skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your math isn't very good. Maybe at least make sure you are within an order of magnitude, next time, especially when it's so very Googlable.

You're saying 20 schools have experienced shootings, total, ever?

Nope. There have been 119 just in the first five months of this year. It's around 1,369 total since 1970.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-sh...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/school-shoo...
There is no such fixed rule. Many high-speed trains Hamburg-Berlin-Leipzig don't stop in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Sachsen-Anhalt, or Brandenburg through which almost all of the route is going through. As far as I am aware there isn't even a single service on that route stopping in Brandenburg at all.
>even if that means they're doing free work in the middle of the night after putting in their 40+ hours a week in

We follow this too, but additional work is paid. It kind of makes sense, because developers who own a service can solve a problem faster and with a better solution than someone from a different team, because they know the full context. In practice, I had to work at night only a few times when production was down. If it's not supercritical, it can wait till the morning.
I should have split up that sentence I guess. I didn’t actually mean to say sicp is quick (although I’m wouldn’t say a year if you are already a good developer); implementing a scheme is quick to learn and do, however I don’t think you will intuit the elegance from it that way. After (a portion of) sicp, you probably will.
The U.S. must commit to making South and Southeast Asia rich
I meant a proper license, with training, psychological testing, etc.
It is the browser's default sans-serif font.
This may not align with the OS's default interface font.
Still have airport security, that stale recycled airplane air, no dining car, and the crappy little airplane toilet. A nice train is still a better experience IMHO.
I think this could be improved in a few ways.

For one, I would make it possible to go forward with the "wrong" (according to the author) choice, and of course backwards to make changes. By only steering the user towards the author's ideal, you have no way to experiment.

But a lot of this is just too subjective. The advice about spacing and so on seems to be based on "just so" feelings about what looks right, not any actual evidence. I'd like to see something that's grounded in research about legibility, readability, and mathematically ideal proportions.

Using a clichéd "sci-fi font" for a sci-fi book feels like an old trope that needs to die already. I get the point, but the author leaves no room for error here.
I totally get OP's comment. Cleanliness and safety of the station is usually proportional to its city's GDP. IE main central station in Vienna is fine. The one in Dresden not so much.

This is very different when it comes to airports as even small tier 2 airports are somehow clean and safe due to tightened security of them being airports and not train stations.
Given multiple countries at the same time are trying to ram through this BS, we need an international convention to permanently enshrine online freedom and prevent the future of surveillance from becoming normalized everywhere
British Members of Parliament are, in fact, notionally forbidden from resigning. There is deliberately no provision to "step down" as the representative. Historically there were cases where people probably did not want to be made MP.

Today, however, in practice you can resign. What happens is you tell the people who look after day-to-day business in the House, and they arrange for you to be offered a job by the Crown which you then accept. Obviously the people's elected representatives can't be the Monarch's employees, that's no sort of democracy -- and so this immediately terminates their membership of the Commons (fresh elections will be held some months in the future to replace them) and immediately the same offer can be re-used. The "jobs" given aren't real jobs, one that's used is Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiltern_Hundreds

Basically the wooded hills where I grew up were once bandit country and so the Crown used to pay somebody to sort out the bandits, the job still legally exists, but today the sort of bandits who live in those hills (bankers, executives, sometimes the Prime Minister himself) would need more than merely a "Crown Steward" to sort them out.
Reminds me of the time where someone shared the pdf for our final exam the day before it was going to be held, including the sample solutions and grading key. I still have absolutely no idea how it was obtained.

It certainly made for good learning material.
> ...input from people who have never worked in the field is of pretty limited value in how to resolve the hard part, and will not do much more than annoy teachers even more.

If people within the education system are getting upset that the people who are supposed to benefit from the education and who are paying an enormous sum of money in order to obtain the education dare to have an opinion about the education, I'd say that's a pretty good indication of the problems with the system. I can't think of any other area where there's anger at customers voicing their opinion. Institutions with that kind of attitude probably wouldn't last long if the education system was opened up and students were actually given some choice (say, by separating education and credentialing).
After a class on data structures and algorithms, a white board interview asking you to invert a binary tree is very different from the same interview when you apply for a job.
No “narrative” is not a fancy word, it’s a word that has a definition and meaning. Maybe you don’t come across it in your day to day, but anyone who makes public statements knows exactly what it means.

It’s basically the story being told. The way to understand it is that politicians and the media have a millions things they could discuss that are relevant to the voters.

What’s interesting is NOT what they talk about. It’s what’s they don’t talk about. And if you actually follow what they say over time it’s starts to become clear pretty quickly.

And it’s not a conspiracy or some secret - I’ve been in the room of a Fortune 50 PR meeting where they discuss the “narrative”.

It’s usually “we only want to talk about X which makes us look good. We don’t want to talk about Y. Y makes us look bad, so if someone mentions Y, use this response to steer it back to X”.

A good narrative example was the Hunter Biden laptop. The narrative was "this is suspected Russian disinformation". Absolutely zero proof it was, but that didn't matter, just keep dropping phrases like "this has all the signs of a Russian operation". Instead of the content in the laptop or hell, even the story about the laptop, the news covers the Russian conspiracy side. That entire narrative was spun out of thin air, the laptop was Hunter Biden's.

There are often good example of narratives being broken, and what you see is suddenly a narrative is dropped entirely and another takes it's place. If you're paying attention you'll suddenly notice some news story has completely disappeared from public discussion almost as if it never happened.

The one big benefit of the internet is how easy it is to follow public statements now. It's much harder to say something at a press conference, have it on Twitter, then deny it the next week. Doesn't stop politicians from trying though.
New Theory Says Alien Rock Found in Egypt Comes from a Supernova Explosion
Listening to teachers, yes please! Listening to pedagogy academics, no thanks!
i like this thread and wish to tug at it a bit.

i’m not so sure we _can_ fix it or even _should_ fix it. in my opinion, fixing implies a standard of perfection. it’s an imperfect system, formulated by imperfect people - the types we’re going to meet and interact with for the rest of our lives. there are always going to be imperfect ways of measuring the “goal”, be it content domain knowledge, or project completion kpi, or something else.

the positives of an imperfect system that i can think of off the top of my head are that they give teachers the ability and motivation to find creative ways to impart information and knowledge, and it can implicitly educate pupils in how to navigate complex, broken systems.

teachers who come up with novel educational methods are generally heralded for their innovations, but there’s not much else to incentivize them to remain or continue to innovate. not to mention the fact that those innovations may be expressions of their personalities and not an actual template for how every teacher should teach.

the same seems true for students. they find adaptations for navigating those broken systems. some will fall into the stream of the system, play the game, and get high marks. what have they learned? i’d say they have learned a fair amount. some will discover a need to collaborate survive and they have learned about themselves. some will complain and resist, but pass based on raw willpower or charm or something else. some will fail but will see gaping holes in the system to explore, exploit, or fill. they’ve also learned.

these are just a few of the dimensions i can think of off the top of my head. i believe that the primary way that we should seek to reform or improve educational systems is through how we treat the educational infrastructure (teachers, staff, materials, services) and the students who are failing to engage the experience due to factors beyond their control (mental health, SES, etc.)
It's not about the journey but about how fast you can get from point A to point B.
All of your recent posts showed as dead, but I vouched for this one so I can reply as I very much disagree with one part.

> AR is technically impossible with current and near future tech.

This is simply not true, there’s been numerous AR products built (just not runaway success stories). IMHO, it’s not “technically impossible”, it’s “prohibitively expensive” generally to get the experience that’s been hyped.
Definition of a Pub [pdf]
It could be nicer if it reverse engineered the speckles of different densities from the error diffusion dithering back into nice smooth continuous gradients.

As it is, it just leaves a bunch of individual dots in, but those could be detected and their color spread out to make a gradient. Like near the horizon of the planet, and the skulls and bones, for example.

Of course you'd need to detect and mask out the area that the gradient applies to, since you don't want i.e. the color bleeding out past the edge of the planet into space, or into the outlines.
I traveled quite a lot through Europe for last 30 years. Never got pickpocketed, never will be. Would not dare for hygiene (homeless people)!

Airports are much better! No squatters, beggars or drug dealers!
Tesla is a relatively small car manufacturer at a time when EVs are replacing ICE cars.

I think they'll continue to grow year on year irrespective of any downturn and that's why he is not too worried.
> Maintanence of planes is way more expensive than trains,

Kinda doubt if you count per passenger mile. Also, planes (and rockets) are _kind of_ simple when compared with trains or cars.
Rural areas are much more walkable; just stay off the roads. Some places you might want to watch for coyote.
Fintech’s boom and bust spells trouble for startups
I might not have been clear. It's not an act. You are not usually guiding your peer trough your thought process our loud step by step. That's inefficient. Yet that is what you should do to maximize the amount of information passed onto the interviewer. It's just a different setup to which most people need to adjust to.
This is the best take. You can see why universities continue to exist - the overwhelmingly wealthy people that hang out here lap it up. This is great West Coast dinner party discussion, while drinking an $80 bottle of wine.

Go to the rural South if you want to see this phenomenon in person. It’s not romantic.
Totally agree.
I might a bit partial to that, because I tend to underperform multiple choice tests for overthinking, but I've really the impression that open ended questions test knoledge much better and make it more difficult to cheat.
Beside that, having almost nothing to do with cheating, another good thing in the French system is the continuous grading: labs were graded, projects were graded, small intermediate tests were graded, so you really do not study for just the exam (actually often you do not study at all for the exam).
(beware: my experience is limited to a single grande école I attended).
With all due respect, it looks to me that you're the one presenting a straw man argument here.

What's the point of (economic) growth if not to meet the demands of the consumerism? You gotta keep consuming stuff to fill the void that consuming stuff creates. There's nothing wrong with consuming less. Look at all the fat fucks on the streets. The needlessly big, loud, and fuel hungry vehicles. It's bad for all us.
MockNeat – the modern Java faker lib
Learning new languages is a different thing than crunching into the next JavaScript fud.
That's pretty much it for me too, those things are there regardless of class.

Also you have no turbulences in a train, also no safety announcements :D
The European air traffic is subsidized quite often, trains not that much. Just take all that government money out from flying and put it to trains, suddenly they become much cheaper.
You are completely wrong about that. If they passed their exams, they know a lot. They're no good in practice because they had little practice. Yes, we do learn most of our practical skills on the job. Medicine is very much a 'know-how' profession.
I am a frequent flier in Europe and I have never needed to wait 1 hour one way to get through security. This is not an issue anymore.
Many years ago I was a visiting part-time lecturer (a.k.a. lowest of the low). I was given the syllabus summary from the prospectus, and then had to write a syllabus; prepare teaching material; write tests/exams; and mark submissions.

The institution was far from elite; they used to send staff on recruitment drivs in faraway places, because (a) overseas students get to come th this country when otherwise they wouldn't get a visa; and (b) they pay more. The result was that many of the students were rich, and assumed they didn't have to work. Many didn't have basic qualifications for doing the work. So they cheated extensively (there was no web and no WhatsApp; they just copied one-another's coursework submissions).

I asked my experienced colleagues what to do. They said that I could report the cheating to the school; but I would then be tied up in exam boards all summer, for which I wouldn't be paid. Also I could expect to have to fight charges of racism. Alternatively I could explain to them the difference between helping one-another out (good) and plagiarism (bad). Guess which choice I took!

Basically, the institution didn't care about plagiarism; they didn't care about the unfairness to honest students; and I don't think they cared whether the students learned anything. By the next year, I didn't care either. I just delivered the material, and went home.
That link was on slides presented at a professional workshop. If you judge slides by whether they are flashy ppt files, well bless your heart.

I agree that the slides maybe slanted too much in the direction of fusion being just around the corner. But that hardly helps hybrid reactors! If fusion is more problematic that promised, that tilts the table even more toward just using fission, with no fusion component whatsoever.

The major problem of fission is not safety, or waste disposal, or (near term) fuel availability. The major problem is cost. It's difficult to see how hybrid reactors would improve cost. As the slides say, the focus on hybrids is more of matter of "how can we make our fusion work appear more relevant", not "what would customers actually want?"
Could do without the ageism
This guy is an idiot.

He created a testing system that encourages cheating. He made it too easy to cheat, so if one student cheated other students (who are all in competition together) would need to cheat as well less they receive a relatively lower grade.

Then when he detected the cheating he didn’t attempt to minimize the damage. Instead he focused all his time and effort building a solution that nobody needed, and let the main problem escalate to the point where nearly all his students were cheating.

The lecturer should be fired.
Possibly. But I think unlikely.

If AI wipes out humanity[0], I suspect it will be a singular personality even if embodied in many copies, and therefore doubt it/they will any of us around in a zoo.

On the other hand, if we get The Culture (no idea how likely that might be), I suspect people will still do sociology for fun.

[0] my guesstimate is P(x-risk|AI) < 0.1, mainly because I think most of the possible AI are tools rather than agents, which reduces the risk from extinction to idiots starting wars and/or coming up with money making schemes that deplete resources before people stop them, which are bad while being well short of X-risks.
> Then why require long time in school and residency for doctors? A boot camp should be enough.

Nurses don't go though the same system, what they go through is closer to a bootcamp.

> No, you don't need any degree to use Excel or MS Word

Yes you do, because if all I want is someone who can write Word documents, I don't need that person to understand computer architectures, see:

https://www.reed.co.uk/career-advice/what-is-ecdl/

> I am asking for degrees for the higher levels of IT field, not for the people who modify WordPress themes, whom I am sure do a great job and are highly needed but are not exactly exponents of high level work in this field.

The IT field is multi dimensional, a person who is building a 3D engine is not the same person who is going to set up the backend system for your bank or write your kernel drivers. If put everything in one hat you are either going to teach too much or not enough in the field that the student will end up pursuing.

Why do you believe the education sector would be a worse place if we would have 3D engineering, backend engineering, mobile engineering and Wordpress theme development as separate fields? I would enjoy it when hiring people if there would be more specific credentials to the role I want to hire for.
I think American teacher often don't appreciate faculty vs student dynamics. They think they are there to help each of their students achieve academic success.

Education mostly doesn't work like that for most people in most places.

Teachers are not allies of students. They are the enemy, they are the problem. Students are rarely interested in learning. They are interested for this whole thing to be over and with a decent result.

This adversity pushes students to cooperate against the faculty. That's a strong motivator to connect and support each other in the face of common enemy. And they are learning a lot from each other, both in terms of knowledge and cooperation. There are also freeloaders in that cooperation that come just for the answers. But when the answer is not as easy as picking a letter, for example the answer is a way of solving a class of problems even those cheaters learn from this coopeartion. And they learn more than they could learn from their teachers.

By exploiting adversarial dynamics, having good materials available and technically ensuring it's hard to cheat trachers can basically have half of their teaching work done by the students as they teach each other. This benefits everybody.
I came across this with System.Drawing on Ubuntu and successfully managed to replace it with SkiaSharp code instead. It was drawing a map for a game in memory then saving to a .jpg file.

I use VS 2022 Community on Windows, tested it there then published to Linux and uploaded over SSH to a VPS. It worked very nicely.
That airports are more secure is not hard to believe, as they're not actually in cities so criminals would have to plan ahead and travel there to start whatever undefined criminal activity we're talking about. I doubt it's the security theater that does it, as they are just for getting onto planes (I haven't seen security people outside of that security area).

It's not like I've never seen a homeless person in a city center (which includes train stations, though usually they're not inside) but I'm not sure that crime rates are actually that high. With cameras all over the place, it sounds like it would be a hard place to operate at more than a handful of times until they know what you look like, but IANAC.
One of the problems with recommendation systems (or maybe the companies deploying them) is that they lack that urge human experts have to edify those that seek advice and raise their standards a little bit. It would be interesting to figure out if such an AI is even possible using current methods.

I'm sure the drug store department head got shrugged off by a lot of customers with no interest in digging deeper than the Top 40 and if he had been an AI optimizing for engagement he never would guided you to these other artists.

The lack of these kinds of positive externalities and small but important relationships is part of what makes AI driven processes so tiresome.
It's the whole "Do as I say, not as I do" motto. In their eyes, you are workers, and they are employers, so these objective tests don't apply to them. They hire based on their need and not your wants. They don't need another Eric Schmidt, they need more lemmings to do lemmings work.

Ultimately, that's how I think these companies eventually mature. The people that know how to steer the cargo ship retires and you are left with workers that only know how to do the work assigned. Bureaucracy ensues and no one dares to steer for fear it would sink it or get fired for causing unneeded risk. And plus, they don't know how to.
This. Flame that curiosity into an intense burning desire. It's worth at least a x10. Another order of magnitude comes from talking one-one with someone who is living and breathing the work. I just don't get these "give me a list of books to read about mathematics" questions that pop up regularly on HN. Yes it's good to read & do your homework, but that shit is slooow. Even the professionals don't "read" mathematics, they talk to other mathematicians, and they work it out themselves. Understanding is not memorizing. I don't know what it is but it's not that.
Yeah, but stability is important. Take the recent federal elections. Germany moved without any pain from a CDU/CSU/SPD to a three party government (SPD/Greens/FDP). No complaints about the election system, besides a too large Bundestag. Compare that to the US elections Biden/Trump: massive problems with the voting system: real and made up.

The Germans voted on paper. -> There was an undisputed result.
I might miss the irony in your words but...
Job interviews and eduction tests have different objectives, I hope.
That’s why I wrote that the planning horizon is 5 weeks.