skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Questions like [..] didn’t assess a student’s innate capacity to learn

Back in the day, I did a boat-load of tests and passed a boat-load of exams at school and then university. I have a drawer full of certificates from (apparently) respected institutions to prove it.

None of which are any use to me right now.

I can't say that any of the tests or exams I sat actually assessed anything close to my "innate capacity to learn".

Q: Is this just me?
If even you think most iot is shit, you shouldn't really be surprised or upset that a twitter account called the internet of shit also thinks so.
> Abraham Lincoln. Winston Churchill. Nelson Mandela. We honor our leaders and always have.

Only if we don't study our history, and have a very low bar. Ignoring, for a second, the question of leadership-vs-leaderlessness (which is important of course), let's remember that:

1. While Lincoln led the US to a civil war which abolished formal slavery, his own opinion on black people was quite horrid:

> I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.

and indeed, the US took very little action to rectify the historical injustice.

2. Churchill was a staunch imperialist in terms of his public career, and is hated by the peoples of the middle east for his involvement in the continued occupation and the continued support and sometimes setup of oppressive puppet governments in British areas of control. At home, he was a tool of the rich in terms of state spending on welfare and other issues. In fact, even when it comes to Nazi Germany, Churchill supported non-intervention in Spain, where a significant British intervention against the Fascists would have had significant effect on later events.

3. Mandela is perhaps the most worthy of respect, but it must be remembered that the ANC essentially gave up on ending material, economic white supremacy in South Africa to end formal, legal apartheid. Whites, to this day, control almost all of the land and wealth. And the worst thing about it is that it is now a black government which enforces local white and foreign-multinational property rights against the landless and the poor.
I think the most important parameter about color is the GrayScale.

GrayScale = 0.299 * R + 0.587 * G + 0.114 * B

Whenever I need a color-space I make sure to use Grayscale as an axis.

This gives me an easy way to get "the same, but in green", and I can easily choose between background and foreground color.

I don't know if this has an official name, but for color-picking I wouldn't want to use anything else.
Yeeeeeeess!

And frankly, the ones in TFA aren't the worst. I'm familiar with yellow taxis from American films. I'm not familiar with 'crosswalks' (full stop) or American 'fire hydrants'.

Your buses also look somehow different often, and those can be hard. Traffic lights even more so, some are familiar, but some styles I would just never see in the UK, so I actually have to look at each square to check, I can't rely on recognising them.

Then, even once you get past all that, it'll frequently complain you haven't selected them all, and you have to guess which square that doesn't have a bicycle it thinks has a bicycle.
European Commission has submitted a proposal for new Data Governance Regulation
Running Super Mario 64 natively on Playstation 2
It would be interesting to see why someone would downvote it.

Since when are captchas a bigger issue than spam bots and fraud users?

and yes i also think that those tasks are actually helping our society. Adding models for self driving cars, for security/emergency breaking systems etc. So whats the issue?
> Spending non trivial time on lowering memory consumption from 40 to 28 MB in case of normal end user desktop applicaton is not reasonable in the sense that very few users will care or even notice.

This hides a big problem of today’s software. Instead of having time to actually think about their software and optimise it, it’s all about throughput and making the economists happy. That’s why projects use various ready-to-use frameworks and get bloated very quickly. And time to look at the whole monstrosity and think about how you can slim it down “is not reasonable” as nobody pays for that. Users are supposed to get a better computer instead.
Yes, you can. A good way to think about it is that a floating point number has a fixed amount of significant digits. A 32-bit float has between 6 to 9 significant digits[0]; a 64-bit float ("a double") can represent just double that - i.e. ~16 significant figures.

This means you can represent 12345678 and 0.12345678 as 32-bit floats just fine, but if you try to add the two, you'll just get 12345678. But there's also a more subtle case, in which you try to add 1234.5678 to 0.12345678, and lose half of the significant digits from the smaller number.

These types of errors are common in calculations dealing with large differences in orders of magnitude, and a part of the common wisdom to not use floats for anything involving money.

Another common occurrence of precision errors happens when modelling large 2D or 3D environments in video games. The simplest approach starts with a global coordinate system, in which calculations take place. Since the number of significant digits remains fixed, the further you are from origin, the less precision you have available for your unit of measure of position - meaning the same calculations happening far away from (0, 0, 0) will have more errors than those happening close.

A somewhat well-known example of that was[1] Kerbal Space Program - a game that models realistic spaceflight within a fictional solar system. As you ventured further out and visited the most distant celestial bodies, you'd notice your ships would spontaneously shake apart and/or explode, as if physics stopped working. Affectionately called a "Kraken attack", it was due to floating point precision errors - that far out, in the global coordinate system, the difference between two closest representable positions became comparable with the size of parts from which the ships were built. With that big of a delta, physical calculations would round some forces down to zero, and massively magnify others, as simulated objects could suddenly only move in increments comparable with their own size.

--

[0] - The limitation is in binary, which doesn't map cleanly to base 10.

[1] - I think they got around to mitigating this eventually. One way you can approach such mitigation is by dividing your space into cells (and possibly subcells), each with its own coordinate system, and do as many calculations as you can within these cells, so that everything is close to the origin of their local coordinate system. Then, for (hopefully few) remaining calculations that involve multiple distant cells, you can use larger-precision representations, which are much more computationally expensive.
TIL I am American
Around 2015, or so I was visiting Boston during some really cold winter (was -10 outside)

We were at the office, went out to wait for a bus, waited for 15 minutes, and since it was freezing we decided to go back inside and get uber/taxi.

I pulled my laptop out of the backpack, tried to turn it on - it was dead.
> Although such methods won't work with targeted bot attack

Neither will Captcha
It'd certainly be interesting to see how people got on with captchas where you identified plain-looking vehicles as taxis because they were obviously Hindustan Ambassadors. Or whether guesswork alone was sufficient to identify unfamiliar terms like 'layby' or'sleeping policeman'
Why would you invite someone to a meeting if you don’t expect them to attend?

At least that’s how it works in our company, so if you’re invited you are expected to attend (and be unavailable) unless you explicitly reject the meeting (which I don’t think anyone but me ever does).
If I remember correctly, Sigor Ros created a new language whereas this is intentional gibberish.
The thread model as stated is "the insurance company notices there is something nonstandard about the lock and denies all claims."
GraphQL vs. REST. Which to Choose? Tough Decision. Let's See Pros and Cons
I don't think 'crosswalks' require road traffic give way to pedestrians? Don't they just mark where crossing the road is not 'jaywalking'?
No. Look up to so called "literacy tests" used to disenfranchise voters. The people who designed those tests, and the "IQ" tests knew exactly what they were doing.
I'm totally blind (lacking even light perception), with optic nerve
hypoplasia (ONH).
Relevant link: https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/blog/living-onh-adult-shares...

Relevant quotation from aforementioned link:

"Many children with ONH have difficulty processing sensory information through
some or all of their senses--referred to as sensory processing disorder.
They may show sensory defensiveness and delays in learning fine and gross motor
skills, which can make reading braille and learning basic daily living skills,
like dressing, grooming and personal hygiene,
difficult or impossible without additional supports."

I find audio captchas infuriating at times, because I struggle to
separate the words from the noise, though they have really improved over the
last 3 or 4 years. I remember one night during 2012 or 2013,
wasting 2 or 3 hours of my life, just listening to audio captchas. All I wanted
was to delete my Facebook account and my girlfriend's Facebook account.
Morning Star is a fascinating example, but (per the hbr article mentioned in the post) the amount of time employees spend on committees devoted to hiring, purchasing etc is considerable.

Exactly the kind of managerial activity devs often want to get away from.
Believe it or not, but I've also been working first hand with this tech for a long time. As in, actually developing the underlying engines.

What you describe is a broad vision that may or may not happen at some point in the future. I agree about the queryable reality part but disagree that AR/VR, 3D scanning etc. "don't matter". Because in a lot of real-life use-cases you don't need the "real-time 3D mirror" but instead can get 80% of the value with something 10% as complex.
Intel has been unable to deliver. They need big changes for that to happen.

AMD is doing well indeed.

AWS and others are trying to push ARM because of better performance/watt in datacenters. Exactly the same metric for laptops.
Press release here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_...
"The problem with the web isn't the amount of control it affords developers, it's that getting people to create interesting content for your medium requires business models that only work if the users of your medium are in some way restricted or tracked"

I think you have this backwards - I recall the web consisting of intresting content before adtech arrived. In my experience, Adtech has a damaging effect on interesting content, instead generating content that only appeases algorithms. Finding the quality content has become a lot harder.

YMMV.
Building AWS Well Architected serverless apps webinar (live in less than 4h)
The decrease of independent minded as an organisation grows seems an almost universal phenomenon. It happens to startups yes, but also to forums, bands, fashions, the internet, games, religions, politics, etc.

Basically anything new will target independent minded people, and anything successful will target conventional people. It's sad for the independent minded, but is there anything that can be done about this ?
But Who's on first.
Do you suspect account deletion captchas are harder than account creation ones?
Thank you, Dang.
And they sell the business accounts; because so many people are used to gmail for their personal accounts, quite a few companies are paying for that.
The windows file copy process bar wasn't lying though, it gave you an honest estimate but was just really naive.
I was expecting to fork over around €3000-€3500 for my new laptop. It's half. I was shocked by the low price.
> Accepting/rejecting may not be valuable to you, but it’s a courtesy and a time-saving tool for organizers.

No doubt, but there’s seemingly millions of organizers in my company that keep shuffling meetings about every 5 minutes.

There’s only one of me, and I absolutely have better things to do than reject or accept meetings all day long.
Am I the only one who has never had any problems with reCAPTCHA?
Slack also allows bosses to read your private messages on premium plans! On the free tier they can as well but need SlackCo input.

I seem to remember this was justified for "auditing compliance" reasons.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2020/1/24/21079275/s...
> I think most of these users are high-pain users

What, non-Americans?
> I agree working in a wider range of ambient temperatures would be nice, but they do have a support article stating the temperature should be over 10°C, so I wouldn't say they've not tested it.

Yeah, the point is 10 C is sufficient ... for California. Not necessarily for the rest of the world. I'm sure they specify some temperature range, it's just not quite enough. Besides it was left outside for 10 minutes, not hours.

To add insult to the injury, all my older Apple laptops were able to survive bouts on the balcony, and if anything, the winters were colder 10 years ago.
Remote code execution in Elixir-based Paginator
There are endless things I could do with my free time that would be far more productive & useful to society than anything I could realistically be paid to do. Having lots of money would enable me to do those things.
Pushed by the Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal
Separating deposit-taking from investment banking: new evidence
The EU has agreements with many other large markets to make sure they do not produce (or import, in many cases) products violating a PDO or GI protection. This is often bidirectional, with the EU recognising PDOs (by other names) of other countries.

The sticky thing here —and likely the reason they also have trademarks— is this isn't just an AOC-style geographical label like Champagne, Grana Padano isn't a place, it means "Big grainy [cheese] from Po Valley".

But I think this guy is rolling over far too fast. If the internet can crowdfund honeymoons and holidays for otherwise well-off people, they should be able to buy this guy enough representation to stand up and not encourage companies to attack people for just saying the names of their trademarks. He's not selling their product under their name, he's not encouraging others to sell their product under their name, it's just a few people making cheese.
For 4 years long? That stretches belief.
For immigration purposes, I've had to take (and pass) a German language test. I've taken so many tests in my life, over 25 years of "school", and I've learned how tests work and how to pass them, that I've made the joke that I could have passed the the written part of the test in any language where I could read the alphabet.
Windows calculator is wrong with maths
In those situations, captchas don't offer any improvement over a text field that always asks you to put a 3 in it. It's just different enough from other systems that it requires custom programming, and that's just not worth it for most small websites.
Making (probably) millions you find unproductive?
Unencrypted Bluetooth is the least of the problems with "smart" locks. All too often, a simple permanent magnet is all that's needed to pop the relay that controls the lock's solenoid.

Obligatory LockPickingLawyer: https://youtu.be/XXW27KKHtc8
> When you tell my boss bad news before me, even with the best of intentions, I end up getting in a lot of trouble for not knowing before he did. Can you try to tell me first, going forward?

I understand that this is a contrived example for a book, but I wish they would have taken time to contrive a healthier example. As a manager, I can't imagine ever admonishing someone for not knowing something before I did, and at minimum I would explore what's going on.

While this might sound nit-picky, a book read by millions will in some small way create and enforce norms for managers, and do we really want to enforce that in this situation the feedback is for the low-level employee and not the senior manager?
"They finally grew weary of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century."

"Some have reportedly even stolen the signposts, leading the local authorities to use theft-resistant concrete when putting up replacements."

It's sad and a disgrace that a town has to rename itself after a thousand years, because people whose intellectual capacity is questionable won't stop with the abuse.

EDIT: I'm sure David Mitchell was right when he said that the world is calibrated for "idiots".
"Artificial selection" (which is just a terrible name for coevolution with humans) is different. It happens in a longer time period of time so the rest of the eco-system (including humans) gets to coevolve with it.

I know there is a lot of propaganda that goes into it, mostly to paint the opposition as uneducated irrational village idiots so you can dismiss anyone who brings this up... or you feel the urge to educate them about the basics, so let me frame it another way which may be easier to understand:

Are you familiar with the problem of invasive species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species)? It's when certain species of plants or animals are introduced into a different eco-system that hasn't evolved with that particular animal or plant... and the whole eco-system goes out of whack. All GMOs are potential invasive species to all eco-systems. This problem does not exist (or is negligible) with artificial selection.
That's just silly; it's well known that Tor nodes are widely abused by spam bots. Google is "punishing" known sources of spam. When I ran a forum many Tor nodes ended up being outright blocked, since there was so much spam coming from them.
I met an indie techno producer who called himself Kura-C which means "penis" in Serbian. He enjoyed learning this fact.
It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject and context.

Moreover if you subscribe to the dichotomy you're probably doing a poor job of creating an environment that encourages people to be independent minded.

At the organizational level it feels completely normal that it will become more conventional within it's own bubble as it grows. Companies are mostly trying to move in one direction and having lots of independent people off doing their own thing runs counter to that. Other similar structures follow this pattern as well. Part of it is cultural norms developing but part of it is recognizing that a company is very much exerting pressure on the people that work within it. Which is probably why founders find it easier to talk to other founders as they both have the luxury of the freedom to think independently within this context as they are steering the company itself.

You see this with attempts at internal startups or R&D teams where independence is encouraged but it's impossible or hard to spin anything out of them because you end up bumping back into the company pressures trying to do so. You're basically asked to "go do something amazing" ... "but not like that!"

Personally I love small companies primarily for the autonomy it provides and as a designer really value applying myself to different problems. So I get the joy of independence but I think I'm fairly conventional on other topics.
I agree completely.

And sometimes it is not easy to accomplish, even when you are not trying to implement dark patterns.

I've had to work hard to get rid of "the jumpies" in my UI, and it still happens a little bit.

I do find it frustrating, however, and I hope to eliminate them completely.
We do. They're the graves for H from Steps.
> upgrade to ReCaptcha v3 maybe?

Funny you should say that. reCAPTCHA v3 is meant to be invisible, watching the behavior of a user in the background, and then returning a score between 0.0 and 1.0 for the website to do with as they please.
I love this, but it feels like Infinite Buffering Simulator 2020 for me.
Show HN: An interactive martian calendar in the browser
Are you sure that English is defined by its usage in the United States of America? Or is it defined by the usage in, let's say, in England?
I too am willing to sacrifice others when it benefits me.
Good points on "work from home" vs. "work from anywhere". My company has made "home" our primary location in everyone's contract as a result of this year. However, we have to stay in the country (why?) and they have stated we should be able to commute to the office for "collaboration" or "important meetings", meaning we're still forced to live in the expensive city.

If I can work from my small shared apartment in the city, why can't I move to the country where it's cheaper and I can afford an actual house or large apartment for myself? I'd be more productive if I could live a less stressful life.
> Can I give you some feedback?

> Can you change that?

I also find these very blunt - this is what I would say if the person I was exerting my authority and the person I was talking to really had no choice, but I was being polite about it.

I would soften them a lot if I wasn't in a position of authority, or if I wanted to genuinely engage with that person.

Also in any case, I would say precisely what it was about:

"Can I give you feedback about X?" so that it doesn't induce anxiety and the person has a realistic idea of what they are being asked before they decide,
and,

"[You're doing good work, and] it would be better if you did Y" to reiterate and reinforce the goal.
> [1] - I think they got around to mitigating this eventually.

Yes, as far as I know nowadays KSP works by inversing the point of reference, that is, your spaceship does not move and sits at (0,0,0) at all times, it's the whole solar system that moves around you.

Of course, functionnally it does not make a difference, and it solves the problem ;)

EDIT: ah, interesting that you have another theory, now I wonder :)
> brilliant in their field not necessarily are brilliant in "soft skills"

You are confusing skill with power.

Hierarchies exist to wield power and exert control over employees in order to extract financial value from them.

There's plenty of people who own businesses, buildings or land and have terrible "soft skills".
Real Estate Photo Retouching Keeps Your Images Clean and Clear
such a long piece just to make one point..
and the supplier is bankrupt.
Thinking is outsourced these days
That is usually because an ad is dynamically allocated to a slot (of a dynamic size often too), which starts after the page loads. If said ad is above the content you want to interact with, it pushes everything down (below) and there you go.

It can be resolved by a) not using dynamically allocated slots or b) by never putting ads above any content someone might interact with.
The Future of VR/AR Is Influencers?