skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
US has spent the last 20 years testing technology in a real theater. China shoots at props in the desert. Russia can't afford to even play this game.
What you and people like you say it superficially true ("just grade on objective performance!")

...but also completely disingenuous.

Student X is an only child, has educated and well paid parents who instill work ethic and have the means, time and ability to commit to helping X get the best grades, including hiring tutors for things they can't or don't have time to teach. X lives in a safe, affluent area and associates with similar peers.

Student Y is one of n siblings to an illegal immigrant single mom with little to no formal education who works two minimum wage jobs so has no time to help her kids even though she desperately wants to. Y might even be working too just to enable the family to get by, leaving no time for studies at home or homework. (effectively having more work ethic than X, just not for school) Y lives in a dangerous area with sirens blaring and dogs barking all hours of the night and many of his peers are involved with gangs.

Granted, these are obviously exaggerated and hypothetical stereotypes, which I don't really want to contribute to perpetuating, but they illustrate a point. You don't exactly have to be some kind of bleeding heart social justice activist to see how unfair it is to Z to be "objectively graded" as lacking "performance" when compared to X.

A common objection is "well how are we going to indicate who is the best candidate for a given university admission or job if we don't have grades or other objective measure to filter out the best people!??!???"

But... that's the point we're trying to make: current grades and other "objective measures" DON'T filter out the "best". To an overwhelming degree, they're just proxies for other things. Surely universities and employers can and will find better ways to assess candidates. (or, if that's what they want to insist on continuing to do, filter out underprivileged people, just like they do now)

TLDR the delusion that grades are some kind of objective meritocracy is ridiculous the sooner it's done away with the better.
I teach bell to bell. (Well, my students show up early to my class, so I teach more like 2 minutes before the bell to 2 minutes before the bell).

Typical homework loads today are waaaaaay over 5 minutes per class in MS and HS. Current high school homework loads are on the order of 10 hours per week in many places.

And in fairness, people like you or me, or most of Hacker News-- don't really count. We're outliers and not really predictive of typical experience.
Cross-Platform Build Automation with Nuke
You wrote 3 paragraphs and did not respond to my question. Did you think what you said is some mind blowing insight that no one have thought of or smt?
My lease ended recently and Subaru cut me a $5k check to take it back. They gave me another lease on a new vehicle for a lower payment.

It's 2.5 years but I only need it a year. They suggested I bring it back in then and they'd likely buy it back off me if things don't improve.
> So you think that you can calculate it as dangerous but they can't?

It's the same thing as texting while driving. People know it's dangerous on some level, but that doesn't stop them.
a, err := foo() // oops, unhandled error
err = bar()
if err != nil { ... }

or

fmt.Println("...") // oops, unhandled error

or more insidiously

err1 := foo()
if err1 != nil { ... }
err2 := bar()
if err2 != nil { return err1 } // oops
Lowtax, Creator of Something Awful, Has Passed Away
It's Official. The Inflation Numbers Are a Hot Sticky Mess
People can’t live in “character.”
Ask HN: Could alternative cellphone providers be the ones initiating SIM swaps?
I follow trends by chance, and noticed so many SIM swaps that occur with cryptocurrency are from alternative cellphone providers. I know they probably have less sophisticated anti-fraud technology, but could they be the one seeing the verification codes, realizing it is a valuable account, and initiate the SIM swap themselves. Just a thought.
Great deep questions :)

1. The driving force behind neural net architecture choice right now is hardware architecture. The model that can be trained with more data and more parameters, will win over any other model. Parallelization is amazing.
I do think they'll make a comeback when people try to do more high level reasoning and try to learn that.

2.
I do mean it in several senses. We looked into neural net algos for summarization but they often produce outputs that sound good but might not be factual. The other problem is that when you search for "best thai restaurants near me" you don't want a nnet lm - generated text. Most ppl would prefer a list of tiles with restaurants and important facts about them. So the models will need to be multimodal.
Lastly, each app is essentially one dimension of looking at a query/topic. You can always "zoom" into each dimension more by swiping left/right or choose a different way of looking at this query by swiping up/down.

3.
They do have all the talent but it's hard to copy privacy features for Google because they make too much money "selling" it to advertisers (ie making it accessible to hyper target people everywhere online/on the phone/etc).
It'll also be hard to copy our entire design and apps and give people agency because they hyper optimized their design for maximizing ad revenue. They also won't open up their platform to let anybody contribute or people decide the order of their results. Etc....
So... I'm just a little worried, not too much :)
Work does give you homework, it's just the self-selected kind. The people who excel and get ahead at work are the ones who recognize this and do the extra work. Whether that's educating themselves so they can make a career move, or taking on extra tasks (which often requires self-edification) to show they are worth promoting.

I think what school fails to do is teach the difference between internal motivation and external motivation. Mandated homework is external motivation for those who don't get it, and for those who do the mandate isn't necessary.
>"people were happy living illiterate"

And you of course have all encompassing stats to prove that they were happy. Government education allowed people with limited financial means to give a chance to their kids at least.

Problem is not the government education. Problem is that thanks to political games the priorities got completely fucked up. The goal should be to actually educate people not to make sure that everyone passes.
A guide on how to work in vaccine science
I think Signal and Matrix are more trustworthy and auditable.

However I also think more people are on WhatsApp than those two (and possibly more) combined and people want to just use it probably for that reason.

I saw some of my contacts sign up to Signal firstly after the privacy fiasco then again in smaller quantity after the major outage. I deleted WhatsApp a while ago but I decided to re-install it again recently or basically risk losing contact with some old friends. In fairness I did try and convert people to Signal; I managed to convince a couple - so not all was lost.
Not to mention, are they really doing it in good faith? Back in the GFC days, Goldman made headlines for just trading against their clients. Rather, I guess, for saying the quiet part out loud.

> Thomas Mazarakis, who heads Goldman’s fundamental strategies group, told select clients in an email that his unit often provided investment ideas that the firm had already traded on and the firm sometimes took the opposite approach, betting against particular instruments recommended by the group, the Times said.

> “We may trade, and may have existing positions, based on trading ideas before we have discussed those trading ideas with you,” the paper quoted Mazarakis as writing in the email. [1]

Would seem a good way to monetize your audience is to (a) get paid to (b) take positions and then (c) control the narrative around your positions - both publicly and to paying customers to gin the position up.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldmansachs-trades/goldm...
Develop a Ready-made NFT marketplace and augment your wealth
How sure are you their assets are really worth 2T? Isn't that a lot of the question here?
I'd rather ask.
Thanks for your feedback.
I agree.
Our first beta, especially with massive traffic right now, is too slow. We'll work on speed. Better, better, never done.
I had exactly the same thoughts as while reading it.
> give students a five-day grace period to turn in work

I don't see how that changes anything. It just means the homework deadline is 5 days later.

> eliminate zeroes in grade books

Meaning if one does well on the first assignment, the rest of the semester can be ignored. A savvy student, once they achieved an A, will be motivated to not turn in any more assignments or tests.

> and re-do tests

Once you know what is on the test, it isn't really a test anymore.
VanMoof has an insurance program with their own employees as bike hunters who will track down your stolen bike, and replace it if they can't find it: https://www.bicycling.com/bikes-gear/a35429606/stolen-bicycl...
I think you may have misinterpreted this (subtle) comment. They likely meant to imply that the US lost the war (context: in the US, “Afghanistan” and “Vietnam” are essentially synonymous with the wars in those countries, sadly).
Sorry dang. I got too heated and let my emotions get the best of me. And sorry wolverine876
Hmm, I don't remember TIFF for screen shots. It was PDF (perhaps PDF-wrapped TIFF?) ca 2002–4 which is not too long after the first usable OS X.
Anecdotal, but during my time as a teacher, the one variable that seemed to govern the success/failure of students was home life—especially whether or not the child had two loving parents. Poverty seems to be the common denominator in those unstable households. I think a broad and robust approach to our collective welfare can address the issue far better than "more money to education!" can.
Agreed.
We'll implement new more anonymous sign up options in the future.
It's just our first public beta release... maybe too soon for hackernews?
Really? Slightly customized in what way? Would a tiff reader be able to decode them?
I'm a parent of two kids and I couldn't agree more.

I went to mostly black and poor public schools my entire childhood. Back then there were a few teachers who clearly didn't care and were never held accountable. Most of the teachers were pretty good though. It's increasingly shifted towards the opposite.

I was blown away by how pathetically run my children's public schools are here in Colorado so I put them both in private school. They get less than half the money per student that the public school system I live in gets, and are vastly more efficient. The operations, the instructors, it's all just run correctly.

When my daughter was still in a public elementary school I walked in one day to try to get her iPad fixed when they were doing full remote learning due to the pandemic. There was a large meeting taking place amongst all the staff. None of them had bothered to return my calls which is why I had to go in person. They looked like they were having a party because I didn't see any work getting done.

At the end of the day it's a government school. Name a single government agency that is efficient with their money. Name a government agency that's good at hiring, or keeping good talent.

We should just do a voucher system and let the private sector deal with this. As a taxpayer I'm deeply resentful of having my money get taken from me and given to unionized teachers who refused to work for a full year and then had the nerve to take summer vacation as if it had been a normal year. These were the same folks who were put at the front of the line for vaccinations independent of their age groups. And then they proceeded to act like they were still in danger and couldn't open schools.
I'm sorry, but this is an unnecessary and negative comment. I don't know why you made it.

Of course a professional will accomplish tasks faster than a DIY'er checking YouTube.

But, as OP says, there's savings AND personal satisfaction involved. Why is time-efficiency the metric you're weighting in value?
This. The amount of ads/js on most cooking/recipe sites is terrible.
Blockchains are managed infra, paid for by users, via microtransactions
this happen to me, I can still see messages that I delete yesterday.
By a large margin, definitely. I was hesitant to attempt repairs on my daily before I picked up car #2 because it was my only mode of transportation. Being able to switch between the two now gives me a much wider time margin for potential errors and my feelings about DIY repairs have gone from "keeping this car alive is going to bankrupt me" to "this is a fun hobby."

When confidence in repairability is low and stakes are high, it probably makes sense to opt for a shop.
VCs like to fund people they can control regardless of competence. this leads to failure eventually.
> That makes each mark more meaningful than a grade that is a hodgepodge of factors that can vary from teacher to teacher.

Grades are always going to be a varying hodgepodge of factors. That's why there are standardized tests, but those are being dumped, too.
I’ve heard a lot of recommendations for this book from programming language designers - is it (and the subjects it covers) useful for everyday programmers (i.e. language users), or just for language designers?

For the latter, I assume type theory would be essential if you’re trying to design a language like Haskell, but irrelevant if you’re trying to design a dynamically-typed language like JavaScript? Would it be useful for the designers of “in-between” languages, like Java or Go?
Real accessibility is about presenting the same information your other users have. So, instead of you typing the description, let each of the drawn objects have its own description and made them discoverable and navigable. I think that Google were trying to make flutter2 components accessible, but it means starting from ground zero and building the same stuff anew.
It's not the worst idea but it also triggers when developers do something to the game and many players want to review that change.
Sure, but are you really arguing that getting bad grades is a good way to learn how to deal with anxiety? Do you have evidence for that statement?
I remember dealing with massive (for the time) TIFF files back in the 90s. I had some full page B/W scans at 1200 dpi which, converted into PostScript turned out to be virtually impossible to convey to my service bureau for outputting to film. I ended up having to send camera ready copy to the printers for them to photograph and strip into the plates in order to meet my press deadline. CD-R was still something in the future and I ended up having to support about 3 or 4 removable media drives to deal with incoming files from my authors.
As much as I would love to give the benefit of the doubt, this is purely about increasing engagement. Disliking something was a very easy way to say I don't like this.

When something controversial happens from now onwards, you will have engage in the comment section. Humans cannot just move on when they have strong feelings about something like Politics or Climate change for example. With the dislike button gone, most people will feel the need to say you don't like/agree with a video. How do you do that? Comments. The negative engagement makes Youtube/Google money. This has been a known fact for a long time. This way they can cash on it more with increased engagement.
WTF?

We are talking about a random US Chinese person, where did I defend CCP?!

WHAT KIND OF STUPIDITY IS NOW RAMPAGING ON HN!?
Ask HN: Winding Down a Failed Project
Anyone in leadership have any experience/tips on dealing with winding down a failed project? It’s been mostly a disaster for years, and the business wants to wrap it up. Many on the team are still trying to stand it up, but the company needs the team to face the music.

What does the fallout look like?
This is also a lazy take, in that it just assumes the marginalization constitutes a justification for lining up behind disinformation.

The problems you reference are real, and are indeed driving discontent. But echo chambers of red herrings and big lies do nothing to actually address the source of those problems - it's just another system of control, driven by a different wing of the same political class. And so if we care about discussing the real issues, rather than just cheering on societal destruction out of spite, we're right back to viewing disinformation promoters as a problem.
Oops. Now realize I omitted key words. Its should read something like:

> Perhaps if the courts allow individuals harmed by Freedom Speeches™ to sue for damages , we won't need draconian hate speech laws and such.

Jill Lepore has me reevaluating my support for laws banning hate speech. While I support the end goal, stopping verbal assaults, I'm very open towards other legal solutions. Like perhaps the courts can broaden the scope of libel and defamation.

Again, not excited about that. Overly broad, and we end up with UK style censorship.

It's a tough problem. But I'm confident we can find a balance.
Drop City and Los Angeles, while we're at it.
gmails application architecture has most decidedly not scaled to the bigger application it is today. once a rare gem of a just in time loading app, now it's just so so so so so so slow. unloved & destitute.
> I don’t know! Capitalism is different now! It used to be that, if you were a struggling online lingerie retailer, you could try to sell more lingerie, or you could try to cut your costs of selling lingerie, or you could expand into some related apparel business lines, or you could shut down, I don't know, I’m sure there were more options, but if you went to an investment conference and said “I’m tired of lingerie let’s do electric cars” investors would be skeptical. But now sometimes you can be a struggling online lingerie retailer and get hit by Reddit lightning. And if that happens, you gotta seize the moment. “People are paying attention to us, we can raise money, only one choice here: electric cars.” (Honestly two choices: electric cars or crypto.) And off you go. Now you run an electric-car company. Congratulations.

i mean other than the hivemind of reddit making choices on who gets to play based on lulz, how is this all that different from private equity (chosen CFOs without a cause with private investor funds) or SPACs (chosen CFOs without a cause with public market funds)?
Would it be that complicated to just skip grades and only advanced students once they’ve mastered a subject? Why do we say “60% correct? That’s good enough you can start learning more complicated stuff”? Let’s just allow students to keep working on something until they’ve demonstrated mastery, and allow them to move at their own pace.
I mean allowing multiple redos for tests doesn’t seem awful. Especially if the test questions can be mixed up. My physics and calculus classes did this with online software & I mastered those subjects pretty heavily towards the end. I understand this can’t be repeated for all subjects but the general idea doesn’t seem like the worse
Lessig talked about this in his book CODE

Regulation of humans happens via these forces:

Norms - people expressing approval / disapproval, imposing consequences and remedies similar to law, but not in a court, and not with assurances of due process, equal protection.

Law - Regulates behavior using courts, process and judgement, and can impose remedies, costs, and loss of freedom, consequenses.

Neither norms or law actually prevent people from doing things. They are both about accounting for things people have done. Notably the more resources one has, greater means and popularity generally mean lower costs and more moderate consequences.

Physics - The rules of the world do prevent actions! If it's too heavy you can't lift it, etc... The better one understand the world, the more agency one has. Access to technology also contributes to this agency.

Money - If you can't afford it, you are regulated. The more money one has, the more agency one has, generally.

What is being done here is to regulate with real teeth, preventing actions, without actually making laws and going through courts. Policy becomes law in other words, and many people oppose that because it represents a direct attack on their agency, freedom and it's very difficult to hold the people responsible accountable.

All Congress needs to do is weave in a little immunity and suddenly very large numbers of people experience regulation they may find expensive or undesirable and have very little they can do about it.
If I were to guess, Rivian's valuation is in large part because of Tesla's success. Tesla proved the path is possible.
> The narrative they don't want to push is curiosity though. They don't want you learning/viewing anything they didn't push for you to learn.

Yes I suppose you are right really, they clearly discourage true open-minded curiosity. They allow a more mundane type of curiosity though, "Did <bad person> do a bad thing? Let's investigate..." totally allowed, for the correct values of bad person.

> Nope. Not even remotely. Even things that aren't vulgar to 99% and only vulgar to the 1% are considered vulgar and are outlawed.

Yes, entirely. I'm not sure what definition of vulgar you are working on, but they absolutely allow it when the target of it is a designated undesirable.
depending on where you are, even the capital bill for improving schools is daunting.

NYC, for instance, regularly reports lead paint exposure in schools.
Man Wow! I did not get a chance to read the whole thing carefully (read the first bit properly and skimmed the rest) but man that is exactly the " "blog" post I've wanted to write since so long.

It pains me to not be able to send advice with a straight face.

Three of the rare things that have been kinda helpful and consistent (ie. not in a motivational bursts way) has been: seeing a social worker and getting diagnosed with ADHD (not gonna claim that I conquered my productivity yet, but having a deeper understanding of ones self, and having the words to describe my self-observations is really valuable), doing things with people/close friends, and religion.

Not claiming that I am satisfied with myself or anything, but these are things that I have found made a small consistent deltas in my life, unlike the bursts I get when I understand a new programming paradigm or watch a Rich Hickey talk.

I with to write more and edit better, but it's in the AMs here and I have a meeting early morning.

Bey for now, fellow earthling
Java's interfaces (nominal typing) is superior for both readability as well as IDE performance. Working on a large golang code base, it's always a struggle for both the programmer as well as the IDE to find out what interfaces a given struct implements. Coding is also more tedious as it's not straight forward to add a new function to an interface and get immediate feedback at the struct declaration site about the missing functions. It's just a big mess overall.

This is of course not to mention the dangers of unintentionally implementing and interface and having bad things happen (this happened in the golang stdlib out of all places as I recall).

Languages like Scala with HKTs or Kotlin with delegates (if I'm not mistaken) solve the issue of delegating to interfaces without much boilerplate. It's just that golang authors have not been exposed to other languages since the 70s.
Not everyone on HN lives in the US or EU. The views that are forbidden here are rule of law, democracy, political representation, freedom of speech, freedom of faith, human rights and so on. People who try to oppose this are regularly imprisoned, tortured, killed, repressed or forced to leave the country.
You're wrong, and that's why anybody helping you will fall on deaf ears.

Humans are irrational. Irrationality can be managed, understood, and harnessed. Don't pretend that grief is an impenetrable weapon against rational thought.