skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently took a CS class at Stanford with an interesting policy on cheating. While cheating almost certainly happened during the course, at the end of the quarter the course staff made a public post allowing any student who cheated to make a private message to the staff admitting they've done so.

If a student admitted to cheating, while they would face academic disciplinary action (i.e. receiving a failing or low grade), they would not be brought up to the administrative office that deals with issues of academic integrity, and therefore would not face consequences like expulsion or being on official academic probation.

However if a cheating student decided to risk it and not admit their guilt, they were at risk of a potentially even greater degree punishment. The course staff would run all students code through a piece of software to detect similarities between each other, as well as online solutions. Students who were flagged by this software would then have their code hand-checked by at least one course staff, who would make a judgement call as to whether it seemed like cheating.

I found this policy quite interesting. As a former high school teacher, I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes, and have historically oscillated between taking a very harsh stance, or perhaps an overly permissive one.

The one taken by the lecturers of this course offered a "second chance" to cheaters in a way I hadn't seen before.
It's a pop song but it's profound. I remember playing it in 2005 . The opening riff, and then it starts talking about various things like the big house. When the song debuted, in the early 80s, having a fine automobile and big house were a big deal and the epitome of the American dream, but nowadays luxury cars and big homes have become so commonplace. An SUV will likely cost more than a luxury car brand. It shows how much society has changed. Now you need millions of dollars. Or a super-successful Substack or some other signifier of status.
His positive story in the epilogue of the students in the next class not cheating is in all likelihood actually a story of the students simply being forced to develop slightly better cheating tradecraft.

The professor here talks about not wanting to enable the features that make it a worse experience to take the tests, but it's an unfortunate truth that there's just going to be cheating if you're giving assignments and assessments where it's easy to cheat.
It's pretty easy to tell when you're managing a team and familiar with the code. You can't quantify it explicitly, but it can be quite clear.

In my experience the top 20% of employees do 80% of the work
> It was inappropriate for this instructor to join the chat and silently surveil their students.

Why? It allowed him to gather evidence of who was invoiced and provide them with a second chance. And apparently it really helped students in the next course to be more honest.
Thesis supervisor. It was a speech transformer. There's a lot of complex parts. He taught me to break it down into different parts, like input, output, and splitting components into black boxes. Speech is very complex, so what we did was just extract certain parts that were most impactful instead of getting it perfect.

He also taught me to take inspiration from different sources instead of trying to be too clever and retry everything from scratch. There's the meme that developers just copy paste stuff from Stack Overflow, but engineering is really just building on the shoulders of giants. There's usually ego involved in trying to figure someone out without seeing what others have done.
I was under the impression that, because Google would have to execute all of that logic in order to even get the content people are searching for -- as I can't imagine an empty page would actually rank highly for anything ;P -- that they weren't using the time of the first request but the time it took to get the content that they decided was the page.
The cynic would say the money they paid for school are just easy student loans that will be forgiven. What's their skin in the game?
From the names it seems reasonable to me that "New York" and "New Jersey" should be parts of "New England

I get what you're saying, but they really really are not.
I guess we have to draw the distinction between "qualification preferred" and "qualification required".

IIRC in many jurisdictions you can sit the exam to become a lawyer without having a degree or anything. The degree more acts as a series of preparation classes for the very very difficult process of passing the bar.

In this situation, cheating in mid terms becomes a bit pointless. As long as the final exam is done with strict security (easier for a one off event), the qualification means something.

So maybe that's what we want for cardiologists and structural engineers.
It's not harder, it's more fundamental. Logic gates express forms of the basic foundations of computation, and building from there conveys their power and expressiveness.

In my degree, object oriented programming came in later semesters, often paired with courses on symbolic computing, discrete mathematics, and computability and complexity.
And you know the exact moment GitHub became aware that passwords were exposed and that they "sat on" that information? If you actually did work with those people, that's even more reason to assume good faith. Saying "I could have done it better" isn't helpful.
Magnetic-field-free, single-directional superconductivity
Agree. Do the same with meetings. How expensive is this meeting? If the meeting takes an hour then the cost of the meeting is the sum of the hour rate of the people participating. Then ask if the meeting will generate enough additional revenue to pay for itself?
I think one reason we want to discover more about the universe is because it gives us a sense of awe and a sense of powers greater than us. One useful trick if you're missing that is to take some mushrooms while you watch some space documentaries. Sure you don't really discover anything groundbreaking but it does open up the mind and you will definitely experience awe.
Why stop there? What about state funded newspapers? And there goes government criticism
Research also happens to be what they are evaluated on for tenure/promotion etc. Teaching evaluations are generally a tiny part of that equation.
<<Script Kills>> can contain individual mini-games, which are sometimes discrete logic problems that can be cracked by computer programming. One example is as follows:

- There are 7 persons living in 7 houses that a in a horizontal line.
- Every house is in one of the 7 colors: red, green, white, yellow, blue, purple, black
- Each of the 7 persons has one occupation of: gardener, security guard, animal keeper, witch, house keeper, driver, cook
- Each of the 7 persons keeps one pet from: dog, bird, parrot, horse, hamster, fish, homing pigeon
- Each of the 7 persons has one of the following favorite drinks: tea, coffee, milk, mineral water, orange juice, red wine, beer
- Each of the 7 persons has one collectible of the following types: diamond, hats, oil paintings, necklaces, ruby, gold coins, or nothing at all

And you are given the following constraints:
1. The gardener is in the Red house
2. The green house is to the left of the white one
3. The one who collects diamonds keeps a bird as pet
4. The one living in the center house drink milk
...
22. The gardener is to the left of the one who keeps fish as pet.

etc.

In a <<script kill>> game the DM (Dungeon Master) would ask questions like the following, which are required for the game to progress:
※ Given the constraints above, who keeps a homing pigeon as pet?

The fun is to manually run the algorithm as a team that one might otherwise type on a computer to deduce the answer to the questions:

for ( ... iterate possible room color combinations )
check constraints
for ( ... iterate possible occupation combinations )
check constraints
for ( ... iterate possible pet combinations )
check constraints
for ( ... iterate possible favorite drink combinations )
check constraints
for ( ... iterate possible collectible combinations )
check constraints
if ok, print solution

The above was encountered when we went to a <<script kill>> game room not listed in the article above the other day. Upon returning we attempted to crack the above problem with a program which ran for 15s on a Ryzen 5600X PC and gave 48 solutions (For the particular problem above that would be `7! ^ 4 =~ 645241282560000` combinations, but the above algorithm would be enough)

So having multiple solutions may be actually a small bug in the particular game we're playing where the DM, who seemed to have assumed one answer already, gave us hints upon seeing us not being able to resolve this puzzle in maybe what seeming was a long time. I guess this will serve as a topic to start a chat with the DM with next time I enter that game room XD
Sure, but just make sure you are Google before you try this.

If you are a no-name company paying whatever your HR department defines as "market rate" and you don't get hundreds of very qualified candidates for every role then interviewing like Google might not be a great idea.
you are absolutely right, and I understand you completely.
Then tell your company to not to reach out to recruit senior & experienced candidates if you aren't sure if they can code from looking at their experience, github, etc. I'm personally very tired of answering recruiters & hiring managers for specialized roles, then the interviews end up being some unrelated CS quiz, mostly from people with less experience than I have.
Anyway, I don't see anything in the article about what the academic office said when he turned all those reports in. I'm really curious, these kinds of situations tend to make national news when some prof brings a large number of students up on academic honor code violations. (ex: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/20/least-100-nav...)

I'm firmly of the opinion that the negatives of group study out weight the positives and generally should be banned in college. Banging your head against a problem for hours at a time assures you understand all the wrong ways of getting the right answer. This means you have a far more detailed understanding, and there is always formal academic study/the prof/etc and the possibility of asking about difficulties in class.

And finally, group chat is small potato's, I'm fairly certain there is a fair bit of 3rd parties basically doing assignments/taking tests these days for students. Primary because I was "mentoring" a student in a subject and found myself in a situation that I had to extract myself from because it crossed a line of mine.
I was surprised it looks as good as it does. Amazing.
Does the industry even need engineers who can code?

This is a hyperbolic rhetorical question but consider how much of modern work really is CRUD API gluing, and how much of that work is not rigorous engineering, but tedious implementation as per documentation and wading through hastily-thrown together legacy cruft written during previous crunch time.

How much of that work involves novel programming and memorized understanding? Most of it requires study of existing codebases, not given a blank REPL to hash out something new.
If it were a 216B cryptocurrency then it would indeed be laudable. It’s Ethereum and it is innovating in every aspect.
Completely agree, this professor is clearly an asshole.
I found TLA+ syntax unapproachable as a beginner. I did more digging and discovered Alloy[0], a "lightweight" formal verification system, which is much simpler, and has industry adoption as well. It's working nicely for me so far.

-----------

[0] http://alloytools.org/
> billion-dollar cryptocurrency

> I’m not sure what the lesson is

Gambling is a profitable business.
Becoming successful requires a stubborn conviction that you can make your own ideas a reality. Doing well on tests requires the ability to re-enact the ideas of others.

They're both valuable skills of course, but they should be recognized as being distinct from each other; and measuring "intelligence" as some one-dimensional modality is a spectacular failure to do so, IMO.

This idea is also to an extent analogous to the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning (AI).
Also: https://physicsworld.com/a/scientists-unveil-josephson-diode...
Cost of revenue is mostly insurance costs [1].

If you look at their financials, they show gross bookings, which include both the full billed values for food and delivery, and transportation of people. Revenues only show their share of that total.

In regards to incentives, it looks like a complicated question, I found an interesting outline[2]

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4293755-insurance-primary-b...
[2] https://news.bloombergtax.com/financial-accounting/rideshari...
Other primates don't play Angry Birds on their cell phones
You forget: Prosecutorial discretion.

There is no crime unless the Attorney General prosecutes it.
It's not only that, though - if you reward the top 10% of performers and fire the bottom 10%, say, but don't actually make sure that said performance is due to skill and not a degree of randomness you may not improve at all.

You also create an attitude of fear which is not conducive to a productive and adaptable environment in the long term. You can get away with it for a while, but it's not a good principle.

Get rid of the annual review entirely. Active management is better than passive with guiderails like prodding reviews. I've never been motivated by an annual review nor have I seen it successfully motivate others; have you?

The opposite is true in my experience. People fear it and become less productive as it nears, it takes time that would be better spent on other things and it's not personally rewarding for the manager or the worker. If done poorly, it also lowers team unity and especially doesn't work as a reward because people don't recognize the behavior that led to it. If you reward behavior right after it happens, people associate the behavior with the reward. If you wait six months, they don't. They can intellectually but the team impact is lowered. Not to mention if you're individually evaluating a team based on arbitrary statistics you miss the people who hold everything together. Nobody wants to help their teammate if it will cause their teammate to get a raise instead of them.

Finally, it causes people to game the system instead of improving their work because the work improvement has less impact on their remuneration.

All that to say I don't think the annual review is a good tool.
Last time I was shopping for houses 1500sqft homes were rarely more than $5k cheaper than equivalent 2000sqft houses.
This is actually brilliant. Quizzes are ideally used to get people putting in the effort: studying during the semester and nudge them away from procrastinating/crunching at the end (thus are low stakes). But even with low stakes they nudge people to cheat. It was technically hard previously to verify the effort directly, so a quiz result is a noisy proxy. But with current tech you could just record the effort itself. If you are going to do problem sets, no extra effort in recording it.
Scientists Accidentally Turn Gene-Edited Hamsters into Aggressive Bullies
A whole lot of people don’t learn anything from MLM and pyramid scams. A lot of people send money to television and radio evangelists. A lot of people habitually buy lottery tickets. A lot of people are greedy, are un/disinformed or unmathematical/unscientific or not sceptical or something, and are easily persuaded to cast the dice and trust sources that so many educated, experienced smart people accurately understand to be incorrect.

faith + greed + an impulse to gamble = money for the taking
I’d say psychology is a good a
thing to know as well.
Possibly English is not his first language, and also humor does not transmit as well online or in text form. It's why stand-up is funny, but if you read a transcription of the jokes it would not be nearly as funny.
The Unarmed Cop (2020)
Chrome's Local Font Access API allows web content to enumerate the names and meta data of local fonts, but doesn't block web content from guessing local font names (e.g. for fingerprinting). The use case is web apps like Figma that want to allow designers to use specific local fonts (such as custom or licensed fonts) in design documents.
Cheating is the natural result of an exclusive funnel for entry into the middle class.

This has been going on for decades in Asia (which is why Chinese students cheat so much), and now America is finally here as well.

Academics like to wax poetic about how students are "only cheating themselves" and "losing out on the educational opportunities", but the reality is much more mercenary and down-to-earth: Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard choice.

Once you have the piece of paper (regardless of how you got it), you're in the club. So the goal is to obtain that piece of paper by any means necessary.
If only there were a website full of exactly this information, but I suppose there isn't.

This person is an evangelist for change in the way we build cities, and if we boil it down, the story here is that it is hard to maintain your profession and activism in some industries.
I mean, if you can acquire or otherwise reverse-engineer[0] the game seed, you can also just find resources by loading a local copy and noting the coordinates of ore. For major servers, anti-xray plugins will be installed as due diligence, but most of the anti-cheat efforts are focused on detection, reverting, and banning.

Ultimately, if you have a big enough server to attract serious cheaters, you will (or at least should) have tools that can also detect suspicious behavior based on heuristics (i.e. see if a player mined straight to an ore block). Tools like CoreProtect[1] can help detect and revert this.

Ore obfuscation still works very well, however, for the majority of causal cheaters that just googled "hacked minecraft client" and installed the first result.

One ore obfuscation technique used in PaperMC actually sends intentionally fake data to the user to "muddy the waters"[2].

(I know a lot of this because I help develop a Minecraft server management tool)

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRurhiK-Lk

[1]:https://github.com/PlayPro/CoreProtect/

[2]:https://docs.papermc.io/paper/anti-xray
Sure, but how many of those C programs are inherently hard to verify vs how many of them are hard because they happen to be built with tools that make them hard to verify?
Here's an example:

https://jsfiddle.net/a3q87ucs/
“He’s so Canadian” likely refers to the stereotype that Canadian people tend to be very nice and apologize a lot

Edit: didn’t see the other reply, but it’s pretty much the same idea
this was a huge deal back in the 40s-70s. They were called 'bibles'
The problem here is the author essentially equates merit with luck and claims talent is "grit". There is luck involved with anything in life. But not everything is luck.
They used Bill Gates as an example, claiming other talented programmers didn't become as rich as he did. While Gates had some luck, the merit was more than just being a programmer.
I’ve been to Victoria.

Plenty of places in the US you don’t need a car either by that definition.
> to be picky about who it shoots.

Like Vietnam and Afghanistan, right? Please stop.
Both the article and the Tango project are recent. The video game is the one from 2005.
As an American every subversive movement I've encountered in the arts is in its own way fighting against or offering updated tactics to temporarily cope with neoliberal capitalism
TLDR: They can move faster above ground in the rain without dehydrating.
For a submission like this, please submit the main URL (in this case I suppose that would be https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/25/spacexs-starlink-surpasses-4...) and then add your take via a comment in the thread. That way your take is on a level playing field with everyone else's.

This is in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
Now they have to find a way to make iPlayer accessible to those residing outside the UK. They've got decent programs but an even more impressive anti VPN detector.
The number of programming jobs that require statistics is huge though?

The MLE job market is booming.
those who know, code. those who don't, find someone who can
In most (all?) of Europe, solar and wind not installed because they are green, but because they are the cheapest. One would think they are not any more expensive in Greece, in fact, solar yields should be a good deal better than in places like Germany. Not to mention cheaper than diesel. How come this is apparently not so?
Firefox has about:config prefs to block web content from using fonts other than their OS's default system fonts.

The pref names and their possible values:

# Visibility level of font families available to CSS font-matching:
# 1 - only base system fonts
# 2 - also fonts from optional language packs
# 3 - also user-installed fonts
layout.css.font-visibility.standard
layout.css.font-visibility.trackingprotection
layout.css.font-visibility.resistFingerprinting

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/de15f9c109f9c474d0...

Here's the Firefox bug about enabling these prefs, probably in Tracking Protection Strict mode to start: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1736005
People go to university for the credential, not to learn. Surprisingly little learning happens at university.

The Case Against Education makes a convincing case about how worthless most of higher ed really is.

Diplomas have tremendous value. The education however…
This raises the interesting question of why victims seek external validation in the first place.

I think it is often the case that victims are seeking something, so it seems natural for the cohort to gatekeep. If someone were to ask me for special consideration or treatment on account of being a victim, I want to know they are genuine.
Funny enough - These kind of attacks where malware hides in VM (without any security monitoring) is sometimes referred as Shadowbunny.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shadowbunny
I think everyone who has been in tech for 7 years has a short list of people they’d want on their 4-person tech team and a longer list of people they wouldn’t.

That I can’t tell you to two decimal places exactly how much better the first list is than the second doesn’t mean I can’t tell who’s on which list with high fidelity/repeatability.
Pretty much all of my suggestions are that, except maybe Firefox.
I suspect (from my experience developing them) that most web apps are internal business tools that are hosted inside private networks or locked down behind login forms. Most people will never interact with them. I think these sorts of tools are the ones that the previous poster was referring to. (And they are rarely so simple as just text and images.)
The Dafny Programming Language
As a benefit to society? Not laudable IMO. But it does take hard work to swindle people into your crypto - that's the perspective I read OPs comment in.
I really enjoyed that tour through time.
You don’t have to like it.

I do a lot of data science in C#, and absolutely loathe Python.

I am not the only one who thinks that the ubiquity of Python sucks but I am certainly in the minority.

I’ve stopped caring.
> it is innovating in every aspect

Could you expand on what you mean here? What are the aspects?
Cheating is routine in remote interviews.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/My-friends-who-cheated-in-int...
How do you quantify the revenue generated from coordination, alignment, transparency and any intrinsic motivation gained by including people in the decision making process?

I agree a lot of meetings are pointless and not everyone present needs wants or maybe even should be there but I'm struggling to understand the quantifying you're supposedly able to do.
My mistake. I didn't realized things had changed so much.