skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ... when future AI systems are built that "hack humanity" as Yuval Harari likes to talk about, and they know us better than ourselves because of AlphaGo like super intelligence...

Such AI does not need to be full-blown AGI to to possess functionally effective hyperpersuasive power.

Start with a sufficiently detailed corpus of an individual's preferences and indirectly derived preferences gathered over trillions of cookie-tracked, A/B-tested interactions of nearly all of smartphone-connected humanity.

Add a sufficiently detailed "map" to give a reasonable facsimile to "hack humanity". There is quite a deep body of applied knowledge of human behavior to persuade people to some desired end. Much of it is applied in structured sales and politics, and the data is sitting there for someone with the right algorithms to tease out the patterns.

Put into practice through an accessible, personalized interface that resembles whatever is computed to most likely elicit the desired end result with any given individual.

You then obtain a mechanism that is quite effective at persuading the desired behavior most of the time from most individuals. No AGI, just massive amounts of current day tech level ML, and the realization that "good enough" results targeting most people are quite within reach.
I understand your issue but to say your research saves lives is an overstatement. Your implying that the lack of vaccination will save more lives than Covid infection. The fact that you aren’t trying to propose mechanisms is exactly the issue. You’re stoking more public fear by your “simple observation”. So either provide an alternative, or your potential implication is not important enough to merit a publication at this stage.
Even better then, we can bury the avocado trees next to them to get even better shade. Problem solved.

It's amazing how us HN geeks are so good at coming up with original and effective solutions in non-IT fields.
I know a few teachers who have quit or want to quit. It isn't a money issue, at least for them.

My high-school computer science teacher (many moons ago) taught advanced high-school math. He quit because the administrative requirements became too burdensome. He loved teaching, but every year the administrivia got worse until he finally quit.

Another teacher was a special-ed reading instructor; that's what she was trained for. But the school lost their funding for her category, so they made her a kindergarten teacher. As if that wasn't bad enough, the principal scheduled so many meetings that the teachers effectively lost their planning period and had to do that at home. Parents had direct access to teachers via email, and parents' complaints had to be addressed by the teachers every day - also outside of school hours.

Another teacher was in a poorer school district (elementary) and quit because the teaching environment was just too difficult.

More money won't fix any of these problems.
> Your argument is akin to saying "there's so much theory crammed into Astronomy that students do not get to look through a telescope much"

I doubt, that a computer with its endless possibilities of using it and programming it, is comparable to a telescope. Also I did make note, that CS is not only about computer programming. So I am fully aware of the following:

> CS fundamentally is not about computers. It's about math and the flow of information between theoretical machines. Computers just happen to be a physical implement.

However, this does not mean, that universities should forego teaching about computer programming properly.

The alternative is, that we acknowledge, that first we study CS, but then employers finance year long computer programming classes for new employees, taught by people, who are actually good at this. The kind of people, who have lots of experience with different systems, programming languages, paradigms and teaching in general. That'll be expensive.

> What about moving the responsibility (and financial risk) off students' backs and to the corporations that want to exploit the knowledge gained in a degree through apprenticeship and learning to code through experience?

Yes indeed, that is one alternative.

I am saying, that employers should not expect and of do not expect good good to come out of people, who recently graduated from university and have their BSc or MSc. I don't think we are in disagreement about that point.

However, realistically this might lead to some employers being to much up in the clouds, only ever accepting employees, who were taught elsewhere and students having a really hard time finding _any_ job at all, because no one is willing to expend the resources to teach them. Furthermore, the teaching will probably be very one-sided, gaered towards what that particular employers uses in their tech stack. It is also highly unlikely, that most employers will have teachers, who are really that good, lets say up to Abelson and Sussman standards, if we may wish for something.
1. Curriculum. Instructional tools and all the things that for profit publishers can convince politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators they need.

2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher.

3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees.

4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties.

5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.
This is a bit anecdotal, but I did upload a book to libgen. I am am avid user of the site, and during my thesis research I was looking for a specific book and could not find it on there. I did however find it on archive.org. I spent the better half of one afternoon extracting the book from archive.org with some Adobe software, since I had to circumvent some DRM and other things, and all of this was also novel to me. In the end I got a scanned PDF, which had several hundred MB. I managed to reduce it to 47 MB, however further reduction was not easily possible at least not with the means I knew or had at my disposal. I uploaded this version to libgen.

I do agree that there may be some large files on there, however I dont agree with removing them. I spent some
hours to put this book on there so others who need it can access it within seconds. Removing it because it is too large would void all this effort and require future users to go through a similar process than i did just to browse through the book.

Also any book published today is most likely available in some ebook format, which is much smaller in size, so I dont think that the size of libgen will continue to grow at the same pace as it is doing now.
You can multiply APR x years of loan term. You’d pay 5.1% APR x 10 or 51%. With the shorter term the payments would be very high each month.
Anything to do with the general public costs a lot because of legal liability, especially when dealing with kids.

Any loss that occurs, no matter how low probability it is, get litigated and once litigated gets incorporated into expected losses by insurance companies and mitigations for it get stipulated into the insurance coverage.

Fire, handicap accessibilities, school shootings, tornado, earthquake, trip and falls, sports equipment injury, etc.

If an entity does not cover its ass head to toe on “known” risks, and lets a loss happen due to negligence, then it is on them. The response to this is lots of protocols and code requirements, and lots of additional bureaucracy to continuously check if those protocols and code requirements are being followed.
If you vote instinctively, instead of for the betterment of the community, I'll be the one to ask you: please don't vote.
While it’s a bit of an extreme case, the file for a single 15-page article on Monte Carlo noise in rendering[1] is over 50M (as noise should specifically not be compressed out of the pictures).

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3414685.3417881
Openlayers v7.0 Released
I really like the idea of using FUSE as SQLite backend, rather than injecting into the process

I love the use case of querying SQLite from a CDN with range requests, because it allows for real “serverless” querying. For example, this: https://github.com/psanford/sqlite3vfshttp
Yeah if ads are added, I’d like my money refunded
Not really.

That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too.

At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect.

However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success.

[0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc.

[1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.
You might want to check out something like https://photoprism.app/
> it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.

This is true, on both counts. Adding top end security does add complexity. The business should decide if it's worth it. And users generally want whatever is simpler, and will only use MFA if it's forced upon them.
No single thing will solve all the problems.

But money is at least a big factor: even those who keep up with self-motivation and co-worker’s appreciation can’t go on if money isn’t there. Paying them fairer prices is the first step in any attempt to make teachers come back.
If the 51% is a single staker or small group of colluding stakers attacking the chain, the rest of the users will probably not want to continue using that chain. The users can activate a soft fork, just by changing the rules of the code to burn the attacker’s funds, and running the updated client software. The remaining honest stakers can then continue to follow the head of the non-attacked chain, and the attacker would be the only one left on their chain.
Most importantly, everyone knows a very bad performing school when they see one. The role of vouchers is first and foremost to reward schools that don't screw things up too badly. Quality can then be a secondary factor.
> by filtering any "books" (rather, files) that are larger than 30 MiB we can reduce the total size of the collection from 51.50 TB to 18.91 TB, shaving a whopping 32.59 TB

Books greater than 30 MiB are all the textbooks.

You are killing the knowledge.

Also killing a lot of rare things.

If you want to do something amazing and small, OCR them.

As an example of greater than 30 meg, I grabbed a short story by Greg Bear the other day not available digitally, it was in a 90 meg copy of a 1983 Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Side note de-duping is an incredibly hard project, how will you diff a mobi and a epub and then make a decision? Or a decision between a mobi and a mobi?

Books also change with time. Even in the 90's kids books from the 60's had been 'edited' These can be hidden gems to collectors. Cover art also.
That's my understanding of it anyway, they give start and end dates usually and no more. Otherwise they open themselves up to all sorts of legal unpleasantness.
How old were the ones you dated?

In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignments hit the students.

But after a few iterations, they have those tools, and at that point things settle down a lot. The material only needs to be updated infrequently. Most of that time that in the first few years was spent building those things is freed back up, and it's not replaced by anything.
Apple smells like a dystopian corporate org.
What makes this special compared to rqlite or dqlite? Edit: https://github.com/losfair/mvsqlite/wiki/Comparison-with-dql...
I don’t think anyone believes the technical process does not exist.

Someone with enough clout would 100% be able to get accounts reinstated (likely without even needing a police report of no wrong-doing).

Google’s refusal to have appropriate moderation and support for edge-case situations is a completely different thing.
RISC-V is pretty interesting in this regard; it uses weak memory ordering by default, but a CPU that implements TSO can simply flag Ztso, and I believe that would be enough to get x86-like memory semantics.

IIRC, Apple M1 uses a similar technique to make sure Rosetta 2 can run translated x86 code without worrying about the memory model. However, M1's implementation can be switched at runtime, while Ztso is not. On the other hand, Ztso is standardized while M1's TSO is not.

Also, the text for Ztso mentions that SPARC uses TSO, just like x86. ARM however is indeed more relaxed.
Nah I think most people like "the idea" of being a lawyer (or a doctor). But to actually be one it's much harder, and that's when they get a reality check

Lawyers will mostly attest how divorce/family practice has nothing on actual criminal practice, and it might be even harder. Most people don't know about the long hours, the case studies, etc. They think it's the romantic view of what they see on TV

Doctors have to know how to deal with bodly fluids. Of various kinds. They have to learn how to tell a family a dear person died. They have to literally survive residency.
descript is the best tool i’ve ever used for this.
On the flip side of that coin, you sometimes have the parents who do know all about their child's ADHD and how to (help their child) manage it effectively, and then you get these meddling teachers or principals who genuinely believe they know better than everyone else about how "problem children" should be dealt with (all while utterly ignoring the actual problem children, like bullies for example). They hear that a child has "a diagnosis" and it's like painting a target on that child for some screwed up teachers/principals, no matter how actually well behaved that child is in practice. Sometimes those vile people even go beyond "too far" and ruin lives with their meddling.
I'm definitely stealing "parasitic administration salaries", because it describes a wide array of administrative bloat.
Why would non-resident apply to the comparison of local schools?

My understanding is that you have non-residents subsidize things such as scholarship programs — but that in-state is fairly close to costs.

State money appears to be a relatively small fraction of their incomes — and is smaller than the increase in their financial position.

https://finance.uw.edu/uwar/annualreport2021.pdf
Sounds good in theory and if it really works as a drop in replacement it’s amazing tech, but numbers, please! I can make a beefy Postgres server handle 5-10-20k tps relatively easily, what can I expect from this?
> 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go?

Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.

> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others.

Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important.

> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.

Bingo. Half the success of 4-year colleges is that it's the first time the bottom 50% of the students are filtered out.

Story time. I was an ESL teacher for 5 years in Asia and planned on coming home to the USA and getting my teacher's license in Math to teach at international schools. I am not currently a teacher, I'm a quant at a big bank.

Why didn't I end up in teaching? The licensing requirements in Minnesota are insane. Counselor's straight up told me I'd have to borrow ~$50k from the UMN for a MS in Curriculum and Instruction before I could teach.

The labor unions along with politicians have built a structure in which there is artificial scarcity of teachers. Not only is the profession filled with disrespect, but it's outrageously expensive and bureaucratic.

Lastly, the Economics of Education field is wild. Clearly there's value to basic reading/math/science education, but it's not clear at all whether teachers are schools matter than much (wealthy communities/parents matter a lot).

Edit: feel obligated to add that k12 education is financed and administrated at the local level, which means our experiences with this likely vary a lot. Mine are specific to trying to move back to the USA and become licensed in MN.
Can anyone explain it to me why this submission has been flagged? Yes, I saw it some weeks ago, but if that's the reason, it should be marked as dupe, not just flagged. It is a genuinely useful website and I don't see much criticism in the comment - apart from the fact that 20 minutes for interchange is too little. Nothing that deserves flagging though.
The shift in the western world into paper pushing in healthcare, education, construction, etc doesn't always come in the form of more bureaucrats. Sometimes it's teachers spending time with ever more frequent and granular grading and survey systems, and doctors filling forms for hours a day.

It feels like the McKinsey-style design of large orgs has permeated the public sector just as much if not more than the private one. It always comes with a massive amount of procedure – employee surveys, follow-ups and meaningless 10-scale measurements, so that leadership can rest easy knowing that every decision they make is data driven. Somehow a spreadsheet analyst should be able to diagnose and fix every possible issue in an incremental manner, and conversely, all poor decisions are due to insufficient data.
Google and Facebook build ad empires after kneecapping everyone's privacy.

But seriously, the aggregated annual revenue of the Top 5 (in the first chart in the article) is $375b. Regardless of what Apple has said or done, why would anyone think Apple wouldn't want a piece of that action?

I'm not defending Apple, only being objective and realistic.
Even WireGuard is also impacted on iOS.

The author of WireGuard lamented that certain network pathway must be preserved for existing Apple infrastructure before WireGuard app can be approved and made available by Apple App Store.

So, there is no easy way to catalogue what kind of cellular data traffic unless we magically ran a network capture (WireSHARK) at cell tower level or root our iOS phone.

I do do know for iOS phones that cellular data traffic is drastically different than LAN-based WiFi traffic.
With FOSTA/SESTA, Congress found what appears to be a highly effective 1st/4th amendment bypass: companies do not receive section 230 immunity for “sex trafficking” material. The government doesn’t say “thou shalt delete,” it just makes companies civilly liable for whatever happens on their platforms, which could be a death sentence at their scale. This has been overwhelmingly effective at censoring anything that even looks like sex work, no matter how consensual. If the intent was to continue protecting human trafficking cartels from modern competition while proving a viable means of censorship, it has been overwhelmingly effective.

EARN IT threatens to expand this to CSAM. Meanwhile, anti-CSAM legislation continues to develop in other jurisdictions, and being global entities big tech companies are exposed to that risk. Hence why Apple published explicit plans to actively scan (albeit locally on-device and with creative use of cryptography to soften the blow) for CSAM on their devices, and integrate with NCMEC. They’ve shelved this for now, but made it clear that they’re not done with this concept.

Big tech dreads the loss of their liability shield, and these measures are an attempt to stay ahead of the policymakers. It’s not as free a choice as it may appear, and the federal government does not appear restrained by the constitution here.
A chime noise at the start and a choice of echo would be super cool..
This person is all over the map--it's the kind of rambling for which the awful five paragraph essay was designed to correct.

Anyway, I am assuming that she is a public teacher and her job is to some extent supported by that fact (with respect to working conditions, salary, etc) as well as by a union. Many private schools, especially religious schools, actually do pay a "pittance" which probably more closely reflects the market rate. Such teachers often do depend on a spouse's salary, or live in real poverty. Public teachers benefits are usually much, much better.

Of course, the big disadvantage of a public school: You get what you get. Only the very, very worst students are expelled so classroom behavior can be wretched, with correspondingly wretched parents (if any). The administration is politically motivated and the teachers get the short end there, too.

Good districts have no trouble getting teachers, and never have.
I was going to quote that very paragraph, as a professor teaching three classes this semester, in addition to my 50 hour a week job as the technical director.

I see at my university the outside consultants telling us how and when to teach. But OPs first sentence here seems to ring true a lot on my campus. Your boss, HR, some organization called "student success" which is made up of MBAs that have never taught a class, some VP of whatever division, they talk down to you. Tell you, as a professor with great student feedback and high marks all over the place, that you do not understand "how to teach" and that we should have Elvsiver, Pearson, or some other bookseller tell us how to teach, or even better, that we should just outsource teaching to them.

They can not imagine why people are leaving.
I don't understand why people complain about the mailto: option.

Whichever after or before, people will need to open up their mailbox to have access to their newly created account, no matter what, so it does not change anything.

The account creation page could easily provide a plain text email as an option, copy/paste the address, copy paste the code you've been given to send and off you go.
Or it could provide both options. Link clicking and mailto.

Not great but else you can configure mailto:handling on any browser/OS
Over-50s turn to house-shares to beat rising rents
My pictures and videos are synced to iCloud, Google Photos, and MS OneDrive. My photos are synced to Amazon Drive too.