skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a voracious reader as a kid and came across this book when I was 12, and the prologue sounded particularly amusing to me:

--

"Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.

Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics — and they are mostly clever fools — seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.

Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can."

--

It made me believe I could really learn calculus by myself at age 12. After reading the first few chapters, nope. Turns out calculus is built on a foundation of algebra and geometry which I did not have until I was 16. Once I did have the foundation though, calculus became easy and mostly mechanical. But to a 12 year old, this book overpromised and underdelivered.

I also found the exposition a little wordy and tedious, like it was written to explain calculus to an English major. It's the sort of book that one appreciates in retrospect after knowing the subject, but not while learning it. I discovered the most effective way for learning math is actually not by reading but to mechanically work through problems to cultivate intuitions and to develop a pattern matching schema. In doing so, one gains confidence that one can actually solve problems. Once this confidence is achieved, going back and delving into the underlying principles becomes so much more contextualized and rewarding.

Learning math by reading books like this is like learning to ride a bike by reading about it. You try to understand all the principles, but when you need to deploy them, you find yourself unable to execute. Much better to do it the other way around.

EDIT: but I want to soften that by saying that I appreciate not everyone learns this way. It's just I've seen too many struggle with math even though they've read the textbook countless times... when a simple change in stategy would yield much better results.
Alternatively, this may prompt more students to take the AMC examinations.

https://www.maa.org/math-competitions
tl;dr: The Care19 app [1] leaks advertising ID and/or location data to Foursquare and Google [2]

'The Care19 privacy policy indicates that “Your data is identified by an anonymous code.” We were able to validate that the app, indeed, uses an anonymous code (in the format of US-84825167-5 or something similar). However, our research has found that the anonymous code was transmitted to:

'Foursquare, along with the phone’s Advertising Identifier.

'Bugfender, along with the phone’s Name (probably including your first name)'

'Our research also shows that Google (via Firebase) also receives the IDFA.'

[1] https://ndresponse.gov/covid-19-resources/care19

In the news:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90508044/north-dakotas-covid-19-...

Original title lacked context. It was:

Jumbo Privacy Review: North Dakota's Contact Tracing App
>I see a lot of people concerned about wages going down. I suspect wages will go UP for most people as we're no longer trapped working with companies in our cities.

I agree - it will open up a LOT more opportunities for those of us that work remotely. I'm guessing tech salaries will start to 'meet in the middle' regardless of location.

We also shouldn't forget that there is a shortage tech. workers, and more opportunities mean more competition and better offers regardless of location.
That's the point of Oil:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil

A new Unix shell. Our upgrade path from bash to a better language.

It runs thousands of lines of existing shell scripts unmodified, but there's also a brand new language that will be familiar to Python or JS programmers. See http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/simplest-explanation.ht...

It works and you can try it now. The downside is that the implementation is more like a slow prototype, but that's being addressed, and the release I made today has stats about the C++ version (blog post forthcoming).
Run something like PgBouncer in front of your postgres instance. https://www.pgbouncer.org/

For what it is worth, the popular postgres and mysql libraries for nodejs support connection pooling out of the box. Cloud functions break this functionality because you are spinning up an instance per connection rather than handling multiple connections with a single instance of nodejs. In this case I think that longer lived containers or vms that can autoscale my be a better solution. That is not to say you should not use cloud functions. I understand they offer many benefits. Managing a fleet of vms or containers introduces its own challenges. In general I think this is a good example of how simplifying one thing can complicate other things. There are no silver bullets. It's all about determining the compromises you can and cannot accept.
Just commenting so people scanning don't miss the logical error.

You're comparing established vaccines with an untested one, so your argument doesn't make any sense.

> Why would you take a 10^(-6) risk to counter a zero risk?

Nobody knows the risk of a new vaccine in advance.

We're more likely to reach herd immunity before a vaccine is approved, sooner the better.
I just installed tree style tabs at the recommendation of this article and it was refreshing the way they handled permissions: a first-use popup that explains some additional features and what permissions they will request if you want to use them.
Doctors Broke Health Care
Now they can pay directly?

At least with SAT poor students still had a chance if they did well on the test.
Well, it would be you and several of your peers making $6000 a month, one or two people making an order of magnitude more per month, and a whole heckuva lot of people making $3k-$4k a month, contributing a progressively bigger portion to the one person making $0. So, no, you don't hang on to the full $6000... But then you may get it back from taxing the capital holdings of those people who own exceptionally large amounts of private property.
I'm in the states, but using your "mate" reference as a cue... I'm currently looking at Austrailia to settle down and raise a family.

I think the opportunity to find a young lady with natural resilience is much higher in AU. Using Mick Jagger as an example, we can populate the planet well into our 70's, so unless you age like a fried turd, there is no hurry.
I improved my SAT score 100 points just doing practice tests
tl;dr: The Care19 app [1] leaks advertising ID and/or location data to Foursquare and Google [2]

'The Care19 privacy policy indicates that “Your data is identified by an anonymous code.” We were able to validate that the app, indeed, uses an anonymous code (in the format of US-84825167-5 or something similar). However, our research has found that the anonymous code was transmitted to:

'Foursquare, along with the phone’s Advertising Identifier.

'Bugfender, along with the phone’s Name (probably including your first name)'

'Our research also shows that Google (via Firebase) also receives the IDFA.'

[1] https://ndresponse.gov/covid-19-resources/care19

[2] https://blog.jumboprivacy.com/jumbo-privacy-review-north-dak...
Private high schools bother me much more then SAT tutors do. I went to $GOOD_UNIVERSITY and it drove me insane how many people had previously gone to a private high school.

The amount of resources they had that I didn't have at my good, public high school was astounding. It was really 'stand out from the crowd' kind of resources that are probably going to become even more important with the removal of SAT/ACT.
Interesting. You're probably right, the experience is different for new grads where the lump sum is really useful.
The followers are slowly starting to re-appear. This is most probably a matter of a massively scaled system reaching it's eventual consistency.
My productivity and quality of life are both much higher WFH. And I’m even more willing to work longer hours, for any gulag drivers who happen to be reading.
I see UBI as more of a response to the existing conditional welfare system which already exists and circumvents this system in the most perverse way where you can make _more_ money on disability than doing something economically useful. At least with UBI you can eliminate these incentive gaps.

Doesn't have to be UBI either, a NIT could do the same thing, maybe even the EITC as long as it keeps the earning curve monotonic.
Eminem Net Worth in 2020 and Biography
Yes, look at all the AI growth at Carnegie Mellon, University of Waterloo, Tallinn, Estonia - any relatively well-managed metropolitan area can position itself as an "innovation hub", the US West Coast certainly doesn't have a monopoly on it.
I think this is a good move overall. Remember, they're not phasing out tests entirely, it's over a 5 year period before they can develop alternative tests.

I think US college exam systems are horribly flawed.

For one, why are they run by a private non-profit rather than the government?

They're also clearly not difficult enough, when at elite universities it's more a qualification than a determinant. In other nations, they're hard enough that the bell curve doesn't clip at the end.

The tests should be free, or at least free for, say, 2 tests per year per student. They should be harder. And they shouldn't be held in the hands of a third party.
When I search for "C string", the first couple results are about "C# strings". I think this is a problem for a search engine aimed towards developers. At least it doesn't show me lingerie (thanks Google for taking my 11 year old innocence).
I find it disruptive as a developer in an organization that used to run it very frequently. It aggressively crawls your infrastructure and blows up AWS API calls with low rate limits, like the EMR cluster description operations.
Haha, the fact that we are code reviewing this on HN is amazing. OK, the issue is "accept" isn't formatted as "image/jpeg, image/png", it's a list of file extensions. Which apparently wasn't enough to trigger iPhone's auto-conversion, and they just decided there wasn't a tech fix. You can totally see why -- they just never tried the mime-types.
There is going to be a massive market for extracurricular consultants in a little while as when everyone gets As, that’s what will be the deciding factor.
What does reading uninitialized memory or reusing variables that weren't set to zero have to do with seeding issues? Read my comment again and reply to its content instead of making up a comment that you would like to reply to.
op00to: I'm curious. What I said is well-known.

Were you trolling, ignorant of current news, or what exactly?
So instead you have the luck of the draw of what classes your HS wants to put you in and their crazy grading system?

My HS's GPA wasn't out of 4, for example. Also if you ended up in Mr. Boris's class instead of Mrs. Solomon, you basically automatically lost a whole letter grade.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207022
the pipeline wouldn't be a simple headline -> purchase -> full article access.

worthwhile content gets surfaced on aggregators like hn, reddit, via recommendation, etc. and there has to be some "sampler".

this would also motivate defense against clickbait, e.g. reputation management and visibility systems for authors and publishers.
Can we fix the article title to properly capitalize SAT and ACT to be more readable? Particularly since both "sat" and "act" are words.
>Admissions tests, allegedly biased against minority students, will be phased out over five years

Why are we lumping minorities into one group when we know that many minority groups score better than average on standardized tests than the general population. Asian Americans, Nigerian Americans, Jewish people, etc all do very well.

In a world where the wealthy have ever more advantages in college admissions, standardized tests serve to level the playing field. I grew up in a very wealthy town and many kids I knew whose parents spent large sums on SAT tutors never improved their scores because they didn't have the intellectual horsepower.

Just because college administrators and others feel uncomfortable that certain groups continue to do better than others on the SAT is a horrible reason to get rid of the test.
This is like saying that a python interpreter isn't good for interpreting python, because frequently python programs might be invoked using a bash script, and so python is incomplete without bash.

If my weird squiggley that I use in my specific niche field isn't represented by any Unicode code point, does that mean that Unicode isn't good for representing English?
Yes, finally! As someone who underwent the standardized testing grind, I have been waiting for an announcement like this by a university system for years.

I understand that there needs to be some standardized way to objectively score students, because allocating college seats to students seems to be an induced scarcity problem.

However, as someone who scored highly and is currently studying computer science at UC Berkeley, I ultimately feel like my time was wasted because the tests have almost no relation to any of my studies in class.

I know that in the absence of SAT and ACT, universities will need to come up with a different system, that has an equal chance of being gamed. Perfect is the enemy of good, and in this case, I would rather we strive toward standardized systems that actually relate to the content of high school. So many times while studying for the test I thought how much of a waste of time it is, and that I would rather be doing something else like programming.

Thank goodness that nowadays all I have to worry about is actual computer science. I got past the time-wasting hump and I never have to look back again. That is, unless I face the GRE...
May I humbly suggest https://histre.com/ that I'm building?

Not only can you bookmark and take notes, you can share collections of bookmarks with your teams and they can add theirs to the collection too.

You can save all the open tabs in a browser window into a collection and either use it to restore that window later - perhaps even in a different browser or computer, or share that with your teams so they can open the same set of tabs.

It has tree style web history too.

The disjointed suggestions they have in this post is actually fully integrated in Histre, Emacs-style if you will. The core idea is that you generate a lot of signal as you go about your day doing stuff online and that can automatically be put to use for you. Unlike the Knowledge Bases like Notion and Evernote, where you need to capture and organize the information (which is useful in a different way), Histre strives to automatically organize it for you.

I'd argue that this supports the "remote work and school" usecase better.

Speaking of integrations, it has Hacker News integration too. Your upvotes are saved into a collection. You can then share that collection with just some friends or make it public (sort of your frictionless publishing page). I'm working on recommending articles based on your HN upvotes.
The old extension system while more powerful, was pretty flaky anyway. Every browser update had a good chance of breaking extensions. At least now there is a clear api that can be kept stable over updates.
If you thought grade inflation was bad before, hold on to your tuchus.
I wonder how hard it would be to build a software-compatible TI calculator clone.

They haven’t exactly innovated in this space in the last quarter century, but it was a nice product back in the day. The bill of materials for a modern version of these couldn’t be more than a few dollars.

I wish copyright terms were shorter.
I doubt the rich kids doing well even moves the needle. That is just being used as cover for "too many" Asians taking up the spots of other minorities.
I wish UC the best of luck designing another test. That it was a unanimous vote is suspicious to me though... did the college board stop bribing the board of regents? Or did the regents pool together to create a consulting agency that's getting paid out to develop the new test? Or are they really all so pliable or same-minded?
Likewise, my Facebook account (mainly used as a dump of my photos from Instagram), got terminated for a reason I've not been able to ascertain, Facebook never responds, so my wife gets invites on my behalf from friends.

Maybe a blessing in disguise?

My Instagram account is still fine though, since I neglected to use Facebook login for it but email instead shrug
In your example, the people saying "won't someone think of the children" are the culprits of pedophrasty.

Once you conceive the concept, you see it all over the place. See here for a more in depth explanation: https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other...
You can see the prices per region here:

https://steamdb.info/app/427520/
I found that weird. On-call is so central to the technical identity of Amazon that I'm surprised you could get through the hiring process without knowing that you'd be on-call.
Until February, WHO was saying COVID does not spread human to human and travel restrictions won't help. So anyone who said "it does spread human to human" and "travel restrictions will help" was considered misinformation and conspiracy theorist.

February onwards, WHO did a full 180. But everyone who got censored before then was the victim.

Same thing about effectiveness of wearing masks.

So anyone pointing out the obvious that "China cannot have lesser deaths than Canada" is considered a "misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorists" because they "contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic".

How people don't see the clear danger of such censorship is beyond me. WHO also says China has been transparent.
Well, does IQ matter for academia? Some latent ability to think quickly matters. That's the point of the SAT.
Domino's Pizza is overloaded. They need cooks, drivers, etc. Probably the best money you can get now without an investment in learning something.
They're definitely difficult enough to separate the abilities of most students into rough groups. At the upper 1% it's certainly hard to differentiate but for the other 99% it's quite effective.
I had middling grades and not much extracurricular padding in high school but 99th percentile SAT (no prep other than a practice test). If it weren't for the SAT I would have had worse college options. School felt like it provided nothing more than read and regurg and my background did not promote anything extra. So personally I do not see how this decision evens the playing field.
Good luck self studying for those -- I tried. I made AIME but had no chance there.

There's no way a significant number of generic public high schools start caring about the AMC. It will just be helicopter parents, wealthy private schools and the odd self motivated student.
That isn’t strictly true and depends highly on the applicable labor market. For example, the worst paid software job I ever had was for a defense contractor that demanded 10 hour workdays 7 days a week during “crunch time” to meet deliverables and overtime frequently the rest of the year.

They paid poorly precisely because of the relative lack of opportunity for software in the region at the time. That meant anyone who’s livelihood was in software had little recourse other than to move. That was the option I took, but others can’t for a number of reasons.
Oftentimes, these tools are developed for much more complex sites than the people who author these rants have ever maintained. Of course it doesn't solve meaningful problems for sites that can be maintained by a handful of developers and whose feature set evolves slowly.

That's fine. Don't use them.

It'd be nice if rants like this also reflect on why these frameworks do exist. Then people would actually learn something.

Here are some of the tradeoffs I considered when evaluating JAMStack vs flask/jinja server side rendering.

1. Low latency interactivity unlocks all kinds of user interaction optimizations for us. The size of the initial download is amortized over hundreds to thousands of lightening fast interactions.

2. It's difficult to manage complexity around large html/css deployments, since CSS is a global namespace. Devs use all kinds of conventions for modularizing CSS. You can definitely succeed with these strategies, but when you're juggling tens of thousands of lines of CSS, it's a lot easier to solve these problems using a real programming language and its module system. We anticipated thousands of lines of CSS over time.

3. Immutability makes whole classes of race conditions unlikely to impossible. Do things still race in React? Of course. Are they vastly less likely to happen? Yes.

4. Managing interactivity through server-client interaction shifts a ton of complexity to the backend that the browser could otherwise handle. If you're designing a multi-stage form, for example, you often have to save incomplete user submissions in servers, depending on use case. Offloading this to localstorage on the frontend is a lot easier to author and maintain.

5. If you host your frontend statically on CDNs, that's several orders of magnitude less traffic you have to scale your web servers for. The vast majority of my company's traffic is handled by Cloudfront, making our operational footprint tiny.

Are there also reasons the modern stack sucks? Yes.

1. Configuring react and webpack is incredibly, incredibly hard. Webpack exposes a vast array of knobs that most applications don't benefit from tuning.

2. Time to first load is absurdly slow and server side rendering is, again, very complex to implement. React is not the right choice for a blog or anything that is sensitive to bounce rates.

3. MUI's documentation and APIs are painful, as OP notes.

For these reasons, and because most of our application was interactive, not read-only, we went with JAMStack.

I definitely think there's a place for the traditional HTML/CSS/jQuery stack. Read-only sites, for starters, with limited feature complexity. Everything I've built in the last several years has grown in complexity and features at a faster-than-linear rate, however, and these new technologies make managing such codebases vastly simpler.
What are the odds that the UC system will make a harder test, and secondly, will actually get good applicants to take it?
Mac Malware Getting Serious: Protecting Mac from Malware
That sound you hear is panicked elites, rushing to the "side door" of the UC system in an attempt to figure out how best to influence their kid's probability of admission since paying a few grand for prep sessions (for piece of mind, mostly) on what's a pretty darn good measure of academic aptitude is a waste of everyone's time, now that the test is rendered meaningless ... until California develops their own. I'm sure whatever they come up with will be quite the improvement.

If there was a checklist that you'd go down to help the University system implode "remove testing for academic aptitude" is probably right before "all objective measures of performance are banned". At that point who the hell can justify paying $150k+ for a "degree"?

Edit: pasting this from my below comment.

I think people are misinterpreting my comment as suggesting elite parents would've been against this - far from it. They absolutely wanted this because now it's easier to hide middling academic aptitude from admissions boards at elite schools.

To be clear: Removing this test helps elite parents, and hurts those who can't afford spending money on "summer experiences" abroad or poverty tourism or whatever.
Undamming the Hudson River
Does iOS not have user accounts? Every other OS has this and it makes this feature useless.