skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well over a century ago now, my grandmother taught grades 1 through 8 in a one-room rural schoolhouse. Barring a substitute teacher when grandma was sick, she was the only teacher those kids ever saw until they went to the (fairly distant) high school for grade 9. Grandma was a good teacher, and every year the valedictorian at that HS was one of grandma's students. The only "central administration" that she had to care about was the little school district's Superintendent. He had no time, staff, nor budget for messing with things that worked. Nor possible upsides if he got any "new ideas" about education.

Grandma's own education was high school, plus maybe a two-year teaching certificate from a Podunk little Normal School ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/normal-school ). Her three rules for teaching 8 grades in a 1-room school house were: (1) Make sure the 1st graders all learn to read, (2) Make sure the 8th graders learn everything they'll need for high school, and (3) Make sure there's plenty of older-kids-teach-younger-ones going on in between, because you've only got time to hit the high points for grades 2 to 7.

But a whole lot changed over the decades, as American "Teacher Education" grew from a bare-minimum service sector into a huge, self-serving established empire. Especially after WWII, an incredible amount of money flowed into colleges & universities. Old stuff that worked couldn't possibly get you ahead in that empire. "Johnny can read" results take a decade to play out in the real world. Vs. cool-sounding new ideas, especially if you could stick a "Science" label on 'em (the status of "science" was incredibly boosted by WWII) and were skilled at spreading FUD and FOMO, could rocket you to success in the ever-growing academic / administrator / consultant / author / etc. Education Establishment.
GPT4 is surprisingly good at it, considering BPE tokenization means it shouldn't be able to do rhyme at all.
Wait, you were still using it? I used it for years and years but then they announced they killed it[1] last Fall and I switched to something I like a lot less.

Is SwiftKey back? Can I start using it again? Will they just yank it again in three months when people get bored of the AI gimmick?

I'm confused.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/microsoft-will-end-s...

Can we please, as an industry, stop selling good things to big companies just so they can smother them with a pillow?
Exactly: either read the APIC ID and use that to look up the CPU number in a table you already have, or arrange a location in memory to use xadd to assign a sequential CPU number, whichever your OS prefers.
Ah. Yes correct. The majority of people in my town spoke spanish, and a significant percent did not speak english at all.
When I started in the biz around 2000 any serious tech business running Oracle or maybe SQL Server if they were MS stack. Oracle was miles ahead of everyone else. In the last ten years I don't think I've seen a single org that still runs Oracle. It's legacy at this point. SQL server has surprisingly hung on, but everyone else is using something open source or something cloud.
As a parent with kids who struggled (actually, performed average) on these nonsense word tests, I do think that is bullshit. If you somehow manage to cheat and get your kids to recognize all the high frequency words they need to be fluent, congratulations, you have taught them to read.

Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical distrust of our teaching staff.

Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better and clearer points than me in my sister comment.
Dealing with Altera MAX7000/MAX7000E devices in legacy designs
This has been bugging me for a few minutes, and I'd be keen on hearing thoughts from other hackers.

Given sideloading will be available, does this not create a broader attack vector that government agencies may use to access user data?
I don't think they seem particularly special even then. Patenting an algorithm to be implemented by levers doesn't seem so categorically different from patenting one to be implemented by transistors.
12 year olds are generally prepubescent children. This isn't like a sixteen year old working to save for a car, or even a fourteen year old gaining a little independence and exercise working a few hours after school. This is child labour. It's indefensible.
I agree with you and I hate that you are being downvoted.

People love to say this is about choice for the consumer but it really is not going to be.

My fear is that the choice will be taken away from my by companies that are no longer able to engage in shady behavior on iOS. Things like trying to collect all my data, forcing me into their billing system, shady subscriptions (like how I can cancel or reminders of it being about to charge).

The Facebooks, TikTok, etc know that many of their users are addicted to their platform and it would not be a stretch for them to push users to download the app through a third party service. I could even see them going so far as to not be on the official store because they know they have the name recognition.

Facebook could even make their own store for other apps that don't want to respect my privacy.

This is a huge concern of mine that this could be a trend that starts small but overtime I no longer have the choice to avoid these alternate stores or to side load to be able to continue to get the full use out of my phone.

Choice is great, but this is giving the choice to developers not consumers.

This doesn't mean that Apple's solution is perfect, but just opening up the flood gates is not the solution either. If you really want to side load get an Android phone.
This was aired on my local NPR station a couple of months ago. It's pretty interesting stuff.
Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, media, and even in game design.

If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.
I think this is a good answer. Our case is weird; millions of tables with billions (not sure how many in total even) of rows and no joins. Mysql handles this far better in our testing.
How is this a paper, they simply fine-tune the fully-connected layer of BLIP-2 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.12597.pdf
Not a new problem. People argued in the early 70’s that you should be able to have a drink if you could vote, own the bar and have your ass shot off in the jungle. Didn’t work.

You can rest assured that Jason and Jennifer won’t be dirtying their hands out there. Just those other people.
I've used both for similar amounts of time at this point. I know a _lot_ about the implementations details of MySQL, and a helluva lot less about PostgreSQL, and that's because I hit _way_ more landmines with MySQL. It's just so easy to use it the wrong way and get saddled with ugly problems for months or years.

To be fair, my PostgreSQL experience is more recent, and both products have matured a bunch, but I've also seen plenty of the bad old MySQL problems—like MyISAM tables and 3-byte unicode—in just the last couple of years.
> I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way?

You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the
rooftops about this for generations.

For example from another story posted here today:

Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math.

Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all?

Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature.

There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
You are either incredibly lacking in self-awareness, you feel absurdly superior relative to your employees, or you are trolling. It is hard to tell which!
Tech investors’ obsession over profit is already waning
Phew, they aren't selling chimps. Had me worried for a minute.
That sounds excellent! Thank you very much for this blog post.

https://example.net/my-first-blogospam
Out of interest, which Three plan (& APN) are you on?

I’m working on using a Smarty (Three UK-owned budget label MVNO, for those unaware) SIM card in a 5G modem as a backup line, and haven’t been super impressed with speeds — so curious about trying your tip.
Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine
Genuine question: what are you basing these 'trust' judgements on, especialy in the case of the Android apps? Open source, or something else?
In my education degree program, in the intro class we spent time every week discussing recent research papers we had read. I was interested in practicing, not doing research, but when selecting schools there were clearly some that had a research focus and some that had a practical focus.
Can vouch - that book is how I learned to read. I became a very strong reader afterward - so much so that when I was 7 the Black and Decker guide to Home Wiring was hours of entertainment.
> Interesting article but it sounds like all the author had to do was schedule an appointment and wait 30min.

Two appointments. They stood him up during the first one, and wouldn't take his money.

It's also interesting how much effort they put into dissuading, people to pay in cash to the point of encouraging actions that would waste money on all kinds of fees:

> For people without bank accounts, their only option for paying taxes shouldn’t require paying fees to credit card processors or retailers—especially since they are likely among the poorest taxpayers.
The Discrete Log Problem is relatively simple to explain in the context of a generic group. It's sort of intuitive that elliptic curve groups are a pretty good instance of a generic group.
So I don't think it is simpler to explain the security of RSA than the security of ECC.

Additionally, the best attack on ECDLP (Pollard's rho) is much easier to understand than the best attack on RSA (the number field sieve).
AI safety: what should be done now?
25 years ago the people behind MySQL said that you didn't need transactions, quit asking for them. They didn't understand any of ACID really. Since then the project has got the important features, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the at the time leaders.

25 years ago postgresql was clearly a slow DB, but they didn't claim you didn't need performance, just that you had to measure first to ensure you really did (nobody did that measure).

Things have changed. However my career ended up not needing much of a DB ever and so I've never had any need to see how much. I just like to watch the fights from the sidelines.
Found my next hobby project
You're absolutely not alone. This is what Paul Graham's post "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" is about.

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Hello, Computer, a series of interviews carried out in 2023 at a time when artificial intelligence appears to be going everywhere, all at once.The first interview is with Marisa Tschopp, a researcher at scip AG who also serves as Chief Research Officer at Women in AI NPO. Additionally, she Co-Chairs the IEEE Trust and Agency in AI Systems committee. Marisa's research explores AI from a psychological perspective, focusing on ethical implications.
Did you evaluate SQLite on a floppy drive or something?
Echoing VLM:

No, not really. All else being equal:

I'd say that today, it's much muddier than it was maybe ten years ago, before the data science explosion and cloud explosion.

That is, turn-key cloud Postgres is not Y2K Postgres, and MySQL post-Maria is not Y2K MySQL. In the former, administration of Postgres has gotten much easier since Heroku got involved and Andy Pavlo started talking about self-driving databases. In the latter, MySQL can do text search well enough that I sat pair programming this with a young engineer around 2016-2017 when I'd have argued prior that you were wasting your time.

In the end, it probably comes down to how you rank your requirements:

usability, performance, suitability for a particular purpose.

Things like postgis and pgrouting may have little equal, so like others, those can be huge differentiators if you need them and see the advantage in db backend computation without invoking the N+1 query problem in aggregate.

I'm biased since I used MySQL before the inefficient backend was deprecated and I used PostgreSQL to do all manner of experimental EAV implementations using bjson including various forms of tuples from Rich Hickey.

All hail Stonebraker.
quantized Vicuna runs ok-ish in my 16GB i7 laptop (onboard graphics) and the output is usable

see this comparison: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/12ezcly/compari...

these models quantised to 4bit should run in CPU set ups with 16GB of RAM + 16GB of swap (Linux) and perhaps other setups run similarly
I think the case of "it depends" mattered more in the days of shared webhosts and basic PHP sites when the relatively lightweight MySQL made more sense. These days, not only is PostgreSQL designed better and has more features (our key usecase was RLS) but its governance is better. You're not tied to the monster called Oracle and Postgres has a very healthy development community that isn't overwhelmingly dominated by any one entity.

I recommend https://pgloader.io if you're currently on MySQL and want to switch your existing app.
Accept Conway’s Law in Big Projects
Can anyone suggest better materials / guides for early literacy development?
This assumes facts not in evidence. The change is being forced by EU law, but it would take more effort to geo-fence it than to make the change globally. Not to mention the fact that it would be effort in the direction of a PR loss.

No, the more Apple way to spin this is as a positive for everyone. As if they had the idea the entire time and just now figured out how to make it work.
I'm speaking of professional white collar jobs. The kind of jobs where you can work independently, nobody is really keeping track of what you're doing and it's not hard to blow off work without causing concern.

I agree that service jobs I don't see much of a difference, but I assume in those jobs you can't really slack off without it being a problem really quick.
In most parts of the world you can buy alcohol when you are 18, in many parts you can buy soft alcohol (beer, wine) at 16, but you cannot drive a car at 16. Both are fine IMO, as long as you cannot drive a car AND buy alcohol at 16.
> Now we need another kind of freedom, we feel it but cannot articulate it.

Simple: empower the user. Focus on the user's freedom to do things.

I think FSF's goals can be easily rephrased in terms of that "new" freedom, while remaining consistent with the original vision.

I also think this is where free software is failing very hard in the recent decades. I was running Debian+SailfishOS as my daily drivers up until 2019, when I completely switched to the Apple ecosystem, after one simple realisation: it empowered me and granted me the freedom to do more with my devices.

There is no intrinsic reason why Apple is better at empowering their users than FOSS is, I think it's the exact opposite: FOSS as a principle and as a development practice has proven over and over again that it can compete with, and even take out proprietary juggernauts - in spaces other than personal computing.

I have on my desk (just for fun) a PowerBook G4 (2001) with OSX 10.5 (2007), and I think that machine + OS is still ahead in usability vs a modern release of KDE or Gnome.

I don't know, I don't think bridging that gap is impossible, but that might require unthinkable compromises like acknowledging the need for proprietary Wifi firmware, CPU microcode, or single sign-on for Google/Outlook/iCloud mail and calendar. So I'm not sure if it will ever happen.
> it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking

Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.

The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.

> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.
Now scrubbed.
It's almost exclusively pronounced puff where I am.

The problem is that the author doesn't really know the cultural nuances, simply saying it's a possible issue isn't helpful because they don't know the relative usages of certain words. I wouldn't be particularly worried about using poof because there already homophones that are innocent so it isn't like fuck. Plus at this point Im not even sure if it's derogatory or just slang for gay.

But anyway, I'm firmly in the intent camp when it comes to words. If the word as used is obviously not meant to offend, offense shouldn't be taken. The world's got enough problems without extracting insults from open source projects.

Fwiw puff the magic dragon to me is synonymous with smoking weed.
launch scrubbed
Windows reserves a certain percentage for VRAM for some reason. So I'd recommend Linux. Or find a way to disable the desktop/UI in Windows.
Building a Chatbot with OpenAI’s ChatGPT API, Next.js and Tailwind CSS
> Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise.

I sometimes link to the Wikipedia article when there are many things by a certain term, or when I'm using terminology that doesn't show up in search results (but is common in colloquial use). Should I do this a different way?
Any DDL worthy of the name (table rewrite needed) in MySQL needs to be done with pt-online-schema-change or gh-ost. With DDL, you want to e.g. have it tune the I/O load of the migration so it doesn't interfere too much with production load. In practice, pt-osc / gh-ost means you have a kind of transaction, because the rewritten table doesn't take the place of the old one until the rename at the end. That's essentially an atomic commit.
My grandfather had to herd sheep up in the mountains at 6 years old. Incidentally he brought with him a pipe and some vanilla flavored tobacco. Currently 90 and going strong.
It became fashionable in early childhood education circles to teach children to read by looking at the accompanying pictures in the book instead of by deciphering the letters and sounding out the word.

This led to many parents thinking that their kids must have dyslexia because they weren't learning to read.

You should listen to the podcast -- it is fascinating. I listened to the entire series three times because I couldn't get over it. It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.
There’s a lot of mistrust and bad blood. Many of those people have moved on.
Ok, what about a 9 year old? Where do you draw the line and why?
Are there any programming tutorial screencasts for OO design or problem solving?
I’m looking for screencasts on things like someone going about getting a problem and going through the whole process of a creating a solution. OO design, problem solving, coding it, testing it etc. Does such a thing exist? Sort of like Practical OO Design in Ruby in screencast form? Or even pairing sessions on a problem? More focussed on the thought process of the developer rather than learning a specific language or tool. Seems like there should be, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place!
As others have said, scrub on liftoff, a wet dress rehearsal will occur.
Yeah, you are probably right: communication is sometimes (always?) hard, especially when only done in writing: my apologies for not seeing through your original message.

In retrospect, you didn't do anything wrong, and I read too much into it: my bad, so sorry!
Hi HN, author of the post here. Working on this project and writing this post was lots of fun! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.
Scrubbed due to the pressurization issue with the first stage.

Will finish fueling and stop the clock at T-3.
How do electrons find the “path of least resistance”? [video]
Aborted for today :(
Also JetBrains products are much nicer than Visual Studio
> but overtime I no longer have the choice to avoid these alternate stores or to side load

Maybe Apple should update the terms of the App Store to be more competitive/attractive then.
BNN Files Lawsuit Against Elon Musk's Twitter
I leave researching Gurbaksh Chahal's past as a fun exercise for the reader, as I do not wish to be frivolously sued myself.
How so? It seems that the IPCC models have been quite accurate, and that we're on track for the more pessimistic paths. Can you explain how the numbers show that this is not true?
Much less than 10% usually for these 4th-party aggregators.
Using Swiftkey since it's first release, it's more than being angry at online changes.

The keyboard works in such a way that it learns your typing style and then understands what you type without the requirement for actually hitting the right keys.

I can type "ky nt gromf koe stw uoi" and it will become "hi my friend how are you".

This makes typing on a phone extremely fast.

The problem is that other keyboards that claim to have similar features are not able to understand my typing gibberish.

In essence, I and many other Swiftkey users have trained ourselves to no longer be able to use any other keyboard.

Is this worth being mad over? In my opinion yes, a product loved by many being purchased by a big company who then close down support avenues is always a good reason to be mad.
The internet seems ripe for the return of a service like StumbleUpon. I used to find all kinds of great niche content through that service. A much better way to kill time than endlessly refreshing a feed or shitposting -- it feels more like exploring the internet.