skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I graduated high school in 2009 and the top schools definitely weren't taking in students with a 3.6 GPA. In fact, I'm not aware of any school in the top 50 that asked for anything under a 4.0 (AP/IB programs enable GPAs above 4.0). Right now I see sites saying that the average Harvard GPA is 4.18. Berkeley is lower but I know plenty of people that got rejected with high GPAs (I know two people that had a 4.8 -- the top you could get in my school -- that were rejected from several top schools).

I say this because two things. First, it is clear that there are things other than GPA that admissions are accounting for. It is a bit unclear what these things are. It would be nice to know how they are extracting signal from noise (and it is clear that this is a very noisy system, though we often don't admit this). Second, if these are actual averages, there's clearly some other aspects that are heavily weighted in that process. The four that would be the most obvious to me are legacy, affirmative action, sports, and students who don't have access to AP/IB programs. These are clearly not meritocratic aspects (lack of access to better programs like AP/IB would imply that these signals aren't meritocratic because meritocracy isn't exactly equitable in accessibility. Or do all these schools know exactly how good each high school is and their inflation rates and variance rates?).

I really think as we're learning more about how people learn that we learn that the signals are extremely noisy and may not even exist. Students from poorer backgrounds may need extra care[0] but they still do pretty well[1]. So how do you measure someone that has potential from a poor school? How does this differentiate from measuring someone that has potential but not the opportunities from median or rich schools? (environment is a big factor in success)

I really just have a lot of questions here and I really do think we should be discussing how noisy this system is. A question I want to ask is: if I randomly select a person from the population and give them a Harvard (or top tier) education, will they be more successful than if they went to a college they could have gotten into based on their merits? If the answer is "yes" (and I think there's good reason to believe this is true) then maybe all these measurements don't really mean much and we're just reading tea leaves. (I think there's some signal but I just don't know how much. I'm also not an expert. Thanks for listening to my ted talk)

[0] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/16/klapper-privil...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
Zip-lock bags (even the heavy-duty zip-lock map bags) don't cut it. If you get even a trace of moisture or condensation in the bag, it evaporates and re-condenses causing a disproportionate amounts of smearing.

The problem I foresee with self-laminated sheets is that the original maps are about 24"x29", and when you cut them into printable 8 1/2" x 11" sheets you need to account for non-printing margins and (sensibly) provide some overlap between adjacent pages. So somewhere between 9 and 16 pages per top map (depending on whether you're blessed with borderless printing). It's quite an ordeal to print them yourself. Even more so if you have to laminate each sheet. On a typical trip, you'll use 2 or 3 maps (48 pages). On long trips much more. Workable, but a real hassle. It's certainly going to be a pile, compared to

You could be selective about which pages you print, I suppose, but I find it comforting to have enough surplus map to know what your escape points would be, should you be faced with an emergency.

God bless Her Majesty's network of Certified Map Printers.
This one:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Lifespan.html?id=0fEbwQ...

The book itself is somewhat pop-sci’ish, and there is something to be said about Sinclair himself being somewhat sensationalistic. However, pretty much all concrete statements are backed with footnotes to actual research papers if you’re willing to dig deeper.
There's only so much sunlight that reaches any point on the Earth throughout the day. You could build something really tall to collect more light from the sun at more angles, but that will cast a shadow and reduce what's available for other collectors. So you end up with a lot of collectors receiving little sunlight or fewer collectors spread far apart.
Yeah, other than the fact that Biosphere II completely failed to be self sustaining, then sure, it resembles what a space colony might look like.

And you are assuming there are no resource constraints on the sizes of those domes; Biosphere II was made by shipping machinery and raw materials across modest distances by truck, as opposed to shipping supplies from Earth by rocket.

I remember reading about Biosphere II in Omni magazine, in the late '70s. We still cannot create a self-sufficient sealed ecosystem here on Earth, 45 years later.
Currently and in near future sending colonist to Mars is either quick or slow death sentence. Something fails and they die fast, they get there and stay there. Slow starvation or systematic failure unless we keep shipping stuff in infinitely. And anything there will have myriad of fun and fantastic failure modes. Not to forget that even things like electronics here slowly fail...

First step really is to solve these issues here before we even attempt to kill people there...
Just like replying late consistently in text messages, eventually it becomes a waste of time even if it's with perfectly good intentions. I usually find it though that it's at least a bit callous eventually even if your interlocutor ostensibly has good reasons to be so consistently uncommunicative.
It's not about current capabilities, but future capabilities.

> But we are in the realm of reality, not fiction, and we have to learn how to crawl before we can walk, let alone run.

In either case, the main challenge, is rapid rockets reusability.

Nothing comes even close to the second place.

The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times.
Perhaps fly around in personal size drone ships. Hop between different air ship settlements. I would find that more climatic than the barren Martian surface.
My primary focus is to add Anki cards any time I learn something important that I am likely to forget, so as to employ spaced repetition and retain things better. But my programming goals are focused squarely on Haskell this year. Last year was Rust, which I will continue to use. But I'd like to see what ideas I will learn from Haskell, as well as make some projects that are well suited to Haskell.
ctrl+f "reflection" no results found.

maybe next year ..
Interesting! My experience is with US colleges and law schools, of which there are a lot more. I think that’s why there’s not a lot of detailed knowledge.
No, I was attacking your idea that it's somehow common sense that the best way of storing BTC is by working with multiple banks (!!!) to store various key fragments, by showing a more extreme version.

Of course, if someone did follow your example, and then the government compelled the banks to hand over access to the physical tokens, other people similar to you would come out and say "not your keys, not your bitcoin", or insist on even more byzantine forms of secret protection.

Not to mention, with your proposed scheme, actually using your BTC becomes significantly slower than any international bank transfer.
It's got nothing to do with computer hacking but it's still all about finding new and creative ways to accelerate growth. 10 years ago that was probably content marketing on social media. Today, who knows and only time will tell, community building seemed to be a hot topic in 2022, but never really felt like any of them took off.

I think the term is heavily overused and for me it's a very specialized role of one person. There isn't really a "growth hacking team" in my opinion.
Agreed!

This would be great! My guess would be in 2022 the math is harder but literature easier.
It is not surprising given the licenses, that the two major clang contributors decided to focus elsewhere (Swift, Objective-C and Carbon), while everyone else[0] is happilly just consuming clang, and only contributing to LLVM.

At least GCC has Red-Hat supporting ISO C++ improvements.

[0] - ARM, Intel, Embarcadero, IBM, NVidia, IBM, Nintendo, Sony,...
> Twitter is still running just fine

The website/service is running but the company appears to have issues with rent payments[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34206993
It seemed that there was a lot of people here on HN that were rooting for Twitter's demise, but I personally don't understand the mentality where someone must lose for me to win. I read a lot of financial news and have noticed that Yahoo finance front page has been covered with articles predicting Twitter's failure, almost like they want it to fail.

Also, the number of articles about Elon's activity at Twitter will cause Tesla to collapse. I'm sure Elon has many teams of capable people at each company that does not require constant input from Elon. It's a bit unnerving to see the degree that media has taken this.
I'm talking about freedom of choice:

>Do we build a wall around Earth and stop them as "illegal aliens"?

This was of course an analogy to the United States, where we put up barriers to prevent emigrants from seeking a better life here.

There's no shame in procreation, but there's shame in trapping people forever in a place where they no longer want to live.
Even worse... There was a web 3 already, and it had nothing to do with blockchain. It was HTML 5 + CSS 3 and SPAs. It just became so ubiquitous that no one thought of it by the term. Now the cool kids are headed back to the server.

The new name is because too few business types know what the "www" on web sites stands for.
Not amoral, it was composed and communicated like a nation-state propaganda piece.

Writing structure set up was a false dichotomic structure coupled with several of the more subtle tactics that play on psychological blind spots which are in common practice by propaganda writers and salespeople alike.

Its not my first rodeo, it is possible to say you are advocating for one thing, while actually advocating for another. Tone, tactics, and time spent can communicate a radically different intention than the words spoken.

The majority of your writing was spent on F1 in a structure that builds agreement (psychological blindspot), followed by the problems those pesky things like freedom of speech cause.

Once you get them to agree, psychological blind spot number 2 comes in, they've agreed to it so will defend that belief to maintain consistency. Same principle to what they did to PoWs in China back in Vietnam, and how they got American prisoners to inform on other prisoners, using forced essay writing.

Its the equivalent of saying I agree (briefly and disingenuously), and then proceeding to line up several simple agreements to obvious yes questions in a row, before the final stick at the opposite while crafted in a way that sounds plausible, just like a used car salesman.

If they don't question it immediately, you get them and they'll behave consistent with the principle and be more receptive to other things you say. Only in this case what are you selling?

Very subtle and clever for anyone that doesn't know about them but its really manipulative and downright evil to use them for something like that.

Those blindspots are very well known, Cialdini released a book which documented the most common ones, and covered other related areas that even people at the CIA have recognized.

If you were blindsided by this response, you should read the book so you can alter your writing style so you don't get blindsided like that again in the future.

Anything using those blindspots that causes or supports an outcome that reduces agency or causing disruption or disunity is going to receive the same kind of condemnation.

They are known hallmarks of subversive propaganda.
Do these lawsuits usually end with a significant punitive fee? If it's just a small, if any part, on top of rent it's a free loan - which is very scammy but similar to tax optimization, what is possible will be done.
I agree with many of the points in this article, even if it is painful.

However, in the chapter "The Mars religion" the author fails to explain why he disagrees with the transhumanists who think mankind must either spread to the stars or die.
Also Musk often states that the window of opportunity is open now and we don't know for how long.
i feel like this is all propaganda to convince tax payers to fund this stuff. it's like we never invented anything worthwhile at all if it wasn't used for war or space. maybe we should just try? try spending some money on good for a change and we'll see if good comes out of it.
I wish it weren't song-based, though it's an understandable implementation.

As others have noted, there are often many cues 'n' clues even before a single word is uttered. But also, I have trouble enough picking out words in my native tongue, let alone when transmogrified by musical prosody and accompaniment.

Today I learned that Polish sounds nothing like what I thought it sounded like :)
Yes, it was also dependent on Apple's contributions, which nowadays focus on Swift and Objective-C.

If you look at the C++ versions being used across Apple's platforms, they are more than happy staying with C++17 (Metal Shading Language is even lower, based on C++14).

Almost everyone else seems to care only about LLVM, otherwise how to explain that LLVM gets almost as many contributions per year as the Linux kernel, while clang is lagging so much behind?
I love my cheap waveceptor which is always, always accurate.

Actually in the process of choosing a casio lineage (waveceptor movement, metal case, sapphire crystal) - do I get titanium or blacked out stainless steel, lol
(Giving some context into this as founder in edtech -- running a 4 yr CS undergraduate program at kalvium.com)

One reason for grade inflation is that this is currently the only filter provided to the industry, who would like to filter students they review. This has ended up as a perverse incentive, and students and the university want to be above the "cutoff" GPA.

One of the solutions we're going with is to provide a 5 point grade per course, and provide this full breadth of data as a filter to the industry during the placements/internships season. Our bet is that the industry will have more diverse options to go by and we end up with better match-making.

Another solution is to have publicly verifiable artifacts of coursework (plagiarism is a significant problem in higher education).

I'd also like to hear HN's recommendations on this topic.
At West Point, until 2020 the big thing was class rank. Graduates could request their three top choices of branch of service (infantry, artillery, logistics, intelligence, etc.). Graduates with the highest class rank got their first choices. (This has changed a bit recently.[1]) So only the order of grades matters, not the values. Especially since everyone takes roughly the same set of courses.

[1] https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/09/13/west-poi...
Doesn't work like that in France.
I get that and do agree. Wasn't trying to deride, just providing a perspective that everyone is looking for different things from conversations and sure, sometimes the same person may want different things which change based on many factors.
This isn't a bad piece but the "demise of Twitter" stuff is laughably incorrect and sounds like Spaceman Bad brainworms.
I'm curious about something. Is the time a functional program takes to run considered a side effect? You might think that in metaprogramming to generate a program you just care about the program you receive - it is a pure function, right? But there's a difference between waiting around for a long time for the result versus getting it instantly.
Is it? The coincidence of risk aversion and status grubbing seem quite strong.

In many ways, status grubbing is the safest meta strategy in contemporary society.

[ascii shrugface]
Stanford prof pays $29M after misleading investors in biotech company
Ada / SPARK can do that. Ada has had some form of that analyses since the first version from 1983.

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-spark/chapters/03...
Agreed. To be clear, I'm not explaining why the OP chose linear types over affine types (I have mixed feelings on choosing one or the other) but rather why one needs either affine or linear types rather than "disposed exactly once" types.
The main challenge is rapid rockets reusability.

The costs of delivering one kg of materials to space must go down by 10 to 100 times.

Whether we go with manned exploration or robot exploration. Whether we choose the Moon or Mars.

Nothing comes even close to the importance of rapid rockets reusability.
How would you determine if the toughness of an exam from a hundred years ago matched a modern day one? The pedagogy, tools, and knowledge base differed dramatically in the past century. A question might look difficult but be intended as a take-home, be graded differently than binary right-wrong, rely on a trick of an outdated tool (ex. slide rule).
No. It's because it's not economically worthwhile yet to do anything significant in Antarctica given the costs of doing something. Treaties will get renegotiated if there is enough economic value and in any case, treaties need to have millitary might ultimately to get enforced. The Budapest treaties never got enforced as an example and that's why we are where we are in Ukraine
Exactly the same amount of backing up as "school != stress for most" does.
Yes, he wasn't a founder. Here's an interview with the founders of Tesla:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/06/tesla-founders-martin-eberha...
i think musk has basically said he doesn't mind risking/losing some lives. and people have volunteered. whether or not the world allows him to actually do that is another story though
Talk of Starship carrying 100 people is in reference to the "Earth to Earth" transportation idea, i.e. carrying passengers on a short hop between continents.
> Significant backend server architecture changes rolled out. Twitter should feel faster.

Without more details, I'm going to hypothesize that these are just the sort of routine improvements and performance wins that such teams deploy on a semi-regular basis. Anything can be called a "significant architecture change" if you want it to be.

If it is in fact a very major change, though, it was probably in the pipeline long before Elon arrived, given the time it takes to develop and fully test such things. It's quite possible that the past couple months were spent entirely on testing and refining a large-scale change that had already been mostly complete pre-acquisition.
I’m interested in the opposite: I want to transcribe meetings at work because my memory and note taking are inadequate.

I’m familiar with things like otter.ai but I am not risking my job by sharing data with something I don’t control.
"Imagine an absurd hypothetical year zero where no contextual understanding of the history of racism is relevant, then what would you do?"

Sure buddy.
There are young people still specially those wanting to work in cool domains like game development, however many older ones have some vested interests in keeping C++ the way it is, hence why even advocating for security is such an uphill battle.

Or see how WinDev is so resistent to change, instead of providing .NET like tooling for C++, like Borland/Embarcadero have done for the last 25 years, they stick to their ways of manually editing IDL files and COM.
I'm sure there are some heavy negotiations going on to get out of leases or renegotiate them.
This kind of thing made iCloud advanced protection more compelling. Their services are becoming so complex that they don’t have tests for all these edge cases. This sucks about copying over the billing info but at least if you enable advanced protection, it’s not your photos or notes!
Wow, that's actually exactly what I was thinking. I will check that out! Thanks so much, I wish I could buy you a beer.
I'd argue that an equivalent education isn't that meaningful of a statement though. Top schools come with a lot more opportunities. Connections is a big one. My undergrad didn't do research and several top schools require a publication for admission to graduate school. An opportunity I never even had (a common lack of opportunity for many university students. There's only so many R1 unis). I definitely agree that you'll get a similar education at a large number of schools (after all, there are only so many professorships available and it is extremely competitive), but I think it would also be a mistake to believe that there is an equal outcome between schools. Prestige may be a confounder, but it is unfortunately a meaningful metric and students know this.
> Because learning how to do it in the inhospitable environment of Mars will teach us lots about how to do it better on Earth.

That seems backwards. I would switch Mars and Earth in this sentence. Doesn't it make more sense to take the easier steps first, which will prepare us for eventually taking bigger steps?

I'm not against Mars exploration. There's no reason we couldn't do both: keep sending probes to Mars, maybe even humans in a decade or two, but make a Lunar base the priority. Then apply the lessons we learn on the Moon to establishing a colony on Mars. And literally use the Moon as a springboard for Mars missions.

I think this is pretty much universally agreed to be the sequence of events. A lot of discussion about this seems to imply we'll just proceed with some Mars colonization mission before we understand the challenges it poses, and before we're certain we can tackle them.

BTW, that JFK quote seems out of place in this context, considering it was made at the height of the space race. The speech was politically motivated, and was meant to inspire a nation to not "lose" the race, while instilling fear in the enemy.
> The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold.

And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.

Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.
Was expecting Batman style chains that autonomously grapple onto the tires. These are not those.
Actually - It doesn't get the numbers right either. If you look at the first reference, "[1]", the author says:

"I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion."

With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)

The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.
It's giving me:

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