skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took the approach of just letting my students have unfettered access to the internet during the pandemic, even for exams. You may think this would lead to everyone getting an A, but it turns out the grades were normally distributed with a B- average, which was pretty typical for my courses per-pandemic.

What I did was ask them to write real code. It’s a course on programming. If you can get the computer to accomplish the given task in whatever way you know, including gluing together parts and libraries from online, then that’s a demonstration other learned something!

And as it turns out, C and D quality work is still submitted even when students have all the time and resources in the world. The internet is not a magic wand to solve all problems for you. For example, my final project is to write a file server. Yeah you can find tutorials for how to do this on the internet, but it’s still going to have to be customized to use my specific protocol. For someone who knows what they are doing, they can do this assignment in 10 minutes leveraging the right tools. For others, they might write it from scratch as we discussed in class. Others still will barely get past writing a makefile, even with step by step instructions and examples on how to do it. So in the end the grades worked out as they usually do, distributed normally with a B- average, and about half a letter grade stdev. That’s just the way it is.

So this fear that access to the internet will lead to rampant cheating is only relevant if the questions are easily gamed: like definitions, facts, and contrived math problems. Well it turns out this is like 90% of prepared materials for the low level intro classes.

I mean, if you can get through a number of semesters of college by looking up answers on Google, the problem is not with Google, it’s with the curriculum. Because what value are these courses really adding if they are just cramming facts into your brain and then you regurgitate them, and promptly forget?

Take chemistry for example. All of chemistry should be in a laboratory setting. All of it. It’s a perfect hands on discipline, yet the standard sequence is just year after year of memorizing facts and definitions with very little comparable lab time.

And I get why this isn’t done, it’s probably not practical and there does need to be an acquisition of fundamental knowledge, but that isn’t really done by going through prepackaged web content (that can’t be resold) with all the answers available on Chegg, as is the case for a great many 100 and 200 level courses in all major disciplines at most universities.
I agree it's very cool, but I have found it to be surprisingly poor in certain scenarios.

A "faint" circle will often score worse than 2 high-contrast parallel lines that happen to be the right distance apart, since the lines manage to trigger pixels along 20% of a circle's arc and their contrast massively inflates their score compared to the faint circle (higher edge pixel density).

It seems like there should be a simple way to weight the results by how dispersed within the circle's arc the pixels are, but I've never dug any further, after hitting this problem I had to move on.
> In continuing our commitment to strengthen and support publishers and a free press, a portion of the revenue from Twitter Blue subscription fees goes directly to publishers within our network.

I’m going to guess that I won’t find any NY Post stories about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop on this filtered platform.

Honestly this just sounds like a door fee for an echo chamber.
They want you to pay to join the toxic cesspool.
Not always true. Some data is intrinsically bigger than others.

If you have a petabyte of chatlogs, sure, you have 24x7 obligations to millions of people. If you have a petabyte of astronomy data, you have like 3 research scientists using it.
Canadian emissions have literally gone down the past couple or years, especially per capita
> We will most likely release free beta version next week.

Please resubmit when it's ready to be tested. Waiting lists are off-topic for Show HN https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
There's some basis. Executive Outcomes was in its day one of the premier private military contractors and formed largely out of outgoing military who served the regime. Any time a big organization gets downsized those people need to find jobs, at the same time there's a robust market for arms-length labor to take on dangerous and politically risky work. The US has probably been #1 for the last 20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Outcomes
One day in the mid 1980s we were checking the speeds available in our VT100 terminals. For fun we dropped it down to 150 to see what that was like. It was so slow that when you hit the delete key, you could watch it backspace, type a space, then backspace again.
Obviously true, but still on balance government-directed spending (especially outside the US, but even here too) is more likely to take long term goals like climate mitigation seriously. And the big picture changes, at the level of serious regulation, can only be done by governments.

If you have $20 to spend and want to do the least damage, give it to the government as tax, basically.
> Pyjion does not currently support with blocks.

> Pyjion does not currently support async..await (YIELD_FROM) statements.

Those are some major limitations for modern Python code.

https://pyjion.readthedocs.io/en/latest/limitations.html
Sure, there are lots of VPS and dedicated server providers that offer lots of bandwidth, but they're not playing the same game as the big cloud providers, or even fly.io, when it comes to auto-scaling, self-healing, multi-data-center deployments.
Nice, more money for the police.
Y'all are making "buy an asset tag printer", "have a rep from Dell/HP" and "use the data center's remote hands if you need it" sound crazy complicated.
The only way to effectively address the college tuition bubble is going to be for Congress to pass a law that caps the amount of student loans that someone can draw to be proportional to their expected salary over X years on a per-school, per-program basis. That would put a lot of pressure on underperforming programs and schools to produce better value for their students, either by improving outcomes, or by reducing the cost of tuition.

Yes, regrettably some programs would go the way of the dodo, but we shouldn't be saddling our kids with crippling debt so that they can do four years of college and end up in the same place they were before they went to college from a career prospective. If people want to spend their own money to study underwater basketweaving, then so be it.

Also, federal loans should be extended to vocational training programs under the same stipulations.

Edit: the DOE should also have the ability to give programs/schools the death penalty (no loans) if they are found to be manipulating data used for these calculations.
> altering a entangled particle so it's sister particle responds is possible

Altering the particle (as far as anyone knows) breaks the entanglement. The person on one end can measure their particle, but that doesn't tell them anything about whether or how the other one was altered.

Once you observe your particle, you've collapsed the wavefunction of the entangled pair. But- crucially- it's not possible to observe the wavefunction itself, so nobody else can tell whether it's collapsed. That is, if I measure my particle, I have no idea whether the particle on the other end will or has already been changed or observed, and I can't know. It just gives me a random value and collapses the state if it hasn't already.

It's only in retrospect that you can detect entanglement; the values you get upon observation of the pairs are correlated once you have both sets of values to compare. But until then you just have a bunch of white noise, and it's not possible (this is the no-communication theorem) to make any sense of that white noise.
This is a good point but from what I understand about the tech ecosystem in India and China - they are both producing so many engineers that some are bound to specialize.

And they are. You will find amazing cloud provider specialists in those countries these days.
I see that often we tax the rich in order to pass their money along to lobbyists who take that money and use it for projects that exacerbate the climate crisis. In California, a lot of tax dollars go to dirty energy. Think of Newsom’s ties with PG&E and big oil. It’s a lot like money laundering and muddies what could and should be a fairly simple discussion about how we get our energy. Another example is Biden pushing opec and other nations to pump more oil. Or when he says he is pro-fracking to one group and says he is anti-fracking to another group a few days later. As long as the public votes for more of this, I think our hope must reside outside the political industrial complex. It’s more likely that someone like Musk will solve big problems than the government would using his money. Look at spacex.
Richard S. Tedlow on the Intel 386 (2009) [video]
You can now buy an ebike for 1000$ new, and prices are dropping every year.
Yo I wouldn't go anywhere. This site is too awesome.

The sooner I get banned the sooner I can figure out a workaround. ;)

This is hacker news that's what we do. Its in the name. :)

And thanks for the well wishes! Its been great chatting with you here as well!

I'll deff holla from my new account if it comes to that.
yes agree - product liability is the "third rail" of public science in Western markets IMHO
> Are there any foundational texts?

The treatise on Architecture from Vitruvius, a Roman architect. This is it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura
This is very funny. A lot of the people who were there are in the audience correcting him and arguing. The interesting thing here I think is how the business worked. The video answers why they second sourced and how second sourcing really work behind closed doors and it touches a bit on the creation of the market.

Recorded January 26, 2009 at the Computer History Museum.

From the Description:

"Under the leadership of Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, the personal computer market changed in October 1985 with the launch of the Intel 80386 microprocessor. Today, no one will dispute that Intel is a world-leading company, but few recall that Intel's path to becoming a technology giant was solidified by an unprecedented business strategy. In this lecture Harvard Business School Professor and CHM Board Member Richard S. Tedlow presents and reviews Intel's sole-source supplier business strategy.

Learn how Intel forever changed the landscape of the computing industry with its decision in the mid-1980s to act as the sole source for its revolutionary 80386 microprocessor. Prior to this risky and unorthodox move, companies would second-source products by licensing their technology to competitors the way it was always done. The 386 microprocessor marked the end of second-sourcing and the beginning of Intels leadership as a components-supplier in the personal computer market. But why was this significant and what did it mean to the future of the microprocessor and the future of personal computers?

Professor Tedlow presents the business case, as taught in his Harvard Business School classes, to describe how these important decisions were made and what valuable lessons we can learn from Intel's industry-changing business choices."
It produces executable code ad hoc based on the dynamic environment. Not an executable. That's not the same thing.
> a greater proportion of it will go to taxes

Is this true? Taxes in the US are pretty high if you have a high income, and remember to include state and local taxes, and property taxes.

> the things you get in return, like pensions or healthcare aren't as attractive at that income level

Perhaps, but it's also attractive that _other_ _people_ get those benefits because ultimately the level of stress everyone else is under has an effect on your quality of life, one way or another.
> This is why having a backup is important.

Which is something that's nearly impossible across most of the US, given the monopoly (or, if you are lucky, duopoly) in ISPs.
Tim Cook Owns Crypto, but Apple Won’t Invest
Read the actual text of the plans here [1], instead of an op-ed from a partisan in the culture wars. The FAQ is at [2] and directly responds to these characterizations. They are not banning gifted & talented programs or advanced students taking accelerated courses. They are not taking calculus out of the curriculum.

What they are doing is breaking up the classic staged path where you learn algebra for a year, then geometry for a year, then back to algebra / pre-calc for a year, maybe take statistics as an elective, etc. Instead, all branches of math will be taught in an integrated approach focused around applied problems. In fact, I think HN would appreciate the shift from focusing on pure numbers and classic formulas to more applied uses of math, including algorithms, probability, data collected and analyzed in charts, etc. From the Q&A:

"To provide a more inclusive approach, the draft Mathematics Framework encourages the use of open, authentic, multi-dimensional tasks. This includes but is not limited to, learning mathematical ideas not only through numbers, but also through words, visuals, models, algorithms, multiple representations, tables, and graphs; from moving and touching; and from other representations. Studies show that when learning reflects the use of two or more of these means, the learning experience improves."

[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
I'm an assisted human being, I need instructions like these :D https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting/blob/ma...

btw my comment was not here to tell people I was lazy. It was here as feedback. Users are lazy. Online businesses track and look to decrease the number of clicks that lead to a sale, there's no reason developer tools shouldn't try to do the same :)

(I know it's free, not complaining)
Professional journalism has always had this problem to a degree; there's always been an advertiser or other funding source you don't want to piss off. Twitter just exacerbates this by rewarding the most sensational, attention-grabbing posts.
That's why I always use :? with rm in bash scripts. eg

rm -rf "${STEAMROOT:?}/"*

Will exit with error instead of running rm if STEAMROOT is unset. Even if used inside a conditional.
I just did it and it seems fi
This is my general stance, as well.

Impossible requirements have been placed on at-home exams and proctored testing; and this company stood up.

Are they violating many moral and reasonable privacy codes to do it? Absolutely. It is a huge breech of ethics.

But universities and their professors asked for it.

Plenty of online educators already know how to (edit: lead) classes and give tests without it; but many, too, are either lazy or overburdened and have asked for this.
> It makes me wonder whether everyone who is extremely anti-censorship really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down.

This is an absolutely ridiculous and tiresome caricature. Honestly, where have you actually seen this? I've seen some fairly "coarse" discussion forums in my time. They're not really to my taste, but I rarely (if ever) see people using the N-word, let alone screaming it in people's faces.
> Whether or not I can listen to my favorite album without internet access isn't.

What about being able to work?
Instead of a cap, why not just make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy? Let the market sort out the expected value of degrees based on the expected probability of bankruptcy
People already play a lot of games where items are bought and sold for real money (not just gacha but e.g MMOs, Diablo etc.) so you can look through gaming forums to find what drives them.

>Also, unless the game itself is open source and any forks / successors honor the same chain, how is that any better than just storing who owns what in a SQL database?

I also don't see that many benefits to be sure it's worth it but there are some in theory. One people mention is that games can easily share items - e.g. owners of a cool sword NFT for one game can use it in another or cryptopunks can have cryptopunk skins etc. Trading would be more streamlined.I guess another potential benefit is you can also have them listed forever like Xbox achievments that can be looked at by others even if after the game is no longer active.
You also can't mkdir there either
lakehouse - simple and open
If I remember correctly, US taxpayers (and implicitly everyone who uses USD even via reserve currency basket) paid 2.3 trillion dollars for the war in Afghanistan.

My point is that no amount of tax money would fix problem of irrational spending of it (if you measure rationally from whole humanity benefit vs few elites).
In threads like this, I'm always struck by the absence of discussion from a security-minded, denial-of-service attack perspective.

It seems like, if someone didn't want one of these platforms to succeed, all that would be necessary would be to hire a few people to spam certain taboo words and ideas from various sockpuppet accounts, and then the rest of the world points at it and says, "It seems like everyone on this platform really does just want to scream the N-word in everyone's face all day, deep down. Good luck with your hate speech site."

And, just like that, the new platform is forever known as a haven of hate, never to be used by "respectable" people. Now, back to Reddit and Facebook and Twitter with you, where we can build a profile of everything you've said, cross-reference it with any other accounts you may have, and hide content we don't want you to see. After all, you're not an -ist, are you?
IBM PCs didn't come out until after I was out of high school. A few years later I decided to join a meetup of the people who were users on the BBS I was on. It was mid 1980s, and it turned out that all the users I had been chatting with were in High School. First of many experiences where I felt pretty old.
I live in Montreal. Our most bike friendly borough allocates around one twentieth the space for bikes as for cars.
Work pays for it, I use it as a PDF editor as well as converting documents etc.
It has been a few years since I lived in the South Bay, but generally Apple engineers would live somewhere reasonably local. A few would choose to commute from Gillroy or Santa Cruz for sure, but it's not like there are only zillionaires living in Cupertino and Santa Clara. Those are pretty mid-range places to live.
Typically flash devices can't overwrite data directly, and can only erase very large blocks (ie. 1MB or more).

That means any write of data must be made to a new, freshly erased, location.

The old version of the data, sitting in the middle of a large eraseblock is no longer used, but cannot be reused until everything else in the eraseblock is either unused or copied elsewhere.

In the worst case (of a nearly full SSD), it means that for every 1 byte write into a 4k page, a full 1Mbyte of data needs to be copied. Typical cases are better (when the drive has plenty of spare space, so can delay the reclamation of the eraseblock for as long as possible, hoping that other things in the block are invalidated, reducing the amount that needs to be copied).

TL;DR: It's complex, but a lot of copying is involved with most writes...
The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people
I suppose it is, but given how much attention Elon Musk's twitter complaining gets, it's useful to re-center the debate. It's not "can $BILLIONAIRE save us from the climate crisis??" - it's: can we bend our governments, systems, and institutions to stop the climate crisis, and serve us all well along the way?

Carnegie built a lot of libraries, but we needed a universal public education system so people could read those books.
Isn't this.... against the goal of trying to bring out the best ability of each individual?

And I assumed that was the goal in the first place.
It's not the same thing. In Java and Python programs, especially Java programs, developers seems to think it's perfectly reasonable to present the end user with a 100 entries stack trace. This may be of use to the developer to debug issues but it's not a substitute for good error messages that are to be presented to the end user.

I don't think Go errors are perfect either as you just tend to concatenate strings together but the information they include are more user friendly if done right, i.e. not just bubble up the error, but adding context that the user is aware of.
Past related threads:

Twitter confirms Twitter Blue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27316115 - May 2021 (722 comments)

Twitter's subscription service might cost $3 per month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27168200 - May 2021 (66 comments)
What search engine does it use?
The rise of Kubernetes and its impact on enterprise databases
Whistleblower awarded $24M by NHTSA for exposing HyundaiKia engine security flaw
Your ideology is flawed. Human beings are not divided into two camps, "Good" and "Bad." You do not slice the pie in two and and discard everyone in the "Bad" camp. If you do, and do so honestly, you will find in short order that you have discarded everyone who ever lived, or ever will.

Humans are complicated creatures with many flaws and nobilities. Because of Washington's actions in both the revolution and his presidency, a vast number of people enjoyed far more freedom than they would have otherwise. Also because of Washington's actions, some people had to endure a life a brutal slavery. Neither of these aspects is untrue, or erases the other from history by its existence. History, and humans, are often messy and uncomfortable. Stop trying to pretend otherwise. It is possible for Washington to be both a hero of freedom and a disappointing oppressor at the same time. This is the paradox of the human condition.

You're not enlightened. You haven't discovered some grand, hidden truth that all the world must know by pointing out that respected historical figures were flawed. We know. We've always known. We respect them anyway, because they did good as well as bad, and the good was a big deal.
Linux _does_ have SELinux. It's just too confusing to use.
It's a shame for that price digitally. Physically it basically is priced to not be sold.
F# 6 is officially here
The book "In the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" [1], is a fascinating account of the post-colonial Congo region, which comes up several times in the OP article.

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Footsteps-Mr-Kurtz-Disaster-Mobutus/d...
I stand at least partially corrected. I am not familiar with biases in facial recognition software but it looks like a real thing in some cases, caused for instance by lack of diversity in training data sets.