skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I speculate this is because specialized higher education is less valuable, in all senses, than well-rounded general education at the bachelor’s level.

A bachelor’s degree is valuable to the student and to society as a transformative period of time when someone can study a wide range of topics, especially topics that focus on large-scale world ethics, and integrate the moral and social maturity imparted by it via social networking within and across universities.

The particular domain knowledge or training in eg math or computer science, pre-med, sociology or psychology, music, education, etc., are not very valuable. Employers don’t really care about any of that, apart from virtue signaling to weed out mass candidate pipelines. The actual knowledge itself is just table stakes and pretty worthless; companies will have to train you to do jobs that have effectively zero to do with acquired skills like programming. But general well-rounded cultural appreciation of a base foundation puts everyone into a level playing field to be fit for plugging in as an employee: basic understanding of how to work in groups on projects, managing interpersonal relationships even when you don’t like them, having a common standard of collegiality and “how things are done,” common understanding of academic/liberal social norms.

While possible, there has not been created an online bachelor’s program that successfully replicates anything like this yet. They all focus on skill building and curriculum, as if that was any part of the purpose of college.

Master’s degrees are quite different. They are a pure credential kind of thing, a certificate of advanced training. It’s assumed you already have the social norm education and that’s not the goal. The hard skills of the training still don’t actually matter to anyone in master’s degrees (nor even PhDs), but they can be used for clout or authority or stack ranking in terms of how decision-making ranks are established. This is much more amenable to online courses because all that matters is the certificate at the end, nobody cares how you got it. With bachelor’s degrees they actually do care that you physically attended “intellectual workforce finishing school” at a physical campus, because the social norm / behavioral training is the only part anyone cares about.
> There’s no reason they should increase their rates right now. They should be breaking into their reserves to handle this.

Last I heard health insurers weren't particularly profitable, and I'd be surprised if they have reserves of that magnitude.

Very happy to be shown wrong with facts though!
May as well just start day trading at that point, dunno about the rich fast part, or the rich at all part but hey, the math is fun at least.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/life-in-the-arabian-dese...
“Read You Loud and Clear ” Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network [pdf]
Comeback? It never went away.

From where I am standing it has always been either Java or .NET since the last 20 years, while we keep seeing stuff coming and going every couple of years.
Healthcare can be the difference between life and death. It is very much unlike any other market good. It is also somewhat unique in that failure to seek early care often leads to much more extensive need of care later, and any imparement is a deadweight loss in human capital terms (unless you're a sociopath who thinks we need to clear out "surplus" population)

A free market requires price discrimination to establish prices. By definition some people must be priced out of the market. There is no free market in healthcare that will deliver anything close to the correct care for the people who need it, and as mentioned delaying the purchase of care or substituting the wrong care is often the worst of both worlds.

Health insurance is uniquely terrible: denying care is the quickest way to increase profits, and unlike fire insurance healthcare is needed by everyone at some point (most people never have their house burn down).

There are some things the free market is bad at. Natural monopolies are one. Healthcare is another.
Oregon state has an online BS in CS degree and also a postbac 2yr option. It’s $30k so not cheap at all though. https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/online-degrees/undergraduate...

It’s legitimate, source: I know someone who did it and is working as a webdev in PDX.
I really liked Animal Farm. Phrasing things you already 'know' in way simpler forms, made me understand it way better.
The psychological impact of coronavirus will be huge.

Till recently, forcing an employee to isolate was a form of mobbing. Today this is healthy pre-caution for everybody. There will be surge in loneliness, depression, and suicides.
Agreed. No specific book has every "changed my life", or specifically been the source of positive impacts.

But reading stories is fun, and something I do constantly. Currently I'm re-reading Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. Every year or two I re-read Dune, Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Amber, and Steven Brust's Taltos series. Always a pleasure.

My recommendations would probably echo those already posted, with the addition of small random stories that I remember fondly because they were just fun, interesting, or surprising (e.g. H. G. Wells: The Door in the Wall, or the original Mary Poppins books recently completed after finishing the Dresden Files for the first time.)
Hypothetical problems are still problems, and they still can be solved. I think the best case of that is the tower of Hanoi. Most abstract problems are made up, here is one:

If you add something to itself, what do you get?

I just made that up. The solution is: you get twice of that something.

With that said, I disagree that these problems are made up. I can see that it is the case in some cases or the majority cases of an industry (the software industry being one of them) but it's unfair to say that all of them are made up.

psychology problems: I've seen some terrible stuff from psychologically damaged people. If a psychiatrist would've helped them, then a few calamities could've been prevented.

Also, I've seen useful things that laywers do. One time a family member had an issue with a big company. Without a laywer he wouldn't be able to right the wrong that they did to him.
I would say that it is because a bachelor program is a system that needs to be born at scale to be useful. With most online education, it's a single course. With a bachelors program, it's many curriculums, which is many courses in many areas of study. I don't see how you get to that and preserve quality. The only thing you may not have to scale is having all four years worth of courses on day one. You do however need all courses for the first year of study on day one and a commitment to provide subsequent years of study as students advance. But then it's chicken and egg. What student will pay for a bachelors program that has no guanrantees of the remaining 3 years of the degree.

The only way I see a credible one existing is if people focus on just coursework for one area of study, each of these being a startup, and then later on down the line, consolidation through mergers and acquisitions starts to produce a multidisciplinary program.

The only other path I see is a credible meatspace bachelor program moving entirely online.

I suspect the idea of a bachelors program will die before any of this happens. The increasing focus on indoctrination in higher education is destroying the credibility of the humanities departments. I'd personally be more interested in hiring someone that spent two years doing a focused engineering degree than someone that spent 4 years pursuing a bachelor degree that contains 2 years of engineering and 2 years of indoctrination and brainwashing.
I own that book and it’s good to have as a resource. Rather than read

I bought “Finance for Non-Financial Managers” and like that better for the clarity and humor on the financial side of things.

I would say both are good for an overview - it will make you realize where you need to learn more and dig in.

For even more I’d recommend “Profit First” and “Simple Numbers...”
You need to find an employer who is hiring based on potential or potential + a track record in a different area. I wouldn't hire an ML practitioner with no practical experience. I would hire someone who's produced in other areas and is looking to make the move to a junior ML practitioner (or who has domain expertise in our corner of the world).. It's like the rest of engineering... just because you've taken a course in Python doesn't make you a software engineer or proficient in it. Now show me that you've done things in other languages and we can start talking. Like, courses in ML don't _really_ teach you about things like:

* reproducing model training
* deployment of experiments in a CI/CD pipeline
* observability of models
* discoverability and governance of results
* versioning of data / models
* optimizing for latency vs throughput
* when to use batch vs real time
etc

Just like a course in a computer language wouldn't necessarily teach you about CI/CD, horizontal vs vertical scaling, or domain-specific bits.
Small businesses maybe, but large businesses work the cycles of the economy like a ratchet. Bailouts in hard times, buybacks in good times.
If a company is behaving unethically (but not necessarily illegally), whistleblowers can help in informing the public as to the abuse. It is especially needed in times of crisis (like this one), but because it's a time of crisis, I would assume the motivations of whistleblowers may be less strong if they don't feel entirely financially secure.
We change the system all the time. Latest revolution was Obamacare.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Agrees. Also, in-browser adblockers can do much more than a DNS-based adblocker. Such as removing dom element, injecting css to fix websites...
I would imagine this to be due to the overhead of then having to track where EVERY variant of a JITted function can then be called from, when to deoptimize, etc.
> A few scammy places have mandatory amenity/resort fees not in the price.

I'd argue that most hotels in major metro areas now have resort fees.

---

But yes I do agree that hotels don't have cleaning fees nor service charges.
Coronavirus Pandemic Compels Historic Labor Shift
Surprised, no. But if you listen to the talking heads on the TV they will tell you a different story about how great this is for everyone.
Some people on Android bubble keep mistaking Android Java for the real deal.
The question itself isn't of much value without knowing your current skills, the domain you work in, nor the domain(s) you desire to work in.
May I ask what kind of background he had? Was it a hiring bet/mistake or was he fine on paper (and probably claiming way too much)?
Hello Hackers,

We’re Firat and Tolga, co-founders of Jooseph. We would like to show you Jooseph which is basically a platform where you can learn with a collection of links to different resources.

Me and my co-founder really like to learn new topics but nowadays, we can’t escape from fluff content. Especially when you are just starting off a new topic. We were frustrated by the search process which is time wasting. Search Google, find the right keywords and then dodge all the fluff/seo content. Voila, we have just spent 2 hour and still have dozens of tabs opened in our browsers, hours of content waiting for us to read or watch them. Yet, still we don’t know which content would be valuable for us and which won’t. So we tried this concept of lists, it’s like asking a friend, teacher or colleague for suggestions.

So, you can learn with modules curated from youtube videos, articles, essays, blog posts, podcasts and more. Also, you can curate your own module and share with others.

Some features
Follow a curated list of different resources.
You can like/dislike a content and this determines the total rating of that module.
You can create weekly goals to finish your module.
You can curate your own list and share.

I’ll be around so I would be happy to answer your questions

Thank you,
That's like tying your shoelaces together, complaining that you can't run, and pointing at the variety in other peoples' footwear when someone suggests that the tied shoelaces might be the problem.
Harry Potter series.

Albus Dumbledore changed my Outlook on life.
Kurt Vonnegut's works: The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Jailbird, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater...

Find the time to read Vonnegut.
> The law makers are the ones who write the cheques and make the system the way it is. The real problem is how laws are made and how the government functions

Amen x 1,000,000. We elected these people whether we voted or not. As a people (whatever country we are in) it is our responsibility to hold them accountable because they will not hold themselves accountable. The whole system is completely broken.

I have but one concrete political belief / theory: Vote ‘em Out! Whenever I have to opportunity to vote I vote for whoever is running against the incumbent. The goal would be to ultimately create an ideological equilibrium instead of a mass polarization (as is currently happening in the US and abroad).
Has the Coronavirus Killed the Techlash?
Video Puppet integrates with several voice synthesis services, including Amazon Polly, which offers custom branded voices [1].

You could create a custom brand voice with Amazon, and we can then integrate it into Video Puppet.

- https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/02/amazon-po...
I’m sorry, we’re any of those part of this article or my reply?

No, they were not. Conversation does not mean “oh anything that involves health insurance anywhere in the world at any time”.
Nothing. I'd put it in the bank because we're about to tumble into a global recession-if-not-depression and take some courses online.
"We went bankrupt overnight due to a runaway script" is "really bad and weird behavior"...
Aren't puzzles a subclass of problems? Isn't a problem simply a question that has a solution?

It made me think about the definition of the word problem. Here is one list: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/problem
Rural living is a cultural choice, not a purely economic one. The "subsidies" you mention, I would bet, are far below those given to large corporations in this country who surely have the capital to expand to these "middle of nowhere" places.
I think /r/wallstreetbets is the modern version of interactive fiction, or perhaps even the evolution of fireside-storytelling that civilization has had for 10,000 years. "The mammoth was THIS BIG! //extends neanderthal arms for affect//"
Now you're entering a bit of a philosophical or subjective area in my opinion - I personally would want any code which is incorrect by construction to fail to compile (if possible) even if it was impossible to reach the code in question at runtime. A "false negative" like that is a feature IMO.
I'm talking about the "Earned Income" section they show here:
https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (you have to scroll down to the second piechart)

It's separate from donations and gifts.
Do you have a good link explaining the details on the loans -> grants? I’m having a hard time finding an analysis of the final signed bill.
I use this for sleep, maybe could put outside your door.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/LectroFan-Sound-Machine/45825724?...
I'm entirely with you. Even though being an author myself.
Examples:
https://github.com/m-ender/retina/tree/master/Examples

More didactic than a language reference
This is nothing new, just the latest rehashing of the same rumor that's been recirculating for months.
There is still a stigma about people talking about money and how much they are making.

It's an important conversation to have, especially when the wealth gap between CEOs and regular people is so wide. The thing this guy is doing can potentially influence the ultra rich into giving up some of their enormous wealth.
Lots of people have tried, with crypto, forex, options, and stock.

I think only hedge funds are really successful, mostly because they can afford better and faster access to data and market makers.
One of my first computer science teachers pronounced "/" (in C) as "divide and throw away the remainder", which sounds awkward at first but turns out to be quite helpful. It's one of those operators which, unfortunately, looks just like one from math class but acts very differently, even in common cases.
Without SE's, lockdowns would mean a nearly full stop of economy and functioning of society. The world would be a far worse place right now.
Unclear. I am part of the MIT+Harvard+Boston General initiative on REUSE of masks. Log reduction of pathogens though limited heat (dry or moist) is VERY unclear. Then, if you don't control very precisely the heat, their filtration capabilities are toast. I would ABSOLUTELY NOT recommend using an oven. At this point, heat might be a decontamination option, but early results indicates that duration will be long (18 hours) under precisely controlled temperature (like 70C).
I got burned by AWS billing. I played around with some tutorials and before I knew it I had a $100 credit card bill.

Even working out what I was paying for proved really tricky. Turning it all off involved crawling through a bunch of opaque control panels.

I'm definitely never considering AWS again for a personal project. It's too dangerous. I'm not a company and I don't have corporate level budgets.
There is a well-maintained and popular R framework with ready SIR, SEIR, etc models, along with a variety of examples[1] - EpiModel[2][3].

[1] https://github.com/EpiModel/EpiModel-Gallery

[2] http://www.epimodel.org/

[3] https://github.com/statnet/EpiModel
It's a necessary step either way. The point is that you're going to have to clean whatever you end up purchasing anyway.
You'd run the risk of a court deciding to pierce your LLC's shield.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/personal-liability-p...
Yep. Perfect markets dont actually exist in any realistic way, and the US constitution itself deliberately breaks perfect markets by providing for patents.
On the topic, why is shopping for auto-insurance such a crappy experience?
We don’t live in a world with perfect information which is what makes all insurance valuable.

So yes? We should give credit to insurance for providing value in the real world.
>hot wax

Yeah, I actually knew that. We were using this tech at student papers in the late 1970s, early 80s. (And I was also the production director for a student group that had some offset presses and did poster design. The typesetting tech for that was more primitive than the newspaper had; you manually cranked the right letter in position and exposed it.
Yes, will polish during the quarantine
Probably ninja'd, but it looks like Zoom cleared this up:

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/z3b745/zoom-removes-code-...
I fully understand that, but NL/DE/CH do not allow their healthcare providers to pull the shenanigans that we do in the United States.

It is incredibly frustrating to need to go to the urgent care for strep throat or something and then not have any idea how much it will cost afterwards, and also have a health plan with a $2000 deductible and $4000 out of pocket max. This is literally the garbage that we in the USA have to deal with all the time.
It's not like they can collect on your personally, or go after the new company.

That is not a safe assumption to make, especially if you are deliberately (AKA fraudulently) dodging debts (IANAL).
Nor does conversation mean your own suppositions, limits, or dictates. And of course, again, you began by referring to single payer in the US as “fantastical” at the top of the thread.
Perfect here refers to the mathematical model of a perfect market and perfect competition, not an external normative sense of the word as some societal ideal.
Maybe think about fixing the system itself instead of wiping it out almost entirely and invoking the devastating unintended consequences.

Despite what you say, it can be fixed, and can be resolved.
I'm pretty sure archive.is is safe... Yes, there's been some weirdness between them and Cloudflare, but nothing security related.
> The video shows a plot of "new cases", which might be measuring the rollout of testing

Maybe, but probably not given how consistent the trend is over time, response, and as the disease progresses.

> It is also not showing data per-capita.

Per-capita would be much LESS representative. The virus spreads locally, at a scale far smaller than country borders. The point is to show the progression of an outbreak. If you show per-capita, you would be showing the number of outbreaks per country and minimizing the growth of any individual outbreak. For instance China, with 4x the population of the US, would be moved much farther down the graph than the US. That would only make the data look fuzzier, and convey zero useful information.

In the end it would probably be a very minimal difference given the logarithmic scale.
I addressed that.

> The US has a very high number of confirmed cases, but it still pales in comparison to many other nations in terms of percent of population.
It’s not quite precisely phrased, but this is just a simple literal mathematical minimum - like that a sphere is the surface which uses the least material to enclose a given volume.

A cooling tower needs to be a chimney - a closed off area at ground level, open at a higher altitude. Given those constraints alone, the cooling tower form is literally the one that minimizes the amount of material required. A circle uses less material to enclose the same area of the ground than any other shape; the cooling tower’s curved form uses less material than any other shape to create any area of opening at any height above the ground.

It might seem intuitive that a cylinder would be more efficient - if you imagine building one vertical slice of the tower wall, going in a straight line up seems like it would require less bricks than curving inwards then back out. But if you build one layer at a time, it’s clear that if you can build smaller and smaller circles before getting wider again nearer the top you will use less bricks than if you just keep building every layer with a circle of the full diameter.

If you balance both of these ‘stretching’ directions - minimize the size of each circle but also minimize the path from each point at the base to a point at the top - you get a cooling-tower type surface.

Actually this mathematical ‘minimal surface’ between two rings - as in the way to create two walls that are circular at the base and the top using the minimum amount of material - is not a hyperboloid, but a catenoid (the curve is a catenary not a paraboloid). The surface does exhibit mixed curvature though, so it is ‘hyperbolic’ if not ‘hyperboloid’.

The easiest way to see the catenoid as a minimal surface is with a soap film - it is the shape that forms when a soap bubble is stretched between two rings. Surface tension forces soap films to minimize area.

In practice cooling towers have other constraints than minimizing material cost - structural, wind load, material strength, ease of construction, etc, so they might actually be a different shape than a pure catenoid.

But it is true that the closer to a catenoid they are, the less material they will use - and that is one good reason why they are not cylinders or truncated cones or pyramids or barrel shapes, and as a result they do have negative Gaussian curvature.