skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Other people genuinely want to understand how things work, and getting a CS degree is not the only way to get there.

Yes, except ...

University courses are always going to have a mixture of people with different motives. One of those motives is going to be a desire to go into research, while another is going to be earning credentials to prove they have an understanding of their field before they embark upon their career. Then there are the people who take the courses with a pure desire to learn how things either in a structured environment or to learn along with like-minded people, without pursuing it as a career path. That runs the gamut from needing university credentials, to the credentials being nice to have, to not needing the credentials at all. Yet, in each case, the desire to learn is genuine.

Then there are the people who are cheating the system by treating the university as a credential mill, the means to an end, where the end has little to do with furthering their understanding. Some of them are upfront about this. I remember one of my high school peers saying they chose their discipline based upon how much money they would earn and how well they would perform. Some choose to deceive themselves about this, largely by griping about how poor instruction is or how irrelevant the course material is while putting little effort into the courses. Whichever way you look at it, these people are problematic when they step over the line by cheating. They go from being passive leeches on the system to actively destructive forces.

There are genuine advantages to learning in a university environment. For some it is structure. For some it is being able to work with their peers. For some, it is having access to professionals in their chosen field. All of these can contribute to understanding, if the learner chooses to do so. I have known very few professors who would turn away someone who was genuinely interested in learning. For the most part, they were more inclined to side with the students who would benefit from learning in a university environment, but were struggling to keep up with the demands of those who would not!
Ducks have ducklings, so naturally, cows have cowlings.
I sort of find the "unstyled" html the best. All other examples seem slightly worse. But then, I may have a strong bias for this style in web-based text. Coming from an academic background, hand-written sites with no css nor js are a strong marker of ultra-high quality content. For science fiction, then, it seems a very natural choice; even more so for Egan.
A question I have is what is today's lead?

Maybe lead is a bad example, because it was known to be bad for a long time... But what is the thing that looking back will turn out to be horrible for us and pervasive in the environment?
The UK has a constitution, just not one that is codified in a single written document with a special privileged status. (In practice, there is also a lot more to the US constitution than what’s written down in the document referred to as ‘The Constitution’.)
Next: The Sun is Racist because it only tans the pale skinned.
Trains were bombed to pieces in Madrid in 2004[1], and since then there were multiple cases of terrorism in european trains. There were incidents galore already, so let's be optimistic that travel by train will stay free of airport-like security. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings
The BBC is a world of difference from PBS. Think of the BBC like ABC or CBS but with no advertising.
Conversely my general practitioners are part of an organization where they are doing their residency. They all are competent, very caring, and effective.

I talked to one of their IT people who told me what a good place it was to work. And had multiple nurses say the same, one going on a 5 minute rant about what a good place it was to work. So that could be a significant factor.
Logic in Computer Science by Huth and Ryan.
> The analogs of the traditional coding interview in the law school world are the LSAT and classroom timed memory tests.

How are these analogous? LSAT is the Law School Admission Test. It gets you into law school. It doesn't get you a job as a lawyer. (The bar exam doesn't get you a job as a lawyer either.) And you only have to take it once, not for every job interview.
Should humans think more like machine learning models?
Ask the students how their code works and how they came up with it. It shouldn't be hard to tell who actually wrote it.
Look into “Make a Lisp” (MAL). Language agnostic step by step instructions for writing a fully featured interpreter, including tail recursion and reader macro support. Plus, examples in every language. It’s on github.
> Abolition is good for the title. / Personally I didn't agree with the subhead choice

Well... that confirms my point: it's arbitrary, a matter of opinion, and therefore, everyone is going to have a different preference.
Thank you! This tip may just be the cure.

But I shouldn't need to know this, pip should have taken care of picking the best download mirror.

Or it could just support resuming a previous download. I don't actually mind waiting for a slow download or having to rerun pip install a few times, as long as it makes progress each time I run it.
I've done this and would echo the good advice you've already gotten about Khan Academy but I think the comments in this thread are skipping over the most important part: pace. Work slowly. Don't move on until you really "get" the concept you're working with. Some topics might "click" right away and others might take weeks of bashing your head against the wall until your brain makes sense of it. That's okay. It can definitely be tedious at times (so be kind to yourself!) but a lot of learning happens when you're struggling to make sense of something so it's worthwhile to lean into the trouble you're having and figure out what it is that you're struggling to understand.

The downside of formal education is that the teacher has a timeline that needs to be kept and the class will move on without you. It might not seem like a big deal in the moment but in math the foundation is so important because the concepts build on one another. Sometimes in really subtle ways. If you have the motivation (and it sounds like you do!) then the huge upside to self-paced learning is that you can build a really strong foundation and the more complicated advanced topics will be so much easier to master. Khan Academy is really good at breaking subjects down into tiny bites and then slowly building on what you've learned but if you don't quite understand a lesson or if you haven't properly paid attention don't be afraid to do it again. If you guessed the right answer but don't understand why your answer was right, don't be afraid to go back and do it again.

So just because one person here could do all of the Khan Academy 9th grade algebra in a week that doesn't mean you should set that timeline for yourself. Everyone is starting from a different place. So maybe it'll take you a day, or a week, or a month, or even months. But however long it takes is how long it takes.
Thanks! I only knew the oft parroted version of the story from family members who worked at Boeing. I guess the detail I didn’t immediately recall was “plane over budget” (which likely lead to the government funding you mentioned being pulled). I still believe that the biggest reason for the ban was NIMBYs though, if you’ve ever been around sonic booms you know how intrusive they are. I lived just far enough away from a military base as a kid that we happened to be near where pilots would occasionally go super sonic as part of their training. After living in California years later and experiencing multiple earthquakes, I’d say the sonic boom was about like a magnitude 6, but only lasting for a couple seconds.
> why do they want this particular lifestyle to be forced on everyone?

That's what car culture does.
Thanks for sharing. It gives more depth to the images and tells the story behind those images better imho than just the Twitter feed.

I did fantasy LARP in my late teens till my early thirties. And when organizing cons we would often have an underlying subtle theme that aimed for societal issues.

But this shoots our meager things way out of the water.
You’re being very vague. What is a specific example of the Queen exercising the power that you claim she has?
NP isn't rigorously proven to be hard yet either.
The trouble with the thin client approach is that fundamentally no control is possible on the client-side. Since the connection from client to server is unreliable, this renders such pages unnecessarily fragile, considerably more fragile than traditional server-generated pages with conventional navigation by link and form. Really, I’d say that in most places where people are inclined to use the thin client approach, they’d be better served by traditional server-generated pages with no overriding of client-side routing or other such fancy scripting.

Have you experienced this type of thin client when you have half a second’s latency, or a connection that keeps dropping out, or moderately high packet loss? I don’t think I’ve actually encountered a full thin client in the wild, but from my experiences with other poorly-done (very common) network-bound web apps in such circumstances, I can report that things are considerably worse than one would expect—that half a second’s latency inexplicably leads to things taking several seconds instead of fifty milliseconds a lot of the time (though I will admit that a pure thin client is less likely to find this so); and that very brief dropout manages to lock the page up for ten or thirty seconds until it manages to (or decides to) reconnect, or just breaks your page completely so that you have to restart and lose progress.

I have worked on apps that work offline or partially-offline, but the problems of the thin client approach are so much more than that—which is why I didn’t use the word “offline” in my earlier comment. Prefetching. Caching accessed entities so that you can revisit them without talking to the server. The bfcache, once you’re talking about simple pages rather than apps. And various more things, some of which I spoke of in my other comment here.

The thin client approach is a nice idea. It can be suitable for tightly controlled deployments. It can be suitable for a very restricted set of apps. It can be a pragmatic choice sometimes. It will tend to be better than a badly-done client-side-rendered app. But I am convinced that it is not very often the best choice, taking into account both user and business considerations; and that for consumer systems, it’s rarely a good choice.
In my time in college I helped a lot of fellow students work through a lot of assignments. I sat down with them and helped them to think through the problem and find examples to learn from that weren't full solutions to the assignment. I helped them find difficult bugs in their implementation by pointing them in the right direction or showing them debugging tricks I found helpful.

What I didn't do was show them my implementation or even talk about how I solved it. Yeah, doing it the long way takes a bit more effort, but the result is that the students I helped actually understood the code they submitted and were better equipped to solve the next assignment without help.
I have to disagree with that. One obvious example is Google, who made a fabulously reliable and fast machine out of cobbled-together ultra cheap commodity hardware, and conquered the world with it. That was in the 90s, and their way of doing things took over completely. It's why companies like Sun went out of business -- they had the super-reliable (and overpriced) systems, but nobody wanted them anymore.

What you're describing (the brake system) is just simply incompetence.
My Polish friends lived in the USA for a decade but there were still times that they definitely had some UK pronunciations on words.
> Specialists in, for example, psychiatry don't need to understand how mitosis works, etc...

A psychiatrist has to obtain an MD degree before they can start to study their chosen specialty. There's a reason for that: before you can treat a psychiatric illness, you have to be able to eliminate all other possible causes for the condition. I for one would not want to be treated by a psychiatrist that couldn't distinguish bipolar disorder from brain cancer.
Students who cheat usually aren't the sharpest pencil in the box.
Is there anyone who has never had a bad experience with a licensed qualified professional? Bad doctors, dentists and lawyers are easy to find. I wish I had a way of gauging knowledge before letting someone drill my teeth
Is anyone on HN using WebRTC in production? I recall watching a conference talk by Martin Kleppmann a few years ago where he was discussing CRDTs and Automerge. He mentioned how they attempted to use WebRTC but it wasn't reliable so they had to use Web Sockets with a custom message relay server instead.
I flew from Ireland to France recently and then caught two trains to my ultimate destination about 100 km from the airport.
The train fares worked out at double the cost of the flight despite being one fifteenth the distance.
This isn't a traditional approach, but you might consider using a JSON parser in your favorite language and then implementing `eval` and `apply` over that data structure [0]. It saves you from dealing with the mundane lexer/parser stuff and lets you dive straight into an actual interpreter:

["define", ["factorial", "n"],
["if", ["=", "n", 0], 1,
["*", "n", ["factorial", ["-", "n", 1]]]]]

["display", ["factorial", 10]]

Here, JSON strings are symbols (identifiers). In a language like Python or JavaScript, you wouldn't even need to use the JSON parser. Just skip straight to doing eval and apply over the list/Array, and you can use dict/Object as your environment to hold definitions. You could be up and running in a few hours, and I think that would feel satisfying.

Then again, maybe that's too ugly to consider. :-)

In addition to some of the other book and web site recommendations people have made (SICP, MaL, etc...), I think "Lisp in Small Pieces" by Christian Queinnec is really good if you want to take it further.

[0] https://wiki.c2.com/?EvalApply
One interesting aspect is that if the language has any sort of implict type conversions/coercions, then type annotation can change program behavior in possibly surprising ways. For example https://blog.polybdenum.com/2022/04/25/when-type-annotations...
Everything I’ve read about American suburbs tells me you must be an exception - stores are usually much farther than a 15 minute walk, and often there are simply no sidewalks at all.

“Nobody is forced to do anything” is hand waving away all of the context around housing, jobs, city planning and transportation. There is a reason 99% of trips to the supermarket are made by car, it’s not simply a matter of “choice”: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2015/august/most-us-hou...
> If they passed their exams, they know a lot.

Yeah, it's an exaggeration. They certainly know some things, and some of them know a lot of things. But, they all had big holes in their knowledge (huge, gaping holes) and

1/ They weren't aware of it

2/ They were trained to hide them and appear to know everything about everything, because they're the experts. That's the scary part IMHO.
FWIW the teachers lack perspective. I've dated several teachers and listened to their side about why they teach the way they do. I would propose simple solutions, like a continuous improvement cycle, and educational experiments conducted at random by regular teachers, then reproduced and cross referenced to build new models. They had never considered these ideas before.

When you live your life in a rigorously controlled institution, you only consider what the institution echos. Outside the box thinking is possible, but it's the exception. You need outsider ideas and collaboration.

Politics will never solve these problems. It has to be grassroots and volunteer driven.
> Instead I try to find an isolated problem/task we have in our backlog that the candidate should try to implement on their own time,

And in this case you're eliminating people who aren't willing and/or able to spend time preparing for your interview process. One of my previous jobs had a clause in the contract that all my programming work belonged to my employer; is your company going to sign a waiver that says they take responsibility if a previous employer sues? Doesn't matter whether or not it's enforceable or not.

What if you use that solution in production, do you compensate for their time in helping solve the problem like you would if the task was assigned to you?

Also, you're not really setting a level playing field here. How do you gauge a candidates experience/seniority versus the other 10 candidates you hired if you're not asking them the same questions or looking for the same things. Maybe I've solved that bug in my current job.

All this is to say that this doesn't "just fix" hiring - I don't know if it's any better or worse than giving people on-site tests, but you're at the very least trading one set of problems for another.
in other earthworm news, I recently learned about the invasiveness of earthworms (in minnesota)

https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/invasives/terrestrialanimals/ear...
Would love to see a video about it, no matter the quality.
Voting Tory is a minority position however you count it: no government has had even 50% of the votes cast (let alone the votes of those eligible to vote) for decades. Brexit meets the first 'majority' criterion, but not the second.

It is entirely possible to be pro-Tory and pro-Brexit while being anti-xenophobia. But the Conservatives have been carefully-mining the anti-foreigner vote for decades (as did New Labour) and it's not plausible to argue that Brexit would have won without that sentiment: it was too large a part of the expressed reasoning of Brexit voters as a group when polled.
Well, if you created a new data structure not known before, and proved theorems about it, that's new math. If you copied a well-known data structure, and prove theorems about it, that's not new math.

What do you think mathematicians do? They just examine certain things rigorously and with utmost scrutiny. These things are simpler than things appearing in real-life. Software interfaces with real-life, so cutting-edge math is really a subset of what's needed for software. That is obvious to me, but I don't have a citation. You can cite me, if you want to.

Finally, dependent types as it is done today in Coq and Lean etc. is not nice enough a logic to attract mathematicians. The reason for that is that it is not nice enough a logic, full stop. So why would it be nice enough for computer scientists? Oh, because your problems are simpler, so you don't need a nice logic?

Saying that Martin-Löf type theory can do arbitrarily fancy math is both false and right. Just as saying that anything can be programmed in assembler is both false and right. Yeah, with enough focus and discipline you probably can, but who would want to?
Haha. Literally just finished a game with my family and was thinking "you know I should laser cut and engrave/mill some metal pieces because these move too much".

For this project I would've had each board host an analog switch (neighbour selection) and use SPI and/or I2C rather than onewire. This would allow cheap flash memory (unique ID per tile + local storage/configuration) with SPI/I2C passthru. That way the host could determine topology easily and deduplicate redundant routes. A dumb read-only MCU could populate the local RGB from flash if required. With the spare cycles thus obtained you could even implement animation.

So... who's got wood for my sheep? https://youtu.be/VBmRCclzCVU?t=33
Another one: I used to take the ICE Sprinter from Hamburg to Düsseldorf. It didn't stop in Bremen and Lower Saxony. Went directly from Hamburg to NRW.
This is it. To expand on further on why it's so crazy to couple education and credentialing - already know all the material in a class? Too bad, you have to pay for it and spend time taking it anyway. Is it a class that's completely unconnected to your field? Too bad, the university is making you take it, so you take it. Is the class taught poorly, so that you need to teach yourself outside of it? Too bad, you still have to pay for it and put time into it, in addition to actually teaching yourself the subject.

The education is the major chunk of time and cost, but the credentialing is what most people are trying to get. By forcing people to buy them together, you can make people pay a lot (in terms of both time and money) for an education they find little worth in just because it's the only way to get the credentials.
> Anyway I got my answer. The answer is, no one has done it

Cavendish experiment with Hydrogen <--> Hydrogen: I agree, probably no one has done it.

But your proposal must change the result of experiments with balls of Iron instead of balls of Plumber. That's much easier, and I'm sure someone has done it, but I can't find a good example in Google. It's a tricky experiment, so it would be nice if you try, but beware it's difficult.

After thinking for a while, I notice your proposal would change the time of oscillation of a pendulum. The standard formula is

T = 2π sqrt(L/g)

but it can be rewritten as

T = 2π sqrt(L/(W/M))

where W is the weight and M is the inertial mass.

The standard theory says that W/M has the same value for all materials and is usually called g. Your theory predicts a 3% difference for iron and plumber IIUC.

The usual pendulum with a ideal string and a ideal ball has some problems, because it's difficult to measure the "center" and get a high accuracy. But there are better solutions that use a solid big rod and measure the different times hanging the rod from a few points instead of one, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kater%27s_pendulum . I used a similar device in the past, but we used more points and it was just a rod instead of a profesiona device. It's not difficult to build one of this pendulums with different materials and measure the W/M of different materials yourself.
GP

> but *figuring out that formula* has already happened.

Me

> It seems we are *constantly changing* the cement formula.

You

> doesn't change anything

Really?

OP makes the classic error to assume that A) physical engineering isn't changing; B) computer world is analogous to physical.
Serving Markdown Direct from Apache
Oral exams have an entire other bunch of issues.
Just looking at the professor side, beside time, I imagine it would be very difficult for to grade with same meter an arrogant student, a dismissive one, a smelly one, an eloquent one, or even the first and the last one in the same session.
The UNCHR says otherwise
Mass migration has little to do with it. The fact is, adding taxpayers to the pool who we haven't had to raise or educate is a net benefit to us (even if it is a loss to their countries of origin). The problem is that we decided to turn housing into a speculative asset rather than a retaining it as a utility. Decades of policy have gone into this, be it the right to buy, the bank of England's mandate, lending ratios expanding over time, and permitting NIMBYism and massive flows of rent seeking capital from abroad.

The BoE's mandate is particularly salient as it is for maintaining 2% inflation: the official measure of which excludes house prices and includes wages. It is very much the way it is by design.
I'm building a language (https://flame.run) and trying a similar idea for imports. In my language there is no package manager. Files just import other files, locally or from URLs (like Deno). But, unlike Deno, I'd like to store the hashes of the imported files for security. I don't want to create a secondary file a la package.json, or even two files like go.mod/go.sum. So the idea I'm probably going with is that whenever you run/compile a program the tooling warns you and asks to insert the missing hashes of the imported files for you, inline.
American Express Default Prediction ML Competition