geebee

I've found there's a big difference in OCR accuracy where it comes to handwriting. For printed text, I've used tesseract, but it seems to miss a lot for handwriting. In my experience, google cloud vision is far more accurate at transcribing handwriting. Haven't tried other cloud based tools, so I couldn't tell you if it's better, but I would say that overall, the cloud based ones seem to be much better at handwriting or oddly formed text, but that for basic typeset printed text, open source apps like tesseract do well.

Wow, that's bad.

I also think that structurally, universities have academic career advancement problems. It's a very difficult system to to into and out of, in a way that is toxic for everyone but unusually so for women.

It's almost perfectly crafted to disadvantage women. Compare it to law, and imagine someone who moves through the elite path quickly. Graduate college at 22, finish law school at 25, go into heavy debt but start at around $200k a year, work brutally until age 30. Ok, not a great spot for starting a family, but you have now earned well over a mil (you probably started at 200 and are now well above 300k). You don't have much time, but you do at least have money and the ability to buy help. You also (if you're a woman) still have a few years before age related issues in having children manifest.

Now, again, it's not great, but compare this to academic. You finish college at 22, you finis your PhD at 28. That's moving quickly. Next, you do a post-doc or two. Now you're 30. And now, even if you're a winner with a tenure track position (not tenured, just the kind that can lead to it), you're still in grave danger, career-wise. It's do-or-die. You are also, at this point, earning about half of what that law graduate earned at age 26. You have no ability to buy your way out of this.

Now, to me, it's nutty that anyone voluntarily signs up for this, male or female [1]. But it's unusually harsh on women, because taking time off at this junction to have kids derails your career at the worst moment. And academic is unusually bad for on-ramps later in life. There essentially are none. Honestly, in spite of age-related discrimination in tech, I'd rather try my odds finding an on-ramp in tech at age 40 than in academia.

There is a commonly cited study that showed women applying for academic STEM positions received over twice as many offers as similarly qualified men. I actually think the research was good, but people didn't dig into the data. The comparison was for women and men who had achieved a high level position in academics. Yes, I have no trouble believing that women who make it through this gauntlet (which again, I absolutely insist on pointing out is lousy for men too) are very appealing to departments that don't want to change structurally. If a well funded department can hire a group of women who made it despite the odds, they can put a halo up and appear to be one of those virtuous departments even as they participate in the structure that makes it very unlikely women will become one of that small successful group.

[1] indeed, part of the reason universities like worker-visa programs is that it creates a pool of candidates who aren't allowed to live and work in the US with economic freedom.

I like the idea of a points system like Australia has, but I'm wary of the excessive emphasis on STEM, and I'm even less enthusiastic about the idea of empowering universities to "sell" access to US residency and work rights through overpriced MS degrees, many of which are, frankly, bullshit cash cows.

Keep in mind, in Australia, plumbers and electricians get the maximum points for professional skills. So would nurses, pilots, and even lawyers (though they must be admitted to the Australian bar).

Hell will freeze over before the US lawyers who write the immigration system rules agree that foreign lawyers and patent agents should have access to the US job market the way they think STEM workers should.

Your reply is important. There is a myth that bullies are weak cowards. Now, they may actually turn into cowards when they are faced with a fight that is important but they are likely to lose. But the idea that you can poke them in the nose and they'll go running is very false. It is absolutely true that fighting back without something to back it up can turn a bad situation into a far more dangerous one.

Not arguing that people shouldn't fight back against odds, or that there's no benefit to fighting even if you'll lose, but I insist that we be realistic about the situation a lot of people getting bullied are facing.

What do you think prevents prices from rising?

I am still interested in knowing what you think Carville was talking about, without prompting from me. You might want to read the interview where he said this.

But I'll give an example. Again, I want to point out that I don't use the term "woke", which I consider to be unhelpful. But here's an example of what I would view as the self-defeating behavior of the far left.

Let's take Judge Duncan's talk at Stanford. Now, I probably don't need to convince you to be concerned about the 5th circuit court or Duncan's judicial record. That much, at least, we already agree about. And anyway, there are far better people than me to explain it.

Unfortunately, those better people didn't get a chance to do so. I would say that the behavior from the Stanford Law school students who chose to disrupt the speech was an example of harmful behavior from the radical left that represents a pretty serious setback for moderate liberals. Duncan won this round, and there really was no need to hand him such a victory. Stanford looked bad, DEI admins looked bad, the student protestors looked bad. They provided a right wing judge with an an opportunity to obfuscate, avoid getting questioned and pressed on important points where he's genuinely vulnerable, and they took from the left the opportunity to raise awareness of really serious implications of what I consider to be a radical court. Worst, they gave him the opportunity to paint his opponents the worst possible light. I think they gave the right wing a real gift that day.

So yeah, I think that everyone on the moderate left knows this is becoming a problem.

Yes, there are a lot of people who will say that. They provide a living, walking straw man, and there are enough of them that I can't say you're cherry picking. As for the tweet, I can't see any reason I'd start reading twitter now, I've been long disgusted with the quality of discourse on twitter.

But if you decide to dismiss the concerns about the excesses of the far left by pointing to racist responses to a tweet somewhere, you aren't being honest about a real problem.

I avoid the term "woke", but when James Carville (famous democratic strategist) said "wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it" (in regards to the far left harming mainstream democrats in elections), I'm not sitting around scratching my head bewildered as to what he's talking about.

I think you're using the term "inhabitants" loosely here. The US doesn't have much of a social safety net, which means that any city that attempts to build one may suddenly find that "its inhabitants" include the 330 million people living in other parts of the country who need help. Or who would just like some money and an opportunity to do meth and fentanyl and shoplift and commit property crime in a place with very little law enforcement. I personally would include that in the definition of "needing help." Any version of "help" that will help in SF will have to be coercive, which is another thing SF's political culture is having tremendous difficulty accepting.

But really, if you took Stockholm out of Sweden and plunked it down into the middle of the US, how long do you think the social safety net would last before it went bankrupt? And this is assuming you retain the european willingness to be coercive about mandatory rehab and confinement (something US based progressives are reluctant to note is a feature of the european social safety programs they otherwise praise).

Nah, you're not. I often find myself wanting more data and stats when I read the interviewing.io blog as well.

Good post, though with the graphic, I do think this is one of those cases when the y-intercept should start at zero. The graphic does make a 7% difference look like a 3x difference. Same thing for the previous interviewing.io post on whether to list certs on LinkedIn.

I enjoyed this article and find the service this company offers intriguing. I've watched a bunch of videos and see a lot of value in paying for a very professional interview with actual feedback, something that is immensely difficult to get from "real" tech interviews.

There's one thing that concerns me, it's the line: "We make money in two ways: engineers pay us for mock interviews, and employers pay us for access to the best performers."

I definitely don't want to equate this with the legal but perhaps disreputable "pay-to-play" or "double-dipping" practices of charging both job seekers and the companies trying to hire them. This looks like a good company, and it makes sense to offer a paid service for people who want to practice but aren't looking for a recruiter. Still... I see a potentially uncomfortable situation where someone who wants a job is paying $150/hr or more to take a mock interview for a recruiter who would then market the candidates who are able to pass.

This article made me thing about the idea of "cohort" disadvantage (as opposed to generational disadvantage).[1] It's not so much which decade you were born in, but whether you were born a year or two before or after a recession.

I remember, during the dot com boom of the late 90s, how much my impressions of the working world differed from people who graduated just a few years after me. I graduated from UCSD into the recession of the early 1990s, and I was living in SoCal, which was unusually hard hit. Graduates of very elite colleges were getting career-building jobs (UCSD is well regarded, but it wasn't quite in the tier to provide that immunity), and very in demand STEM majors were still getting good offers, but a lot of college grads were stringing together multiple service industry gigs. I'm really not kidding when I say that 5 years later, English majors thought the main difference between college and the working world is that now you can easily find well-paid work in media companies and your employer pays for the booze and parties (though finding an apartment in SF was a nightmare compared to the recession).

I suspect it's this way for people who graduated on the wrong side of the 2008 banking crisis as well. It's not Gen X or Millennials or Z, it's a much narrower time frame.

Some of this is definitely about resilience. I personally allowed it to affect me too heavily. I went back to college to study engineering and never really managed to shake the belief that I'm only as employable as my most up-to-date hard skills. The idea that a smart person can enter a new field and learn on the job... I know it's true, but I've never quite been able to really believe it. This has made me too conservative.

Not everyone from my cohort responded this way, but I do think it's more likely among people whose first few formative years in the workforce happen during a very poor hiring climate. The thing is, as I learned from he next bust - if you have a job before the recession, you often manage to hang onto it, and by the time the next boom rolls around, you're well positioned to take advantage. Even if you lose your job after a couple of years, you have some experience locked in, and you understand how it all works, and you know that there really are jobs, that things will improve, and that you just need to weather the storm. But for people who've never really experienced anything else, I think it creates higher risk mental habits of risk aversion that can be hard to shake. I also think that once a better hiring climate resumes, employers are more likely to go to colleges to recruit for entry level positions, and tend to overlook people who graduated several years earlier but lack relevant experience.

I've read that this effect is much more muted among very elite college grads, and I strongly suspect the same is true for a few very in demand STEM majors at non-elite colleges. Since this is hacker news, I can describe it as a vector field. People who are just on the wrong side of the line can get swept into a completely downward vector field than people just a couple spots before or after on the X-axis. Very elite college grads and some STEM majors can re-enter that positive, upward vector field at a later date.

[1] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recessi...

For all its faults, California really got this one right. In some ways, this goes to show just how remarkably harmful non-competes are to the economy. If you make non-competes unenforceable, you can put all kinds of barriers up and still have a thriving tech industry (a high concentration of research universities didn't hurt either).

Interesting observation. I agree with what you've written, but I might even go one step farther, the wealthy like extremely expensive things that don't require much money.

Yeah, I'm being a little glib there. But what they love is golf, tennis, violin lessons for kids. Yes, they own expensive golf clubs (and memberships) and tennis rackets and violins. But what they love is that they can slum it with a very inexpensive tennis racket or golf club or violin, whereas the expensive gear is useless in the hands of someone who hasn't had a lifetime of lessons that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you have the money, you can't buy the technique, and people who play these sports/instruments can recognize instantly if you know what you're doing (even in movies, tennis, golf, and violin, faked technique is immediately recognizable). It helps a lot of your parents had money and trained you up in these things when you were a child.

To try to be as charitable as possible to the journalist who wrote this line, I'd say it means that there was a moment when "we" (society and our institutions) might have been able to intervene in this man's life in order to treat the drug addiction and mental illness, and that we failed to do so, and now we have a face slasher roaming the halls of a res hotel with a knife. There is some merit in this. And when I say I agree (to an extent), I mean it, but "getting the help he needs" clearly means commitment to an institution, and ideally we'd find a way to do this before the face slashing occurs. Kind of like how we don't wait for a drunk driver to kill people before we start enforcing laws on drunk driving, even if the drunk driving is the result of a deep addiction and/or mental illness.

However, I ultimately have the same reaction you do to this sentence. The pure language of compassion shows no compassion for the victims of this crime, or the horrifying and brutal nature of this crime. It really does pinpoint the source of paralysis in a very progressive city like San Francisco. I have trouble believing that we won't reach some kind of turning point, mainly because the failure is just so spectacularly and overwhelmingly undeniable.

and works from inside a whale.

I was floored by the reporting from the sfchronicle about the conditions in one of the hotels San Francisco leased and used to house the "homeless" during the pandemic. I put "homeless" in quotes because it is not fair to use this term to describe the hellscape that was this hotel. There was, at one point, a meth and fentanyl addicted man roaming the hallways slashing people's faces with a knife because he wasn't getting the help he needs [1].

If that last sentence caused you to pause a bit, fair enough, I paused when I read it in the Chronicle as well. Those aren't my words, that's a quote from someone involved in the program. Thing is, I actually do agree with the statement. But it does astound me how determined we are to use only the language of compassion, even when describing a drug addicted man who is roaming the halls of the housing of last resort for homeless people in a pandemic, slashing faces with a knife. Our language around this does hint at the source of our profound paralysis.

As for mental institutions, they have a bad rep for a good reason. But consider the depths we have plumbed in street conditions, tent camps, drug scenes, fentanyl overdoses, meth-induced violence, and somehow using a single term, "homelessness", to encompass this and people who are having trouble affording housing, blurring the distinction. I know it's always risky to take the perspective of the future as if it will prove one right, but... maybe we will look back on our treatment of the mentally ill as simply another installment in the cruelty of our mental institution, just that we sent it from the institutions to the streets for a while, but that those looking back will not see an appreciable difference. That last sentence is optimistic, because it at least leaves open the possibility that we will someday look back on this from a better place.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros

I'd be interested in learning more of what you mean about "good programming". If you mean the standard practices around software engineering - code reviews, unit testing, integration testing, automated testing, archiving and version control, and so forth, then yes, I would agree that CS programs don't teach "good programming." However, speaking as a math major who has had to continually study to remediate gaps in my understanding of CS fundamental, my impression is that CS majors do a lot of programming, especially around algorithms and data structures, operating systems, and compiler design, and were way ahead of math majors like me at the end of college. And I actually had a somewhat CS oriented math degree, since my classes in number theory, numerical analysis, linear and non-linear optimization, and graph theory all had programming labs.

What are these schools where an algorithms class has no coding assignments? At my college, you could take graph theory in the math department and not take the optional programming lab, but in CS? Really? Not saying this doesn't exist but... weird.

The problems with employer controlled work visas are so apparent, and have been apparent for so long, that I believe these issues really are a feature rather than a bug. Keep in mind, the people and companies that lobbied hard for this program are the same ones that orchestrated a massive and clearly illegal collusion to suppress wages.

I think they've gotten away with it for this long because they have an exceptional tool in their arsenal - calling anyone who opposes employer controlled visas "anti-immigration". Even PG got in a few digs[1]. They get an assist from genuinely anti-immigrant people, whose opinions they present as the only argument, and they succeed in making people with reasonable objections to employer-controlled immigration spend the rest of the talk show disassociating themselves from this allegation.

At this point, I'm convinced that part of the reason we don't have a skilled immigration that preserves the freedom of mobility of the immigrants themselves is that high tech companies and investors don't want immigrants to have this freedom. They like it that an immigrant's right to reside in the US depends on staying in the good graces of their employer. They like it that a founder's right to live in the US depends on the blessing of a venture capitalist. Employers and investors don't want their power to end at offering a job or money, they want more power over people than this. They keep things this way because it gives them a tremendous amount of power over their workforce.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html

For another point of view, I recommend this article from the New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/california-studen...

I'm going to be a little obnoxious here. Did he really implement a factoring program, or did he approximate the solution to a high precision numerically? Both would be impressive under the circumstances of course. But if he did it numerically, he still might want to pay attention to how to derive the quadratic equation using partial fractions. It's actually pretty clever.

Yeah it’s there. Should have read it better.

I'm coming in very late to this conversation, but there may be some ambiguity here. Americans will often use the word "Brahmin" to generally refer to an upper class. For instance, the "Boston Brahmins" is a phrase used to refer to old money WASP families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin. So this might not have been in tended specifically as a reference to upper class Indians (it wasn't entirely clear to me from the post).

It depends.

There's a kind of professor I like to refer to as the "wheel of misfortune" professor. I think we've all known them - they're one of a group of professors who teach a standard part of a curriculum but teach a vastly different version of the class, with outlier levels of time commitment and grading standards. This professor can end up severely disadvantaging certain cohorts simply because the students had the misfortune to end up in the unfortunate class based on a spin of the wheel, because of what year they entered a program or what time slot of day happened to be open in their course schedule. Well connected students who ask around are often aware of who you need to dodge.

I've known a few of these professors, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that a student who happens to have the misfortune of this particular professor for organic chemistry or intro to data structures and algorithms is measurably less likely to continue in the major or professional path than a student who happens to enroll in the same credit class with someone else. I remember a nature show about newly born fawns and grizzly bears. A fawn's survival to adulthood is largely a matter of chance, depending on which side of the river the hungry grizzly bear happens to be wandering down that day. These professors are the grizzly bears of the academic world, and they leave a real trail of destruction in their wake.

To be clear - I don't know that this particular professor qualifies as a grizzly bear. A few red flags - such as cheating and not attending class - suggest to me that the scenario I described above might not quite apply. But I do know that these professors often invoke rigor and standards as a justification for the harm they do - as if the other professors, who assign higher grades and higher completion rates don't teach a rigorous class.

When this happens, I generally see no need to "fire" someone - I'd just limit the professor's teaching load to advanced, intensely difficult electives at the upper division or grad level.

I won't allow it either, but the question does become "what are you going to do about it?" I don't want to assume anything about your experiences, but you might be surprised, in a place like San Francisco, how few options you have.

Too late to edit - I meant to write "excluding self inflicted rates", not "excluding non self inflicted rates", though I don't get the impression there was any misunderstanding.

Correct - though the US doesn’t have a dramatically higher suicide rate compared to countries with vastly lower gun related homicide rates. So excluding non self inflicted rates may provide the more relevant metric for this analysis.

A shortage at a certain wage level probably indicates that the prevailing wage is too low. So targeted visa programs designed to provide more workers at the prevailing wage can suppress wage growth, which, over time, really is no different from a reduction in wages.

This is why a lot of people, like me, favor high levels of general immigration but don't support targeted visas like the H1B. I'm especially opposed to visas that are controlled by the employer and restrict the personal and economic freedom and mobility of immigrant workers in the US. If employers are lobbying for visas that allow someone to work in the US only on the condition that they remain in a specific role at a specific company at a specific salary, that should raise all kinds of red flags. You're allowed to be a software developer in the valley, but you'll be deported if you try to open a small business or enter a different profession or even change employers without new "sponsorship"? I find it remarkable that so many people don't see the egregious problem here.

Isn't there a hack/scam where you could (in the absence of a same-station charge) pay less or nothing to ride bart?

I remember people talking bout this ages ago (like, 20 years ago). You keep two bart cards going, and use the same one to enter and leave the same station. If there's a same-station charge, you can use it to enter/leave a nearby station, avoiding the higher fee for longer trips.

Is there a possibility that the same-fare charge is kept around to prevent this hack?

One interesting thing to come of these discussions - a lot of the problems with US News methodology arise from the attempt to push certain metrics from 90% to 100%. Class size, faculty with a "terminal" degree, class size, admissions rate. Many of these things are treated by the rankings as "the higher (or lower) the better." As an analogy, I'd use lean muscle mass percentage for elite athletes. Generally speaking, lower is better, and in many sports, all elite athletes are all under 10% body fat. But much below this starts to become harmful, and would eventually be fatal.

I think this is kind of what's happening with Columbia here. For example, Columbia claimed that 100% of the faculty had a terminal degree. Prof Thaddeus (if you read his full blog post) questioned this from two angles. The first was to say it can't possibly be true. The second (which I found more interesting) was: why would you even want this to be 100%? Seems like Columbia has valuable faculty who don't have a PhD or MFA or whatever is the "terminal" degree int he field.

The harm here isn't in wanting a terminal degree for a high percentage of faculty, it's trying to get this to 100%. I'd say that it probably is a good sign, overall, that most of the faculty has a doctoral degree, as this is the main training degree for research and teaching. But the way US news does it, you get more points for 95% than 90%, more points for 99% than 95%. Seems like a lot of harm comes from trying to wring out that last bit, since even if you do generally agree with the value of a PhD for research (or other terminal degree), it does seem like you'd build a stronger faculty overall with the ability to hire 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 based on some other credential.

So much else fits this pattern. Small class sizes.. kind of the same thing. Sure, it's a good sign, but they're only an indicator, not a goal in and of themselves. Low admissions rates, high test scores. All good metrics, but things that can become not just harmful but harmful and maybe even fatal to a university if pursued with a single minded intensity as if total purity in the metric is the goal.

Honestly, overall we just have to reject the US news rankings. I appreciate what Prof Thaddeus did here, and it was a useful and very well reasoned and sourced takedown. But now and then, I realized that there isn't much to be added, just new and interesting ways to say what everyone knows at this point - yousnoozeandworlddistort rankings are pretty well idiotic. I actually think college rankings in general can be useful if managed cautiously and read critically, but this one is just a turkey.