skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the college admissions process is by no means a perfect system, if you're accepted to Harvard, you're probably a pretty darn good student.

If Harvard graded on a curve, such that half of their students—who presumably got straight A's in high school—received a C or below, would that be more fair? Would it be a better representation of student performance?

I suppose the answer depends on the purpose of giving grades. If the goal is to see who outperformed who, Harvard's average GPA is a major problem. If the goal is to see who learned the material, then Harvard is providing an excellent education.
What good is the discussion if you don't fully read the initial thread? That graph makes it really difficult to do.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle and ignoring our requests to stop.

Please don't create accounts to do that with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I had a choice between University of Maryland and a much more prestigious institution. It should have been a no brained because of the tuition alone but I struggled with it at the time. Being around people who care about things besides school was super healthy for me and I’m so thankful I made the right choice. (Go Terps!)
I’m not here to win an argument. I provided a fact and nothing more. If sports cars also burn through tires quickly they’re causing pollution of this type as well.
Self plug - another web modem

https://quiet.github.io/quiet-js
I used to work for Amazon. I did not give Jeff Bezos $100,000. In fact, I actually made money out of the deal.

If you were a fairly senior SWE then customers gave Amazon a few million dollars for the work you did. Jeff got $2.8m, you $200k. On paper it's unfair, unreasonable, and unbalanced, but you agreed to it, and without Jeff you would have earned less. Maybe it's fine.
I see a lot of your replies are to basically leave the country. Got a chip on your shoulder bud?
Not solving the underlying problem.
Because US average family size is 3.3, especially in suburban areas, while Europe is 2.7, less in the wealthier countries. Ever tried fitting 3 car seats in a Nissan Leaf?

Moreover, US suburbia, with its huge distances between home, school, sports and entertainment centers, has a tradition of kids car pooling. In Europe distances are shorter and biking or walking are more popular.

These, with proper marketing, almost forces US families to have at least one large car. Whether it's gas or electric is a matter of status, disposable income, area of living (suburbia has less charging stations because population density makes it less profitable) and local political climate.
The language has a standard library fit for its intended purpose - scripting the DOM.

Moving javascript out of the browser and trying to use it as a one-size-fits-all replacement for everything from systems to application programming, and every language from C++ to Java, is the original sin. Stop complaining because Brendan Eich's toy scripting language isn't a good replacement for things it was never meant to be used for. A screwdriver isn't a good hammer, either.
yep, and if reasonably sufficient, a noscript/basic (x)html should be there too.
Solana's blockchain clock loses track of time, now running 30 minutes behind
Sure, a malign tumor grows until the host dies.

Same is true for our glorious, of course unavoidable, an extremely resilient and fair economic system.

There is only black and white, zero and one, locusts capitalism and stalinistic communism...

/s
> The problem is that USA is already full of unlicensed guns

The Uvalde shooter purchased his weapon a few days prior. Most school shooters do. Anything making that harder helps.
on separate note,
why don't registry like npm take a raw repo and build in some kind of reproducible environment (like nixos/or even standardized docker ) then user uploading pre built package is beyond me. i think fdroid does sth like that.
i think it will help with a lot with different supply chain attack.
(not this one though).
native extensions (c++) will be pain though, but with the advent of wasm maybe native extensions are not that great idea now huh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Volkswagen e-UP/Skoda CITIGOe iV has a range of "up to" 170 miles (270km)
Yeah, but finding a decent place to rent in Germany is the real problem.

It's nearly impossible as everyone is locked into their rental units and will never move.

You basically have to wait for someone to die.
I'd like to have something like the Lit Motors self balancing enclosed motorcycle.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=lit+motors&ia=web
Any choice that affects people is inherently political.

You seem to be conflating this fact with the so-called "fad" of leveraging decisions for clout in an overtly partisan context.
Homebrew is a package manager. Windows has its own package manager: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/ I guess MSI isn't a panacea after all.

Here is a not so savory story on how winget came to be: https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/
If it's just to serve CRUD apps or run web sites, bottleneck is network time and browser rendering time, unless you're doing actual data processing.

And if you are doing data processing, easier to use a data science library like Pandas for Python which implicitly have DOD built-in.
Yep, cmd is great where it is. If I compare cmd-shortcuts with identical ctrl-shortcuts, with normal key mapping, the ctrl ones strain my hand and pull my fingers away from the home row. The same cmd-based shortcuts do neither of those things. It's one thing Apple got very right, that everyone else is getting wrong.
Matrix would happen differently today
I keep a small printout in my wallet with 20 phone numbers just for that situation.
How to stop a robot vacuum from getting stuck on the laundry rack
I encountered children begging for food and/or money in Delhi
It's unconstitutional. Congress is supposed to appropriate money. Can a Republican president "forgive" up to $10K in capital gains taxes?
You can incur "maintenance debt" like anywhere else and some cans kicked down the road end up not needing to be done or being done in a different/better way. But as someone who lives in an old house, you do need to keep up to some degree especially with things that are only going to get worse if left alone.

I agree the parent lifetimes are probably a bit low. But the basic point that annual costs for a house/property are significant even if you can trim a bit at the margins.
Polar Ice Accumulation from Volcano-Induced Transient Atmospheres on the Moon
Your point 2 is spot on. Saying hierarchy affects income the most is bad analysis because hierarchy is obviously highly correlated with income. This would only be news if the author got the opposite result they did.

It would have been way more interesting to see an analysis on what hierarchies are net positive for society (i.e. competence hierarchies) and what hierarchies are net negative (probably coercive hierarchies where there is not enough competition so there is market power being exploited)
I will note that Harvard extension school weeds out prospective students based on whether they get a 3.0, and they will kick you out if you fail to maintain that gpa. So at least part of the university's grades have a hard floor that prevents people with poor grades from getting accepted or graduating.
I'm sure some college kids have tried to use it and classify it as a "pizza emergency"
If you can get beyond the clickbait title - I think what you'll find is that Gladwell is really talking about the very real STEM people, most of who are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings - who were weeded out in Freshman Calc BC or Differential Equations because the bar is so tremendously high if everything is graded on a curve at a extremely selective university - before you had a chance to meet them.
What are automatic weapons designed for ?
Defending against malicious bots with a zip bomb
> ... the Canadian government uses third party US website services to provide government of Canada services.

Can you please clarify? e.g. which websites/services?
Came here to say the same thing. Funnily enough I'm in semi-rural Ohio. I see POTS infrastructure all over the place being neglected. Boxes are open to the elements. Spliced cables are just laying out on the ground.

I can only imagine the ghosts of old-school telco linemen rolling in their graves over this.

I keep meaning to do a deep-dive into public utility regulation here to see if the incumbent telcos are required to maintain that infrastructure. I'd actually have fun going out and photographing/geotagging damaged infrastructure if a court would actually compel the telco to do something about it.
Payphones have been mostly gone for ages in NYC, there were just a few stragglers.

I don't see any connection between the moon and payphones, anyways.
>It used to me Cemusa and another company who's name slips mind.

JCDecaux is the other one - they actually bought Cemusa a few years ago.
Didn't watch the video but the article was good. I think their mindset is absolutely correct- we should be worrying less about overpopulation than underpopulation and we should be pushing forward trying to make technological progress instead of embracing a degrowth mindset. While it does seem like big ideas are harder to find, I think some incentive shifting (e.g. more focus by corporates on long-term growth through productivity increases and innovation and less on financial chicanery) along with the innovation that comes sometimes with a single new platform (remember all the "Uber for X" products that the iphone enabled) that can help turn the tide. Plus, seems like many more people are concerned with progress, from Cowen to Progress.institute, so hopefully with more focus there will be more results.
Payphones were replaced with LinkNYC kiosks, https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/3/20/22985681/linknyc-5g-tower-...

> The LinkNYC buildout halted in 2018, with the majority of kiosks installed in relatively plugged-in Manhattan ... The company wound up unable to make its payments to the city, racking up a bill of $60 million. By 2019, the company faced bankruptcy ... The reboot of LinkNYC will add fifth-generation cellular network technology, on top of existing features like free Wi-Fi, a 911 button and USB chargers. Multiple telecom companies are in talks to house their 5G equipment in compartments in the upper chambers of the poles, Cannon said.
Just received this email yet (I have 3 CCs). It doesn't surprise me. It was quite clear the app and the product stopped getting any attention quite some time ago.
I'm at the beach, and i'm goin fishin. Doing very good.
Were It Not for Cosmic Good Fortune, We Wouldn’t Be Here – Science Connected
I'd wait a few years on Chicago -- my impression is that they've been undergoing some pretty profound cultural shifts regarding admissions and grading, i.e. their rigor is getting more performative and less real (and it was always at least a little performative, or at least, rooted in being just a little gratuitously mean).

EDIT: Not coincidentally, it was an admin brought in from Yale who got this ball rolling.
Noticed this too!
Even if Proton has all the best intentions, by concentrating a lot of interesting accounts, they will most definitely fall victim to sophisticated attacks by well funded adversaries. I doubt that Proton's security is better than Google's security. If you want a truly secure mailbox, it would be far better to use Google than Proton and just PGP encrypt anything truly sensitive.
Richard Nakka's Experimental Rocketry Web Site
Packj tool (https://github.com/ossillate-inc/packj) analyzes Python/NPM packages for risky code and attributes such as Network/File permissions expired email domains. It uses static code analysis. We are adding support for Rust. We found a bunch of malicious packages on PyPI using the tool, which have now been taken down: examples https://packj.dev/malware [disclosure: I’m one of the developers]
I placed an order for an Aptera around 2008, but they never delivered and eventually refunded my $500 deposit in 2010. Rumor had it that they couldn't produce the body shell. After the Aptera debacle, I ordered one of the very first Nissan Leafs instead. I kept it for 8 years (about 60K miles) but ended up selling it when the range had dropped to around 50 miles. The 2011 Nissan Leaf had the worst depreciation of any car produced in 2011. I no longer own an electric car (but I'm no longer commuting).
The shape of the architecture, and the practical effects of that architecture on performance are two distinct topics. You can have have a long and interesting discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of data-oriented programming versus the object-oriented approach without ever touching the topic of performance.

Also, DOD isn’t fast unto itself, it just lends itself to fast implementations.
Non American here.

Are GPAs meant to be comparable between institutions?
Hiring Data Shows Trending Rise in Layoffs
If this was chrome, wouldn't the OOM kill only kill the offending tab? Why can't firefox handle it this way too?
I like the word "admittedly" there because I read it as it's a dirty little secret of yours, haha.
abiological intelligence has a much larger set of possible habitats. Given the vast possibilities of virtual spaces it's somewhat unclear to me why a post-biological intelligence would even be interested in spreading across the galaxy beyond a few observation outposts.
What if you're poor yourself? :(
Hey "Bruh". The points you're making may be perfectly valid but your tone is condescending and childish. Maybe dial it back a bit?

We're all very glad you've found your utopia.
> […] circumvent the will of the people and enter a war there was no appetite to get involved in.

You may wish to re-examine that claim:

> Germany also made a secret offer to help Mexico regain territories lost in the Mexican–American War in an encoded telegram known as the Zimmermann Telegram, which was intercepted by British intelligence. Publication of that communique outraged Americans just as German submarines started sinking American merchant ships in the North Atlantic. Wilson then asked Congress for "a war to end all wars" that would "make the world safe for democracy", and Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917.[4] U.S. troops began major combat operations on the Western Front under General John J. Pershing in the summer of 1918.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_entry_into_World_War_...

The declaration passed 82-6 in the US Senate, and 373–50 in HoR:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_declaration_of_w...

Sound like a fairly popular action.
US stocks rise on signs of cooling inflation. End of 8-week losing streak?
ok

> Effective selectivity mechanisms outside the page reduce the need for intra-page selectivity optimization in terms of delivering performance but you still need to preserve memory bandwidth

"mechanisms/optimization/delivering performance" - these are just aspirational words - exactly what 'selectivity mechanisms'? I can barely make sense of this. In fact, I can't. At all.

> Some of these assertions are self-evident and non-controversial

They aren't self-evident because they aren't evident to me, and as for non-controversial - this is just ducking the question. You're still not justifying anything.

> and the issue of B-tree bloat generally

A btree page will be between 1/2 and completely full. Random insertions should make them ~75% full. In MSSQL I just created a table of ints (clustered PK) and inserted about a million random ints and had a look at fullness (page = 8060 bytes):

- Avg. Bytes Free per Page.....................: 2046.7
- Avg. Page Density (full).....................: 74.71%

yep, so an average of 3/4 full. Bit of expected free space. Where's the bloat you talk of, and what's the alternative structure if this is unacceptable.

Edit: this is just leaf nodes. You might claim it's ignoring non-leaf nodes. Check: 4MB data gets you 56K non-leaf. Massive 2,000 factor fanout (8K page / 4 byte ints) is why. So what bloat?

> Using mmap() for storage is the low-performance option, articles regarding which are regularly posted on HN,

for small files, so I understand. For large AFAIK they're good, which is why they're used. So what's the alternative? Point to where HN says mmap is slow for large files.

> that it "has mmap" is a good example of why it is expected to perform poorly

justify this please.

> But more broadly, you seem to be a bit confused about the theory of database kernel design and the tradeoffs that can be made there?

You may be right but you've just handwaved my doubts away without any evidence.

> You are questioning things about how actual, real, databases, including most open source ones, are designed.

I'm questioning your claims in the hope I can understand better. I'm not a total noob. I am wondering why I can't make sense of you posts.
You know how they say the least 20% of a project takes 80% of the time. I'm at that phase of one. I've the strict feature-set and roadmap ready but I can't just can't seem to finish it.

I'm not burnt out. I just want to start another project, learn another thing, but I'm forcing (in a good way, I believe) to complete this project and release it to friends and in a couple online forums. And yes, start using it myself! :)

Thanks for asking. Thanks for reading. I wish every one well!
S.F. population fell 6.3%, most in nation, to lowest level since 2010
I can point to SVG functionality (2 or even earlier in some cases) missing from both browsers and Inkscape, but my feeling is that there’s more missing, and more important stuff missing, in browsers than in Inkscape. Where browsers are generally ahead is CSS in SVG.
I used to plug my TRS-80 MC-12 into a cassette recorder to save and load programs. I wonder if an online TRS-80 emulator can still do that trick...?
To put it in crass words, it’s been amusing to see discussions on “sensitive” topics on HN always use the same formulaic modes of thinking because people are either conditioned or explicitly withholding controversial viewpoints because they think they’ll be punished for it, all the while there’s ego-stroking around the supposed high quality of discussion. It’s like Groundhog Day.

Yes, r/conspiracy is true, as are 4chan and a number of websites that have been banned/taken offline over the years. You’re basically not allowed to question whether or not any of their members’ posts had valid points, lest you become an outcast like them.

The boogeyman for us all is that if we allow all modes of thinking, then the clever trolls will usurp the discussion and drive their own narrative. So we wink and look the other way, unaware that the same outcome has occurred regardless.
Wingo's politics are mainstream for an open source developer in the 2020s. He's right about Stallman, he's right that GNU needs new, collective leadership, and he does a damn fine job maintaining Guile.
I have been procrastinating on finding a new job for about a month now. I am seriously questioning whether I want another web development job. I'm almost 40 and the web space stopped being interesting for me about 8 years ago. I suspect I'll procrastinate until my bank account balance gets low enough to cause me to panic and then I'll get serious about getting another web job.
There's nothing particularly difficult on the server side — a quality SFU should be capable to handle on the order of 400 video flows per core, and there are quite a few high-quality free software SFUs available (Janus, Jitsi, ion-sfu, livekit, Galene). To give some perspective: we're using Galene for lectures, and our single-CPU server uses around 40% CPU usage in a room with 120 students (who keep their cameras switched off during the lecture, of course, and only occasionally switch them on to ask questions).

As the grandparent mentioned, the problem is the client side. Since there is no standard videoconferencing protocol, every free software project needs to develop their own clients. And it's difficult for a free software project to have the manpower and expertise to develop quality clients for the web, Android and iOS, so in effect what we currently have are mostly half-baked web clients.

There is some hope, though. The IETF have been working on standard protocols for ingress (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/wish/), and if their protocols get deployed, you'll be able to use the same streaming software (think OBS) or IP camera with multiple distinct videoconferencing servers. An interoperable interactive videoconferencing protocol is nowhere near, but as more people understand videoconferencing technology, there is some hope that people will get together and start working on multi-protocol clients (remember Pidgin?).

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Galene (https://galene.org), and I've been actively participating in the Pion community (https://github.com/pion/webrtc) and collaborating with the authors of ion-sfu (https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu) and LiveKit (https://github.com/livekit).
Nice try.

Landlords and homeowners and the finance industry don't control the market... they just form a political bloc that controls zoning and taxes and transportation infrastructure and central finance, and these knobs in turn control the market. For some reason, they always vote for policies that pump their holdings. Can't imagine why. These policies do create problems, though, and it's not only reasonable to attribute the problems back to the people who voted for them, it's unreasonable to do anything else.

"It's just the market!" is on par with "Look, a squirrel!" in terms of critical thinking.
hyperloglog is not an indexing method
MariaDB Columnstore! And now Xpand has columnar indexes.

Columnstore was previously known as InfiniDB and Xpand, Clustrix.
Both have been in production for over 10 years and I have been a very happy user of them.
Show HN: Find NPM Package Alternatives
About this well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTE0wePCD4U
> Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.

Do good employers recruit from Maryland? Will you find FAANG and all the investment banks there? How tight is the Maryland alumni network?

I didn't go to a school anywhere near as prestigious as Harvard, but I did go to one with a strong reputation and it means that there is a strong community and good employers recruit from there.

The degree is a small part of university.