skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question isn't "can the SATs be gamed?", though. The question is "can the SATs be gamed more than whatever other criteria you use?". Simply analyzing one half of the equation won't produce a correct answer.

Rich people can game standardized tests. They can also game grades. They can game admission essays. They can game interviews. If colleges admitted students based on brain fMRI data, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that rich people managed to exploit that, too.

Are the SATs unfair? Absolutely. Are they more unfair than the alternative? I'm not convinced. I usually prefer the devil I know.
That comments section is quite something!
Is there any difference in aquarium cloroquine and prescription? I’m assuming mostly manufacturing conditions

How do you plan on measuring your dose and dosing it?
It appears Seattle may have "flattened the curve" too much as new cases have flatlined.

Sounds good!? But healthy young people aren't building up antibodies.

Which means when we end social distancing, the virus will start spreading just like it did before.

The goal here isn't to prevent everyone from getting it. The goal is to slowly build up heard immunity, in a way that doesn't overly burden the healthcare system, and to hopefully learn some new treatments along the way.

https://depts.washington.edu/uwviro/
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/unemployment-insurance
If the reason is benign, I'm guessing it's just because AP tests have gotten so watered down that they're just a stand-in for the SAT subject tests at this point.
Wow, that's wrong on several different levels. I can't even begin...

I understand that you don't need an electrical engineering degree to be an electrician, but still, these are some fairly basic concepts in the electric power industry, especially the safety aspects, so you'd think someone working on live wires would know better.

Honestly, any halfway-intelligent person who travels internationally should know that Europe runs at 240VAC/60Hz, because this is really important if you want to use your American electronics there without a transformer. (When I went to Europe last, I brought my laptop, and an adapter which does not convert voltage, only the prongs, but that's OK because the laptop's power brick says it works on everything from 100VAC to 240VAC, as do a lot of electronics these days. But you have to check this first, you can't assume! Plugging a 120V-only device into this adapter could cause a fire.)
I don't believe I was straw-manning the guy (never my intent), and I did very much believe his comment made him come across as - to use your word - an asshole. Rereading the portion I quoted, I find his sentiment to be just completely horrible. Zooming out to the rest of his comments here for context, the whole thing is just a sad reflection of what faces the graduate of a typical computer science program when entering the profession and interviewing with a sadly typical... well... you know.

What entry into the profession should be like for a new CS graduate, and how we fall short compared to the other professions, feels like a topic for a much longer comment. Although perhaps it's a little bit like the book "The No Asshole Rule," where one might read the title and kind of get the point, and just skip it. Or possibly one might read the title and feel vaguely threatened, and just skip it.

OTOH, I really do appreciate you pointing out that I might not have been elevating the discussion with attempted humor, and I appreciate your work in general.
The more offensive the better. This is bad and they should feel bad.
Seems you're admiring exactly what you're criticising.
I've been thinking for a while that this whole millennium has gotten off to a bad start.

Maybe we should regroup and try again.
Second dog tests positive for coronavirus as owners warned not to abandon pets
Except the virus is doubling over those days so completely ineffective.
Given that FORTRAN was designed as basically rote translations from discrete math notation, it is deeply ironic that we now need to explain things in the opposite direction.
These are difficult questions and I don't pretend to have the answers. I'm simply noting that even suggesting an alternate path is shouted down.

Reading this thread, and several others and watching several other discourses, I do not see that to really be the case in whole. In part maybe, in whole? No.

Disagreements are being had sure about this or that element of this situation, but disagreements have great capacity to forment solutions whereas this 'taking your ball home' attitude of assuming dissent implicates snark and disagreements implicate being "shouted down" (especially when, as you've done earlier: presenting various whatabouts when there are people who are actively trying to understand this disease and bring about solutions are screaming "STOP THAT") is it self an alternative path I think many people prefer to avoid.

Good luck. Wash your hands.
I feel bad for whoever owns that email. They're getting all the spam!
iFixit is building a repair database for medical equipment, and needs your help
Maybe it flattens their curve, too!

With the deadline less than a month away, surely they have paperwork from some of their customers and can do those returns by April 15th. Then they can do another batch by July 15th.
Ahh yeah, I use the Apple keyboard cover and that's a bit cramped even for English. I can't imagine typing in German on it would be fun.

Not sure if it covers everything you need, but have you tried using the Alt/Option key for typing certain things? e.g. Alt+u and then o gives ö. Alt+s gives ß.
Detailed audit of Voatz' voting app confirms security flaws
That's a fair criticism of the general SAT - I used to teach those classes, and the test is very gameable in the sense that there really are "A FEW SIMPLE TRICKS!" to learn that have nothing to do with actually knowing the material in a useful way.

But at least some of the subject SATs are not like that at all, specifically the math/science ones. There really aren't many tricks or traps, they really are like normal school tests (if multiple choice) where doing well on them requires you to know the material they cover. Nobody who is "good at tests" is going to 800 the physics one without knowing physics well enough that they'd do well in a freshman mechanics course, and someone who gets a 400 either slept through class or is going to struggle at college level.
A great way to get rid of outrage culture, btw, would be to get rid of all the systems generating the outrage.
If you're only looking for one novel view, can it use less views that are close to the novel one?
According to National Geographic, this story is false[1]. There were always swans in Burano, and the dolphins supposedly in Venice were in fact filmed elsewhere.

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavir...
Location Data to Gauge Lockdowns Tests Europe’s Love of Privacy
Agree completely. SAT isn't perfect or perfectly objective. No test is. As long as a test controls admission to a highly desirable school, there will be exorbitantly expensive courses for it.

However, it is a far more objective test than the rest of the admission packet, and it's being dropped with no alternative.

This will make admissions less fair, precisely because SAT is still a test that you can ace with discipline and hard work without much monetary investment, and it will be replaced by other criteria that actually requires more capital.
You mean like they did at Kent State?
No, exclusivity of the inventions and knowledge was a -- perhaps the -- key piece of value they held.
eBay has a lot of attackers: You have FB Marketplace on the local C2C side. They own kijiji (annihilated CraigsList in Canada at least), but it probably cuts into their eBay revenue.

Then you have Amazon on the B2C side.

And Aliexpress doing their damage on the low-margin direct-from-Asia side.
Kerala in particular and South India more generally has also preserved other Indian knowledge traditions well - Ayurveda comes to mind.

But despite my innate Indian nationalism I think the time has come to stop writing articles (or even having thoughts) like the one linked above.

Yes, many cultures, including several represented in the Indian subcontinent, had deep and important ideas. It's even likely that in some disciplines - the mind sciences being the most obvious - there are many ideas and practices that are waiting to transform and revolutionize 'western' science, whatever that might mean.

But the knee jerk chauvinistic instinct that says all science (& democracy & sliced bread) arose in Greece and the Indian/Chinese/Middle-Eastern response to counter that with continued fractions in the Lilavati (as well as spaceships and chimeras) has run its course in my view. Plain common sense and generosity suggests that insights have mingled across people's for millennia. One of my favorite sources for that belief: Thomas McEvilley's superlative "Shape of Ancient Thought." [1]

If anything, the events of the past weeks show that we are still stuck in a parochial mindset when the big problems of the present and the foreseeable future are all human in the expansive sense of that term. And why human - I would rather rather we started thinking with any number of other species that have something to teach us.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Phi...
>The conventional wisdom has long been that the SAT subject tests are MORE predictive of future success at MIT, because the influence of test prep, cramming, test coaches, etc. is minimal for the subject tests.

Citation needed? The admissions office has much better data on this stuff, but in my experience, MIT students who performed well on these tests did so because their schools offered AP exams that were relevant. For students like me, we were S.O.L. and had to teach ourselves a year's worth of test material entirely by self-study while still maintaining top grades in school, doing research, and studying for the SAT.

To clarify: not disputing that there's less cramming, just that it's a better predictor.
It's not "death fast", it's: 1) way more deaths and a complete congestion of medical services vs. 2) less deaths, manageable medical service and a period of painful stagnation for the economy.

If you get critically sick or injured (not COVID19 related) and hospitals are overflowing, you will suffer when no one can see you because of COVID19 cases.
This is great, I've done calcs to get the upper and lower bounds, but to get the full range like this is super. The example of moving was perfect, I had done a similar calculation by an excel sheet and it was a pain.

Nicely done!
That's a very bad analogy. People can become great musicians without ever learning music theory, since being a "musician" is such a wide category. You can be an awesome singer and not know what a diminished seventh is. I learned how to play Moonlight Sonata, 3rd Movement in high school [0] (not that that makes me good, just low-intermediate at best). I know practically nothing about music theory except how to read sheet music.

On the other hand, you can never become a great, or good, or even mediocre ML engineer without understanding the math. If anything, in a production business environment, if you are responsible for creating the model yourself, you'd just be doing more harm than good. Yes, you'd be able to use pre-baked frameworks to run data through an algorithm or model that you have no idea of what it's doing or why and get some numbers and graphs out, but you won't be doing actual science or modeling. You might know how to use Python to do something as simple as run a linear regression, which if you don't know the math, you'd just have a vague understanding of it "finding the best fit line", whatever that means. However, you wouldn't understand that (under the L^2 norm) it's minimizing sum of squared errors, the properties of that (BLUE [1]), whether or not you'd want to apply regularization [2] or not, statistical tests of whether or not a linear fit is even applicable, the importance of outliers due to their overweighting under the L^2 norm, etc.

If I were responsible for a modeling or prediction project, I would never trust it to a software engineer that didn't understand the math of what's actually going on.

> so anyone who benefits from this article should probably take a detour through a math book before continuing their Python ML, or else risk having beautiful code that implements nonsensical math.

I couldn't agree with the GP more. That is 100% spot on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zucBfXpCA6s

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Markov_theorem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization
This would be great, because getting those same results in standard SQL or MariaDB is a pain.
Bud, screen-space is scarce. Why does that header permanently take up a third of vertical space?
Well, it is for those who are ill and/or quarantined. Or disabled, or incarcerated… I was not only referring to this current situation. Plus the curfews in place in France and Italy are very close to being total lockdowns.
> Each incremental step is normalized over a few days

So far, the "temperature" has been increased every 1-2 days.
https://bit.ly/3b5Jsj8
Which platform do you use which does not rely on large amounts of open source libraries?
>mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people.

The whole point of the American University is to produce these kind of people so that shouldn’t be surprising. Otherwise you could earn a degree via self study proctored exams. Lack of objectivity during the application is a symptom not a cause.
The Temple Bar, Dublin [1] one caused controversy about a week ago when it showed lots of people not respecting the social distancing guidelines.

[1] https://www.earthcam.com/world/ireland/dublin/?cam=templebar
How? What are they spending their money on? They need to put people on leave and "pause" their business as quickly as possible!
To clarify, this announcement is only about the SAT subject tests.
If doctors are using this, and not seeing an effect, why do they continue using it? Doctors are humans, and prone to irrationality of course, but they're also scientists.

Maybe my faith in the collective ability of the world medical professionals to evaluate their treatment techniques is misplaced, but I still have faith that these people are acting in accordance with their scientific training.

Maybe that's wrong, and I shouldn't be trusting these people. But if I'm not trusting doctors (and especially infectious disease experts who are writing papers about their findings), then who should I trust?

I think a lot of this distrust in institutions and doctors is going to get us into a lot of trouble. I wish people would start listening to these orgs.
> But the moment I have to care about the implementation of an abstraction rather than the abstraction itself, the abstraction has leaked.

No, that's not what leaky abstraction means. If an abstraction specifies its performance properties, but those properties depend on context that isn't captured by or enforced by the abstraction, that's a leak.

To use your example of the STL, if you can allocate a fast constant-time abstraction at a misaligned address, thus causing it to violate its own performance specification, that's a leaky abstraction.

Having the wrong performance characteristics simply means it's the wrong abstraction, not that the abstraction is leaky.
You can’t race in your youth if you don’t have serious money. You don’t have to be super wealthy but you need to be able to spend probably tens of thousands per year before you can make a name for yourself.
I think you can turn it into that if you use Emacs as Daemon [1]. Then you would be able to call vuiet from the command line as this, for example

> emacsclient -e '(vuiet-play-artist "queen")'

You can then turn it into a full CLI tool for interacting with vuiet with some nice wrappers around the above command, and similar ones. I would be glad if someone gives it a try. I, for one, feel very comfortable inside Emacs.

Thanks for your nice words! I really appreciate it.

[1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon
Yes, it's true. Please re-read what he said, especially the "in the context of" part.
> Anybody cheering the exclusion of some test or other, because it was a pain to study for in high school, is simply not noticing the frog-boiling secondary effects going on. Every bit of emphasis taken out of objective results mean more advantage for smooth talking, photogenic, well-connected people.

Absolutely right. Standardized testing become popular in the first place as an egalitarian measure, a way to combat inherited wealth and privilege. But wealth and privilege always want to propagate themselves to the next generation. Nowadays, we see rich parents paying crazy amounts of money to get their mediocre children into high-end schools, sometimes to the point of straight-up bribery [1]. They bribe crooked doctors into lying about their kids needing extra time on exams. After they get their mediocre kids into "top" schools, parents demand grade inflation. Once the kids graduate, they spend years supported by their parents in unpaid internships smarming their way into positions of power and influence unavailable to anyone who has to get paid to live. We have a thoroughly corrupt system that promotes stagnation, corruption, and incompetence.

Standardized testing is extremely inconvenient for the kind of person who uses these dirty tricks. It's hard to buy a university enough libraries to cover up your kid's 1100 on the SAT. This whole push to deprecate standardized testing is just corruption justified with twisty self-serving rhetoric about fake justice.

Only standardized testing should count toward university admission, because the only thing that matters is the competence of the next generation of decision-makers. We can only have a functioning society because good decisions get made, and status corruption damages society's ability to make good decisions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...
I can fully recommend "The making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes[0]. The book begins with Rutherford's experiments that first indicated that an atom might have most of its mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus.

From there, it follows the intense period of scientific discovery that captivated that era. It's a fantastic portrayal of the science and the lives of people behind the discoveries.

I learnt in highschool that electrons orbit around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. I had taken these facts for granted. This book opened up the world of technical innovations, leaps of imagination and the really amazing discoveries that the smartest people of the era had to grapple with in order to come up with that model of the atom.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
How the coronavirus outbreak started, explained
I mean whatever Firefox does. I’ve never once gotten spam because sites can’t send you notifications unless you opt into them (so it’s more like a battery friendly super fast RSS replacement.)
Honestly, like a lot of rustdoc bug reports, it isn't really super clear what exactly it's tracking. Someone suggested one thing, then some related things were suggested... it's tough.
We did the same thing with a gyro to make the robot drive perfectly straight, and it was enough reliability to secure a place in the finalists at regionals.

Hello from a mentor of FRC Team 2560!
Sending bad vibes that way to show my disapproval. Science!
Weren't they already losing money prior to this? Seems like a lot of companies are attributing losses to the Coronavirus masking the actual problem behind it all.
Yes. But it is optional.
I would like to second the multiplatform suggestion. I want to be able to see my notes on any of my devices, not just Mac/ios, otherwise it's just not worth it to me.

Your software looks great! And I would happily fork over cash for it, but I need a Linux client ;)

Best of luck
College Prep is a giant business that needs to be dismantled. They have a monopoly in this area.

IMO each college should be doing their own objective test. Definitely agree about subjective tests - smooth talkers will get ahead. But that's already the case in getting a job after they graduate - interviewing process is already broken.
Did you miss the first part?

> SAT I scores and SAT II scores predict performance about equally well in isolation

They're both good predictors. They're just the same predictor twice, as opposed to being two different predictors.
> Those that have already been devastated by Fluoroquinolones are extremely upset to hear that a related quinolines drug is being proposed.

Raising awareness of the risks based on your personal experiences is reasonable. But the above statement seems to cross the line into irrationality by pre-deciding that quinolines aren't worth trying here. That casts doubt on whatever scientific arguments you put forth, because it doesn't seem like you're capable of being fair about this.
Those estimates are generally in line with what other independent investigators find, maybe a bit smaller.

The elephant in the room in these kinds of discussions is the validity of the tests to begin with. MIT makes a statement that the general tests are predictive in combination with other criteria, but how predictive?

Generally studies of these sorts of things find that they're moderately predictive of first-year GPA (like .4 correlation), and then trail off to zero as the interval between testing and outcomes increases. The effects are even smaller in studies in relatively unselected samples (due to court orders or legal decisions, for example).

So one argument always goes that you should use whatever empirically-supported stuff you can to make fair decisions, but we treat them as if they're more than they are. Sure, you could have a lot of things that are significantly predictive but with small effect size, or where there's lots of noise, but why as a society to we pretend these are huge effects?

The other thing about that paper is the hint that the practice effects are larger in higher-performing examinees, which also makes sense and is consistent with other studies. Why is this a problem? Because those are exactly the types of students for whom these issues are more applicable. A 12 point average gain with practice doesn't matter if you're including people who never had a chance at MIT anyway, but a 20 point gain might in a highly competitive group where small differences are being magnified tenfold.

The issue in all of this isn't the people in the 99th percentile versus the 50th percentile, which is the bulk of what's going into these predictive models and effect sizes, it's the 99th versus the 95th. There's a ton of real-world noise, but society acts as if the noise is nonexistent. It's like we're idolizing the outcome of some kind of survivorship bias process.
Visualization of working from home effect on daytime Internet use
My gas furnace supplies a baseline of heat, and my basement gets topped up with electric heat. What are the mechanics of energy usage for me?

I feel like all energy is converted to heat in my laptop. That would mean free computing power?

Am I missing something? Can energy be converted to a form I am overlooking with computational work?
Optimize for the aspects of the supply chain that don't depend on the specific drug. For example, the packaging of pills probably doesn't need to vary that much in general.

But the point isn't that we are prepared for every eventuality (e.g., chloroquine), but that we are doing due diligence in preparing for the likely eventualities (e.g., general purpose respiratory treatments like ventilators).
At this rate I might need to change my stance on the biblical writings about the apocalypse & 4 horsemen.