skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was born in yugoslavia (later slovenia), under the red star, communism, brotherhood, unity, equality, and all other communist bullshit back then.

...and even then we had standardized testing, and it worked.

You went to elementary school, usually the closest to your house (from about 6/7yo to 14/15, =8 years), and at the end of that, you'd apply to a highschool of your choice (either general "gymnasium", or 3 or 4 year technical, trades, economic etc. school), and then you'd have standardized tests. Your grades in last three years and your test scores would be calculated into points (i think it was 120 points max), high schools would sort the applicants by points, and however many spots were available, that many top students would get accepted and a cuttoff point value was published (everybody above X points got accepted).

In high school it was a bit more complicated, because standardized testing had three core subjects (slovene, math and usually english (1st foreign language)) plus two subjects chosen by the students. Colleges would post requirements in advance - most had just 40% grades, 60% standardized testing, some (i think medicine) required one of the two chosen subjects to be either biology or chemistry (and it was 20% that subject, 40% grades, 40% other subjects), and only a few (art, acting, music) had entrance exams. And the process was the same as before... everybody did the tests, results got calculated into points (i think 0-100), top X got accepted.

The exams included knowledge from all the years of schooling, and tutors were a thing for "bad" students, who couldn't learn enough from the teacher (or didn't listen, did other stuff, failed, and had to get a higher grade, not to fail the whole year). With math, you had to know math... there was a lot of practice in school with every part of math, and tutoring was no better than just doing the work from regular workbooks. With history, well.. you had to memorize a lot of stuff, but you knew that when you chose the subject. There was no way to game the system, because everybody did the same programme.

I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized tests... IMHO, using grades is worse than testing, because an average students with shitty classmates will in general get better grades, than in a class with mostly "geniouses".
I really don't think he referring to some physiological limit of individuals. It is the aggregate of society, which includes the prevalence of distracted driving.
The purpose of the first paragraph is not to present the credentials of the leader. The purpose is to make a parallel between the current state of the robotics industry and the creative & commercial expansion of the web once the technology became more accessible.
Hahah, well, a couple of guys out there have hundreds of billions of dollars, and far fever ideas worth competing with this one. Good luck!
>you break the transformation across many cells

In theory, yes. But the reality, nobody does that unless an error is apparent and needs to be investigated. The vast majority of calculations in Excel spreadsheets are done using cumbersome, multi-line, unreadable formulas that try to pack as much logic as possible into one expression. Such obscure formulas are the main reason why lots of business-critical Excel spreadsheets contain grave errors, many of which are are never discovered.
No. He's saying that the GPA in college doesn't matter, because he just asked his teacher to raise his grades, and that worked. Whereas his girlfriend was more intelligent by the SAT, but didn't realize this one simple trick.
Yep - worked there for a few years on an iOS/Mac team. Was pretty fun to watch the progression over the years. When I joined they gave me a mac and a PC desktop because so many internal tools only worked on windows or IE.

But that changed rather quickly from 2016-2020. By the time I left I hadn't turned on that old desktop in months (unless I had to do some windows specific dev work) and could do nearly everything from the mac.
The Metaverse is just a mmo, except some of the characters are real, the world is a parallel of ours, the bad guys are whoever is trending as a villain (good for engagement), and the quests are ads.

The end goal would be primarily to have this digital world leak over to the real one as much as possible, having untold profound influences on human life

The negativity is because it will be awful if they succeed.

Imagine logging in to your job via this metaverse or some small country using it for voting in 50-100 years, or not being able to take part in conversations because you are not logged in to your ar.

Imagine the data collection and potential for manipulation and censorship in the distant future
Just gotta say: I was really expecting to not like this batched format but actually it seems kind of okay.
I think it's an important point.

To kinda bounce of your comment and replies, no, I don't think the SAT is racist in any way.

However, I don't think it's a particular useful metric by itself.

I had a near perfect SAT score (sans all this private tutoring people are talking about), but was an absolutely terrible college student. Just wasn't for me, and despite trying twice, I never really got anywhere. I wish I hadn't spent the money. And I hope I didn't prevent someone who was truly more motivated an opportunity in doing so.
The Roomba sure is good at (pardon me) sucking up personal data.
This statistics simply proves that Tesla drivers know when it's safe to activate autonomous driving.
Make it self driving 100% of the time under all lighting and weather conditions and then compare the numbers.
What if the horizon of time we look at appears linear, but if we have "zoomed out", we would have noticed a non-linearity?

The same way as the Earth appears largely flat to the observer standing on it, but from space it is clearly an oblate spheroid.
The top students will remain the top students. The Asian kid who would have gone to UC but now goes to Cal Poly will graduate and completely kick the ass of the UC kid who got in through “holistic” means.
Vatican isn’t a nation. It’s a country, created by Mussolini. It was never a real nation, only a bribe to convince the Church to not interfere with “fight against communism”.
I first learned Linux (and C) on a SparcStation LX back around 2005 with Debian. I had it fully kitted out with 9.1GB SCSI Hard Drive, 128MB RAM. I sold it around 2011 for $300 and thought that was a lot. Now I see them going for 3x that amount and I wish I'd kept it.
Big thing is (present day) you blow a fuse. So it's not total infrastructure destruction.

"In the opening days of Desert Storm, modified tomahawk cruise missiles were used against Iraq. The warheads were made up of bomblets that contained spools of carbon fiber wire"

https://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/the-weapon-that-d...
Note that for the opposite use case, knowing the bird yet wanting to hear its sound, there's this:

https://www.xeno-canto.org/
shoutout to DecSync (https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync) to use Syncthing with your CalDAV/CardDAV contacts/calendars/tasks and sync local RSS feeds across devices. I don't really use nextcloud anymore for stuff that is only for myself and does not need to be shared
Or, it's priced at market -- within 10% of Azure, GCP, and Alibaba, and not the highest priced among them.
He grew up in London so it makes sense! I'm always happy (or sad, maybe) when I get to see Ottawa in the b-roll
What a ridiculous assertion. No wonder they make such crap UIs at Tesla. Elon doesn't think much of his fellow humans, does he? We can't drive. All our inputs are errors. And we shouldn't be living on this planet. Wrong on all three counts.
I'm not sure of any state universities using a lottery, but some do automatically admit the top N% of students from every high school. For example, U of Texas admits the top top 6% or every high school.
Some people in America don't like SAT's because of "disparate impact"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
1729 was also Ramanujan’s taxi number

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Hardy-RamanujanNumber.html
Not with vision based autonomous sensors.
This is maybe the best reason to allow autodrive. We need to let it learn because it will get better. Whatever we pay now in terms of lives lost is made back in the future, in lives saved.

All depends on our faith in the system getting better of course. There's always going to be dissatisfying things surrounding it.

Gotta be up front about the state of the art though, can't let people sell a thing like it's the finished item.
> IMHO, using grades is worse than testing

Empirically, grades are more predictive of college outcomes than test scores. Both are pretty artificial though, and cause various kinds of perverse incentives.
By the way, I stumbled at a gorgeous HD intro [1] for the Dig, apparently made by some talented guy.

Now I badly want a real HD remake of the actual game.

[1]: https://youtu.be/xHJlIhpNS2I
I'm an extremely unimpressive Asian male and I got into my state's flagship, which is considered a public ivy according to the 1985 list [0]. If going to a state school is beneath these people (and therefore, even associating with people like me is beneath them) then perhaps I'm perfectly fine with them feeling a tiny bit of discomfort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#Original_list_publi...
Coaching and tutoring has diminishing returns. Simply having done the practice test before the actual one would both significantly boost the score while reducing the anxiety. The tricks are not hard to learn, and practice tests are cheap to buy (or borrow from library). SAT is (was) probably the cheapest way to boost admission chance for a poor student compared to extracurricular, competitions, volunteering, etc. Those with money always have an advantage, but standardized test like SAT is probably the most egalitarian, as everyone has to take the tests by themselves in a controlled environment.
Both scenarios can be true. FB could be at the forefront of AR/VR with Oculus and maybe related things like Identity. And on the social network side, they could be a in a slow decline. My bet is something more akin to AOL/Yahoo rather myspace, where the remain relevant in certain niches (older people more focused on the legacy experience, mom & pop stores that currently use facebook pages as their webfront, etc ...). That said, it seems entirely likely that they would make an acquisition like instagram once one gains traction and stay relevant that way.
That's why I said 'sell' instead of 'provide'.
It works well in print if tuned to the printing technology, as originally designed. You should be able to adjust it (again, as designed) for the print technology you are using.

Most common typefaces are useless for mathematics, so it's a bit of an oranges and apples comparison anyway.
Lanes in heavy snow covered roads are more of a suggestion. You can either drive on the bare 'wagon tracks' of road, or on the proper lane (that you can't even see) with 6-12 inches of snow on them.

Often when driving like this, you see a glimpse of the middle-yellow line inside one of the wagon tracks, and you realize that you're actually driving in part of the other lane. Fortunately the opposing traffic's wagon tracks are also shifted so that they're driving partially on the shoulder.

A GPS guided car would make a mess of the wagon track pattern that all the humans decided to just go with.
> But it is a software problem.

There is a software authoring problem (which is where the ML bits are crucial).

If we had to program all robots like we had to with CNC machines, then programming them would be a high skill problem, even if we throw a lot of tools at it.

I can work my way through a Tormach, but is that really what I want to spend time with? The ultra low level specification of what I need done?

I'd love a pedal based training system with something like "Identify", "Orient", "Place", "Count", "Test" to teach it things in steps & get a program out of the demonstration (that donut computer vision project was amazing, because it showed you didn't really need ML to do these things).

Like we have people who are demonstration learners, I wish I could do something like that of going from many scenarios to a final one and have the robot to dissect every one of my actions into a flow-chart of its own.
Researches demonstrate that malware can be hidden inside AI models
Well, I cant bet money that figure is wrong. Sigh.

How on earth do these so call "consultant" do their home work.
Not exactly a sympathetic character...

From Wikipedia: "In 2016, he was fired from the Tor team for attempting to sell de-anonymized Tor2web traffic."
Tesla has spent about $8.5B on R&D in the past decade. Of course, not all of that was spent on FSD, but let's assume it was.

Let's also assume our hypothetical public transport is built in San Francisco. San Francisco recently spent $1.5B on a 1.7 mile subway line. It will also take a decade from when work begun to its opening next year.

That works out to be a 9.7 mile subway that opens in 2032.
Facebook is becoming "Buy-n-Large" from "Wall-e". The prescience of that movie is more evident every year since it was made.
> I have no idea why only america has issues with standardized tests...

The United States has issues with standardized tests because (1) its black population performs very, very badly on them, while (2) official policy is that the black population should enjoy outcomes such as college admission or job offers that are in line with its share of the total population, not with performance against objective metrics.

Note that communist societies had the analogous problem; whenever they implemented standardized testing, class enemies filled the ranks of top scorers.
One place I worked at did, by policy (D. E. Shaw & Co.).

It was also the place with the densest collection of high-achieving, highly intelligent colleagues that I’ve ever experienced.
The exact situation with the moons coloration changed by atmospheric conditions and being in just the right location over a long straight road to trigger this on a long stretch of straight road is probably quite rare. The software eventually does reject it as not a yellow light, only to change it’s mind back to the moon. I am wondering if this relates to the image classification system starting over from scratch regularly for some reason.
Is it vocal also or only instrumental (hopefully)?
OEMs also shipped Vista on laptops with as little as 256MB of RAM, where the silly thing was immediately deep into swap space (on a slow 4200 or 5400 rpm 2.5" spinning hard drive) immediately after booting. It was the most excruciating experience.
High calibre students not only help the university's rankings, but also other students. A few of my courses had absolutely terrible lecturers, but we managed to more or less learn the material from each other.
Grades are very subjective, especially with oral exams.
> Could it be because black culture highly values sports and black kids tend to spend more time than the average kid playing sports due to parental or cultural influence?

Americans love meritocracy and hard work when it comes to sports, and can't stand it when it comes to academics and the resulting income.
Sounds an awful lot like Positive Train Control, which has a hard enough time keeping communication up with just one vehicle per track section. You're not going to get very many nines of uptime when dealing with electronics exposed to the environment.
You really gunning for that QA job, are you ?
Debian Bullseye release planned on 2021-08-14
I'm personally convinced at this point that most everyday distinctions between living and dead are arbitrary human categorizations. Even a "dead body" is teaming with life. As far as "inanimate matter" is concerned, all matter is ultimately part of a plethora of various different cycles and processes of transformation and recapitulation... even if something temporarily looks like it's static to us and our meager little narrow timeframe of experience, it's not.

Just to clarify, I don't mean that these distinctions are meaningless, just that their meaning is inherently embedded in human experience.
Getting out more data than bandwidth allows is a information theoretical impossibility. Your proposal has the flaw that it needs one pass per bit in the block on average.
I was commenting on your post which you claimed this had to do with sexual orientation. This has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation. If the priest was straight and been using Tinder instead of Grindr to hookup with woman it wouldn't make a difference to the story. If instead of anything related to sex this had been stealing or something it wouldn't make a difference.

That is all I said. You jumped to the conclusion I was implying something I didn't say. You need to be more cautious about properly interpreting other's speech.

The fact your are continuing to claim that this had to do with sexual orientation in this post indicates you don't understand what I was saying. The reason this exploded is not because he is gay. There are a lot of gay priests.

The next issue is this priest was not just a regular diocesan priest. He was a very prominent priest who was part of the United States bishop's conference. He held a role in misconduct investigations. This makes it a very public (US wide) not just a parish / diocese issue.

I am not sure why you are bringing up the state. It makes no sense in any context of what we are talking about. I haven't said anything about the state or legality of this issue.
I would rather reconcile this rumour to this patent filed last year about a “Peer-to-peer distributed computing system for heterogeneous device types”

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/09/08/apple-researching...
Meh, I'll use the Mozilla VR OS with uBlock 2040 on it
What Was the Earliest Music?
I've posted it above, but it deserves one more: a gorgeous HD intro for "The Dig"

https://youtu.be/xHJlIhpNS2I
Is *that* why Hytale hasn't been released yet?
My high school GPA was very bad, my SAT was "good enough to get in", and my university GPA was excellent, showing that I was now an adult and taking things seriously.

No SAT, no admission, I think would have been the case for me.
That sounds like motivated reasoning to me.

I would think someone who goes on to found a hedge fund would understand that if you drastically lower the cost of something which produces a valuable result, the effect should be to increase the demand for that value, not just shrug and say "no, we only do 1 of those per day".
The idea of AI and mathematics as a whole is to compute and do what is humanly impossible. It's expected that self driving means not just superhuman but almost perfect.
> The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020

This is incorrect (despite the citation).

Federal tax collection in 2020 was about 16% of GDP

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

The OECD reports "The tax-to-GDP ratio in the United States has decreased from 28.3% in 2000 to 24.5% in 2019."

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...

For comparison, the weighted average in other OECD countries is about 34%.
Is it really a gag order if it is a “preservation letter” from the US Marshalls? No court gave any order here, as far as I can read the article.

What would have happened had they not complied?
It seems like a pure improvement if they're still preserving the microfilms. Any digital form can be copied indefinitely without degradation; microfilm can't. And a library of digital copies is enormously cheaper than a library of microfilm.

A reasonable source for film costs might be http://www.matthewwagenknecht.com/the-actual-costs-of-film/ which says 16mm (color) movie film is US$197 for a 400-foot roll. That would be enough for 12000-20000 A4-sized pages at typical microfilm linear reduction ratios of 20-25, so about 1¢-1.5¢ per page. Black-and-white or diazo film might be a little cheaper, but probably not more than a factor of 2. Microfilm stock might actually be more expensive (finer grain, lower-volume product?)—does anybody know?

By contrast, a page of ASCII text is about 4KB, or 1.2KB if gzipped (which, yes, could create risks to accessibility). A new 2TB disk costs US$45. So making a copy of the transcriptions these volunteers created costs 0.000003¢ per page. For the price of a single 400-foot roll of 16mm film, capable of holding tens of thousands of pages, you can buy five 2TB disks, which can hold 1.7 billion pages each, and put a copy of your corpus to be preserved on each one.

If we're looking at preserving scans of the pages, well, I have a PDF scan of Volume 3 of Dr. Dobb's Journal here from the Internet Archive. The pages are scanned at 2550×3300 (300 dpi) in grayscale, which is considerably better than any quality I've ever seen on library microfilm, and the 484 pages weigh in at 232MB, 500 kB per page. So a US$45 2TB disk can only hold 4 million pages scanned at this sort of archival quality, a cost of 0.001¢ per page. That's still literally a thousand times cheaper than microfilm.

Hard disks have some real problems with longevity: paper will last 1000 years if well-treated, microfilm will typically last a century (though it tends to get scratched if used, and nearly all microfilm is acetate rather than PET, so many microfilms succumb to vinegar syndrome in only a couple of decades), but disks tend to develop problem with stiction in only 10-20 years, and they wear out and fail catastrophically sooner than that if they're in use. Right now the strategy is to copy the digital data to new media every few years, and try to use archival file formats.

So we need to do much, much better. But the costs are now so low that a hobbyist can put ten thousand scanned books in their pocket; in an afternoon they can make a digitally-perfect, checksummed archival copy of a thousand books, using a couple of dollars of disk space and BitTorrent. In the microfilm age that would have been impossible for anyone but a librarian, and a nontrivial cost for the library.

You sound like you might be interested in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/archival.html, which discusses ways to improve archival, especially digital archival. I think there are some straightforward approaches to
> All the best colleagues I've worked with aced the SAT and/or other standardized tests

I did not do well on my SATs (1500/1600) - do you think there's any way to make up for this? Or am I supposed to be as unimpressive as I was at 17 forever?
> But "why are manhole covers round?" is not. It's a stupid "have you ever heard this clever fact" question that's often designed just to figure out if you're clever and/or lucky vs testing actual knowledge and skill.

I once had this interview question, gave them the expected answer, and cited the source of that answer. I never did get that job.

I am going to take your claim a step further and assert that this type of question can only reliably test cleverness if the interviewee is properly primed (e.g. there was a prior discussion of workplace safety), then the important thing is explaining why. Otherwise the only way to arrive at the answer is to realize that construction/maintenance workplaces place a high priority on safety. That isn't the type of thing you're likely to think about during an interview for a programming position.
I absolutely agree with your entire comment. The system must be taught, but everyone must participate to the best of their ability. Can't mess it up, there are people we haven't even met yet who are counting on us, collectively, to do better.