skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting that livestream count-up stopped at T+18s right as the PAO calling pitch-over maneuver, well before it started overcorrecting and had gone sideways(figuratively and literally) on camera, and then resumed erratically from T+41s.

Aren't T+ times tracked externally for trajectory calculation purposes, in parallel to being timed onboard for control purposes - like, guys at the pad clicks his stopwatch as he sees a green light and yells the reading into the phone ASAP so that guys in places like Hawaii or Africa knows when to start waving their dishes in a sweeping arc, while the vehicle itself operate valves and fire mechanisms as it sees fit?

I'm just a space fan, but if they were taking T-time on stream from vehicle telemetry rather than just one-shot syncing at launch, I feel that's rather original, and, absolutely no offense, but find it very German.
This section:

> Apart from parsing the SQL query, I also considered an alternative testing approach that I might implement in the future: go through each migration one by one, and insert some dummy data into the database before applying it, to make sure that we test each migration being applied on a non-empty database. The data would either have to be generated automatically based on the current database schema, or we could commit some example DB dataset together with each migration, to make sure that we have some representative data sample available.

Suggests that this may also be a fairly complicated direction. Although it's not entirely clear to me why he can't just put one record in the db before any migrations, and then pull it all through. Plus it has the added drawback of removing your coverage for the (not unimportant) zero case.
Non-drama good shows (IMHO) from Apple TV+ include but are not limited to Shrinking, Ted Lasso, Mythic Quest, Trying, Schmigadoon (this one is weird though).

Anyways YMMV as usual.
God help us when those poor students graduate into the real world, unable to perform even the simplest metaphysics or epistemology!
Not university, but an interesting related post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1jmsp7n/my_6th_gr...
> I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling,

This appears to be a valid point, but it really isn't.

In a case you're paying sysadmins, in the other you're paying cloud engineers.

> performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it doesn't, I just wonder.

You'd be paying those anyways. AWS's mantra is that amazon takes care OF the security of the cloud but YOU (the client company) take care of the security IN the cloud. Same goes for performance etc.
I’m not dismissing the trade issue but I’d like to point out that the currency exchange rate is really bad right now, I’m not sure many Canadians can afford to travel these days. Our economy is not doing so hot with raising rents and grocery prices, people are struggling. I think there are multiple factors at play here but Trump’s rhetoric is certainly not helping.
Generally not, but we choose where we take our from water from.

If there's too much fluoride in the rock water we take soil or surface water instead, for example. If there's too much fluoride in the water we do not supply it to people's taps, but this is for values like 4 mg/L.

So we mostly don't take any measures. In Stockholm it's apparently less than 0.2 mg/L though.
That’s… not true? “As of June 2023, Apple TV+ has nearly 200 movies and TV shows in its catalog.” Not a lot, but still not 10…
I made a few assumptions about the actual deployer and their environment that I shouldn’t have… I’ll need to address this. Thanks!
Pearson make great money charging obscene amounts for books. In many subjects they'll have some online component so if you thought you could get away with using a second hand copy of last year's edition they'll make you have to pay for the online access section separately regardless.
Anything I’ve read about how South Korea treats its students makes me doubt it’s the way to go.
From HN guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

We are hackers here. Building is good. Sharing is good. All this is true even if you personally know how to do what is being shared, and it is easy for you. I promise you there are people who encounter every sharing post here and do not think what is posted is easy.
Here in italy, in stem university (especially computer science) being given slides is a given.

Some teachers record their lectures as well, although it's not mandatory. For some subjects I prefer following in the class, and for some others imho having the slides and doing on your own is much better than having to follow lectures. It depends. But at least, you have a choice

Edit now that I think about it, everyone's mileage may vary wildly. I think I haven't been studying by taking notes in a lot of time. I'd rather just read the slides and try to understand the whys and whats behind what was explained. Some colleagues of mine would rather take notes or write a condensed version of the course material to better remember it. I guess ymmv a lot
A considerate professor would allow using an older or multiple editions of the books, and assign appropriate readings or problems for multiple editions. Libgen e-books are a strictly better product anyways: you don't have to carry it around and you can annotate them without the notes being inside the book.
"This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down."

Sounds like an educational system problem.

I find it very odd the need to blame phones for everything. POTUS probably can't read a serious novel cover to cover, few of the senior managers at my work can, these kids are all going to pass college despite not being able to do it, it's a basic question of incentives.
My psych professor twenty years ago gave out the slides with strategic blanks in them, that way you didn't have to write the whole thing down, but you did need to listen at least to the point where you could fill in the missing bits.
Honestly, that doesn't sound uncommon even for the classes I took 20 years ago.

A single book in a non-literature class could easily go for more than that. CS was especially bad in this regard, for some reason.
Tuition at similar (second tier state) schools is going to be ~$6000 per semester! It goes up from there.

What's going on that the students have the resources for the tuition but not books at 5-10% of that cost (that's a 4 course load with books costing $100-150 per course)?
Have you seen what books cost? Not textbooks, like those from Pearson or something, but regular books.

This guy is a philosophy professor, so if he is assigning a book every 1-2 weeks, in a 14-week semester, let’s say that’s like 8 books.

Buying 8 books for under $100 is cheap. It does sound like he takes care to craft an affordable syllabus.

Of course, if you are taking 5 classes a semester it’s gonna add up, but this is really not on the egregious end of things.
But why wouldn't you just give them the slides? Isn't it the students problem if there is stuff missing?
20 years ago, I would get the book list from the professor and purchase the identical "international editions" of the same books on Ebay, shipped out from Macmillan India or a foreign imprint publisher. They were probably 1/3rd of the US price, but the content was identical.

Often times, professors would allow us to purchase earlier editions of the book for our coursework, which were a fraction of the cost of the most recent edition.

Worst case scenario, I could reserve the book at the school library, but I'd have to move fast as there'd only be a handful of copies available.
> At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?

The disconnect here is that your professors are assigning you work like this because the purpose of a university education is to broaden your horizons, challenge you, and force you to think about _how to think._

The fact that you're treating it like trade school is your problem, not the university's.

> I distinctly remember being penalized for any insight that didn't fit marking criteria back in high school english lit.

Good for you. High school writing has nothing to do with university-level papers.

> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs. Some lecturers are also just incompetent with barely any understanding of what they're teaching in the first place...

Your issue, again, is that you're arrogantly assuming you don't have anything to learn from things you personally haven't prioritized. A major role of a university education is to beat that idea out of you by showing you how wrong you are. Pity it isn't sticking.

> ...though this probably wouldn't be as big of a problem in better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works

What the actual fuck, dude? Ivy League? Right in the second paragraph: "I teach at a regional public university in the US."

I went into this article kind of annoyed at the stereotyping of "these kids today," but way to go reinforcing the article's points. Damn.
Setting aside Libgen (never used it, don’t know anything about it), it’s unlikely that any of those authors is available on Gutenberg in a modern, critical translation. Reading primary texts in their publication language was dead or dying even when I was a philosophy major, but still it’s impossible to do close textual analysis without a scholarly translation.

I know some of the early translations of e.g. Nietzche sometimes end up saying the opposite of what might have been intended, which is a downer.
That’s fair. I agree with other replies though that parsing and evaluating imperative code is a lot tougher and less flexible than adhering to the principle of least power and making it declarative data.

It’s also worth noting that using comments is exactly how the shebang line works in the first place. It’s just so well-ingrained after 45 years that people don’t notice that it’s a shell comment.
Yes. Most textbooks retail in the ~$200 range. I remember that I had one class in college that had such a long list of recommended textbooks (on top of two required texts) that buying all the course materials would cost $3000 retail, and this was 10 years ago.
(2016) Interactive Neural Network Art
"Generational list of programming languages" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generational_list_of_programmi...
Of you summarize yourself what the professor said and write it by hand there are more chances you will remember it.
From my experience, if a lecturer doesn't give slides, there are two possible reasons:

1) They are not theirs and want to avoid being caught;
2) They believe they are the only source of truth and need to show the insects, I mean students, their place.

Saw both of them.

And if there are no lecture notes, I am not going to be more engaged with it. Au contrare, I will be franaticaly copying everything from them to my notebook and not listening to the lecture itself.
I find it wild that we’ve been using triangular reckoning (parallax) for over a millennium, all the way back to early mariners. Measure two angles, draw a triangle, know where you are. That same method now maps galaxies. We’re still navigating the unknown with geometry.
Because only boomers can have boomer takes? The take is boomer, not the person saying it.
Even if we pretend the quote is real (it was invented in the 1900s), then as you suggest, Socrates might have had a point: Athens was pretty much done for as a meaningful political or even cultural entity within a couple generations of Socrates.
It's hilarious to explain you can't be assed to read a novel for a class that is about literary analysis and then also say It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning.

Part of the idea of courses that aren't direct job skills is that you will have done it and learned from it.
I’ve never tried it so I’ll take your word for it. To me the reason it feels silly is because iCloud functionality is really good.
I think people who have been building with LLMs have a different view on what is complicated vs not :-)

It may be easy for you to configure, but you dropped some acronyms in there that I would have to look up. I have definitely not personally set up anything like this.
My original post says this:

> Preventing cavities is far more effective with topical application of fluoride on the teeth, rather than ingestion.

Since you don't seem to disagree, there's nothing to discuss then. Cheers! Also, it is a fact that fluoride is most effective towards preventing cavities topically. You can Google Scholar this and see for yourself. There's a reason dentists prescribe high-fluoride toothpaste or gel, instead of just saying drink more fluoridated water.
It's worse than that: many textbooks are actually subscription services.
When it comes to the ChatGPT-ification of cheating, I'd say it's an Anglosphere problem, as it's primarily trained on English-language material.
As with so many modern debates, it feels like people quickly choose a side and then work backward—rationalizing every argument from that perspective without much critical thought beyond maybe acknowledging some surface-level issues (yes, phones exist and people are probably addicted to them). The author falls into this trap too!

Spending $100 on a single course material can be a real burden for college students taking multiple classes per term. Sharing lecture slides was a basic expectation decades ago. Students were cheating long before ChatGPT: The response like the one about the UGM could’ve just as easily been lifted from SparkNotes.

On the other hand: Maybe educational outcomes really are declining, but no one wants to pump the brakes because failing students might mean less funding. Maybe Socrates actually was noticing something real about generational decline—attitudes and norms do shift between generations; they’re not locked on some linear path. Maybe we need to just revisit the concept of university as vocational school in general.

We’re so preoccupied with proving we’re right that we lose the ability to honestly evaluate which changes deserve serious scrutiny and which ones are just part of the usual generational churn aside from the obviously massive ones (like phones). One side is wrong and stupid about all facets, my side is correct.
If one just needs a paper, not education, there are plenty of degree mills that will grant a degree at half the price and 10% time commitment.
“And he wasn't paid until he delivered, like any contract with a business”

I don’t know the specifics of these contracts, but I very much doubt it based on my experience. That’s not how any Government development contract I’ve ever worked on has worked… There are startup payments, payments for milestones (including many at the start for various design stages before anything was built), payments at varying levels of build, etc… - often more than half (sometimes more than three quarters) of the contract value was paid before the final product was delivered.

We did some pretty cool things too (this was in defence satellite communications) but various Government customers took like 80% of the risk on the development most of our big products (obviously we had already proven our design abilities with smaller components but much smaller scale), which we would then sell to them and other Governments.
At least they're not expanding the standard library for reading emails, yet...
Yeah.

Counterpoint to the above was the customer who selected OS/2 for their computer --- we installed it and delivered, but the next day they called asking for help with installing a printer --- despite my only OS/2 experience being doing the install the previous day, the UI was consistent enough that I was able to talk them through this on the phone w/o a reference system to use in parallel (we only ever sold the one OS/2 computer and never did get a second copy in).
I've finished my Bc. in computer science before AI, but even then, sitting through a 1.5h long lecture and reading a textbook was just not the way to learn.

a) better quality lectures were available online - it's much easier to learn linear algebra from top MIT Professor than a random one at my university

b) the text books were absolutely terrible compared to what was available online

I can understand that 20 years ago people were captivated with the physical lectures because it was the only way. Today however, professors are competing with 3blue1brown, Khan academy, pre recorded lectures from top universities and many more great resources. Standing in front of a blackboard slowly going through an unintuitive math proof is just not going to cut it and people will get bored.
> it isn't that hard to verify LLM claims, just ask it for original sources

Have you tried actually doing this? Most of the time it makes up urls that don't exist or contradict the answer it just gave.
I guess I'm on the other side of this. $30-100 is a reasonable price for books for a college-level course in the United States.

Assuming this https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college is accurate, tuition at the mid-level state university in the article is probably around $10k/year. That's more than it should be, but why would you play $10k/year for classes then not buy the books?
It has happened to me, I don’t need to look at following generations. I was an avid reader in my teenage years, I was devouring anything Crichton, Grisham, Cussler or Robin Cook were putting out (hardly Dostoevsky but I was an average teen).

Now I devote my life to work and my 3yo daughter and when I have ~1h for myself on a working day (after she’s gone to bed) I just mindlessly scroll on my phone, and when I’ve tried to read a book I just lost any kind of attention span I had and I realised that I’ve “read” a couple of pages but I wouldn’t be able to say what they were about because my mind was elsewhere. So I end up reading a lot of text on any given day but never literature, it’s either code, emails, Slack messages, technical docs or websites…
I don't think it's fair to characterise all "comic book" films as being immature, although there's a lot of shallow super-hero films being pumped out of Hollywood these days. Maybe if more people in the U.S. were familiar with "V For Vendetta" (despite Alan Moore's loathing for that film) then their attitude towards government might well be different.

(Trying to think of another good example and the Watchmen series tackled racism head-on, also Persepolis is a great animation covering the Iranian revolution)
Yea this was the one part that puzzled me. Why would a professor be protective of their lecture slides? I seem to remember most of my professors being fine with distributing these. Or at least it was never a point of contention.
Ask HN: How would you describe the way AI writes versus a human?
I’m talking about prose here. It strikes me that it often is possible to tell or feel that an AI has written something, but I find it hard to pin down - and I don’t have any great descriptions that distinguish its writing from a humans. I’m talking about aside from the obvious, extreme fluency and competency. How can we tell that something is written by an AI rather than a really good human writer?

I’m not asking for a programmatic test. I’m just curious how you would describe it yourself.

This is specifically about prose, but if you have any really great insights to share about the difference in how it writes code I’m all ears.
Re: the gym

I've always been quick on the weights, if you give me a workout plan I'll say something like "that's a great workout plan but it needs supersets" [1] It's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time that some people sit in the machines forever but it's steadily gotten worse. I complained to the head of the fitness center at my Uni two years ago about students sitting in the machines and scrolling on their phones.

Lately I've been going to Crunch and over there it seems 90% of the young people are wearing Airpods; lately I've been getting more assertive about asking "can I cut in?" when somebody has been sitting in the leg curl machine for 25 minutes but today it involves gesturing wildly like Brain from Inspector Gadget and having them take the pods out before I can make the ask, at least they are always polite about it.

It's bad enough that I picked up a copy of Enter the Kettlebell and a 35 pound kettlebell (an intimidating object right now) and will probably set up some TRX straps in my AV/VR/rec room. My fox wants me to do functional training anyway.

Re: grad students

I'm a non-academic with an academic background who works at a research university. My unit shares a kitchen with a bullpen of about 40 grad students so I wind up talking to them all the time. Pre-pandemic it seemed I could always get them to talk about what they were working on but this year many of them seem terribly inarticulate. The CSGU union saturates the area with posters that explain what they are doing for grad students that should be easy to read but I get the impression that some struggle.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/what-is-a-superset
Yes, I had the exact same thought. $35 is a lot of money to people who aren't tenured professors or fully employed developers like myself now.

The lack of understanding of economic realities just kinda stinks.

It was a long time ago now, but the biggest reason I ended in a local two-year college instead of a four-year university was I simply couldn't afford the $20 application fees. I only applied to two schools because it was all I could afford.
Question: is there something I can do in the office to improve tooth health? E.g. after drinking a cup of coffee, maybe neutralize the pH with some antacid? Or, I don't know, chew some gum? Are there products that are relatively convenient and don't require a brush and water?
I don't know if it is just me but I run every class of app in isolated "islands" (like work profiles) on Android. Browsers, banking apps, social media, instant messaging, tools, etc. Almost everything is isolated from another non related group.
Still waiting on real pattern matching in TyoeScript.
In graduate school, I would spend four to six hours every night hand-copying textbook chapters into a spiral notebook as it was the only way I could slow down my reading sufficiently to actually comprehend the material.

For undergrad, I would always read the 'assigned material' (essays, literature, etc.) but only recall opening one or two textbooks.
Seeing everything in an utilitarian pov frightens me. I'm a university student, I love reading, I love acting, I love spending my afternoons riding my bike to the seaside or to the tuscanian hills. Nothing of this is going to make me a better developer. But I can't imagine a world in which I don't read, in which I don't get to know people acting or working at the venue meeting other performers, or feeling connected to the Earth with flowers blooming and birds chirping
The Ivy league isn't teaching Dostoevsky any differently than from an 'average' school, and have a significant number of legacy and preferential admissions who wouldn't otherwise pass the academic standards that everybody else had to.
Corporations are not actually persons. You should read the Citizens United opinion if that's what you think it meant.

Corporate owners are people engaging in voluntary transactions. Their freedom was essentially the question in Citizens United. "Corporations are people" emerged from the media as an oversimplified version.
the aptitude of the students and general motivation is different, though.