skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve found on most topics I know something, the top comment is usually a random guess in the dark. They don’t know what they’re talking about and actively harm understanding of the issue. The standard HN top comment will have no grounding in facts but will simply assume the worst intent possible of everyone involved. This cynicism is mistaken for wisdom.

Of course I see a lot of wisdom on HN threads discussing subjects I’m not familiar with … but only because I can’t tell the difference between cynicism and wisdom in those cases.

You’re frustrated that someone would comment on a thorny legal issue while having no understanding of the law or knowledge of the specifics of NAFTA. But that’s how it is on every thread not related to software. See the hundreds of threads where software engineers suddenly became expert epidemiologists overnight for an example of this phenomenon.

I’m not sure what the alternative is. Certainly it isn’t just keeping quiet and not discussing anything we’re not experts in. Maybe sometimes it’s ok to speculate just for fun.
Can you share what did you do with the students that could not do algebra physics and chemistry in junior high?

I’ve always thought yours was the right way. There are some students which will do the minimal but will manage if challenged. Seems the equitable way leaves them behind.
How to Check Your Spam Folder in Gmail and Outlook
Sample problem for K-1 [1]:

"Jane fills a bag with three types of chips. There are 3-point, 4-point and 7- point chips. Jane picks 3 chips worth 15 points. Which chips did she pick?"

Sample problem for grades 5-6 [2]:

"Pinocchio drank half a cup of black coffee. He then filled the cup back up with milk and drank one third of the mixture. Again he filled the cup to the top with milk, drank one sixth of the mixture and filled it back to the top with milk one final time before he drank the whole cup. Did he drink more coffee or milk?"

[1]https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/981338/Blog/Element...

[2]https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/981338/Blog/Middle_...
Find local variables in the traceback for an exception – Simon Willison’s TILs
"Covered by the media" is a stretch: Murdoch has been hard at work ignoring all of it.
Should I wipe my MacBook before repair?
I need to take my MacBook Pro in for repairs. It looks like it needs a new battery.

I am concerned about the security of my accounts and the information I have on the computer. A Time Machine backup + factory reset[0] seems to address those concerns.

Would be curious to learn other people thoughts/recommendations.
—
[0]https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/11/how-to-factory-reset-macbook-pro/
Recent trend to dumb down math and calling 'racist'. Unfortunately it will be immigrants (like I was), that will suffer the most. Most immigrants are poor, and don't have the connections and money to go to private tutoring route and rely heavily on public education.

Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan
https://forums.somd.com/threads/virginia-dumbing-down-educat...

Educational malpractice in the name of ‘equity’
By Post Editorial BoardApril 30, 2021 | 6:14pm | Updated

https://nypost.com/2021/04/30/educational-malpractice-in-the...
> 6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.

I've always felt that cars are already like this. I don't know much about cars, but I know that there's a wide range of conditions that can cause the "check engine" light to be lit, all of varying degrees of severity. If computers were like cars, instead of an error dialog with a googlable error code, a single "check computer" light would appear on your keyboard, and you'd need a $100 hardware debugger to find out what actually happened.

God forbid your computer suffers a second error while the "check computer" light is on. You'd never know because there's only one light.
Likely because as the Twitter thread demonstrates, most non-geeks don’t know what Find My is or how it works, and they don’t care to learn about it.
> Fast forward ten years

My laundry list for GPT-4 is:

- multi-modal - image + text + other modalities

- multi-task - the training data should include all useful supervised datasets and knowledge bases besides next token prediction

- longer context window

- using external search and an external memory bank - so it is up to date without retraining, and has episodic memory

This kind of general model could be hooked up to a virtual body and trained on a diverse set of RL tasks, the problem is that it's probably too slow for real time use.
> "understanding" or something. But they can't say exactly what it is.

Umm, you just said it yourself, understanding. The model has no clue whatsoever what any of the output means, just that it scores good.

I don't understand Japanese. But given enough time and feedback I can try all the possible combinations of sounds I can come up with and answer a question in Japanese till I get a satisfying feedback from the Japanese speaker (ex: his facial expression) that asked the question. Is this satisfactory as for speaking Japanese in your opinion?
That's exactly the codec that I had in mind when I wrote that. Regardless, MP3 is overkill, and 10Kbps is still a small fraction of what MP3 would use (the lowest MP3 bitrate iirc is 32kbps, which is still more than three times as large). Besides that, MP3 just isn't tuned for voice applications.
You are so close to understand the issue. When Google, or anyone else, is flagging it and sharing the result with, e.g., law enforcement you can have a problem. Apple will no just simply refuse to upload stuff that would be flagged in the cloud, it is flagging it already before upload on your device. And share the results with authorities. That for now they claim to only do so with stuff about to be uploaded is of minor concern, the tech is there to scan all the pictures on an iPhone now. No reason to believe it will stop with intended uploads, or pictures.
You can pop on Amazon and get a cell phone goes tracker that’s more reliable for not much more.
Orbital refueling is probably the most practical answer in the short run.
This seems to imply "the government" is some single minded entity. Anyone who has had to deal with "the government" knows that it is rare that the same department can stick to a purchasing strategy.
I was quoting Office Space, I didn't literally mean I had a disagreement with PC
> These things were intended to be shared and enjoyed.

Were they? Like, is that actual historical truth that author intended that?
This is a way over simplistic view. It's not a CIV game where someone decides what "China/Han" should do for all these thousands of years. People's minds change, sometimes the people themselves change, accidents happen. You don't have to find some hidden "truth" that goes back 3000 years to explain what China today does.
Probably best to start with the Bronshtein - Semendyayev: Handbook of Mathematics. It's still widely used in a lot of slavic speaking countries. Google it, there's a pdf available.
Actually for Germany, the costs for sending an SMS with Twilio is 9 ct. If I’m not mistaken, that is 10x more than what it costs in the US.
Still unusably bad. First load performance is vital, and a very large number of visitors come without cached files. It's going to get worse as the battle between privacy tools and ad networks intensify.

I totally agree with you on pruning dependency trees though.
Romanian here, the "I learned this when I was 9" might have been a slight exaggeration so that your friend could make a point, but as an another anecdata I can say that I distinctly remember one of my first calculus classes while I was in 9th grade (I think I was 15 years old at the time) and our maths teacher trying to explain to us how real numbers are defined and, more importantly, what that definition really means. That class/hour stood with me ever since, even though 25 years have passed.

But truth be told it very highly depended on the quality of the math teachers. I was lucky enough to get into one of the best high-schools in my town so that we got a really good maths teacher, but the teacher "quality" was not that uniformly distributed across different schools.
Physics and engineering though are absolutely full of interesting effects we observed first though, then hypothesized as to why. University level physics labs are almost wall to wall "observe the original effect that was weird" as a result.
> Apple is doing this because they believe they'll make more money this way

And possibly, as mentioned in an earlier post on HN, as a defense against Anti-trust litigation.
Do you want to perform some serious stunts on tracks and endless traffic, then this extreme car driving simulator crazy stunt game is the best option for you.
What's wrong with pictures of the police?

Also, a big concern that people have is what the Chinese government will want to be censored. Researchers in the US can investigate that without fear.
Yeah, no.

Apple products aren't that popular outside of Western countries ( and the US in particular).

Take India for an example - the iOS market share is a paltry 3.2% for 2019. Ukraine, 13%. Nigeria, 6%. I highly doubt those users are nicely spread to give you full coverage everywhere and not cluttered in the bigger cities and their more affluent parts.

Heck, even France is with 23%, that could easily leave significant gaps in coverage.
Wikipedia and community wikis also centralized (drained?) a lot of knowledge that might have otherwise existed on separately hosted sites linked through webrings.
28$ lasts 6 months similar size https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07N4DHFZM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i...

They get smaller and better the more you pay. Gps cell trackers are cheap and prolific
Vodafone to bring back roaming charges from January
Hmm, you're right. This was a comment made to me about a decade or so ago, when this person was at, or had just left, Liddell power station. It was definitely gamed in the way I described - the best coal went into the one burner that was actually monitored - and I'm guessing I since assumed that to mean brown went into the other three.

Referring to http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_f...

- it looks like NSW has a range of coal qualities being mined, and I'm sure even slight deltas in price, at the quantities we'd be looking at for a power station that size, would reward this behaviour.
Hydrogen airships are terrible against any kind of attack. They are so slow and flammable that one can bring them down with just a flying toy. I'm not even talking about incendiary ammunition. You would not put people or expensive cargo on a low and slow flying bomb in 21 century.
Mozilla’s UA String experiment to check if Firefox version 100 breaks websites
How far could a spaceship go if we never ran out of thrust? (2020)
I studied in a top school in Moldova which follows a curriculum whose foundation was defined during the Soviet union times, so could be pretty close to the Russian curriculum. Just as an idea, in grade 10-11 I was studying limits, complex numbers, derivatives, grade 12 was dedicated to integrals and solving problems with them. Math got progressively harder starting with grade 5. I remember I was filling about 2-3 notebooks of 48 pages (little squares pattern) per semester with homework and in-class class problem solving. We always had homework to do, and often it would take me hours to come up with a solution to the more difficult problems that would give me a 10 (grade A+). My nephew who finished grade 4 has no homework (Canada), but I remember my grade 4 I had so much homework for each subject (math, French, Romanian, geography, arts, etc). Heck, in grades 1-4 we even had summer homework, which were books containing exercises for various subjects, and I remember that vividly because I hated to do homework in the summer. I'm quite sure that good Russian school are also quite intense..
Add Nimbus client code for “Firefox/100.0” UA string experiment
I quite enjoyed it (but I'm also a sucker for bad puns).

I highly encourage to follow the links to all the references listed at the end of chapters. Some of the more silly, outrageous or wtf objects, names, events, descriptions don't even do justice to the insanity of real things.
I believe that too, and believe that companies (handwavy) are looking forward to permissive open source licenses becoming de rigeur so that they can build and bundle projects cheaply without contributing back (proprietary-style hacks behind closed doors will suffice to ship; production costs reduce, and, strategically, air -- developer time -- to the FOSS ecosystem becomes gradually easier to stifle).
I don't know if it's that, but for me math "clicked" when in 2nd class of primary school in Poland we had a whole year of solving intuitive math problems. Basically linear equations of 1 or 2 variables, but that was without knowing what any algebra or even what a variable is - we started with only basic addition and multiplication.

Teacher asked us (one by one) to describe how we would arrive at the answer to problems and why that way. Sometimes it would be a contest - who guesses the answer first and that person gets to explain the process and bask in the glory of being the smartest kid ;). And then we were shown how to write that solving process as equations and practiced changing from problems to equations and vice versa.

At the end of the year most kids understood algebra.
Interactive Machine Learning Experiments
> One of the challenges climate activists face is determining who exactly is to blame for the climate crisis,

No. Even though researching these power plants is valuable to find low effort / high reward actions, blaming buildings is almost as bad as blaming each individual separately with carbon footprints. Both are diversions meant to make people not look closely at colonial fossil capitalism.

The problem is systemic and only system level solutions can be effective.
Apple have stated that air tags are for locating lost items only, not for stolen items. If the beeping makes it difficult to recover your stolen items, you’re holding it wrong.
Teaching might be (or might have been) a prestigious and relatively well-paying job in Albania. I wouldn't know - would you?
Dunno how old you are but back in the analog cellphone days I had my mom's clunky old flip phone lying around, I was 14 or so and followed some instructions off a BBS. If you put a piece of tin foil between two of the battery contacts you could get the phone into debug mode and you could punch in any channel number and just listen in on it. I lived near a freeway, so I would spend hours in the backyard eavesdropping on people's conversations as they drove by and faded in and out of range. You had to be quiet, because if they were close enough to pick up your signal they could hear you too. Dudes arguing with their wives, drug deals, it was quite an education. The shortwave radio receiver my parents bought me as a birthday present gathered dust in the closet.
Here you go: https://www.noodle.com/articles/let-s-get-rid-of-special-edu...

Inclusive classrooms raise scores of the lower performing students. That's probably true.

It glosses over what it does to people on the other end of the spectrum.

As someone from the other end of the spectrum, growing up never having to put any effort, having few or no peers close to my level, and being constantly encouraged by the people around me to do poorly for curves etc... I can say I developed life long development/psychological problems as a result, and the idea that I or anyone in the future like me should be slowed down so everyone is more equal is deeply offensive.
> scan for messages critical of Xi and the boys.

I see what you did there. Touché.
So it is a language with single-character symbols for the most common array operations like map, filter etc.

I think the article tries to make it sound more mysterious and groundbreaking than it really is.
Not sure you understand how wars and diplomacy work. Remember how 9/11 strongly discouraged global American military and economic power? Neither. Or how Germany was justly punished into submission for causing WWI. They really were humbled into not starting any more wars weren't they?
Yup, see my reply to the sibling comment made at about the same time as yours.

I've mucked up with the brown coal assumption (mining and power generation are not my thing) but I don't doubt the accuracy of the report from my engineer friend that the highest quality coal they shipped in went into the one burner that was carefully monitored, and the cheapest / lowest quality material went into the others.
2020 Tesla Impact Report [pdf]
Yeah, some of it leads me to question if the exciting story has been embellished a tad.

But it's still an exciting story of vigilance and good life lessons. Who doesn't like that?
> There's been no statement that this is going away. Implementing this functionality with E2EE backups seem highly problematic.

No more problematic than WhatsApp offering WhatsApp web (web.whatsapp.com) or Signal offering its desktop client while being fully end-to-end encrypted and routing communications through the phone.
no, nothing.
Not sure about these after-class schools, but I can compare my ex-ussr school and uni education with math or CS undergrad textbooks I read a lot in English these day. Not sure about early education though.

1. Russian math books are straight to the point, superconcrete. Hard to read in a linear fashion but very useful when student is serious about going through it ("Problems in mathematical analysis" by Demidovich is a perfect example, Mark Vygodskiy's "Elementary Mathematics Reference").

2. In most textbooks I remember nobody tries to build a dumbed down explanation of things. This might lead to the book being harder to understand without teacher's help. I remember how some American undergrad-level introductory math analysis books were trying to skip proofs, avoid certain details, giving too many intuitive explanations ().

3. Mid and late school math is pretty advanced, especially when compared to US typical level.

These days I live in UK. Kids go to school early here: 4-5 years. My daugther is 6 and is comfortable with trivial math. I've read a few secondary school textbooks and they feel quite ok.

So maybe this is a US problem.

EDIT: a few example books added
I also wrote an explainer for VQGAN here: https://ljvmiranda921.github.io/notebook/2021/08/08/clip-vqg... to coincide with the growing interest in these models
> There really shouldn't be two standard package managers for JS.

Yarn made npm move in the right direction. Like in any other area, we need competition.
Yes it's slow to build today, though it hasn't always been the case: France once built 56 reactors over 15 years [0].
Yes it's expensive, but once again, this isn't a feature of Nuclear power, but one of the capitalist (or at the very least neoliberal) system it is built into: 60% of the Hinkley point C costs are due to the mode of financing (not 100% public) [1].
The real question is not whether this or that type of electricity generation is better (although it's also an important question), but rather how we can completely redesign our socio-economic system to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels (hint: global logistics are far from electrified), reduce emissions from the agricultural sector (we do need to eat), etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
[1] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/hinkley-point-c/
I've been living abroad for almost six years, I've been working remotely, and for the visa I've needed for where I've wanted to be I do not need a local bank account (I can renew every year or every two years which is the most they allow for foreigners anyways).

I don't use credit cards and never had. When I need fiat, I swap with "friends" locally who want crypto or who do have accounts (they "shill" crypto brokerages on television stations shows [and their ads on other show slots] in the country i'm in and there are more local users of crypto than people who actually have regular brokerage accounts to trade local stocks in the country). And there are local websites where I can actually pay for bills with crypto but I see no real need to when its relatively easy for me to get cash (cash top ups for alot of apps that can be used to pay for lots of things from bills, goods/services and food). Any brokerage accounts I've had (IB and robinhood), I've long drained the funds/liquidated assets and these days I'm really only exposed to what I can trade on a dex.

Other foreigners I've talked usually jump through some hoops to have a local "agent" to set up accounts for them that they have control over, but i cannot be bothered. Less exposure to bailoutistan, the better.

To use crypto, you need to find someone else who will swap for it, and over the past 10 years, that has increased enough for me to be ok with the work arounds. May not be ok for the way you want to live your life, but it works for me.

One day i'll be "stateless", but a lot more work to happen on that front with many others for that to come into fruition… ;)
In some places in the US it may be a funding issue, but in most places it’s not.

Take Baltimore for example. The public schools are very well-funded by any standard. And yet they have several high schools that didn’t produce a single student proficient in math.

https://www.k12dive.com/news/several-baltimore-schools-repor...
I enjoyed this a lot (best book in years for me). There is also an audio version available which is also really good. Thank you Scott Alexander!

I found it unique in many ways and would love to hear if people know more similar books.
Think thats a still from <<The Crown>> and not a pic of the actual ‘snake/senex’
you might find this video amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8SER24F0U8
It’s about the gödel incompleteness theorem. I think it’s fair to say that’s as big a flaw in math as flaw gets.

It says there are things in math that are true but unprovable, and we can’t know if it’s unprovable.
SwiMP3. It's a music player for underwater activities.
It enables me to listen to audiobooks and podcasts while I swim, which makes this workout much more enjoyable and fun, as swimming can become boring once you do it every day for an hour.
And that is why there is the patch workflow. Did you not read the article?
> In itself that's a sign that we live in a world where our consumption of resources has to be restricted. This is a lowering of quality of life.

Yes. The point is that the lost quality of life some experience by going vegetarian (full disclosure: I have not managed to, I've only cut my meat consumption in half) is far smaller than the one everyone will experience if this climate change runs amok.

> So, we can only eat plant-based food. We cannot travel. We need to live in small flats in megacities. We can only use mass transit, etc. This ends up being 1984 meets The Matrix as I commented somewhere else.

I didn't say this. Yes, travel needs to be shifted to renewables. And yes, cities are probably better than rural living.

> Shouldn't the objective be that every human enjoy life while preserving the environment? Have a large garden, have pets (someone commented that they should be banned), travel to see the world? I think it's better to have fewer of us with better quality of life and able to enjoy a thriving environment.

Great secondary objective! We need to find a way to do it that doesn't make us miss our primary one: prevent catastrophic climate change. I think we can do it.
How old is grade 10-11? I always get confused with these as each country numbers grades differently
Can't take this serious. The "Hu Line" is massively inconsistent in the various maps used here!

In the topographical one, Sichuan is west of the Hu-Line, while in others it is east of it. Make up your mind.

Don't fuddle with the line just to tell a story.