skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>In a recent post, Parrhesia suggested that course grades should be 100% determined by performance on a final exam—an exam that could be taken repeatedly, with the last attempt being the course grade

>[...]I suspect this proposal hasn’t seen much contact with people who’ve actually taught classes

This is how a fair number of classes at my university are graded. Particularly math classes are structured so that you could literally ignore the class for 3 months and then just show up and take the exam and that decides 100% of the grade. Some homework is available for bonus points, but it only contributes to going from a failing grade to passing. While retaking the exam to get a higher grade isn't technically part of the system they will let you do it if there is space.
I spent my 20ss trying to become a professor and teaching undergrads. The article resonates loudly with me.

One of the best thing about nope-ing out of that lifestyle has been this:

I still teach people.

I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating.

I teach people almost every day and this is incredibly validating and they find this useful.

I teach new things to musicians I play with. I mentor my coworkers when they are working with new things. I help my friends and partners learn new things. The best is that I know how to research ideas and commit to learning them myself.

Much of formal education has systematic problems that make it struggle to achieve its stated goals.

But "teaching" as a form of human interaction is a wonderful thing.
What’s wrong with doing the things that your more mature, logical self actually wants instead of what your younger, uninformed self thought you’d want?

There’s nothing stopping you from eating ice cream for breakfast, spending all of your money on Lamborghinis, and playing video games all day. As an adult you realize that those things won’t actually bring you true happiness and those decisions will cause significant negative consequences in the future that you’d rather avoid.

I don’t see what’s sad about that, other than maybe the disappointment of losing naiveté.
I see. Regarding Go, how would forget to import the Go net and http packages for your app? I would think your compilation itself would fail to begin with. Or are you referring to something else?
japan only exist so nato can push a western presence in SEA, just like south korea, hence why they are being 'westernized'

USA prepare its pawns for china, the pacific will be remembered as a radioactive bloodbath in future history books

there, my theory as to why we get lot of propaganda lately
Email is unencrypted by default, and although private secure message systems like this are annoying to work with, they do avoid that problem.
"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years."

Always loved that quote.

Unfortunately it doesn't always work out that way. Parents can also get worse as you age and learn that some actions or behaviors are inexcusable. But as a younger person you either didn't understand the context or thought it was okay.
It's not because it's news, this story is just one of many.

But it's starting to illustrate the seemingless stupidity by the Russian army or eg. the unwillingless of their large amount of conscripts to fight (against relatives sometimes!) at this point.

That's why i posted this.

We've never seen a war happen where the invader is actually ridiculed by the defender on social media, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGrwSb2J_qo ( farmers stealing tanks or the pun that tanks acquired by civilians don't need to be reported as source of income for taxes) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyVie8Psaj0 ( Russian soldier vs door: 0 - 1)

Note: Yes, I know the actions are cruel and I've already done my part (for now) to contribute to Ukraine. There's also value in ridiculing Putin's Russia as he's so desperate to be recognized as a "world leader", while failing so hard: https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529?t=...

The illusion they tried to setup of "big modern army" with hightech seems a distant past by now. Their equipment is rusty, outdated, ill maintained and the actual modern tech is mostly sold to other countries, because they need the money. Or look at the production numbers of their latest high tech tank - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-14_Armata
I live in Israel, but I now want to move to HN land.
I do have an opinion, but it is not really important here. I just want to say how touched I am to read this thread. Where else can you find such a polite, fact based, open minded discussion of a flammable topic.
Yeah. It's truer of non-academic conferences which often even have sponsor slots. But even there, there's at least some effort not to have product pitches because if they tilt too far in that direction, people just won't attend. Conferences need to maintain some base level of quality/utility or they fade away.
Then why do they need a price attached to the coin? It seems that speculators are the majority use case for this virtual casino.
I get what you're saying but I also disagree with it as a generalization, and say it would depend on the subject. For theoretical subjects, an exam is about the only way to test your understanding. Memorization is not going to help you solve math problems.
Actually, if you open the post and scroll down enough to see one of the other posts published by the author (look for the post titled "Why did Russia attack Ukraine..."), then you would realize that the entire website has piles of misinformation.
I got a lot out of this course https://people.csail.mit.edu/asolar/SynthesisCourse/
from one of the authors of OP.
Why Putin is playing poker not chess (march 4)
Needless to say, I closed my BoA accounts.

I've read a number of BoA horror stories on HN, and didn't think anything of them. I just assumed there were a lot because BoA is big in California.

Then, recently, I tried to deal with BoA customer service.

- I'm saving up a few thousand dollars for a Christmas present, but don't want my wife to see the money in our joint account at another bank.

- Since I have BoA credit card with almost nothing on it, and a BoA next door, I decided to open a savings account.

- End of the month, I go online to pay my BoA credit card, and I can't. There is no way on the web site to pay with anything other than the savings account, and no way to re-add my previous external account that I've used with BoA for the last 10 years.

- Call customer service. Wait on hold for three hours, getting transferred twice.

- Finally get someone at BoA to tell me that because I added the savings account, my status changed and I have to add new payment accounts all over.

- Explain again that there is no way to add an external payment account.

- Two more transfers, and someone confirms that the web site is screwed up. Hold on while I transfer you to that department.

- 20 minutes later, someone comes on the line to tell me that tech customer service doesn't work on Saturdays anymore and to check back in a few days and maybe it will magically fix itself.

- I decide to go to the branch. Open BoA app to check its hours, and it's marked "Temporarily closed." So is the next closest BoA. And the one after that. The nearest BoA that is going to be open on Monday is two hours away, according to the app.

- Monday I go out for coffee, which takes me past the BoA branch next door. It's open. People inside. Everything looks normal, contrary to the app telling me it's supposed to be closed.

- I go into the branch, pay off my BoA card, empty the savings account, close both accounts.

Bank of America doesn't deserve to represent itself as the bank of America. It should be called the Bank of Dipshits.
Have you looked into building payment gateway apps? If there are payment processing services that supports your country, you can look into if they have an API that you could use to build a payment gateway. The payment gateway app can then be integrated into eCommerce sites.
> Proclus (ca. 335 BC)

Proclus, whose quote opens the section on Euclid, lived more than 700 years after this date, well into the 5th century AD. Euclid himself wasn't born till about decade after, in 325 BC.
They are the wrong layer of abstraction outside of simple CRUD apps.

If you have to check the API docs anyways, I rather define custom domain specific verbs than debate whether something should be a PUT or a PATCH.
- Always use a response envelope

I would mostly agree except in 1 case, streaming data is easier without an envelope. Making some array inside an envelope stream is usually more code and messier than just getting some metadata out of header. So if you have something like data integration endpoints and you expect someone could pull many megs of records, consider no envelope.
Does each block require separate power source or the power comes from the core block(base)?
> I really didn't read your original comment as talking about philosophical zombies. Is that what you really meant, or is your new comment a play on words? Please excuse my confusion.

No worries - p-zombie is definitely what I meant by “zombie”.

> I don't understand what you mean by "GOFAI systems are just ANN engrams"
> I don't understand "ANN engrams" anyway.

So, in psychology, there was and is a tradition of understanding where in the brain any given thing exists. For example, what specific neurons or groups of neurons are responsible for individual memories, thoughts, concepts, etc. They call that location the “engram”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_%28neuropsychology%29

What I’m trying to say is that with a complex enough neural architecture, one would be able to conduct the same engram investigations on an ANN.

> so clearly neural networks do not need to be "statistical"

Eh, I’m not an expert (just a bachelor), but I generally agree. Some (all?) artificial neurons may need to be statistical functions over a sample space. However, some (many?) artificial glia may not need to be statistical functions over a sample space.

An artificial glia’s sample space might simply be the artificial neurons, themselves, rather than the direct stimuli, if an artificial glia were to be programmed using statistical functions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia

> Who knows. This is only a conjecture, currently.

Indeed :/ it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I’m a busy software development professional, not a professional academic.

I’ve got to run some errands for the day, but I would be stoked to continue this conversation.

Perhaps we can build up some sort of testable conjecture.
the point is minimizing.

the vehicle is a giant middle finger to minimization. pure excess.

I think it's not not about a line but a posture, and that truck is one that's obvious: fuck responsibility.
I feel like I'm going to call bullshit on this. I'm not convinced at all that this is less common in modern films. This one off example is nothing noteworthy. Plenty of similar examples in recent films.
Exactly!

I think it's because CNN is supposed to be dialing more towards 'center' in an effort to pump up dismal ratings. Maybe Rolling Stone is 'punishing' them for the betrayal.

P.S. Could ESPN/ABC/NBC/PBS/etc be far behind?
Great article. Firing someone is hard. Even for poor performance it can be really hard, like heart-pounding fight-or-flight anxiety-ridden hard.

It’s worst when the person who is doing badly at their job is a nice, well-liked person like “Bob” in this article.

But it helps when you realize everyone involved in that situation (a person is dragging the team down) is miserable, and the misery only ends when that person leaves. It also helps when you realize there’s a really good chance the person who needs to leave is the most miserable of all - they know they’re operating in a low-trust environment and it sucks.

I think there’s a lot to be said for “person-job fit.” Sometimes people really excel in one job and really struggle in another, but even folks who are really struggling are likely change averse and reluctant to do the work to go find a new job. In that case, severance can actually be a blessing.

That was me once. The severance I got helped me immensely by freeing me up to hunt for a better job full-time. Once I was out from under the soul-crushing drag of the bad-fit job, I realized I didn’t even want to be in that line of work, and changed careers. I’ve been much, much happier since.
Since we can just make fuzzy predictions and not face any consequence, let's go !

1. The Russian military (aided if needed by mercenaries) is bringing entire cities to the ground in the south of Ukraine, and just buying times before leveling substantial parts of Kyiv. Source : the news.
Painting that as a "military defeat in the making for Russia" is just insane propaganda.

2. There is a perfectly "acceptable" diplomatic compromise, where Ukraine is split into roughly east/west of the river, buffer puppet states protect Russian border, and Ukraine is free to join EU - except Ukraine does not have all the eastern mines anymore, and is basically another poor country that northern Europe is going to refuse people from.
The compromise is "acceptable" by everyone except Ukrainian gouvernement, of course - but it's astonishing what having the rest of the world urge you to bail (before the winter gets cold) can do.

3. Putin will stay in power as long as his health and / or close guard of oligarchs permits. As long as gas and oil remains sold to EU, he only has to fear about the former - which we know nothing about, and I'm tired of hearing people speculate about.

4. Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen dropped a couple points in the poll - thankfully for them, the elections are in an eternity of four weeks, so this will not prevent one of them to be on the 2nd round. None of them is planning on winning anyway (baring a last minute scandal for the president), financially getting their 15% each will ensure the success of their campaigns - so business is going fairly according to plan.

5. I think I vaguely remember this author of the post saying things about the end of history after the wall fell - so as assume we could both be wrong in the end, right ?
They let you retake the exam? Like... the same exam? Or re-do at a later term?
> However, unlike traditional to-do apps, Move gamifies the experience by allowing users to earn points for tasks that are completed which in turn allows them to customize an alpaca avatar with accessories like hats, clothing, sunglasses and more.

This feels like the kind of thing that would be fun to use with children or as a tongue in cheek thing with friends.

There is no way I’d want to touch this for anything professional, though. I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who thought this was a serious way to work with other adults.
Happy birthyday, YC!
Not directly related to the title, but further in the article:

> newly minted MBA ex-consultant who’s just started working at Dropbox as a product manager: and here is my presentation about why it is imperative for us to expand from file synchronization and, for some reason, password management, into financial service integration through our automated financial information archival tool, and then ultimately into financial services, which will strengthen our moat against competition from other file synchronization services

I think this is largely part of why modern web services are getting more annoying and aggressive about monetization strategy -- a massive proportion of people in product these days seem to not be the sort of nerds-solving-real-world-problems who founded Dropbox, but someone coming from big consulting companies where the main output seems to be 300-slide presentations. It does not seem like they have much of an exposure to the more human-centric style of building a good product, but rely mostly on buzzwords and spreadsheets, because that ties in closely to what they did before.

I'd like to hear a counterargument from any ex-consulting product managers, or people who hire them though :)

That being said, the password management seems...okay to me? Services like 1Password already used Dropbox as a backend, so if you're paying Dropbox, it seems like a fair feature expansion for them to give you further reasons to keep using them since the space overhead is presumably trivial. You probably have a decent amount of sensitive data in there as well.
Can I ask what role were your interviewing for where you weren't asked to solve Leetcode style problems on a whiteboard? I thought that was standard for AWS. You mentioned it wasn't SDE but I'm assuming it's still a DevOps/Technical role you have based on your STAR examples.
> One of the unfortunate problems with FDB is the glacial release process.

One person’s “glacial release process” is another’s “stable production-grade database”. Not everything has to rev like an npm library…
moving the goalposts is so pathetic. not that GPs inane point that you ostensibly clarified wasn't obvious.. my point is I am doing my best with what I believe.

those truck buyers could start literally anywhere, but I doubt they are. same goes for the tuning company.

there is clearly a grey line. and this truck is clearly way past it.
It's the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...) in full flow.

Journalists, almost entirely as a group, are experts in nothing. Colossaly ill informed on every subject, and "research" consists of scrolling through Twitter to find a point of view that backs up their preexisting predudices. These days, many struggle with even basic English and grammar.

I'm not even giving them the credit of indulging in propaganda, because that requires some actual critical thought and intelligence. They're just bad at their job.
As an advisor of PhD students I've learned that both things are important in different amounts. Much of what our education system measures right now is "willingness to work really hard from a young age." When I meet students from top-tier institutions I see a lot of this: it's really impressive. I also see a good deal of of selection for what I'd consider raw problem-solving ability. I see a smaller degree of selection for raw creativity.

The most creative students I've met have been the ones that didn't accumulate credentials, and often suffered because of (possibly undiagnosed) ADHD. They did well when they found their passion, either because they found it later in life or because they really, really cared about it. Our system doesn't do as well with these people, but they can usually make their way through.

Unfortunately there's a downside to this: all the creativity in the world isn't going to help you if you can't execute. A brilliant idea only takes you so far. And gaining sufficient background to have brilliant ideas is often an even more demanding task, which passion alone doesn't suffice for. I don't exactly know what to do about all this. What I do know is that a system that bases future success on how well individuals do at age 16 is fundamentally, profoundly stupid... And I wish I had a better one.
Fish 3.4.0 Released
I want universal healthcare, but otherwise I agree. It’s stupid that we’ve developed a model where healthcare is tied to employment. Imagine if the only sane way to buy groceries was through a food insurance plan because buying them a la carte was insanely expensive, but also food insurance was super expensive so you needed to get it through a job.

“I can’t quit my job, I need my food insurance so I can eat!” That’s the situation we’re in today with healthcare.
If I were in a deciding position at Twitter I would find it extremely challenging to handle war propaganda, to be honest. I’m quite torn here.

Using the Nazi trope is clearly playing the west, where it has been effectively tried, tested and abused in past and present. As one example of many, during the peaceful revolution the same accusation has been used by the GDR to discredit the Monday demonstrations. While it’s true that there were some neonazis walking, it was a tiny percentage.

A war comes with propaganda and is probably the most difficult moment for social media tech. I will be curious whether someone can come up with an intelligent, rational solution that learns from the mistakes made in history - and values and represents the principles of human rights the west defines itself by.

A tech solution could be detecting polarized, one-sided speech and automatically presenting information orthogonal to it. Could also help against other kinds of rabbit holes and increase frontal lobe usage in people.
There is a breed of very narcissistic person in our culture that will always find a way to blame their inadequacies and their mistakes on those around them. In high school, if you are a teacher you have quite a lot of authority in the classroom and so even if your student is oriented in this way, they will just 'not like that teacher'. Helicopter and apologist parents are increasingly an issue but they aren't directly in the classroom.

In college however, students are grappling with their own burgeoning adulthood. They realize a TA is just another student with a few years on them. While the professor might be a bit out of reach, for a narcissistic person, it is easy to justify to themselves that they are actually above the TA in status/rank/morality/righteousness/sociability. Subsequently they can beat down the TA in the way that you mentioned. "All my problems are the result of your failures to address them". "I would have done better but the TA didn't like me." "Oh I hated that class the TA was a total nerd." "No one ever told me I had to do the assignments, I didn't realize I would be tested on this."

It doesn't help that people who choose to become a TA are often a 'helpful' kind of person, the exact kind of person that tends to be a little bit susceptible to these kinds of criticisms, even if they are untrue. The only way to move forward as a TA (and as a person) in this environment is to harden yourself in the ways that the article and many other commenters mention. That's my 2c anyhow.
I'd say the editors did a good job in this case, considering both "they mostly come at night, mostly." and "game over man, game over!" have both become iconic often-quoted lines.
I could be the perfect person for such a position depending on the specifics. Anyone interested in finding a person for a similar kind of role, please see my profile for more info and contact details.
I would create a per-capita federal refundable tax credit which is commensurate with the average cost of "comprehensive" market health coverage for an individual, but not mandate people to buy anything other than catastrophic care coverage.

Dunno what you'd call that.
I know 2015 wasn’t that long ago (I’m pretty old too :) ) but it wasn’t that long ago when language support for Unicode was patchy (Go is only 12 years old and it was a big thing that supporting Unicode out of the box). Even as late as 2015 some popular desktop applications either didn’t support Unicode or didn’t default to it. MySQL only supported utf8mb4 in 2010 and it took a few years for that version to become wide spread. Plenty of servers I managed back then didn’t even have Unicode locales installed.

To be clear, even in 2015 _I_ personally would have recommended Unicode (like yourself) because it was clear that it was, and is, the future. But I can forgive some people for being cautious about it even as late as 2015 if universal comparability was their concern.

My point is, if you’re only targeting English speakers _and_ you’re primary concern is portability then ASCII isn’t wasn’t unreasonable recommendation.