skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well the USSR used over 30 million people as slave labor in their gulags, which were mostly involved in construction works and natural resources extraction.

That can certainly advance things.
The price isn't set on the cost to deliver, at all.

It's based on ability to pay, which is based on available credit, which is based on whatever bankers can get away with saying lifetime earnings will be.
So they are not deluding themselves about how transmissible covid is, nor how serious it is.

Meanwhile the rest get told to get back to the office.
MIT has been doing that with a big chunk of its courses for years and yet the value of its degrees have yet to depreciate. The value is in 1. the people you meet there and 2. the value of "MIT" on a piece of paper. The same is true for other elite institutions.
It's Harvard. It doesn't matter how they accounted it, they have not changed the Tuition cost with this announcement so it's the same money and they are not hurting for students.
Regarding smaller batch sizes and batch normalization: Have you found another normalization layer to work better for small batch sizes?

I agree that the mean and variance of the small batches won't be representative of the true mean and variance, but in practice, I've used batch norm for small batch sizes successfully (e.g., <8). In medical imaging, due to memory constraints, I commonly see batch sizes of 2 (or even 1, although it's not really "batch norm" at that point).

The paper "Revisiting small batch training for deep neural networks" [1] discusses the benefits of small batch sizes even in the presence of batch norm (see Fig. 13, 14). They only look at some standard CV datasets, so it isn't conclusive by any means, but the experimental results jive with my experience and what appears to be other researchers experience.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.07612.pdf
Both infections and deaths are undercounts, the former certainly by much more than the latter.
Node's design of Worker Thread, Promise and async/await makes an easier combo than Python + asyncio/trio which requires a lot of work to get it done.

But in the end, use what works for you, and if you need performance, you still have Go, Rust, and/or C++.
Firstly, sorry about your friend. This is a huge issue with big companies where they will spend $1M on McKinsey to figure out why the company is unproductive when -- if they had just spent that $1M on bonuses they would have achieved productivity.

Same with M&A -- at poorly run companies, internal ops will be starved of budget, execs wonder why, and they do M&A to improve things.

It all has to do with poor governance and bad executive incentives.

(Side note, they are not paying cash here, they are paying with inflated sock.)
This makes sense and it's a wonder that most companies aren't doing it. There are a lot of people who can do the work with the right apprenticeship/training. IMO, there really isn't a shortage of people who can learn to do the work, but there is a shortage of companies willing to make the investment in people.
at the moment the comment immediately below this is advising folks to find an internship, and in many ways that's what you're describing - a role with a limited timeline and a low minimum bar, but within which some people will be able to demonstrate abilities and promise far beyond that minimum.

It's reasonable, but it doesn't always work out. One of the larger heartbreaks of my professional mentorship time was bringing in someone who seemed like they could be a "diamond in the rough" but was just unable to ever quite pull it together. Watching this person's limited successes and repeated failures and their understandable, almost always mature emotional responses, and being unable to help them get over the hump was pretty frustrating for all parties involved. I also think it was short-term bad for my career: I felt judged for putting so much energy into someone who wasn't quite working out, and I don't think that opened any doors for me personally.

So - it's still a risk! What I think is that when it works it's great, but the people doing the hiring, evaluation, and training are still taking a fairly time-and-resource intensive risk, and when it doesn't work it's no fun at all. Gives me a lot more sympathy for folks who take the safe route.

Maybe there's a paraphrase of "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" along the lines of, nobody ever gets dinged in performance review or passed over for promotion if they only hire candidates who can sail through whiteboard-algorithms questions.
Might give more flexibility to move to optical sensing and avoid the contact issue entirely.
x264 is kinda absurdly good at compressing screencasts, even a nearly lossless 1440p screencast will only have about 1 Mbit/s on average. The only artifacts I can see are due to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling (i.e. color bleed on single-pixel borders and such), but that has nothing to do with the encoder, and would almost certainly not happen in 4:4:4, which is supported by essentially nothing as far as distribution goes.
Stanford's all-online CS106A ("Code in Place") in the Spring quarter was organized in about two weeks and fairly successfully scaled all aspects of instruction to ~1000 online learners.
Actually, the irony of this comment is that hard problems usually need a government to solve them.

So sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences -- setting aside my Syria and Yemen portfolio -- then I think those suggestions are terrific. (Laughter and applause.) That's not, by the way, to say that there aren't huge efficiencies and improvements that have to be made.

But the reason I say this is sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked. No, it's not inherently wrecked; it's just government has to care for, for example, veterans who come home. That's not on your balance sheet, that's on our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that's hard and it's messy, and we're building up legacy systems that we can't just blow up.

- President Obama
keep licking dem boots
This. You can also learn everything taught there and better by just buying and reading the books.
I don't think edX was deliberately misleading people about the "free education" aspect. They are a non-profit, and I think they genuinely wanted to open up education to people around the world. They tried that for over 5 years, only charging for verified certificates. The switch to charging for full course content happened after many years of trying to compete with Coursera (and to a lesser extent, Udacity).
I think it usually involves 'helper' type folks. They end up on a project, and they 'help' the project get done. But the work they do tends to be just the boilerplate (or cut-and-paste style work), or just the gathering of test resources, or a surprising amount of work that you would assume that the PM or Manager would do, but instead is done by this person (organizing meetings, setting up checklists, emailing people about current issues/priorities).

This isn't to say that those people don't add value, but if they do this for a few years, they may find that their ability to do greenfield coding has significantly diminished, so much so that they struggle to write objectively simple code because they've fallen out of practice.

Source: I've been one of those people, and I've worked with many. It's an easy rut to fall into, particularly in Test Engineer role (what MS used to call SDET roles).
I didn't really see that. For example, DHH was extremely critical of Balaji's shenanigans. It seemed like rationalist twitter (most likely due to the anti-NYT sentiment relating to the SSC drama) + some VCs vs the rest of Online Twitter. Taylor's beat is usually of the more liminal variety rather than red meat, culture war content, so this whole situation feels like the result of misplaced animosity.
This website is awful, at least on mobile. I’d like to read this, but the site seems actively hostile towards that goal.
The worse is they keep showing me, say a stereo receiver even after they know I bought one, and it makes me feel like maybe I bought the wrong product when I see other products with better features/price advertised. These ads literally give me buyers remorse for the product that they themselves sold me.
Families I know in India 10-ish years ago used to be against the whole technology wave and were concerned with the effects of electronics. Now that they have gotten their hands on smartphones and other devices: oh man they will put the American stereotype of being obsessed with the screen to shame. 24/7 Whatsapp, Instagram, and mobile games. They will come to the same realization as we are though. Just a matter of time.
Sure "browser chrome" suggests a web browser.

But "chrome" to mean user interface is pretty far down the list of definitions for chrome, and even the most generous interpretation is similar to GUI/UI/UX and that doesn't exactly say "web browser".
What advantage does dicom-numpy offer? I've mostly developed with pydicom for my medical imaging pipeline as it allows me to retain important dicom information (pixel spacing, etc). In fact, the 'PixelArray' attribute returns a numpy matrix that I can then use.
All 9 members of the Supreme Court went to either Harvard or Yale. I'd say that yes, signaling matters.
Six months of coronavirus: the mysteries scientists are still racing to solve
My experience, as someone who has advocated for hiring people along the same lines, is that this is a pitch that everyone will agree is a good idea. But then when it comes time to actually hire someone under it, people will hem and haw about whether or not they have the capacity to mentor people like this.

Usually it then won't happen unless they fit a very specific "comfortable" mold of person that they believe can be a "self-starter" which usually just means someone who's similar to person/people deciding on the hiring in various ways.
That's quite the leap you made there. Have you stopped beating your wife?
Be thankful. Most of us aren't that fortunate, but I haven't met many that would be OK with admitting that - work makes too big part of our lives, and admitting that it doesn't have any big meaning takes some guts
Wow, that's wickedly cynical.

I don't know how I would have learned how to become an RF engineer if it weren't for a four year BSEE that focused heavily on DiffEq, Complex Math, Fields & Waves, and Discrete Systems... and access to patient and friendly (mostly) professors for help during open office hours, which were a necessity (for me, anyway).

I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to teach this to myself with YouTube videos. But maybe you've had better luck?
Having taught a semester online, I think you can do really good teaching online, but you need a few things:

1) Small class sizes. Mine was under 15. Otherwise, very little discussion happens
2) A lot of work & learning assigned outside of class
3) Time each class for sub-groups

I do think they will have to adjust the tuition. It is hard to justify paying 60k or whatever Harvard charges for online education. It is objectively much, much cheaper to deliver.

Schools will need to invest in a lot more online tools and training, however.

I don't understand how larger class sizes will happen, unless they are going completely lecture.

The other thing I did with my small class was set up a Slack channel. I was available daily to chat about whatever and give feedback and work through concepts.

I spent a tremendous amount of time chatting with students on Zoom and Slack inbetween classes when I taught online last semester.

The idea that good online teaching is just like some free MOOC is not reality-based. It needs to be very hands-on.
I love that it's considered entitled to imagine creating a world that's not based on the machinery of capitalism and subjecting people to work jobs that are created by fealty to business.

It's possible to be economically productive and consider the methods in which we create our economy. We are capable of that.
Consequences of an utterly inept pandemic response.
Sometimes observational studies are all you have (especially early). 5 months out is very early. A good observational study can tell you more than many poorly-executed randomized double blind placebo controlled studies. You may see RCT come out in at best another year. OTOH you may never see good RCT's because...

Pharmaceutical companies and their custodians, FDA CDC and WHO, don't prefer a cheap available solution. Yet the earliest hope, Gilead's remdesevir, has proven ineffective, less effective than HCQ+ZINC+ZPAK.

The public is confused by the politicizing of this but all they need to do is "follow the money". There are not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars to be made here. Everybody involved in vaccine research who is not a saint is trying to get rich off Covid-19 and if they can make a case to the press/congress/executive of the US goverrnment then they will be offered money to do so by interested parties.

EXAMPLE:

"The COVID-19 Treatment Panel of NIH evaded disclosure of the massive financial links of its members to Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of a competing drug remdesivir. Among those who failed to disclose such links are 2 out of 3 of its co-chairs."

the above quote is from:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/05/02/pseudo-science-behind...

for details visit:

https://defyccc.com/covid-19-panel-gilead-ties/
As a company you're also competing against other companies for hires. Good candidates can get offers from multiple companies. If you're going to tell candidates to make an opportunity cost sacrifice of several weeks of work just to the the possibility of an offer then you better be offering something extremely valuable to the candidate. Otherwise why would the candidate take the chance on your interview process if they can secure an offer from other companies without paying the opportunity cost?

The result is that this interview process will likely only be pursued by candidates not able to get offers from other companies.
My understanding is a lot of universities are playing bait-and-switch, announcing unrealistic plans to reopen in the Fall in order to get deposits/tuition, but secretly knowing they'll be 'forced' to move everything online again.

I don't know about big universities, but we (a small TCU - Tribal Community College) do expect to open in the fall. The problem is going to be if we see a spike or get directions from the federal, state, or tribal governments late in summer.

The second problem a lot of people don't talk about is if the institution is accredited for 100% online courses. We got an exception that allowed for the summer, but we would need it extended into Fall. Being an accredited institution doesn't automatically mean you can teach 100% online courses.
How's "homework (the key value of the courses) " ?
Homework is homework, You do it or not. They don't teach You how to do the homework, homework is just an assignment /exercise.
(1) Why are you ONLY looking at the fatality rate?

I don't have all the links here, but just because you don't die doesn't mean there aren't other serious consequences (especially for people with existing conditions). People are losing their taste/smell etc. There's a lot of unknowns but it doesn't seem like it's that benign. You are treating it as binary either you live or die.. seems like it's more complicated than that.

(2) A fatality rate of 0.3% to 0.4% might not seem to bad, but you can't look at that alone. The contagion rate is HUGE compared to other viruses. So while the rate alone might not seem terribly bad, the fact is that with how contagious it is the vast majority of the population will/would have ended up getting it if proper precautions are not taken.
"Sane" is one of my personal pet-peeve words. But only because people use it in an extremely approximated sense. It seems to always mean "good, for whatever meaning of good I personally choose to define, along whatever axes I choose to measure", without ever coming close to defining it any further.
I'm using Adguard's DNS on my router. 5 of us at home due to Covid-19 and no complaints from anybody about things not working.

NextDNS has a more advanced version (you can add and remove domains) for $19.90/year

It's not quite as good as having a PiHole or similar setup because some devices have their DNS settings hard coded. You have to route those addresses to override your Chromecast, etc.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html
https://nextdns.io/
This is hilarious. I think the author assumed Blackrock was a coal investor because of their name.
Regarding latency, beyond the kind of benchmarks proposed in the paper (from which this performance claim comes), keep in mind that the behaviour is qualitatively different between the two alternatives.

Systems programmers in OCaml can apply techniques to achieve a low latency, but these are unlikely to scale as well under ParMinor. Indeed, with the latter, it is not going to be possible to have a low-latency domain and a non-low-latency domain coexist: the whole program has to be written in the low-latency style.

This is clear from the qualification “stop-the-world” for ParMinor, but worth to note for people who would read the claim out of context. There can be further qualitative differences in the GC design that are not measured by the benchmarks.
If I'm reading this correctly, all incoming Freshman will spend Fall semester living on campus and all graduating Seniors will do likewise for Spring semester, however all courses will be online only. I can't imagine doing online coursework from the dorm and I'm not sure what kind of safety is being gained by just avoiding the classroom while social interactions continue.
> It has been shown to cause permanent health issues even in young people.

Can you point to a study showing that?
But it doesn't shut down countries.
regarding downvote- apology if tone came off wrong . was genuinely seeking advice on this
Why would opening up Harvard’s instruction to more of the genera public help their brand? They operate on a scarcity basis.
The mortality rate so far has been under the assumption that those who need to be hospitalized can be. If everyone catches it at the same time and we can't treat them, the mortality rate is bound to rise significantly.
miniLED means that they place small LED's that are basically equivalent to the present level of LED technology behind an LCD array. So instead of the normal LCD backlight design where you shoot LED light sideways from the LCD module edge into a series of films that direct the light from the sideways direction to the normal viewing axis direction, the LED's are placed in a regular grid behind the LCD array itself, but you need a large number of these mini LED's to cover the entire surface of the display panel, as well as some diffusers to reduce hotspots. The main advantage is that the peak brightness you could get using this technique could be quite high. And in a sense you can get high contrast ratios by selectively dimming certain zones. So comparing two zones the contrast can be quite high, but comparing within a zone the contrast ratio is still the same as a normal LCD.
uLED means that you are attempting to place one LED chip for every pixel. Equivalent to how they build those large LED signs at sports arenas. In the smart phone situation, the LED chips would need to be crazy small -- on the order of say 10-50 microns -- so the name uLED (microLED) makes sense.
I Work from a Van
Opening up to a larger group of students will weaken Harvard's brand. Many of these top institutions are valuable because rich, well-connected people go there, so going there allows one to meet them. There are companies where it is an unspoken rule that they hire only from Harvard, law offices that recruit only from Yale, etc.
The average student at Harvard doesn't pay even close to actual tuition, most of the endowment is earmarked for student aid.

If I remember right, something like under 90k earned by the student's family, they pay nothing. I haven't worked there in 2 years, so the math is a bit fuzzy but the concepts are accurate.
Rent the runway is a billion dollar company. A bigger issue is the danger of deplatforming and corporate terms of services when it comes to fundamental transport infrastructure.
Do you have anything more recent? We're about 45 days past that estimate and the fatality rate for people who test positive is holding steady at 4.5% if you divide it out. Clearly that doesn't include anyone who never got tested (and likely people w/o symptoms didn't), so I'd like to see if the CDC still stands by the numbers here from May.
Do I need permission from Mozilla to sign things? Or are there self-signed certificates? Does that means source distribution works, or do I have to use their "store"?
Sandi Metz us not the only person with opinions on abstraction, nor is the article a definitive opus on abstraction, so it's not surprising people also include other ideas.
It's the automatic opt-in that concerned me more than anything; any time a company chooses to force a new feature on their users I question the necessity of the action as well as the intent. I had the same issue with automatic opt-in of their telemetry and Studies; I never asked for that and I don't expect it from a company that touts their stance on privacy as a reason to use their software.

My point being, even if Pocket is 100% benign and never leaks any user data, the user should still have a say in whether it is turned on by default on a fresh installation. Anything less is user-hostile, a descriptor Mozilla should avoid if possible.
Actually, in the 1960s Morricone joined the experimental improvisation ensemble "Nuova Consonanza" where he played trumpet and flute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruppo_di_Improvvisazione_Nuov...

He was very well aware of the contemporary classical/experimental music scene and you can hear the influence in his scores.
This may be true in public markets, but I’m not sure it extends to venture capital where not everyone can get access to the same opportunity. A good VC firm will not only see the best opportunities but may also pay far less in a competitive bidding environment. That’s where edge comes from.
Thanks for your insight. Out of curiosity, why don't more of such production lines have dedicated machines that each do one small/simple action and then send it to the next one. It seems many seem to deploy general purpose robots that mimic human hand/arm features (that I would imagine have a higher latency cost in terms of controlling,positioning,etc). Is it so that you can manufacture multiple products with different assembly steps?

I work in automation, but of biological processes (vaccines) and we have the same production issues with bottlenecks/capacity planning/down-time mitigation, etc.
It would. I think a common option is to use magnets and hall effect sensors. If you use an analogue hall sensor, you can even make an "analogue" switch that can have a different effect if you push it just a little bit compared to pressing it the whole way down.

Neither of these satisfy me, because in my eyes if you're using an off-the-shelf sensor of some kind, you're not really making a switch, you're just putting a little mechanism around another type of switch. Making the contacts out of cheaply-available material is important to me, although it's hard to really articulate why.

I'm trying to do this from as close to "first principles" as possible.
In Silicon Valley, this is how it's always been. Just hidden. It's like this in the finance industry as a whole as well.