skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This gave some interesting insight into what a lot of my colleagues and I were thinking was going on as we rapidly transitioned to online delivery for our lectures. Certainly we’ve seen shared IPs and similar results within cohorts…

Traditionally we used closed book exams where mechanical engineering students have to solve series of problems. Stressful and encouraging of learning a lot by rote, these have never been liked any anyone. But they offer a level playing field for students in a perverse way. Many new students have not sat similar state exams either and were given estimated grades.

Many of us switched quickly to lecturing on Zoom and giving midterm exams via online quizzes with Brightspace or Blackboard VLEs. That meant open book exams where we have no ability to proctor (due to GDPR apparently).

The capability of setting up complex randomised exam questions was limited too. Brightspace only supported numerical questions based on simple algebraic expressions and would silently truncate an moderately long equation that previously passed checks.

The use of WhatsApp groups is extremely common in general by students and we all knew this would allow easy cheating on exams. So while we randomised question order and used random variables where possible, most academics felt preventing students from moving back and forward through questions was cruel and was typically avoided. Where it was used was vocally opposed by students.

As we look back at what worked and didn’t I think the consensus is that midterms will remain online and we will return to big exam hall finals.

This year I ran my online exam on campus. I booked a few sizeable rooms and split the students across them. It seemed to limit non-independent work.
Buy another, use ZFS send/receive. It's only double the price! Better yet, put it elsewhere (georedundancy). With ZFS encryption, the target system need not know about the data.

For critical data though I use Borg and a Hetzner StorageBox.
> based on what he actually did in life.

Don't forget about Mimi Alford.
Just because Nadine Dories drunkenly talks nonsense about Channel 4, to an extent that she makes her cabinet colleagues look like geniuses in comparison, you don't have to believe her. Here's a snippet from Wikipedia for example, plenty of other sources are available:

"As of 2022, it breaks even in much the same way as most privately run commercial stations through the sale of on-air advertising, programme sponsorship, and the sale of any programme content and merchandising rights it owns, such as overseas broadcasting rights and domestic video sales. For example, as of 2012 its total revenues were £925 million with 91 per cent derived from sale of advertising."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_4

They get no money from the license fee, from taxes, nor from the government. Except when the government chooses to spend tax money buying and spaces on TV, which would be no different to private companies selling ads to government.
Have you ever worked with a really bad hire? Someone totally incompetent at doing the job? In my personal experience, that person completely tanks the productivity and moral of the entire team. I’ll also point out you are not doing that person any favors by hiring them and firing them one month later (if your org is even capable of doing that). Bad hires are disastrous.
A baby dying of starvation is probably much worse than the risk of giving it wrong formula. And have you ever heard a hungry baby crying? It's not something you can wait long for.
The Russian government has extremely limited avenues to trade Rubles publicly, and exercises dictatorial control over those within its borders who attempt to do so.

The rate is essentially fictional - you theoretical seller, cannot get that rate. [1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/russias-rouble-rebo...
Next semester, we plan to start doing "interviews" of students in which they explain their own code to us.

It obviously doesn't scale, so we'll use random sampling.
McDonald's and iPhones and other branded crap are not strategic. Who really gives a fuck about their existence. Russians could always get cheaper Android phone from China and do just fine. They would not loose their sleep over McBurger being replaced with something else either.

Ability to produce advanced microchips, high end machinery etc on the other hand is. When the existing stock (all bought from the West) is depleted / wears down Russia might start to really feel the sanctions. This has a chance of permanently damaging Russia.

If however over the time Russia can manage to restart the ability to manufacture those things (possibly by banding with non Western world initially) then yes - it could then show middle finger to the West and get on with its business.
It’s actually a C enum.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidatadetect...
Right, would be nice for them to unify these.
It’s a cliche, but yeah, Google.

Or any co/startup doing "deep tech" in the area of Deep Learning.

I am doing _applications of DL_ now, want to do actual DL.
I'm a new computer science professor coming from "industry" (as the academics call it) and can confirm that cheating is rampant. I've also noticed that it is an arms race you'll never win; cheaters will always find a way to cheat, and you can try to subvert them as best you can but will eventually end up harming legitimate students, which is unacceptable.

What I wish existed was an independent board exam that students had to take for employment. Many professions have this, from medical professionals, accountants, engineers, and the trades. My thought is this would disincentivize cheating and encourage deep learning at the university level, while offloading the cost of cheat detection and enforcement to a board, whose job is to solely evaluate if someone is capable of entering the workforce. A separation of concerns.

Another reason for board exams: when I was working, I was asked to do a bunch of flimsy engineering to satisfy management. It would be nice if I could respond "If I do this, I could lose my license, so no." Just like if someone asked a carpenter to build a house not up to code, or a dentist told the hygienist to do shoddy work to improve throughput.

If anyone knows anything about this, I'd love to chat, because its something I've been thinking about for a long time and I hope there's a good reason why it doesn't exist.
As AWS doesn't price services based on carbon footprint, you can't infer the carbon footprint from the cost.

I agree however that certain AWS services are disproportional expensive.
There's the mention of "sustained flight at mid-altitudes". Perhaps the intention is for this to be able to fly over land as well? Maybe by sacrificing some cargo capacity in mid-altitude flights?
In high school my favorite resource was the Calculus (9E?) textbook by Larson. Super thorough in the explanations, there were tons of practice problems and step by step solutions on their website (no subscription needed iirc) for odd # problems.

My biggest struggle was skipping some of the basics and having to go back and re-learn after really struggling. But struggling helped in a way because then I really understood why X or Y solution didn’t work. If there’s anything i’d suggest, it’s that once you get some confidence in solving problems, try to approach new ones without looking through the entire lesson first, and that will help the actual way to solve the problem really stick. (And it’ll help you ask more focused questions!)
> For such a bold claim, one would expect evidence to be readily available.

The only way to provide this evidence would be to to conduct an RCT in which you hire some percentage of people who fail the test as a control group. The nascent psychologist in me loves this idea, but it seems unethical, and presumably this is why nobody does it.

But I disagree that we need ”evidence.” It’s flat out obvious. If you give your job candidates a discrete math problem orders more difficult than the usual ticket, you minimize the risk of hiring someone who can’t do the job.
They are also required to commission content from small UK producers, so privatising them will likely have a knock on affect.
There's certainly diminishing returns between "an SSD" and "a faster SSD" (unless the slower one is DRAMless or QLC), but hard drive to SSD is still a big gulf
Texas has other even more terrifying fragilities that I'm not going to get specific on, because they're that scary and I don't want to give crazy people ideas.
> who needs to store 32tb of data?

People hosting large private media libraries, I assume. Think people eschew music/movie streaming services and instead download FLACs/videos and stream those over their local network.
Some of that off-lease equipment idles pretty low - be sure to check the bios for all “energy saving” options.
> For example, the Poles are much better at building apartments and transport infrastructure fast than anyone else on your list, including Germany.

Is it that they are 'much better' or the economy is in different stages? The housing market in Germany is much more expensive. It's much cheaper to build in Poland.

Germany already has a larger transport infrastructure. Example: Autobahn 13000 km in Germany vs. roughly 2000km in Poland.
> as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state

This is not correct. The Frankfurt-Berlin Sprinter, for example, is nonstop.

It takes about 3h 50-55min. Connections with 6 to 8 additional stops take not much long, though: around 15 to 20 min. more. Less than 3 min. more per stop.

The biggest problem with trains is Germany, in my opinion, is not speed, but the unreliability of the connections.
3-4x higher sounds like a good bit of the distance between $1500 and $9200. Maybe you implicitly agree with the premise, and are mistakenly thinking TFA is talking about Austin when it’s not?
> I think the assignments were completely fair examples of what I might experience on daily basis.

In my experience, you have a lot more than an hour to do it in the real job. And while perhaps 1% of SW folks will deal with in on a daily basis, most will not. I certainly have gone years without needing to use graph algorithms (including even DFS/BFS). And I've needed a BST only once in a decade - and I didn't need to code it, just needed to understand the data structure and complexity to know that "binary_search" in C++ was a superior option than using a map for my use case (even though the complexity is the same).

Some context: At work I recently solved a problem where I had to build a graph (DAG), and do some queries on it mildly efficiently[1]. I did it quickly thanks to wasting time on Leetcode, but no one knew how quick, and people were impressed that I "got it done in less than a day". The reality in most SW work is that whether it takes you a day or an hour to solve this problem, the overall rate of progress will not be impacted.

[1] Mildly efficiently because for the first POC pass, I didn't memoize, and then I got lazy and decided I'd optimize it only after getting a real world data set and seeing if it was slow. It wasn't, even for a decently large data set. The reason? Business logic dictated that the max distance between two nodes did not exceed 8, so from a complexity stand point, you're not increasing the work N-fold by not memoizing, but it's just changing the constant factor.

Somehow, I suspect that in half of the FAANG interviews, had I coded this and argued that the complexity didn't change, I would not get a pass.[2]

[2] Not trying to be cynical: I did argue this for a different problem in a Google phone screen - I had been asked to write some code + data structures to handle an Manager/Report relationship, and the interviewer pointed out my data structure was less than optimal. I countered with "In most companies, the number of employees a manager has under him/her is usually bounded by a small number." Surprisingly, the interviewer gave in.
I wouldn't claim that the required supplements are literally not available on the commercial market, but the FDA requirements (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...) include over a dozen nutrients to track, some within a relatively narrow safety range. It's not practical to expect that stressed, busy new parents are gonna buy all these supplements, much less break out their scales and carefully measure 2-7 micrograms of selenium per 100 kcal.
Lots of people can talk about code but not write it. Way more in fact!
> I bake my own bread

Hear hear! I bake once a week, sourdough is my white whale, I've never made a good one, the lean crusty breads need a good commercial oven to turn out a good crust. The home ovens (even with crazy modifications for steaming) don't do as well. Alas, if anything is most anti-adapted to time-saving automation it's cooking and baking. I can spend 8+ hrs a weekend (yes, that's right, 8+) for food prep or spend that on more technical endeavors. I think about that trade-off frequently. It's not the cost, it's because the alternative is terrible nutrition.
> You can do both!

Not if you have other interests!

I am a very cultural person (reading books, writing, playing music, etc.). I volunteer after natural disasters, too. And I also value interpersonal relationships with people I care about.

It felt bad in HS, but in college, I was mature enough to simply not care. (I also gained enough skills in the meantime to be certain that I won't ever starve.)
Good for Charles Marohn!

You will see who is on your side when things fall apart. Suburbans sprawl has weakened towns, as has the Richard Florida mindset of attracting specific people to create an unsustainable economy.
> I recommend reading about [vertical rhythm](https://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm), which turns a lot of imprecise choice to exactly correct sizes.

I've no problem using it as a decent rule of thumb, but what's the evidence this is the one correct way to do things?
Personally, I would focus on the 75-80% of cases where you don't need things like ECS, Kubernetes etc etc. Give me a simple choice to setup either a low traffic web site/app (perhaps a single EC2 running say a framework) and do all the goodies like SSL, DB provisioning for me. or give me a choice to setup a bit more highly available site which uses Load balancers with couple of EC2 servers and boom. Don't overcomplicate.

I am literally trying to solve a problem in AWS Infra right now where I want to setup PHP/Laravel apps on demand and all the tools that exist are way too complicated. I want a simple UI that asks me for the domain, github repo and a couple of questions (db/cache etc) and then boom. It setups the site.
All students in a class cannot take an oral exam simultaneously. This means that either:

* everyone gets the same questions meaning later students can cheat by asking earlier students what was on the test, or

* everyone gets different questions meaning much more effort to design the exam and big risks that some students will get easier questions and others will get harder questions
About 7 years ago there was an Amazon sale ($300) on Lenovo TS140 towers with the low-powered Xeon chip and ECC RAM and 4 drive bays. Ever since I've been unable to find a similar price point for the same quality, but wanted a backup server. I recently got a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model) and external USB hard drive (8TB) mirrored with a s3backer volume on backblaze B2 for about $300 total, and as a backup server it's fast enough (performance limited by the Internet speed to B2) and probably idles at 10W-15W.

One of the nice benefits of ZFS native encryption + s3backer is that if I had a total outage locally and needed to recover some files quickly I could mount the s3backer-based zpool from any machine, decrypt the dataset, and pull the individual files out of a filesystem. It's also a weird situation with cloud providers that convenient network-attached block storage is ~10X the price of object storage at the moment but performance can be similar using s3backer.
Except in Rust you nearly never write a destructor. Unless you have very specific needs it's always generated automatically for you.
> I had a lot of trouble on the same premise and I won't make that mistake again.

Please elaborate, I'd love to hear your story!

I hear a lot of advice around raid/z-levels and it often seems backed up by shaky math that doesn't seem to be backed up by reality (like the blog posts that claim that a rebuild of an array of 8 TB drives will absolutely have hard read errors, no exceptions, and yet monthly ZFS scrubs pass with flying colors?)
Pyramid[1] was based on the last chapter of SICP, was executable after a couple weeks, and I had never written any lisp before(outside of a couple hours playing with Scheme once).

Most of that time was the code generator. An interpreter is much simpler and you could have something similar in a couple hours. Especially if you use a JSON parser to start, and switch to S-expressions once you get everything working. Or use an existing Lisp with a (read) primitive that knows the syntax.

As for "why Lisp?", it's a bit like how you never need to read the JSON spec to write JSON in practice, because they unified the syntax into a few core datatypes(primitives, arrays, objects). Besides the simple syntax, they also include a symbol table core concept that tells you how to interpret the minimal syntax.

In most languages, it's a lot of work adding a new feature to the language: Lexer to recognize token, backtracking parser, adding a new internal type, etc. In a Lisp interpreter, you just edit the symbol table to know about a new form and you're done.

Despite the core being simple, a practical Lisp environment is going to have thousands of primitives with a variety of effects on the runtime, and you'll need to look them up. Racket has about 1700[2] implemented in Chez Scheme, for example. But at least they're "only primitives", so there's uniformity in how they're used. Nothing like "What's the syntax for an anonymous function that takes 1 callback as argument that captures a local by reference and 3 other variables by value?"

[1] https://www.michaelburge.us/2017/11/28/write-your-next-ether...

[2] https://github.com/racket/racket/blob/master/racket/src/cs/p...
Yeah, you're right. I think in the context of your story, the board seems like they did not do you justice. I can say from my experience with engineering boards, they seem to be more transparent and will publish their decisions and the underlying opinions on how they reached their conclusions. I think that added transparency goes a long way to mitigate the scenario when a regulating body ends up serving as a mechanism to avoid accountability for the group they are intended to regulate.

I think I agree with your gardening analogy. It seems to me that the issue is often rooted in the hiring process. If a company was able to adequately assess the skills, they wouldn't need to rely on credentials, period. I think credentials become a lazy shortcut in many ways. Sometimes I think this is borne from the fact that many hiring decisions are made by people who are too far removed from the work being hired for, and thus need some pragmatic shortcut. It's easier for HR to say "you don't have the right degree" than for them to read and understand your resume to conclude "you don't have the right skills". The first is binary, the latter requires a lot of nuance.
I guess the bottom line of it all for me is: can it build me an interstellar space ship (FTL would be nice!) or not? I'm OK if we're all merely sharing the illusion of colonizing nearby stars.
550 miles between paris and berlin

630 miles between Portland and Sanfrancisco

500 miles between San Diego and San Francisco

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California_High-Spe...

Too much Douche-Baggery in that project, take a look at the california money grab they joke of american high speed rail has over the decades...
A: Obviously spoofable

B: GP said the intent was for "frequent travelers", i.e. I'm assuming one-off travelers are intended not to be allowed. Having to verify multiple trips before you can get in sounds like a horrible user experience.
Financial Benchmarks for SaaS Startups, a Self-Assessment Tool
Did similar recently.

Some suggestions for anyone else looking to do the same:

i3 runs a bit cooler than ryzen, still 8 threads. 8tb WD blues (they're SMR at 8 and up). You can find Atx boards with 8 sata ports and dual nvme slots for caching / fast pools.
I'm certainly not claiming regulatory boards are perfect. Far from it. But I do maintain that some quality control and accountability is preferable to the alternative of no quality control and accountability.
How India is casting itself with the West as a US-led bloc emerges in Asia
Nonsense.

Your city council is the People’s Central Planning Committee that runs the construction economy in your city. They decide what is produced and they decide who does it. Construction in your city is a planned economy - every bit as much as the Soviet Union or pre-Deng China.

And like every planned economy, it sucks and fails in just about every way.
Thanks, I understand that. My point, however, was that the comments
might better reflect the contents of the linked article and that the
various distractions into the personal failings of Boris Johnson etc
were disappointing.
Looks to me like they are mocking poor uneducated Americans. That's being nasty. Making fun of "White trash" might be entertaining to you and them but to me it is bigoted and hateful.
This is known as gravitationally induced decoherence. We don't know if there's any truth to this, but people are seriously working on measuring this stuff in the lab. You might like to read what Roger Penrose has to say about it. (Btw, we already know how to combine Maxwell's equations and gravity. This is all classical physics.)
Presumably the price provides some sort of bounds.

(Unless they are doing something like putting profits towards some sort of carbon maximization scheme)
A teacher, or two.

One taught me about what rigor was. In so many ways.

Another taught me that there is another side of Math. The non-heuristic parts. The stuff where is there is reason, logic, etc.

Dad took a broadband connection, and watching YouTube became realistic. I got 3b1b, Numberphile, MIT OCW.

Edit: My discovery of Halliday, Resnick, Walker physics textbook and Feynman lectures also was helpful. It was mostly- the Internet.
I feel like that's code scanning tools to blame. A lot of them complain about "magical constants" even when they're cleaner than a dedicated constant
> Bit rot on your remaining drives can occur which wouldn’t be detected until rebuild time

ZFS can perform periodic scrubs to detect and repair bit rot, and I'm pretty sure TrueNAS is configured to do this by default
Scala’s implicits are something like that (though not for local variables). You can create a method signature like `listEntities(implicit connection: DBConnection)` and at call site if you have a DBConnection typed object in scope (and exactly one so it is obvious) it will be inserted automatically.