skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You say that innocently, but you may not realise - they know the necessary hashtags.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/amber-rudd-necessary-...
There is a lot of syntactic variation possible, both for formula and algorithms. Even for something as simple as quicksort there is enough natural variation for a class of 30 maybe even 100 (if no references can be used).
Anything more complex and even with references it should be unique.
FUN3D (used by NASA and SpaceX to model fluid flow)
Most of the comments seems to be about the impact of cheating on the class or how the system is broken and how it should be fixed. Fact of the matter is, most cheating pays off. In my experience a prof or teacher will rarely go so far as been described in this story.

I took a massive gamble on my high school finals to not only cheat but to steal thousands of tests and exams via malware that I wrote over the course of a year. Its been 10 years since that happened, and reading this I might do a story of how I stole 1 terabyte of data in my final year, and passed all my exams.
All specific discussion of obesity aside, this was extraordinarily well written. Bravo to the author if he should ever see this comment thread..
Application posters: https://fun3d.larc.nasa.gov/example-6.html
It’s so efficient. I love it.
I still don't see what this has to do with the comment I was responding to. Who cares whether you tackle low level computing earlier or later?
This was one of the reasons why the use of such tools was strictly prohibited at my former university.

Another argument given was:
even if you only have to *think* about using such a tool you are already in a situation where good scientific practices is no longer guaranteed. In other words: if you/the students would have followed all rules of good scientific practise right from the beginning, you would never need to use such a tool.
But I guess if you are the developer of such a tool or work in that area of research, you probably see things differently...

Also; how many different ways are there to explain rules on scientific practices within 150 word? How much similarities would you expect from O(100) different students - even if they write independently? - I'm not sure if that is taken into account in such tools.
On a different scale: when piping e.g. a typical PhD thesis though such a tool, the first introductory paragraphs will always have red flags (simply because that topic was already introduced 10000 times and everyone read more or less the same introductory textbooks).
The important part - the main part of the thesis - of course should be unique (but if the supervisor/examist/committee is not able to "detect" this in their own, well...).
Of course literally copy&paste an introduction is still not okay. But -as the blogger also said- this can easily detected by issuing a simple yawhoogle search in case the text already reads suspicious (e.g. if the style of writing varies a lot between paragraphs etc).

So yes, I'd agree that the use of such tools is relatively limited when it comes to "real" scientific works but in this particular case it was quite neat to see how easily you can use it to atomatise the collection of evidences if you have a large class of students...
Your grade reflects how well you learned with respect to your peers.

Getting 80% in an exam in a weak cohort of students might earn you an A, while doing so in a strong one might get you a B instead. Is this fair toward a student getting a B this year with the same score that earned somebody an A the year earlier just because they happened to enroll with different peers?

Also why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?
Not sure it proves anything in interview context though. It's a language specific trivia you'll quickly learn either from experience or from a good mentor. Proves nothing about your ability to code or to be a successful member in the team. Unless you're actively looking for a candidate that knows all those JS optimization tricks.
> these old adventure games had their art stored in a vector format this whole time and we’ve just been rendering it blocky and pixelated to preserve authenticity?

What do you think "stored in a vector format" means? The old art is the old art; it doesn't contain more information if you learn something about the storage format that you didn't expect.

Look at the example backgrounds. In the first, we see a tree with a round knot, presumably where a round branch fell away. There's a round hole in the center of the knot. Rendering the stored data in an inappropriate way, we can instead see an oddly polygonal tree with a bizarre +-shaped hole in it. We can also see that certain parts of the image just aren't defined, relying on the pixels to have a certain width within the image. Look at the swatches of white on the tree branches, the crenellations, the base of the tower, the little palm tree beside the banners, the grass behind the tree...

In the second image, the skull on the left is missing a tooth. In the rerendered version, the tooth is for some reason no longer missing. What was a gap in the teeth is now a tiny string of black dots, much thinner than the teeth, forming an inexplicable straight line across the teeth. What was a gash in the bone between the skulls is now two clearly unrelated thin black lines which appear to have been painted onto the bone. The lighting on the skull on the right manages to avoid casting any light on certain parts of the skull, again a problem that doesn't exist in the original art.

The third image is mostly fine. All of them have something weird going on where pixels that have a 2:1 aspect ratio in the original are rendered as perfect circles in the rerender, but the aspect ratio of the overall image doesn't change.
Yes but the Shuttle Transporter has several modifications and reinforcements, so it's not really a "stock" 747

Flying it is also more complicated
So, the Leibniz argument? Our current system for educating citizens of all ages is already the best it can be, and any change or even reflection upon it is a waste of time.
How is it nowadays?

Is it still the same, or has it changed?
Nice point about the minimum 0.5 ACU, forgot about that one. From what I've read 0.5 on v2 is the same price as 1 on v1, which seems pretty dumb coming from aws.

Could you elaborate more on this:

> You can have public access to serverless v2

Because the docs mention the following:

> You can’t give an Aurora Serverless DB cluster a public IP address; you can only access it from within a VPC based on the Amazon VPC service.

Potentially I could setup an RDS proxy or vpn inside the vpc and give that public access, but that seems a bit of a roundabout way of handling this.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/best-practices-for-wor...
To be honest, I like the ability to override the darkmode setting of an app. I want certain apps to be bright sometimes, without having to switch the whole system.
It seems overbroad in that some cities are doing fine, while in other, less trendy places, there actually are dying towns that these arguments could very well apply to.
I once, a long time ago, had a similar argument (somewhere online) with a bunch of Java coders. I asked them to create a library for solving quadratic equations. Asking to create a library itself was a trap of course.

Everybody came up with some solver classes in Java, some stateful, some stateless. One guy presented the most monstrous solution with 100+ lines of code where you could individually assign the coefficients, individually modify them, trigger recalculation, get the number of roots, get the roots. That guy was very proud of what he did.

Oh, I found bugs in his code. But that was considered normal. People make mistakes, right?

I showed them a two-line solution with a single function (where you'd try hard to make a mistake) and nobody liked it. I was ridiculed right there, for not solving the problem "properly".

It struck me how someone can overengineer a solution to the simplest problem and be proud of it. I thought at the time this industry is screwed if this is the norm.

In fact probably some 90% of so called library code on GitHub is overenginnered crap. 90% is arbitrary but from my experience every time I look for some solution let's say for some GUI effect on iOS, find a library or a framework, take the source, analyze it, start simplifying it and I end up with a version that is orders of magnitude shorter and can be just copied into my project it's so trivial.

You realize that it was so trivial that there was no need for a library in the first place.

I liked the post about minimaism the other day here on HN [1]. It still amazes me how minimalism is not the norm, is not taught as the only way you should solve problems in software engineering. There's no "proper" way other than the most minimalist one, period.

However, minimalism requires some extra effort to achieve, and that's the whole point of engineering.

[1] The post was about minimalism in programming languages, but the author had another, more general post: https://pointersgonewild.com/2018/02/18/minimalism-in-progra...

Edit: mandatory favorite essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
Yet they are able to do the job. Something doesn't lineup with your testing methods vs outcome.

If these people are finding work elsewhere and doing productive work for years what does it say about your process?
A bit unrelated, but I have been using pdm (https://pdm.fming.dev/) which is something like Poetry but faster and PEP compliant (!)
Sounds like a great use case for closures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)
Defects, and potential defects, tend to cause a background of mental overhead, and communication overhead, throughout the organization. People have to remember what kinds of assumptions are broken under what circumstances, and relate that to a business impact.

There's a mental unburdening when you can just say "situation X won't happen".
one could argue that it's a job for the compiler to make sure two equivalent language constructs (map and for loop) perform similarly...
I've had the pleasure of multiple trainings from Klaus Iglberger.

Here's a talk he gave concerning free functions at CPPCON'17 [1].

It's high-level enough to be understood by non-C++ devs and I believe it can be applied to any OO language.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_bhZCoX5M
This comment is saying "No one else here knows as much about this as I do", and little else.

Your only concrete solution, produced by your years of study, seems to be "shut up and listen to educators". Well what are they saying?? How do we fix the problem of cheating and the other issues associated with measuring learning through testing?

If you have so much specialized knowledge about the problem, what does it tell you about how to fix it?
Fun part is that it can work like ideal world when you have 1-2 devs per year to hire and as a small company you get 20-30 CVs a month.

Once you get into scale where you need to hire 20 devs a year and get 100s of CVs per week it all breaks down.
It's not zero sum.

"Some 74 per cent of the 114,000 convictions for licence fee dodging in 2019 were for women"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/decriminalis...

TV licence prosecutions are more than 1 in 10 UK court cases
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10256679/...

So hundreds of thousands of people a year are being criminally prosecuted and convicted in service of this funding model, at the tax payer's expense.

We wouldn't stand for this for any other media organisation because it's fundamentally wrong. No amount of PR puff about the BBC changes that.
Compare with: <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-peabody-dispatch...>
They have a point though. If exam is testing for things that can be looked up easily, what's the point? Test for understanding and make tests individual enough to make mass cheating not feasible.

> Agreeing to follow specific rules and then silently not following them is lying. Do you consider that to be okay too?

Students are hardly in a position where they can express their views freely. Do you consider laying out rules and punishing anyone who voices objections okay too?

Things are never just black and white.
Look at .Net Blazor for a non JavaScript solution.
It's about speed of solving medium leetcode not coding skills.
Wikipedia’s Switch to HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship (2017)
>Judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the law unconstitutional in a ruling from 2008, considering that the Texas statute cannot define sexual devices themselves as obscene and prohibit their sale. However, with a GOP majority in the House and in the Senate, the law remains in the books. So yes, under Texas law, it is not allowed for a person to own six Dildos

Somebody doesn't understand how law works. Unless they are playing semantic games and only a minority of the 5th Circuit ruled it unconstitutional (or the ruling was later overturned by SCOTUS), the Court overrides statute law, and the law is unenforceable.

So, no, it isn't illegal, and the article is premised on a lie. And look how many commenters here get triggered by one lie.

It's just like there are thousands of deeds that have racial/religious covenants on them, but those clauses are invalid even if the deed is not changed, because case law.
It looks to me like the data relies on the images using a minimum stroke width relative to the size of the rendered image. All of them display areas of white where there is no image data, because increasing the resolution caused pixels to appear in the space between strokes that, at the original resolution, were less than a pixel apart.

Stated another way, the images are full of shapes that should have color fills, but instead they're just strokes that are guaranteed to be so fat that a fill would be redundant. You also don't need to define every edge of a shape - you can define top and bottom and just let the fat strokes implicitly define left and right edges.
Ask HN: Is there any service that notifies new updates of commonly softwares?
One can already easily get a list of fonts installed on the system…
Lack of constraints.. I'm sure having no memory, no cycles or not even computer access time made people aim at diamonds, not tar pits.

One thing I'd add over the 'screwed industry', at least in the java,model era is that the more they added, the more "tools" they needed and it was seen as a quality. Basically quadratic complexity at the cultural level..

ps: as usual, https://duckduckgo.com/?q=stop+writing+classes+pycon&t=ffab&...
Free tier, like all things, is pretty bad if misused.

The reason we want a free tier is to try things out before we can actually commit to something. We don't know if what we are doing is actually gonna make money and sometimes we go a few months without working on it. So it's kind of a pain to pay for something we don't use.

That's why serverless is also nice to have on our current stage, things can just scale to 0 and there's no wasting of resource.

> running on a VM and runs fine on a 5$ a month instance

Easier said than done, unfortunately.
fellow sidewalk worm helper here. ever since i was a kid, i could never bear the sight of earthworms on the side walk, getting stepped on or baked dry when the Sun comes out. i had always thought i was alone in this behavior (none of my friends did this), until i read that Albert Schweitzer did this too. he won the nobel peace prize in 1952.
Ask HN: Theoretical CS summer schools/events taking place in Europe this year?
Hi, I'm a TCS MSc student who was looking for some events (summer schools, conferences, or any type of event related to TCS, logic or math) taking place this summer in Europe. Do you know of some? One that was already recommended to me is ESSLLI, which I was considering to attend, but I could even add a few more. Thanks.
You can't educate someone who is not ready to be educated. Those that get the most out of college are those that put the most in. This was true 1000 years ago, and is true now.

Yes, this system is the best [1] because access is open to all (which it wasn't). So those that want to go, can, and those who want to learn, can.

What probably needs to change is the understanding of what college is for. It's not to give you an education, it is to give you the opportunity for you to take an education for yourself.

[1] for some definition of best. Not all schools are created equal, nor all subjects, scale is in play here as well.
Liz doesn't have any real power, at least, no more than any other very rich old ladies.

This is too often misunderstood or perhaps even just deliberately misexplained on HN. For example, you will see people saying that Liz blocked the Military Action Against Iraq (Parliamentary Approval) Bill. Because hey, it says "Queen's Consent" so that means Liz had to authorize it right?

Nope. The power of Queen's Consent is operated on behalf of the government. Liz doesn't get to decide what "she" consents to. That Bill was blocked because the alternative was a (probably rather lively) parliamentary debate about Blair's [the Prime Minister at the time] enthusiasm for starting wars. He had the numbers, but this would embarrass him because it would have forced people who'd prefer to say they hate war, they wouldn't want a war, to admit yeah, of course they want to put troops in harm's way to further their careers. Queen's Consent isn't a matter for debate, so nobody had to be made uncomfortable.

If a non war-mongering government took up similar legislation, Liz wouldn't be like "Oh no, you can't take away my war starting powers" because they aren't her powers, they are government powers, and the government decides.

Remember, a predecessor of this Parliament executed the King for starting wars. Since that point it's clear that the Monarch's "powers" belong entirely to the Government, and the Government answers to Parliament. If you're wondering why you've got this nasty lying piece of shit in Number Ten, don't look to Liz, the people you sent to Westminster gave him that role and they could take it away today if a majority of them wanted to. You sent them there, that's democracy.
>I wish the west coast could succede

Indeed.
I think it's a pretty common pattern to use

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Not the most convenient, but solves (works around) the issue
why do we need to "measure knowledge"? school should be to teach knowlege. Measuring is not our problem. It is the problem of the employers. Test the teachers not the students. We only need to make sure the teachers are of good quality, not the students.
I neglected math a lot in HS too and tried the Khan Academy route, but figured out over time that you really can find your gaps and fill them on demand by focusing on the work you want to do.

I wouldn’t discourage you from trying a more comprehensive approach to building a great foundation in math. Math is awesome and if you enjoy it, go for it. If you want to stay focused on ML, you might do alright by figuring out what you need as you go. Just walk back from each problem until you find your bearings, then dig in.

Math is huge and you could find it takes forever to arrive at the skills you need to do the specific thing you want to do.
Best tests I had were the ones you could bring your notes or even any book to. The questions were structured in a way, that you had to know and understand the topic quite well to be able to answer/solve them in time. You couldn't just copy answers from the material you brought it with you, but you could use it as a reference to help you solve problems, like you use references in real life to find solutions to problems. If you didn't know the topic well, you didn't stand a chance to complete the test in time.

The tests I respected the least, were the ones were you were required to write down memorized definitions. I mean why? In this day and age I can google any definition on my phone in few seconds. I can also memorize definition of some rule without properly understanding it. That's not useful. Give me a task to solve that requires me to truly understand that rule.
Read gcp's policy and they say preview periods can last around 6 months, and I'm not sure when alloydb preview started.

But even if there's a free period, it'd be complicated to develop stuff around the DB for free, just to turn into 100s of dollars after 6 months, that's not something we want to see happening. So an indefinite free tier with limited resources would be better. Like aws lambda 1M or firebase function 2M request free tier.
Interesting, that they used Whatsapp. My impression was, that it’s barely used in the US. I’d expected to see a discord server instead
Do your developers have to work in 2 week sprints and forced to work on tasks split into sub 1-day part so they never have any real autonomy? Then you aren't giving your developers more freedom than Google. And if you aren't working like that then you aren't doing Scrum.

Google gives even junior developers multi month projects to own, manage and complete. No Scrum shop gives developers that level of autonomy, not even to senior developers.

So to me the time I've spent working on Scrum projects feels like a sweatshop compared to how I could plan and structure development at Google. At Google I am free to collaborate with stakeholders, build prototypes and get feedback etc, as I see fit to complete the project. Or not do it when I don't feel it is needed, the important part isn't how I run the project but that I run it well. If you don't give your developers that level of autonomy then I'm not sure why you'd care much about developer competence at all. (I quit Google a few years ago though due to how the company was changing, but I'll never join a Scrum development team again)
There's a book I read that specified that the universe could be "stateless" to an outside observer, yet the simple act of computing it allows us to exist.
The whole thing is fascinating. I only just read about it because of the long slog that was Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock, which spends basically half the book talking about the China/India Line of Actual Control, and dips into Sikhism a bit.

I had no idea that Indira Ghandi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards, after she insisted they be reinstated to her protective detail, Intelligence Bureau having removed them after Operation Bluestar. The same operation is what lead to the Air India 182 plane bombing. Quite the blowback, only to then be met with the killing of over 8,000 Sikhs in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
KhanAcademy and 3blue1brown (https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown/playlists). Remember, it will take time. It won't be fast. Especially if you really want to understand ML algorithms.
> It sounds like the only difference in your example is that these things exist but are not centrally verified to be identical, because apparently diplomas themselves are the problem.

Yes, exactly.

You are using a diploma as an indicator of knowledge, and you have a diploma-giving machine (university) that gives the diploma to anyone that can pass a test. People cheat the test in order to get the diploma. It will always happen, no matter how intricate you make your tests, because you cannot automate knowledge verification.

It isn't a "problem" - it's an "impossibility". And it's one impossibility software companies have gradually started dealing with - most don't care about diplomas anymore, because the correlation between knowledge and having a diploma gets lesser and lesser the more diplomas are printed artificially.

So, that is a pretty good solution, too. Remove diplomas altogether, and let employers measure knowledge in a way they seem fit. They will have responsibility for the mistakes of an employee, so it makes sense that they make the criteria. That way, educational institutions will have to make their education useful in the real world, or their reputation will crumble.