skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The scholarly opinion of this question has been quite dynamic over the last century.

Nowadays, the consensus seems to be that Caste was definitely a thing before the Raj took over, but it was more fluid and regional, and was not the centralized, static hierarchy it is today. There were other power structures (feudal, religious, etc) that were not colored by caste, and competed with caste to triangulate people.

The British Raj took calculated steps to centralize, formalize, and entrench the caste system, shaping it into a form that is recognizable today, where it is strictly tied to opportunity and wealth.

It’s worth noting that is a common pattern of colonialism: to divide the colonized people against themselves along arbitrary, existing lines and elevate an arbitrary group, aligning the interest of that group with the interests of the colonizers. It’s a timeless and tragic human story.

I’ve only started researching this subject, so if anybody would like to correct or qualify anything I’ve said, I welcome it.
there's a prior discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25259917
Any argument about emphasising grit hinges on the extent to which grit is actually teachable. As the original article states, the measurable effects of grit seem to be a near-equivalent of conscientiousness from the well studied 'big five' personality metrics, and (as far as I understand) the evidence shows that these traits are very stable over the years (conscientiousness slowly increases over age, but roughly equally even for people who have lead very different lives) and there are no known interventions that would reliably change them.

So an argument against an educational policy to emphasize grit is that, as far as we know, this will not actually increase grit in the students. Socializing children to view the world a certain way will have many effects, but not that.
> Game Pass relies on third-party content. I want it to be that way. I want our third parties to have success. One of the things, going back to previous CEOs, Bill always had this good point of view that you’re not really a platform until other developers make more on your platform than you do.
That's a knee jerk reply.

But there's a point to that.

Democratising education is great for literally every industry except education industry itself.

There should be some way to do that.
I think of it not exactly, but sort-of, the other way around: using trig without any linear algebra is a shortcut to doing the linear algebra. Or maybe it’s just that the trig stays the same, but it’s possible to hard-code or short-cut your transforms to not include matrices or dot products explicitly... in simple cases. In reality trig and LA aren’t in competition, they’re both necessary in a serious renderer, and they represent different tools and different views on vectors.

Sines and cosines fall out of rotations because of the implicit circle involved, but it’s more general to think of a transform between two basis frames. It just so happens that the lengths of basis vectors of one frame projected to the other are computed using sines and cosines, but the transform and dot products are there whether they’re made explicit or not.

Using only sines and cosines falls apart very quickly, here are a couple of examples:

Compute a surface normal under non-uniform scaling. You need the inverse transpose matrix. I don’t even know how to derive it using trig.

Implement instancing or a character rig in your ray tracer. As soon as you need to compose transforms just to trace a ray, the trig route is off the table (impractical in the extreme), and matrix math is required. An alternative might be geometric algebra - is that in the same boat with linear algebra for you?
The only reason this is being seriously considered is because the president has the power to cancel federal student debt without consulting Congress. There are some arguments that canceling student loans would be a much needed stimulus but as far as economic stimuli go, there are much better ways to spend $1.5T.

I also think it's wrong to do this without seriously addressing the ballooning cost of college.
> Isn't 401k tax-free in the US?

Traditional 401k is pre-tax going in, taxed coming out (a good deal for most people, who even with savings are likely to be lower tax bracket in retirement than during much of their working career.) Roth 401k is post-tax going in, tax-free coming out (a good deal if you are saving enough to end up in a higher tax bracket in your retirement than most of your working years.)
The problem is that fusion is not rocket science. It's way harder.

By the time SpaceX was founded, we've been shooting comnercial rockets into space for half a century, and had flown humans to the moon multiple times. Some application of modern technologies allowed to do the next logical step, a cheaply reusable first stage (expensive reusable space systems existed for decades, like the space shuttle).

Fusion is nothing like that.

We can reliably blow fusion-based nuclear bombs. That's mostly it. We don't have a reliable reactor that would run any close to breaking even (a fusor does not count). We have no experience burning the plasma for more than a few hours, before losing it to internal instabilities. Certainly we have nothing similar to commercial energy generation furled by fusion. A plethora of approaches exist because no common design is known to reliably work.

This is not a moment for a SpaceX. This is not a moment for an Apollo effort. I'm not even sure it's a moment for a Manhattan project type of effort. We still seem to know too little to spearhead an engineering effort. I'd be glad to receive a qualified refutation of my points.
There’s a lot of talk in the HN comment section recently about the death of general computing and the open web. I’m not convinced. There’s definitely closed platforms both hard and soft but the web still exists and general purpose computers are still available.

When I see these complaints I see people talking about how they want other people to use the Internet and computers. That smells like authoritarianism.

If you want to contribute to an open web then do it. It’s not your job to get our metaphorical racist uncles on mastodon or something. Why would you even want that?

The romanticized “old web” was just a product of massive selection bias that still exists. If you want that experience it is still out there. Just stop worrying about what other people are doing.
Great work!

I wonder if their expertise would be helpful in understanding deep learning, a rare field that made advances before mathematicians had fully laid the groundwork (sometimes they do a century ahead of time :));

https://deepmath-conference.com/
KSTAR uses superconducting confinement coils. It takes virtually no power for the confining field.

I work on a research machine that uses copper coils. It uses 16x 1000 HP train traction motors with 2000 lb flywheels for energy storage to power the confinement field for one second. :)
Solid State _Drives_ degrades over time and require wear levelling[1] to avoid frying the chips.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling
I mean, I would expect most OSes to today. If you run a couple thousand threads on windows 10, or Android 10, or a recent Linux or BSD, it's probably fine (ish).

But probably not on Windows 9x, maybe not even on NT4 (although, NT4 was pretty solid), and I wouldn't expect good results on Linux or a BSD from 2000 either.

But macos has lowered my expectations. It's a mash of FreeBSD from the turn of the century, with Mach from earlier, and whatever stuff they've fiddled with since then, plus a nice UI layer. They don't regularly pull in updates from FreeBSD, and the killed their server line (which was mediocre at best anyway), so when it panics if you do something weird, it's not unexpected.
Would you ever consider an iPhone?
The morning exercise and cold air exposure alone is going to confer benefit, vitamin D aside. I feel better throughout the day if it starts with some form of exercise.
There are fairly silly exclusions to donating blood. I was recently (but apparently no longer, thanks to new rules?) blocked from donating blood because I spent too much time in Europe. Would be unfortunate to gate this care on such eligibility.
Oh absolutely, little blame can be fairly put on students, though everyone participates in the system and deserves some (and eventually everyone responsible was a student themselves at one time).

> To fix the universities, you have to fix the incentives

Who better than the universities to drive change? That is sort of their fundamental purpose is it not?

If you need to lead a university around with a carrot, it really has failed to be much of a university.
I don't get all the exception hate.

Exceptions are great when you are prototyping something. You will not have to bother about the very very very edge case. This is important when you have HOFs.

For robust production software though, you need something like result type or checked exceptions.
Gamedev from Scratch 0: Groundwork
> the space shuttle was designed to be reusable.

No, actually the PR was that it was reusable, but the design was not. Each shuttle had to be remanufactured after use, taking up to a year and costing $1 billion.

But it gets better. They had "lost tiles" problems on the very first flight, and never bothered to do anything about it.

What a piece of junk.
Until the late 90s on-chip wire delays were something we just didn't care much about speed was limited by gate capacitance - we got speedups when we shrunk the gate sizes on transistors - after the mid 90s RC delays in wires started to matter (not speed of light delays, how fast you can shuffle electrons in there to fill up the C) soon after it got worse because wire RC delays don't scale perfectly with shrinks because of edge effects - this was addressed in a number of ways, high speed systems reduced the R by switching from Al wires to Cu, tools got better able to model those delays and synthesize and do layout at (almost) the same time
> That sounds as if you're steering close to a whiteboarding interview which a lot of people will claim isn't great.

One major difference is that unlike a whiteboarding interview there are presumably clear expectations as to what one is expected to have learned in the class and therefore what topics the discussion will cover, and at what depth.

Another issue with whiteboarding interviews, specific to computer-related subjects, is being asked to write code on the whiteboard, which is a severely unnatural act in all sorts of ways compared to the way one normally writes code. But an in-person assessment in a proofs-based math class, for example, would not have that problem. Similar for a CS (as opposed to software engineering) class.

And in a software engineering class, the concept of "test" is pretty odd, for the same reasons that whiteboarding interviews are; I'd expect longer-term projects to be closer to the right evaluation tool.
No legal recourse, and cultural differences. An adult male in Japan propositioning a 13 year old for sex is legal in their current system, whereas that doesn't really fly in America.
I’d rather it keep some metadata than have a login tied to my actual phone number.
Is this from real world observation, or just looking at the diagrams or what? Because by all accounts, these chips don’t seem to encounter any issues with the ui or encoding movies or whatever. Which would strongly imply that memory contention between the gpu and cpu is not a significant issue.

If you have actual data that backs up your position, I would love to see it.
Another mysterious monolith found in Romania
> The corrolary to your message is “don’t build mega-projects” which doesn’t make sense to me.

I think the two posters meant that size of the people working on a single thing is negatively correlated with innovation. The analogy was that Tesla is less ground breaking now compared to when it was experimental.

> The corrolary to your message is “don’t build mega-projects”

Mega projects are more optimized for delivery and leaving lesser things on luck and it is beneficial in most of the cases. But posters are saying given the vast scope of things that could be tried in fusion space, mega projects likely won't be touching those.
Weighing software abstractions to design better programs
I dunno but my understanding is there are completely ethical ways to obtain embryonic stem cells for research.
You speak like someone with the experience of parenting. :D
because Trevor told the police that Jonny had told him "give me money or i'm going to post untrue information about you to ruin your reputation". The info turned out to be true, which makes me doubt him recounting that Jonny brought up the idea of a pay off.
But there's more work being done per average x86_64 instruction due to RMW ops. Hence why they just look at an entire binary.
CPU is exceptionally great but I don't think Apple is also leading GPU. I doubt M1's GPU efficiency is mostly came from 5nm process.
Pros/cons of various countries for new company setup?
Has anyone seen a good comparison with pros and cons for various low-tax countries for setting up a holding company? Malta/Estonia/Lithuania/Singapore etc.
Entertaining read - thanks!
I disagree in a small way.

Telsa / SpaceX / Elon - focused on ground up physics principals. They said things like, how can we make a better battery pack and will the math then work for a good EV car. They showed to their satisfaction that the answer was yes, and built from there to a degree. Their battery / powertrain work has been consistently good before any of the huge capital efforts, and the path forward was pretty well defined.

Same with their rocket engines. They iterate and qualify pretty quickly.

ITER and these folks are spending billions on what is actually ancient tech with really no realistic (I don't think) path to sustainable commercial power even theoretically in any reasonable time horizon. This is the Space Launch System approach, gear up and go on old tech.

We do need someone in a lab (Tesla / SpaceX style) iterating, and then proving out key physics / components. The problem with ITER, you CANNOT stop funding it, it's just gobbling up all the money because the number of jobs now tied to this - it's a jobs machine basically.

At spaceX it doesn't feel like their are a lot of sacred cows. These maga projects are pure sacred cow it feels like sometime. It's private / personal capital driven.
If you have a linux computer you can boot from usb or a second drive to run windows. That's what I did when I had to take exams using Proctortrack.
For context: 1926 was the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1929 it was not yet clear that this was the technology that would take us into space. That sounds about right for fusion. It is probable that we have built a primitive version of what will eventually sustain a net-positive fusion reaction, but it may only be obviously a milestone in hindsight.
Getting the heat from neutrons randomly flying out of the reactor to water is a hard problem. The current thought is to cool the reactor with liquid lithium, which itself will be undergoing fission and releasing helium during the process. The liquid lithium and helium would then be pumped through water cooled heat exchanger and some sort of filtering process to remove the helium. Also, all of the plumbing and materials have to withstand radiation 100 times that found in fission reactors.

I’m not saying it is impossible, but they won’t be working on it until ITERs successor sometime in the 2050s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_sea

> The Aral Sea ... was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions in the north) and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region in the south) which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s.

> Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size...

> By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea.
> they want other people to use the Internet and computers.'

they want other people's content to be available on the open web (not just their own content).
Seems easy to rule out vitamin D if sunlight exposure isn't relevant at time of infection then.
> You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working.

Another day in PR cringe. Yet another zero information statement.
Despite the source being open and hosted in an American owned company, you still made it a point to wear your Tinfoil hat on?
> "no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others." [0]

It seems reasonable to me to think that, whatever the scientific contribution of the study, the fact that it doesn't test the primary claimed benefit of masks suggests that it is not the last word on the matter. When I say 'I would not be quick to promulgate or depend on the study', I am not dismissing the study, but recognizing its limitations, as do the authors.
I mean, that's what happens as a cuisine gets passed down from generation to generation: it evolves. Cuisine and language are similar in that respect. The sort of English spoken in the US is no less "real" than the sort of English spoken in England; why would the Chinese food made and sold by the descendants of Chinese immigrants in the US be any less "real" than the Chinese food made and sold in China? They both evolved from the same point, and simply diverged and evolved.

And that's what we're seeing now with Thai food. As the generations get further and further removed from the original immigrants, the cuisine continues to evolve in its own direction. And why shouldn't it?

It's also worth remembering that restaurants are not always (and in fact, rarely are) representative of the actual local cuisines. There's still heavy emphasis on the good ol' home cooked meal (as hard as frozen food chains might try to supplant home cooking), and that's where you see both the preservation of tradition and the proliferation of experimentation, marketability and profit be damned. Indeed, looking at these home cooked meals, it becomes readily evident that the oft-denigrated Chinese holes-in-the-wall and small town pizzerias are far closer to authenticity than the fancy gastropubs and fusion restaurants of snobbish preference; authentic cuisine puts form over function, and heartiness over presentation. Authenticity comes from humility and self-awareness; it doesn't need to try to impress anyone's palate.
> To your main points, they have yet to fully utilize advanced packaging (TSMC 3D for example) to get much more RAM in the SOC.

The M1 is using off the shelf LPDDR4 modules on the package but not on the die. 3D stacking is possible for denser DRAM modules but wouldn't make much sense compared to just adding 2 more DRAM modules and spending the physical space on it - there's more than enough room especially in devices like the Mac Mini. A boring ol' daisy chain setup would work perfectly fine here.
That is one proposed path; another is direct conversion of high-energy particles to electricity. The former seems much more likely to be feasible, but the latter is potentially more efficient.
DEC Alpha NT could run X86 code thanks to FX!32, and faster than a core you could buy from Intel at the time.
I think the Wikipedia editors would ban the proxy's IP pretty quickly for making junk pages.
> And black people are disproportionately impacted by COVID.

Isn't Africa doing surprisingly well?
How can I learn enough trig to really grok this?

I can code it up but I don’t understand how it works.
And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach.
Even completely closed systems can host open systems, as long as contracts don't forbid it. It's really all about the money. AOL, ISPs, POPs, Microsoft, etc were never either stupid or philanthropic. They saw money in the distance and they built platforms to collect it.

The best way to "save the open web" is to make money off it.
The Utah monolith is gone as one appears in Romania
It's a bit tricky, as the "privileged upbringing" also often involves heightened expectations of confidence (part of entitlement) and most of the life, especially early, is within a peer group who have similar privilege or lack of it. What would be an achievement for a less privileged family would be expected as table stakes for a more privileged one - you won't be compared (and won't compare yourself) with people who succeeded despite all the hurdles, the comparison is against what other people with similar (or more) privilege did by exploiting every advantage they had. So this creates a systematic exaggeration of your confidence and competence combined with the fact that you're always seeing everyone else's exaggerated competence and entitlement so that your actual competence does not compare favorably.

Such a situation can easily lead towards imposter syndrome and low actual confidence combined with a faked posture of high confidence - even if actual competence is expected to be good compared to poorer classes as socioeconomic status does (on average) lead to better skills due to better opportunities and other aspects.
Windows can, and so can Linux. (I make use of it fairly often when I'm e.g. playing a game and using an external voice chat program.)

macOS cannot without third-party tools, as far as I can tell.
ITER will NOT in any reasonable time frame actually do it, and will not be a commercial success.

Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
Put your mic in another room then.
> And they are concentrated in certain types of places (e.g., poor urban ghetto) such that the parts of the country that aren't these places have vanishingly small probabilities of being hurt by a shooting.

I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.

As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].

And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...

[1]: 6.4k murder victims in 2019 from handguns, 3.3k from unspecified firearms, 1.5k from knives or cutting instruments, all other causes below 1k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
Spase.io Files 2nd UDRP Against Spase.com
"How far away from a nuclear blast is safe?"

Google: 6 feet

"What is the opposite of a dragon?"

Google: a Tiger

"When was running invented?"

Google: Running was invented in 1612 by Thomas Running

"where is spaghetti code grown?"

Google: Slovenia

Two months ago such a result was posted here
"How many web servers are there ?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24664280
Not sure what it gives but "how many web servers" gives 'four'. Did someone at Google fix the result individually?

Also note that Logic the rapper is ranked higher than actual logic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18413380