skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I very much struggled with discipline and motivation at university and eventually dropped out. It was not until I started working when I became a highly motivated self-driven learner. Now I love studying and learning (and teaching), but I do it at my own pace and I choose the things that matter for my work or are just plain fun.

Looking back a decade later, it would have been very beneficial if I didn't go to university but instead did an apprenticeship and developed from there, built up confidence and independence incrementally and forming my path iteratively.

Most of my friends and family actually went (are going) on such a path, from apprenticeship/trade-school to working and eventually advanced training or university later in life.

In Switzerland this model is widely appreciated and seems to be the default (I didn't look at numbers). Newly the (first) apprenticeship is called "Erstausbildung" (initial education), implying that it is the first of many steps in our education, revisited/expanded at later stages in life.

In many other (OECD) countries this seems not to be the case and college/university is regarded as the default or thing to aspire to for everyone. I personally don't agree with that notion and have become more and more convinced of a more continuous and flexible education that isn't necessarily tied to academics.
>Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism.

So we shouldn't try to find out the truth, lest it be against our interests? That doesn't bode well at all.

The idea that racism is wrong because we all have equal capabilities is preposterous to begin with, why, you might as well justify sexism in that way.
Exactly. Sealand/HavenCo could Play their micronation thing right up until the UK cut their supply and comms links.

Does it raise the bar for bothering to do that? Sure. But it’s certainly not absolute protection.
No edge in technology lasts forever, and once a new design is out it's much easier for others to copy. The fact is M1 was a nasty shock to their competition and was the biggest single advance in desktop/laptop CPU performance and power efficiency in a long time. If that doesn't count as innovative, I suspect there's some shifting around of goal posts happening.
They didn't. They were compelled to start logging the IP of a specific customer.
As an academic matter, maybe. As something that we should make decisions based on, either as individuals or as a society, hell no. The benefit to society seems quite scant, but the risk of having such system taken over by a eugenicist is quite high.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point that for the given audience it's not appropriate to rigorously define the different sets of numbers.

However, I absolutely detest it when teachers just "sweep it under the rug", when they pretend that they just provided a definition when they evidently did not.

Like the commenter you replied to, this sort of stuff genuinely threw me off in high school and made me feel like I didn't understand mathematics.
Here in the US, the NEC specifies a one-foot separation for low voltage unless crossing at a perpendicular angle. Low voltage is generally a specialty, so a lot of electricians don’t know.

The bigger issue is that there are tons of electricians that never went through apprenticeships and who never picked up and read a copy of the code (which has major changes every three years). The result is a lot of cargo cult installation which may or may not actually be correct.
I also dislike companies that use the label 'Made in [country]' as a prominent hook to promise users they will get enhanced privacy - which may or may not be true. I'd rather they be honest and say: these are the examples when we must comply with the law and must hand over the following details.

We all need to make our own evaluation of the privacy promises of those services and whether they actually provide privacy above and beyond what other companies offer. We shouldn't rely on vague impressions that privacy is strong in company X merely because of their presence in a particular country (and which the company uses heavily for promotion).
Honeypot always was a honeypot
Fair point. The point still stands but in a weaker way though. Even people who say/claim they care make mistakes.

The idea is that contacts can still send you media without prior approval. Do their children never make mistakes? Do their spouses/gardeners/etc.?
A lot of people in the comments here are spinning it as if boys are being systematically discriminated against when the article explicitly says the opposite:

>>> “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” said Jennifer Delahunty, a college enrollment consultant

And many aren't even putting in the proper diligence:

>>> "Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered."
The push to vaccinate kids shows our moral compass is askew
Oh boy. People who know basic ML think "Oh, it was unintentional, just a basic misclassification, it happens." Guess what? You're still calling people slurs on your website, even if you did it accidentally.
If they really cared about anonymity ProtonMail would ship their mobile app with bundled TOR. Especially the mobile version, since plenty of non-tech savy people use mobile only.
I don't think you realize the danger some people are in in some countries just for performing what many would perceive as basic freedoms.
> I have been trying to get better at chess lately. I grew up playing it so I'm already fairly proficient, and I've been putting a decent amount of free time into studying openings and playing puzzles. Yesterday, I played my friend who hasn't played in literally years and never really played seriously anyway, and he beat me handily 3/3 games. I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master, no matter how much time I put in, because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.

Given the immense complexity involved with learning, there's essentially no way for you to describe the situation with enough detail for anyone to be able to make an informed judgement. It's extremely common for bad players to describe themselves as 'proficient', spending a 'decent amount of time' can mean anything, studying openings and playing puzzles is likely the wrong way to practice, the skill level of your friend is impossible to ascertain, etc.

The way you actually get better at anything is by:

1. Dedicating enough time to it, consistently (~20h per week or so maybe if you want any sort of quick results). The incredibly common trap here is that people think that spending time on a game equals getting better at it. There's no way to improve without spending a certain amount of time playing, but spending time playing does not make you better on its own.

2. Doing whatever it is you want to get good at (doing anything else does not count - if you want to learn how to play regular chess, play regular chess; puzzles or anything else does not count).

3. Reviewing your games to find mistakes you've made - this part is crucial, if you can't see any mistakes you made, you cannot improve. If that's the case, get someone better than you to review your game(s).

4. Playing while trying to work on addressing one mistake at a time, until you don't make it anymore.

Chess is actually really easy to improve in - fast, trivially repeatable games, chess engines, lots of learning resources, objective rating system.

> I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by 'chess master', but for example getting into the top 10% of players is pretty easy. You are indeed incredibly unlikely to be one of the best, because for that you will have to dedicate your entire life to playing chess. But unless you literally want to be one of the best (top 1%+ of players), genetics will not limit you. You may take more time to get to any given level than someone gifted with more working memory or whatnot, but it's still doable.

> because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.

Because of humans' limited memory and processing power, we play games not by exhaustively analyzing but via building simplified models and heuristics so I don't see why you'd need to 'keep the board in your head'.
There are plenty of people who build here on HN (more than most other sites) and the requirements are pretty clearly described in the article.

While it's not as simple as a Go program on a VPS, there is certainly a lot of unnecessary overhead here. I think you underestimate just how much poor and wasteful engineering there is out there.
The obvious questions being a) Why do they sell vpn ?, and b) Why is the web-email client not routed over vpn if it has any value whatsoever?

If they route all email over vpn, do they have to disclose the enduser's ip ? If so, how do they avoid that with standalone vpn ?
> the private platform argument

No part of what you said is an argument.

Do private platforms have unlimited latitude? If not, what are the underlying philosophies underlying current limitations, and can those be seen to imply that other limitations should be made? Should private platforms have unlimited latitude?

Those are discussions that could be had. "Private things are allowed to do whatever they want" is not only a thought-terminating cliché that avoids all ethical or tactical judgement, but a simple falsehood.
Does this apply to a country in which the police can seize money from the public during a traffic stop on a vague suspicion of it being illicit, and keep it with impunity? Country where people are advised “do not talk to the police”? Standards are different around the world, you know…
Euclid's postulates would now be called axioms, not definitions.
I find Sealand fascinating. Imagine founding an off-grid location as a data haven, and it got popular. What would happen? I can see covert operations from foreign governments happening for example, driven by copyright lobbyists. Would they then need to hire security forces or train their own armed forces? Would it eventually join global political organizations to influence and protect its position? It gets really interesting to think about.

There's no doubt in my mind there would be huge demand for such a thing. People hate that the government can spy on anything you do. The chilling effect is exhausting.
What, you mean those landing pages with that majestic snowy mountain doesn't automatically mean robust security and unparalleled privacy? My life has been a lie...
1st sentence - Explaining the tool for those the tool was made for without beating around the bush.

2nd sentence - Explaining the tool to folks in the general web domain what it can do for them.

3rd sentence - Explaining where to learn how to use the tool if you've stumbled across it but web is not your area of expertise.

All that info fits in nearly 25 words then it lists the options for the tool and jumps straight into multiple examples (with outputs!). If the only explanation had been "htmlq: like jq, but for HTML" I'd agree but having the comparison to explain what it does isn't a bad thing it's _only_ having the comparison that would be bad.

Personally I think this is a model example of a opening for a Github readme.
Which probably doesnt make sense to last 4 years. I assume this trend will lead to new types of certification
Well, yes and no. Currently, Swiss law doesn't support this and providing the IP is based on specific requirements for telecommunication providers as far as I know. But yes, the law could be changed. However, keep in mind that Switzerland is a direct democracy and people here frequently actually vote on such issues directly (if one can gather enough support from the public).
> Simple beats complex.
> Fewer moving parts equals less overhead.

Took me almost a decade to really comprehend this.

I used to include all sorts of libraries, try out all the fancy patterns/architectures etc...

After countless of hours debugging production issues... the best code i've ever written is the one with the fewer moving parts. Easier to debug and the issues are predictable.
The private sector has its share of issues, but be very careful assuming ownership by the state always serves the public interest.
> I think there is a market for datacenters in open seas.

That's what the Sealand [1] dudes thought.

Until a bunch of boats showed up loaded with men carrying rifles who simply took over the country.

And when that happens, who/where do you turn to to whine that someone took your thing?

That's what sovereignty means: you're on your effing own. For real this time.

One thing most people tend to forget about governments: they have the monopoly on physical violence.

That's the first, most important and probably only useful thing you pay taxes to your government for: physical security.

If you want to run a DC in open seas:

- buy a bunch of gunboats
- hire a small army to provide physical security
- try and not piss off any of the real countries lest they be the one showing up with many more gunboats than you may muster and take over the "open sea DC".
- your services won't be cheap: gunboats must be maintained, armies paid and fed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
I fail to see how a women being unable to open a bank account in the 60s, explains why a girl born in 2000, would not want to spend her time geeking on her computer trying to build a website, in 2012. But i'm all ears.
Why? What if they're working for a drug manufacturer trying to find a cure for cancer when they discover that one of the other drugs their employer creates is killing people, but that's being covered up because money. Should those people stop trying to cure cancer or just keep quiet about unnecessary deaths?

What happens if your job is to be a watch dog for oil rigs to make sure they're not polluting local waters or covering up spills? Some rough looking men tell you that you should forget some of what you saw in your last inspection? Should these types of jobs not exist?

What happens if you're just out for a walk late at night because you have insomnia? You just happen to see the chief of police up to some less than ideal actions at 3 in the morning in the park. How would changing your job even help in this scenario?

Sometimes people need to communicate something that could be a problem for their personal safety. And the rest of us as a society dearly need them to do it. And personally, I would like them to be able to do it while also costing them as little as possible. Because otherwise people tend to be quiet about things that should be known by all.
Encrypted email over an onion router (might even be TOR) would be no worse than Matrix over TOR for someone that needed anonymity on top of privacy. Since email can be done entirely offline, chances are that it would be better for the privacy:

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim
>It's extremely unlikely that genetics changed in 60 years, but environmentals did.

Due to epigenetics, environmentals actually shape genetics to a degree.
A few people have been experimenting with OS integration (e.g. Windows context menu), but IDK how far along those experiments are.

I've been experimenting with a web-based UI [0] for my Rust implementation of age, because I really wanted drag-and-drop but could not figure out how to persuade any Rust GUI libraries to do it ^_^;

[0] https://rage-encry.pt/
Weird ‘Accidental’ Star Could Help Reveal the Secrets of the Cosmos
And yet they said they didn't even know it was a climate activist so how could they really fight if it isn't simply technicalities they are fighting on? Again, they fail to provide transparency in what reasons those requests were rejected and sounds like more marketing spin.
Maybe, but I think it conflates two things: i) getting a college education and ii) the price of it. Maybe the price in the US just isn't right anymore.

At the same time, the "elites" do make sure their offspring does get a prestigious (signaling) college/university education. So baring big changes to how society is run, some things will be difficult to get to without a college education.
Today, i read somewhere while watching protonmail case comments, that switzerland has quite extensive surivellance laws which include possiblity of logging whole country inbound and outbound traffic for period of 6 months.
For secure communications it’s much better to use Signal than e-mail. (Preferably with disappearing messages.)

I understand that people desire the UX of an e-mail client such as Thunderbird, Mail.app, Gmail or whatever. Nothing wrong with wanting that. But there is currently no good way to send e-mail securely.
Do you think that the phone company should be allowed to ban women from using their lines?
SpaceX rolls Inspiration4 Falcon 9 rocket to the pad for historic launch
>The actual issue is they have to interview with people holding the same ignorant assumptions you do.

And then "helping them" with public assistance programs that have rules that are purpose built to incentivize familial instability.
What was the problem being solved by choosing such a strange stack? Can someone explain why this generation(of which I am part of) builds weird things? "Show HN: ARM16 kernel built using brainf*ck compiled on PDP-11", "Show HN: Lisp inspired language that uses the Chinese character for monkey instead of parentheses".

There are a lot of useful things to be build, but does everything has to be quirky in some form? Are we so limited in our imagination, that we decided the ultimate artistic achievement is to be "different", not good different, just weird different? I don't find it funny, I don't find this creative, it's just different for the sake of being different. We are, if I may use the term, in a baroque era of software development. Instead of going for efficiency, simplicity and extracting the essential, we go for the unusual, uncalled for, uncanny and unconventional.
Don’t more Americans have a 4-year university degree than Europeans?

OECD data seems to suggest so

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiar...
Bonds held by the Social Security trust fund have the same legal weight as bonds held by the public: defaulting on them would be a violation of federal law. The Treasury has no option to say “it’s only an internal IOU, we don’t feel like paying.”

Bonds held by government programs are real (not optional) demands on future government revenue. When Congress passes a budget each year, that budget has to cover all payments on outstanding debt, including intragovernmental holdings, not just those held by the public.

Social Security bonds, when redeemed, fund Social Security benefits, which go to real Americans. Defaulting on bonds held by Social Security would result in real reductions in income outside the government.
I _think_ this is a sincere comment speaking to the credibility of npr, so on that basis: I love npr, big fan... but they're just as fallible as other news organisations (or indeed, all organisations). They can be trustworthy, operate in good faith and make mistakes by failing to vet something to the extent required, they're not mutually exclusive.

https://www.npr.org/corrections/
It looks like this because it's C# and probably using standard UI frameworks instead of hot new buzzword tech or Electron.
Show HN: A task runner / simpler Make alternative written in Go
Truly a Historic Moment-NASA’s Perseverance Rover Collects First MarsRock Sample
I’m not that surprised that ProtonMail folded; as someone else said they’re not going to do jail for you. What’s concerning is the nature of this warrant and arrest. As far as I can tell all the articles haven’t mentioned any actual crimes; is France just straight up arresting climate activists now?
As far as door controls go, I really like Frictional Game's approach to controlling doors via an analog mouse motion as seen in the Penumbra and Amnesia series. Not only does this feel a bit more natural than having an animation play after clicking, you are also fully in control of how far the door is open at any time.
How did India’s Buddhists disappear?
Why start there? What about when they illegally seized the property of slaveholders?
Sorry for the rant but as a math lover this is terrible. In my experience "algebra 2" is taught for multiple years and is in my opinion the most boring soul crushing math I was taught. And I say taught because its forced into you with very few interesting observations and thinking. It focuses on memorizing formula's a procedures, which while these things have there applications I don't consider someone who can say y=mx+b or the a^2+b^2=c^2 knows much about math or more importantly engages with things in a mathematical way. I think there is this focus to produce calculators when you want thinkers and maybe and I hope this has changed in the last 10 years (age 24) but I feel like the American middle school level produces bad math habits and skills wrapped around solving test questions instead of thinking.
> I guess they gotta stop doing that then, huh?

Why would they? They get paid to put out crap, so they'll continue doing it.

Bottle water continues to come in plastic bottles, even though glass if far cheaper/easier to reuse or recycle. Plastic bottles are literally trash, yet it'll continue being produced if people keep buying it.

Near-disposable phones (both hardware and software) won't stop being manufactured if they continue being in high demand.
If we're following HN guidelines correctly, the title should be 'Dolphin Progress Report: August 2021' -- what has been submitted has been editorialised.
> Although its exact mechanism of action remains unclear [...]

Quote is from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482369/ , which has last been updated this year (or so it says). The studies quoted are from 2016 and 2009, so any real insight would have to be very recent.
As far as I can tell, this was about squatting in an unused commercial space that was once a restaurant. The spot had been damaged prior to the squatting and no renovations to fix it had started.

So, yes, a crime, but comparing it to Hans Reiser seems a bit over the top.
> Maybe the price in the US just isn't right anymore.

Has it be right since at least the 1990s though? There’s clear divergence between income and college costs in the USA, and it’s hard to see why, given everyone in the industry seems to be taking a part of the honey pot. Seriously, how did we arrive to “textbook for a semester are more expensive than tuition is in other counties”?
Even loopback is significantly slower than a direct method invocation.
What gives you the impression that Android security updates only involve Play Services and Chrome as opposed to the file system, bluetooth, wifi, CPU, and GPU stacks, or anything else? Do you have a reason for believing that any of the numerous drive-by Android remote code execution CVEs published since August 2019 can be mitigated without updating any of the vendor and kernel components that Google had to update to stop them?

Let's ask ourselves this basic question: If Play Services and Chrome could keep an Android Pie system secure, why does Google bother with a separate security patch date?

> Meanwhile there's a zero click iMessage exploit article still on the first page of HN.

Maybe because it's news and critical Android remote exploits are found often enough to not be news.