factually incorrect. The electoral college precluded the winner of the popular vote from becoming president in the last elections, so no. You can vote for the specific person you support but that does not guarantee the outcome.
Who are you voting for in your municipal and/or state elections in November? Yes, this year. Do you know there are races?

Federal elections are incredibly important, but on a day-to-day basis, city and state elections will affect you just as much, if not more.

Here in Seattle, for instance, seven of our nine city council members are up for reelection, and the outcome will determine how $6 billion gets spent every year. It will help determine whether Seattle can keep pace with its huge influx of tech workers. It will determine whether housing affordability gets addressed.

And not that many people are really aware of these elections. Even fewer are aware of the primary that will determine who's on our November ballot.

So, if you've made a plan to be a voter in your forthcoming municipal elections, then bravo—I'm incredibly happy to hear it. And now get to work making sure that your friends and family members have up-to-date voter registration information on file, and that they have plans to be voters, too.

Vote Save America makes it easy to check if your registration is up to date: https://votesaveamerica.com
No metric is free from this problem, but grades have a much more severe case of it than competing metrics (citations, standardized tests, competitions), and we should treat them accordingly. Even if all metrics are bad, we should try to favor the ones that are less bad.

Elite admissions all claim to control for grade inflation/deflation, but since they don't divulge details they almost certainly do a poor job of it. I'm not at all sure it's possible to do good job of it, but some of the obvious easy "fixes" (e.g. using percentiles) would at least alleviate the problem you describe.
>You have to pay for ambulances?

Not everywhere in America / California. Sometimes it's city by city, city versus county. It's actually quite complicated.

When they do charge, they charge a drop rate, then per mile - much like a taxi. They also try to get the semi-conscious patient on the gurney to sign a whole bunch of forms about liability and payment.
everything in MTV is closed after 9pm, any day of the week :)
Impact Volatility in Options Trading
Seems like a catch 22 situation. Should we believe a publication of a psychopath or should we assume it’s a manipulation. Matrix within Matrix.
Agree, and with the unfortunate history of robo-calls, more and more people are letting calls go straight to voicemail. At what point will cold-calling not be essentially worth the effort?
THIS is a criticism of the CPC. Also, China is not a communist country.
Is there an ELI5 of why cold fusion is so difficult to achieve?
I described, in the message you're responding to, how to do the same thing with SKIP LOCKED.
That's exactly true. That's the lesson I'm getting out of the series.
My preferred solution would be to disable javascript altogether.

> Sucks to be them. If they've exhausted their private use IPv4 addresses, they can either rest comfortably knowing that NAT and IPv6 can solve their problem or they can ignore IETF recommendations and build a card house network that breaks if you give it a stern look.

This will only lead to organizations running IE7 (or whatever outdated IE version is most common now) forever.
z/OS Unix is interesting, it feels kind of like the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Some things you can do from either the Unix shell interface or the 3270 interface, like compiling c/c++ programs, but a lot of things are much more difficult or impossible from the Unix shell.

In case anyone is wondering why z/OS has a Unix in it, from the wikipedia page [0]:

"Numerous core z/OS subsystems and applications rely on UNIX System Services, including the z/OS Management Facility, XML parsing and generation services, OpenSSH, the IBM HTTP Server for z/OS, the z/OS SDK for Java, and some z/OS PKI services as examples"

There is a company called Rocket Software that ports tools to z/OS Unix, including Python (2.6 and 2.7), Vim, Perl, Git, and Bash[1][2].

I think IBM actually pays them to do a lot of these ports to make Unix on z/OS suck less.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Services

[1] https://www.rocketsoftware.com/zos-open-source/tools

[2] https://www.rocketsoftware.com/zos-open-source/languages
Eh.

(1) I'm more sympathetic to schools that don't graduate everyone - which is part of what the article is arguing for, explicitly - back in the old days when you could pay for college with a couple of summers worth of full time work. Today, it's a crushing debt that will stay with students for decades. The school pretty much owes it to the students to ensure they graduate. That's not an argument for making the school easier, but that the school should be going to whatever ends needed to ensure that the students do get an excellent education. The question isn't "how do I give out a curve?" it's "how do I make sure every single person in this room gets an A-level knowledge of the material?"

(2) I majored in a hard science in undergrad (bio major, chem and lit double-minor). Our hardest class was OChem, where the professor would brag that only 4 people per semester would get A's. In OChem 1 I was #6 in the class and got a B; in OChem 2 I was #2 in the class and got an A. I don't see that it did anyone any favors: the actual class knowledge distribution was reasonably bimodal around "people who were clawing over every single point to try and be one of the A's" and "people trying not to get an F". Instead of a grade that reflected their mastery of the knowledge, most of us got lumped into the middle of an artificial bell. But it was orgo: its reputation for killer difficulty gave the professor free reign to grade how he wanted.

(3) Do we care about inter-major inflation? Are we worried about the relative difficulty of getting an A in Lit vs. getting an A in biochemistry? Which of the reasoning in favor of "difficult grades" exempts inter-major comparisons? Why don't we care that an A in literature is a joke to get compared to a B in physics? How would we make an A in business as hard to get as an A in chemistry? Who would actually benefit?

(4) Much of the criticism of inflation comes from credentialism. Universities were never anything but credential-producers; the only thing that's changed is that enough of the public now attends that that's visible to "the masses."

(5) What's the value of a university education? If the answer is " the intrinsic satisfaction of learning", grades are irrelevant. If the answer is "social signaling", then grade inflation is already working as intended. If the answer is "job training," then grades of any arbitrary difficulty will still generally be a poor proxy for how one will function in an actual job environment. What's the defense for the value of grading?

(6) I appreciate that we implicitly deny the idea that students might be getting better. Average scores on med student board exams have been climbing YoY for a while, as new and better study aids keep getting released. The average med student now knows, objectively, more and better than his predecessors did. is it shocking that something similar may occur in other fields? If it is, damn, that's a more amazing failure of the educational industry than any amount of inflation.
Show HN: Scrollable canvas with tumblr images and arts for design inspiration
That's absolutely not categorically true; if you have an American HMO like Kaiser they have price lists and cost estimators on their website. They also have advice lines exactly like the post you're replying to. I can also email my GP or message them through the app if it's less urgent.
Thanks for doing the sleuthing on that, I (and surely others) had been wondering about the same :).
The problem is you can't reliability detect non-deterministic bugs, so in those cases you essentially have to use the UA to decide if you can use them.
One of the frustrations of raising young children in the USA is the monthly ritual of birthday parties where everyone takes turns being the recipient of two cubic yards of "stuff". The gifts are almost invariably plastic junk from China via Walmart or Amazon. They hold my children's attention for about a week and then spend the rest of their lifetime occupying space in my house or in a landfill.

I absolutely hate this. Why can't we stop doing it? I look around and it's like no one sees the futility and stupidity of it. The social manipulation is so effective and complete that there's not even a single thought of the consequences of all this waste to the environment or even our own lives.

Recently, everything is covered in this pernicious glitter that rubs off when you touch it and leaves a trail of microplastic pollution everywhere it goes.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I put on a stoic face but inside I am on my knees begging for us to wake up and stop the madness.
BC waste to energy plant to handle disputed Philippines garbage
> It's just straight-up logistically impossible

yes, Facebook should probably get sued daily seeing the way it is acting so that they can suffer the consequences of its actions... If that isn't possible, maybe jail is the only option.
Why Large Languages Explode
They were thinking of quantum tunneling, which could, along with a lattice, allow protons to tunnel close enough together to fuse without having to cross the coulomb barrier. Or something. Some guy from a Berkeley LENR startup named Bloomsomething told me this tale once. Sounds vaguely plausible in a "quantum stuff is zany" way.
Don't feel too bad, most people can't detect passive voice correctly. Hell, Strunk's Elements of Style, when discussing the avoidance of passive voice, has four examples of clunky writing that can be rewritten to use the active voice, except three of them are already in active voice.
I know you are joking, but unlike Google, Tesla at least tries to finish whatever they start and actually deliver stuff, while google quickly jumps the ship if the thing does not work out and abandoned all their customers
That is for sure a thing but that's definitely separate from grade inflation.

The grade inflating teacher might give the person who almost got it right an A, the teacher not inflating might give that student a B.

Even in these super difficult engineering classes at ultra hard schools there are always some people getting the answers right and showing all the work correctly so everyone knows they aren't cheating.

I had some classes that were incredibly difficult where realistically maybe a bunch more of us should have failed.. the teacher scaled things up but we sure as hell did not get undeserved As.
I find the tone and tenor of the article to be closed-minded and exceptionally naive, almost as though the author had never really left the confines of the academy.

I disagree with the belief that schoolwork performs a valuable filter function when it is "rigorous". I agree that rigorous coursework that emphasizes book smarts selects for something, but I don't value that something outside a set of very narrowly defined circumstances.

Having completed both a masters in philosophy and an M.S. in computer science, I'll go as far as to say that I don't think college matters at all any more, in tech, and that's fine. My career path in tech went from Amazon, which didn't care about my "pedigree" to being self-employed, to my current job which just valued the evidence that I could get shit done. I don't like hiring new grads, but when I do what I look for is exclusively accomplishment outside the classroom. Sure, a B student from an MIT csci program will have a degree of algorithmic agility that j-rando web dev who's been hacking away for a decade won't, but I can think of exactly zero times that's mattered.

So I think the "academy"
should be an opportunity to climb, to make things happen, to go above and beyond, but I don't think it fulfills its primary purpose by insisting upon harder coursework. In fact, de-emphasizing coursework in favor of making or doing things in the world of research/business/politics/etc. seems preferable to me.
I see that there are other comment questioning the same, I saw that only after posting this else I would have added this as comment to it.
Seriously impressive - had a blast with it for a few minutes! Love all the -game feel- effects - very good!
This just reminds me why I use Vagrant and only run a local webserver while I'm actually doing development work on it.
I agree, the negativity is unreasonable. Yes, there are very big issues facing our species. But I think we're showing a good track record in fixing those issues. Not a great record, but a good-nuf one.

The late Dr. Hans Roslings' book Factfullness is a fantastic antidote to the negativity facing us. Before you go on, please take this quick quiz to see if you are smarter than a chimp: http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

The first time I took the quiz, I got 2 right out of 13 questions. I did much worse than a chimp would have.

Factfullness is an easy read and well worth the time. In fact, you can read it for free here: https://archive.org/stream/FactfulnessByHansRosling/Factfuln...

Bill Gates gave the book out for free too; that's how important he thought the book was.

Factfullness goes into much greater detail (with MANY sources) on why and how the world we live in is actually getting much better.
Top Programming Languages in Blockchain in 2019
To clarify why WHATWG exists and why W3C lost power over the HTML spec:

Around 2004 W3C abandoned organizational effort on HTML in favor of things like XHTML2, XEvents, semantic web, etc. The WHATWG was formed in reaction to that, rewriting HTML completely from its W3C HTML 4.0 version for example to make it better for web applications and to specify things in more detail.

Since the formation of WHATWG, W3C HTML specs became copy-pastes (often not even correct copy-pastes) in an effort to satisfy paying member companies (https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/14#issuecomment-1...).

You can see everything WHATWG maintains here: https://platform.html5.org/ (they are the green question mark)

The W3C still maintains a good chunk web standards though, such as CSS, Wasm, web security, etc.
I should have known better than to click on a click-bait article like this.

Even if Disney+ enters the market and immediately dominates, that doesn't mean Netflix is dead. They'll have to (continue to) adjust and maybe their stock won't be competing with Amazon, but that's far from dead.

Netflix managed to turn a dvd-rental-by-mail service into the first majorly successful streaming service, and they are using that to pivot into creating competitive original content.

Netflix may survive, it may not, but this article was trash.
I think what grandparent meant was the "markup" (wrong word) between different products: random knife vs herder. Manufactum does not have an insane markup on the identical product, they just exclusively stock high(er)-end products.

Hilariously, the catalogue is a problem even within Amazon. Moving from Austria to the UK, I noticed that amazon.co.uk isn't showing me the same products as amazon.de. Looking for vacuums the latter (in the top 10) shows me Miele, Siemens and Philips (all over EUR 100). amazon.co.uk shows me random brands I have never heard of for < 50 quid, despite me never having bought that type of product (within a category).
> We do know, all the evidence points in the direction that the western diet, high in animal products and processed foods is the number explanation for the rampant increase of cancer, diabetes and heart disease in the west.

Here's the thing: we don't know that, at least not with the kind of certainty you're claiming. In particular, "high in animal products" and "processed foods" are totally divorced from one another, and can't be lumped into the same causal bucket without a good reason for doing so.

Are the animal products in our diet causing diabetes, or is it the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup, or is it something else entirely? I have my own suspicions, and plenty of people more qualified than me have their suspicions, but they're still just suspicions, not proven facts.

Same thing with heart disease. Red meat was blamed for coronary troubles for years, but there are plenty of people on paleo diets that seem to improve all of the important markers for heart disease. There are also plenty of people on vegan diets that seem to improve all of the important markers for heart disease.

I think we can say, without any controversy, that eating more vegetables is better for us, and that eating foods that come in cans or boxes is worse than eating food that comes farm-to-table. But aside from those two broad categories, I don't think we can make sweeping claims about what foods are "good" or "bad" for us, simply because there is no consistent, conclusive research to prove it.
One way to try sweetbread is to see if your local Mexican market with a food court has "mollejas" tacos.

Otherwise I have no idea how the average American will encounter it. Seems super old timey.

I also love buying those large packs of chicken hearts and browning/carmelizing them in a pan.
What if the adopters of the paleo diet have turned to it because they are already suffering from a disease and it's the most popular healthy option?

While the animal products consumption per person has increased in the US, so have other factors such as stress, depression, loneliness, alcohol consumption and a sedentary lifestyle which all contribute to diseases. And if you pay close attention, the reduction of all these factors is what countries in the "blue zone" all have in common.
> Parliament could apply criminal charges upon Zuck, and the USA may have to arrest and extradite him.

Consider that this is where political pressure from the US (and I'm sure all countries would do the same in such a case) comes into play to prevent such instances. Also consider the kind of diplomat present at the helm of that ship. Most countries would rather not trigger him into irreparably damaging long term relations between them. He seems to do that even when there's obviously no long term benefit for the US.

So don't hold your breath for this decision to hold anything other than a symbolic meaning. But this to be honest is good enough in this case. It sends a signal to people, it sends a signal to FB, and it's plausible that the legal framework targeting such companies will be adjusted to mirror the sentiment.
> But for STEM it is way more clear. Wrong answers on a math test are wrong. Software projects that don't compile should fail.

How hard should the problem set be? How long should students have to complete it?

As you increase the difficulty you will push down the score distribution. How do you propose to square the existence of a score distribution against the quite subjective level of "difficulty" of the work that you're setting for grading?
What’s the Magic Behind Graphene’s ‘Magic’ Angle?
"it's for a popular audience" is a bad justification for publishing misleading or wrong information that teaches people a wrong headed view of what a science is. It's not just poor quality, it's a actively harmful to culture and social progress. It's a supernormal stimulus, the journalism equivalent of replacing real foods by sugar and oil mixes -- it pushes people toward preferring wrong things over right things.
No, when I say you can’t, I really mean you can’t. If you try visiting https://google.com in IE6, you get the other part of the problem. It doesn’t work. The cipher suites are too old.
The problem I see often is when sites would use whitelists,l so when you use a less popular browser you get the use Chrome page. At least put a banner that my browser is not supported but let me try the page.
I don’t think Meng from Huawei was committing a crime that was illegal in China yet the USA still had her held and extradited from Canada.
Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on YouTube, also speaking just personally.

This isn’t practical at all in a latency sensitive environment. Feature detection works once JavaScript has loaded on the page, which means we either have to serve you a giant bundle of stuff you may not be able to use, or we have to degrade the experience of the latest browsers by detecting features and fetching more HTML/CSS/JavaScript once we know they will be able to handle it.

Feature detection absolutely is used for some things, but it’s unreasonable from a latency perspective to serve the bundle of all possible sites and make all these decisions on the client. We aren’t talking about polyfills here- A lot of these features mean we are shipping a totally differently lay out because this webkit uses flex box 2009, or mobile safari 8 has a layout bug, or IE has a quirk around event bubbling in video elements, etc.

Feature detection stops being better when a) your supported browser list stretches into the early 2000s around the world and b) you are in a latency sensitive environment where it is unacceptable to degrade performance of the latest browsers. If you aren’t bound by those constraints, or the detection has a cheap fallback so it isn’t meaningfully impacting latency, I agree with feature detection.
Very nice. Note that when it says "press start" you need to press Enter if playing with keyboard.
If the agreement was Canada as a country ensures their recyclable exporters will only export things that conform to some standard, then the burden would be on Canada, yes.

But, what kind of bizarre world do we live in where we ship our trash to overseas places to be 'recycled' ? It just doesn't make any sense. We are exporting our waste and pollution to developing nations, those people are probably facing much worse environmental conditions than those in the developed world. It's truly despicable.
Can you give more information, if you can?

The only contractors I work with, and not too closely at that, are the tier one support people for our product in the Philippines. And then there's some web developers, designers, and project managers who work for a web design firm, but their job seems pretty cushy so I wouldn't include them in this conversation.
There were a lot of things going on in the world in the '60s. Whatever you think of TFA, it's simply arguing for more rigor in education. Unless you think racial minorities are less capable of rigorous study, there's no reason to assume the article is racially coded.
In the article it points out that although the results are negative when it comes to cold fusion, they had positive results about connected themes like materials research.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20025871.
Those are the age-old arguments against TDD. Every team will have to analyze the value proposition in their context to see if the return is worth the investment.