skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad for all the people in this thread, for whom Codecademy worked, but I strongly suspect it worked for them because of their drive, and not because of the quality of Codecademy.

~1 year ago I pointed some friends that wanted to learn Python towards Codecademy (because it's just the most prominent example of it's kind of platform). Just out of curiosity, I looked over their shoulders, and I'm glad I did.

From what I could the tell the course offered very little beyond a Python REPL in terms of guidance. It didn't teach the difference between a variable name `foo` and a string `"foo"` (one of the most common struggles for newbies), at a point in the course where it assumed that knowledge to complete a step. And all it gave as feedback were bad error messages (IIRC 1:1 the one of the Python interpreter, which are very hard to interpret for newcomers). I was baffled that the flagship learn-to-code-platform had that level of quality after ~10 years of operation.
I dont really think so. First of all, math geniuses are fighting among themselves for a few positions that allow them to actually use hard math. We produce more of them then we can reasonably use.

Second, teacher able to move kids up from "idiots" is actually saving us a lot of money.
Yeah, I'd say "whether humans are involved" isn't actually a good metric for whether abuse detection is fair / avoids screwing you over.

A better proxy would be "how much the company spends per user to detect false positives". Whether it's human oversight for each case, or engineering time spent fine-tuning algorithms to exclude known false positives, the more the company spends, the less it's going to screw you over.

(In practice, companies want to spend very little, which is why you get underpaid Mechanical-Turk workers and slapped-together detection systems.)
It reminds me of the old adage: "Two is one, one is none. Have a backup. Always."
The doses do not all set your immune system to the same state, despite being the same substance. The subsequent doses cause further evolution within the body to broaden the spectrum of its response.

This is why there were two doses in the first place, on a schedule, instead of one dose.

The sequence is more like a progressive immune system training program than a one-off health powerup like you'd get in a video game.

Omicron is close enough that the figures show a significant effect after the third dose compared with the second.

It was not something which could be assumed, because the response curve depends on details of the virus, so the recent data is good news. However the scientists had enough understanding of the details, and Omicron spreads so fast with unknown consequences at this time, that it was worth rolling out the booster soon after Omicron was detected.

It is a popular misconception that each vaccine sets a simple "immunity %" stat, and that the booster simply resets that stat after it wanes. It's an easy idea to explain, but the immune processes are more subtle than that.

Perhaps we need some of that subtlety to be better known now, so that people understand why the booster sequence is useful.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59639973.amp
>AWS didn’t “go down”

The context of the parent seems to be that they intermittently couldn't get to the console. That seems fair to me. If we're blaming developers and finding gaps in HA design, then AWS should also figure out how to make the console url resilient. If it's not, then AWS does appear to be down.

I imagine it's pretty hard to design around these failures, because it's not always clear what to do. You would think, for example, that load balancers would work properly during this outage. They aren't. Or that you could deploy an Elasticache cluster to the remaining AZs. You can't. And I imagine the problems vary based on the AWS outage type.

Similarly, with the earlier broad us-east-1 outage, you couldn't update Route53 records. I don't think that was known beforehand by everyone that uses AWS. You can imagine changing DNS records might be useful during an outage.
>"Maybe they are getting tired of arrogant older programmers..."

And this is of course valid reason to ignore basic data preservation approaches.

Myself I am an old fart and I realize that I am too independent / cautious. But I see way too many young programmers who just read sales pitch and honestly believe that once data is on Amazon/Azure/Google it is automatically safe, their apps are automatically scalable, etc. etc.
The thread suggested that Poles in the UK had lost freedom of movement, I'm just pointing out that this isn't the case.
I disagree a bit. I'm not sure how much this has been a part of why it's taken off, but TikTok does one quite interesting that it took me a while to fully grasp the implications of: indexing on sound and allowing easy reuse of existing ones. When you create a TikTok video, there's an option to reuse the sound of an existing video, and when viewing one, you can click something to see both the original video with that sound as well as all the other ones that used it chronologically. Lowering the bar to reusing a sound and adding custom video to the point where a non-technical user can do it with little effort essentially has basically enabled the proliferation of video memes, which before were created and evolved much more slowly than purely image-based ones due to the amount of effort needed to create and modify them. The fact that no one else seems to have caught on to this basically gives them a monopoly on this type of content, which makes it incredibly sticky.
You have to be prepared to deeply invest in career in the short term to be able to retire in the medium term. I'm not at 'early retirement' stage but I have been able to hit some financial independence milestones -- some tips:

* Build your personal brand, blog, code open source, write a book, etc. Be known for something specific and valuable

* Get a great job at larger tech co, probably American based given salary differences, especially if its in your area of expertise, then you can negotiate more salary and stock

* Cut down a lot on your personal expenses

In short be prepared to invest a lot of your personal time and have a lot less fun in the near term.

TBH most of the people who have 'retired early' got lucky in the sense that they either joined a startup and had a great exit or joined a FAANG in the mid 2000s and worked there for 10-15 years and watched their stock grow and grow...

OTOH, you can just choose to work your hours, have a sustainable and fun life, disconnect and work on preventing burnout, and just roll with the tech lifestyle
It's slightly more, but this is why I have stuck with Dropbox. Their only business is storage and it means they are less likely to do things like this. They have't been in the news, that I have seen, about actions like this.

Google is a consumer hostile company at this point. Unless you have a friend with pull there, or make it a big enough news issue, the little things are treated with automated hostility.

Google isn't alone here, it's the result of very large companies being under regulated on the consumer side.
Note that this is due to both the racial disparity in test results, and the weak relationship between teacher test results and student results. From my reading of the decision it would be allowed if the tests actually served an important purpose.

NYC recently settled a similar case:

https://gothamist.com/news/city-pay-largest-ever-settlement-...
The right to remain silent is a vital right in criminal court cases, but certainly doesn't apply to our own conclusions. Consider that only Tinder has records indicating whether there was a ToS violation, and what that violation was. Tinder is not releasing those records. Tinder has a financial incentive to claim that there is a ToS violation. Putting those three items together isn't proof that Tinder is lying, but is evidence in that direction.
ars longa vita brevis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa%2C_vita_brevis
No it doesn't? My argument is that human life has been full of unavoidable difficulty for 200,000 years, so if bringing kids into a painful world is unethical then having children has always been an unethical decision. Even if we as a society go back 200 years, the decision to have kids is still just as unethical as it ever was. Which is to say, having children isn't an ethical decision it's an emotional decision.

Or I can put it this way-- The most ethical thing any human can do really is to commit suicide so you don't further consume finite resources. But the desire to live is a strong emotional desire and even the most logical person will justify their own life while simultaneously consuming resources and contributing to the problem they lament.
Yep. I follow the advice in the article:

> NEVER learn a new word without learning what is its sound.

Because on probably a monthly basis my partner will make fun of me for pronouncing something wrong. The phrase is "I learned it from reading" --but it's not a good enough excuse anymore in our wide web'd world.

Oh, and I've spoken American English since birth, and have been variously told my language and communication skills are very strong.
Actually, I don't see a scandal in this, all income should be in the public domain.
In fact it is, in various contexts: public workers salaries are public in the US, in my country tax sheets are public record, you only need to identify yourself to get them.
With the caveat that my knowledge of Ukraine is rather weak (I've only been to Kiev once), my best guess it that they won't be able to conquer all of it - Ukraine is huge, so eventually I think it would be split it into two parts.

Within Ukraine there's a decent divide between those who are pro Russian in the south and those who would like to retain the Ukrainian language and culture, mostly in the north, so it wouldn't surprise me if Russia manages to retain the southern part, but ends up having trouble with North-Western Ukraine.

That said, this isn't a game of Civ and I hope the Ukrainian people won't have to go through that horror.
You can choose a cash payment but the box is worth significantly more, something like double, plus the peace of mind that you should have most of what you need as you learn to care for your first.
It's not so much that federally funded public education wouldn't be valuable or beneficial, it's more that the Constitution enumerates powers to the Federal government (Article 1 Section 8), and any power not enumerated to the Federal government is left to the states (10th ammendment).

Accepting funds from the federal government tends to come with strings attached, and such attachments tend not to work well over the generalization of the entire population (see the OP's about standards being added/dropped for everyone when it probably should have been considered from a local or hyperlocal perspective).

The strings-attached conditionality shifts power to the federal government, which is something to be avoided at all costs.

Edit: to enunerate to the Federal government the power of education, the constitution would have to be amended. Totally doable, but a requirement nonetheless.
Engineers are human too, are susceptible to being wrong, and are susceptible to all other sorts of human cognitive biases.

With respect to the association between engineers and extremist groups and beliefs, I would wager that this is probably better explained by a third factor (personality traits which make someone less flexible, and less comfortable with shades of grey, for example).

Your comment is interesting, but none of the questions it raises mean that what I said wasn't true.

The question is not "are engineers inherently better thinkers". The question is "If you take someone and teach them STEM topics, do they become better thinkers than they were previously". The answer is (ironically / speaking of black and white thinking) pretty unequivocally "yes".
I think people are going to find way to criticize Chesa here, and there probably are some valid ones, but at the core I think he's right. It seems obvious to me that you need to get to the root of the problem if you care about solving the problem at all. Just prosecuting people won't prevent the next criminal, we need to meet people where they are and make sure they have skin in the game too.
I'm quite fortunate that I work for a company that's very transparent about pay now, but I've worked at a few places in the past where sharing your salary details was considered a serious offence. Obviously the point was to maintain paying as little as possible. I occasionally wonder what would have happened if the payroll database had ever been leaked, or if there was a leak from HMRC (UK version of the IRS). I strongly suspect it would have been the end of the company as a lot of people would have walked out.

You'd think that risk would have been enough to equalize the wages a bit, but it definitely wasn't the case at any of the places I experienced. I guess the existential risk is less of a threat than the cost savings are a benefit.
Instead of asking 'if' we should be asking 'what if', then we can make some predictions and find ways of testing them. We can also model the properties that we have into a computational model. One huge problem of this is the representation of time/change. If the machine can halt our world to produce the next game state then 'tick' there's no correspondence of our 'time' and outer world time so any properties involving time doesn't need to have any physical basis.
I think general education is useful, yes - but I was responding to a comment that was hyping up STEM as especially important. Aside from maths, I don't think that's correct.
> I'm curious why a poor translation would more strongly affect non-white francophones?

Canadian French, without assuming translation issues, might conceivably more strongly negatively effect non-White francophones, who may be more likely to be part of immigrant communities from (and natively speak the French of) various non-Canadian nations where French is commonly spoken, like (e.g.) Haiti.
Yes, I remember this as well. Growing up, late 80's, we had a NES, then in 1989: a Sega Genesis, and also a Turbografx 16. Yes, we were spoiled kids...
How to draw S-curved arrows between boxes
> As I said elsewhere, the average Joe who cannot remember their own passwords should not be using crypto

Yes, I agree with you on this.

However this is far from the dominant narrative coming from crypto advocates. That is all I am objecting to.
The MasterCard Match List and Terminated Merchant File
Lol no you aren't "sending all your data to google". Come on man, certainly they spy on you but all your data is a bit of a bogey man story.
This is exactly what I don't understand about the whole thing. People are arguing that this was unethical but the researchers literally proposed the study to their review board which said "go ahead it's not a human subjects research study and does not need consent and is not by that virtue unethical". Perhaps the review board was wrong, people make mistakes, whatever. But assuming the review board was correct in its analysis of the situation (and who are we really to challenge that unless there's a glaring negligent tier mistake), I have yet to hear an argument that dissects the ethics of this case and clearly lays out what ethical quandary we have on our hands and where the line was crossed.

It really seems to me that people are conflating "annoying" with "unethical". Sure, spamming people is annoying. But how is it unethical? I had the same questions about the linux kernal security patches issue. Annoying waste of a few maintainers time, arguably yes for some definition of waste. But unethical? How so and can someone link me to literature detailing the ethical framework that disallows otherwise legal activity in good faith pursuit of knowledge because someone got annoyed in the process? I think that would be an interesting read.
Which while you're not wrong - there are issues with some programs where it could unintentionally discriminate.

The easiest visual instance of this can be photographic filters - Google's Pixel 6 emphasized better photos for people of Color, where other sensors/phones may not be correctly calibrated for PoC. This is a pretty minor instance but easily visualized.

AI that does facial recognition or facial identification has in the past had issues with the faces of non-white people. It isn't a result of a 'racist' programmer. It's just from the fact that most testing and the data sets of these softwares is lacking the necessary diversity. It is part of including more people in software engineering is to combat these issues.
> We’re blaming the wrong things for San Francisco retail theft

Seems a little callous to call these shoplifters “things,” but what the heck, I’m on board.
too true, I once had a conversation with a friend of mine. She was saying to just use tinder. As we were about to get in the car, I told her: I'll do nothing but swipe till we get there. if I get a match, I'll pay for lunch when we arrive, otherwise you pay.

She said yes.

easiest free meal I ever got
This Year in Matrix
Maybe thinking about sexuality as a market is your first problem. If you’re not physically attractive, just don’t use Tinder; it’s not the only way to find someone to date.

Shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who blames “women” as a whole for his problems would have a hard time meeting women.

And as a corollary, I’ve dated super hot guys before and frankly a lot of them have a hard time with relationships because it was so easy for them to hook up when they were younger they don’t know how to put the effort in to make someone feel desired.
> Obviously this individual was special and most people wouldnt be able to teach themselves how to code entirely on their own

I'd disagree. Sure online learning tools such as CodeAcademy and free videos on YouTube are useful and can provide a great leg up. But I know quite a few folks who pivoted their careers from non-programming jobs back in the 90's and none of these learning aids were available. We just used books, vendor documentation and whatever random stuff was available on the fledgling web and usenet groups to get us going.

I don't think it takes a "special individual", it just takes a bit of willpower and attention.
If your name is Ben Dover you must have heard that 1000 times at school.

Otherwise made me giggle (again).
I pronounce 1 and 2 the same. I pronounce 5 and 6 the same. I pronounce 3 as a schwa.

Western US, if that matters...
> You need a back up generator and to be a short distance away from a petrol station

My building has a natural gas backup generator.
That's just someone saying that - not an actual source. Anyone can claim anything on the internet.
Go's generics have been in development (by the same person) since the pre-1.0 days, with various proposals submitted for their inclusion. Are you suggesting that those earlier proposals failed for frivolous reasons rather than real technical concerns?

It seems to me that that it was less about active pushback and more that people who cared about having generics in Go was limited to an exceedingly small group of people who weren't necessarily experts in the subject matter. In fact, the Go team hired an external expert to lay the groundwork for what became the winning proposal.
I think what was shown not to help is mandatory homework - and that's assuming a pretty high-quality education in class, as is standard in Nordic countries. But the teacher should absolutely be there to help the students with any extra work they might choose to do on their own.
I think they didn't say unemployed for a reason, which is why I didn't say unemployed for a reason. Not having a job is different than needing a job for food and shelter and any flexibility, the former is "not having a job" the latter is "unemployed". I don’t consider that an edge case.

What I got out of it is that they had a bad experience with someone not occupying their time with something.

I "vilify", or more-so call out, their overfitting. You’re assuming they didnt have a basic stable lifestyle AND that they became a burden to OP. I’m assuming they could have had any level of stability and became a burden to OP for any reason, that at least removes the predictive capability for determining if the other potential partners would become a burden to OP.
Previously discussed (66 comments) just a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28298729
Any Albanians on here who can validate if their own salary is in the list?
The past major threads on this. Others?

I was part of a human subject research study without my consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29611139 - Dec 2021 (360 comments)

CCPA Scam – Human subject research study conducted by Princeton University - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599553 - Dec 2021 (331 comments)

Princeton-Radboud Study on Privacy Law Implementation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599154 - Dec 2021 (10 comments)
As much as this sentiment feels natural for an engineer there are a few things to keep in mind:

* you get exposed to a wider range of technology at a startup and can work on different things; that's more fun for you personally especially when you're under 30 yo and still learning the ropes; political indoctrination is mostly non-existent

* many startups at best get acquired; so all your "useful" efforts could end up in /dev/null or be completely replaced after the next VC round

* a minority of startups are doing real tech that's worth tolerating small company inconveniences; for every Imply/Rockset/Starburst there are many more companies building another web app, likely using inferior programming languages

* Big Co compensation and benefits are unbelievable for people coming from startups. Work/life balance cannot be compared too. Unlimited PTO could actually be European-style 4 weeks. I believe there were not so many posh places to work at ten years ago and so it was less realistic to join one.

* there's no question that startups and large corporations require dramatically different mindsets/habits. But you really get paid a lot to tolerate that smaller-than-a-tiny-cog feeling.
Whats the point of even reading these articles? I saw one yesterday that literally said there is no proof it is less deadly. Everything is conflicting.
The legacy of the Dreamcast was the Xbox, specifically online multiplayer (and massive controllers!).

Peter Moore (who worked on both consoles) has talked about this several times over the years, e.g. this recent example [0]

[0] from 7:40 https://youtu.be/tadtqchbbh0&t=460
I Am a Developer, Sorry
When meeting someone, it is common for this question to be asked at some point: "What do you do for a living?"
Depending on your answer when asked this question, you may see a range of reaction. Some occupation will cause awe, others indifference. But for a number of reasons, telling about your occupation may also give you contempt in return. If you have experienced this before, then talking about each other occupations, a usually dull topic of conversation, becomes sensitive. You may even become hesitant discussing it.
I have had awkward reactions and even heard disapproving comments about my job in the past few years. Sure, I do not expect to be praised like a brain surgeon, in fact I though people would not care about me being a web developer. But it seems my field of work, the web or the tech industry more generally, has a bad notoriety in the eyes of most people.
Although my work does not have the biggest beneficial impact on the world, I do not feel like I deserve such reactions. It has come to the point I am thinking about simply lying when asked about my job. Answering with something boring enough to shift the topic of conversation to something else quickly. This would spare me from the hard looks or negative judgment I have had.
Have you also experienced this? How does it go when you answer this question?
Is that in the paper? Because a priori, I definitely wouldn't ascribe it to that specific a cause, and at least that's not what I meant.