sdsaga12

"Let’s break down what it takes to create just one course – say, an introductory course on core pre-algebra concepts:

- 50+ core concepts to teach - 20+ problems per concept - → ~1,000+ individual problems per course

That last number kept us up at night. You can’t just explain a concept once and move on. You need enough variations to let learners truly master each idea, enough edge cases to build real understanding, and enough of a ramp in difficulty to create that perfect learning curve.

Designing the right game and sequence of concepts, so that learning feels like flow, is the fun part. But then you need to make a thousand carefully calibrated problems. And that part is a lot less fun – and it takes a long time."

This seems like a practical and appropriate use of LLMs. It reminds me of a similar application I heard about recently from a friend who teaches language classes using ChatGPT or equivalent to generate dozens of example sentences to teach specific grammar rules.

I find it refreshingly limited in scope compared to many projects that aim to outsource the creative process altogether rather than focusing on automating the legitimately menial and repetitive tasks.

Ah, I'd been thinking it must be a device somehow related to manufacturing bullets (but how? was the question) -- it hadn't occurred to me that it could mean the pointy tips of bullets themselves. And thank you for the book recommendation.

Sounds like the bed of Procrustes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes#Mythology

What are "bullet points" as named in this article? It's difficult to find anything on Google not referring to the typographical symbol of the same name.

Context: "Archaeologists also found a hammer, tweezers, pliers, keys, knives, bullet points, and a completely preserved 14th century gauntlet, in addition to fragments of its counterpart worn on the other hand."

Interesting that you raise the connection to schizotypal thinking. I recently learned there is a quite explicit connection between excessively instrumental, abstraction-obsessed thinking and schizophrenia. I recommend looking into the work of Iain McGilchrist if you want to learn more. A brief sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfMnaLpU7s

"Enshittified" is a valuable contribution to the lexicon.

I second the recommendation for Nongbri's "Before Religion". It definitely improved my understanding of what it is we even mean / have meant by "religion".

For a more evolutionary understanding of religion, I'd recommend Joseph Henrich's "The WEIRDest People in the World" and "The Secret of our Success".

Finally though certainly not least importantly, I'd recommend Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and His Emissary" and "The Matter with Things". Both touch on how it is we see and understand the world and how the current default perspective differs from those of other times and places.

What is bland is universal, what is universal is bland.

Isn't this true of all new strains of all contagious pathogens? They are constantly undergoing change. We estimate low probability that mutated viruses or bacteria descended from strains we are familiar with will have dramatically more harmful long-term effects, but we don't actually know for certain that any given year's new strains won't have very different risk profiles until much later. We can make probabilistic models based on historical data, but they are unavoidably vulnerable to underestimating the risk of black swan events.

One could argue that certain features of covid make it riskier with regard to long-term effects, but that is not a proposition that is well developed in the public conversation, especially by proponents of the zoonosis hypothesis. The lab origin hypothesis with its accompanying assumptions of serial passage and direct gene modification would in my eyes strengthen the case that covid's long-term effects were less likely to conform to historical data on other viral infections, though interestingly the intersection of those who find the lab origin more convincing with those who have serious concerns about long-term harms is a pretty small set.

This all depends on how you're approaching the question. Why do you want to read the news?

What do you hope to get out of it? You're absolutely right that the NYT has changed in recent years, but that change has been part of systemic shifts that have affected all of journalism as it existed before the internet.

For most outlets, "the news" is now substantially more infotainment and in-group sermonizing than it used to be. Buzzfeed-y clickbait and Facebook-y rageporn juice engagement numbers like little else. Competition for your attention online is fierce and, with access to alternatives at the click of a button, audiences have very little appetite to continue reading an outlet that publishes things they don't agree with.

Are you looking to stay abreast of conversational topics in certain social circles? Are you looking for high-quality information that will help you form more accurate predictions about the world? If so, what types of predictions are most important to you? Economic? Social? Political?

Do you like your facts presented in an editorialized fashion or do you want events to be reported without being nudged to feel one way or another about them? Do you just want a news source that provides fun stuff to read? Do you read the news because you're not very into sports and books are too long? (I've been there in life.) How important are polish and sleek UIs to you? Do you want to read content that goes down easy or do you want to survey a broad set of views on subjects to know what other people are thinking even if some of that makes you angry or confused?

This is maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I'd use this decision as an opportunity to step back and reflect on the bigger question of why you want a subscription to a news publication in the first place.

Once you have the answer to some of those questions, that should help narrow down your search.

If you're interested in some articles that further reflect on changes in the news, I'd recommend these two: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displaceme... and https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-is-americas-new-relig...

What type and size company do you work for? And how did you find it?

That sounds like a pretty ideal scenario to me, but I'm not sure how to go about finding similar positions.

Thanks for the question -- it's important to grapple with even though it can be very uncomfortable and answering it is basically one can of worms after another. If you entertain it seriously, it really gets down to the philosophical roots of how to treat others from different moral systems and worldviews.

I don't think this is a problem any society has ever elegantly solved, definitely not permanently, and I think it's a distinct possibility that a solution that feels "clean" the way good software design can is not possible.

Abstractly, a culture consists of core tenets that it considers literally unquestionable. For most of history, this list of tenets would include things like the existence of a god or gods, the moral imperative to respect the rulers, the prohibition of things that were thought to harm the group such as murder, theft, or adultery, and so on. More recently in the Western world, we might include things like "women are equal to men" or "people of all races are equal".

It is very difficult to defend these types of propositions and values in any sort of universal or non-self-referential way.

Even things we assume to be moral universals in the Western world like the sanctity of the individual (bodily integrity, freedom of conscience) or the importance of intent in our judgment of wrongdoing (manslaughter vs. murder) are, if you examine the historical and anthropological record, not actually universal at all. (Check out The WEIRDest People in the World by Joe Henrich if you're curious about these specific points.)

The US Declaration of Independence is a classic example of this. It asserts: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

If you don't also find those truths self-evident, all following reasoning based on their axiomatic status might very well seem wrong to you. What if you contest the existence of a creator? What if you contest the idea of innate equality of rights and dignity? What if you contest the focus on rights rather than obligations? Or what if you assert the existence of a different creator who explicitly singled out one tribe as the most holy, righteous, intelligent, etc.?

Because the core tenets of a culture are to some extent arbitrary and thus susceptible to replacement with a different set (like Christianity displacing paganism or atheistic rationalism displacing Christianity), there is a strong inclination to defend a particular set of tenets by making questioning them a taboo. That's the underlying purpose of the concept of heresy and its accompanying social shaming.

Unlimited viewpoint diversity does actually threaten the continued existence of a culture if its defenders are not able to meet the arguments of its critics in a way they and their audience find compelling. If you say "I think gays shouldn't marry because it goes against God's will" and your audience mostly thinks "I don't believe your God exists, so that's an absurd argument", you won't convince very many people and soon people will stop adhering to a core tenet of your culture, perhaps eventually leading to the death of that culture altogether.

In the Western tradition, the probing of a culture's foundational values and assumptions has been the domain of philosophy at least as far back as Socrates being sentenced to death or exile for showing impiety toward the gods of Athens and corrupting the city's youth by prompting them to ask questions that must not be asked.

So what does this rambling mean for toleration of viewpoint diversity?

Its absence can prolong injustice (abolitionists faced lots of censorship in the 19th century) and undermine scientific and creative inquiry (see Socrates, Galileo, McCarthyism, etc.). At the same time, its presence leaves all of your holy cows, carpenters, and civil rights vulnerable to ideological attack.

Those are two difficult tensions to reconcile.

I come down on the side of erring toward more viewpoint diversity because I think it encourages reflection into why you hold the values you do and teaches you to defend them vigorously or, sometimes, change them to something you find more compelling.

This isn't something everyone wants to do all the time everywhere, though, so I understand not wanting your company's Slack to devolve into constant philosophical debate or even less productive forms of disagreement.

I think we've been running into such trouble with this recently because many of the existing implicit boundaries separating parts of our culture were washed away by the great cultural homogenization of the internet and especially social media platforms. It used to be more possible to have fierce debates on university campuses about contentious issues without that instantly bleeding over into industry, non-profits, schools, knitting clubs, etc.

It's like Douglas Adams wrote: "the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Sometimes boundaries are healthy.

The best answer I've encountered is moving in the direction of a more federal system in which cultures can live as they think best AND individuals in each culture are empowered to move to different cultures if they don't like where they are.

This is not a perfect solution, though, because it still requires the universal enforcement of certain moral propositions, like people should have the right to their own body and mind and choice of home. Those propositions would not have been accepted in slave-holding societies or even recent collectivist societies like the USSR, which prohibited its citizens from emigrating without permission. This is, realistically, an iterative improvement that would only apply to cultures that already accept foundational Western moral attitudes.

Hear hear.

If your conception of diversity doesn't include viewpoint diversity, you are operating within a prejudicial, small-minded, small-hearted, and regressive framework. If you belive the most salient details about a person can be read from their appearance, you are a bigot.

This cuts every which way, but many want to pretend it's not true for their own biases. This includes seeing someone with blue hair and a pronouns pin and writing them off immediately just as much as seeing an old white man with a camo mouse pad and assuming the worst.

Don't do either of these.

You'd be surprised what differences can be bridged if you approach those different from yourself with patience, love, and toleration.

Remember, it's not really toleration if there aren't some things about someone that are legitimately hard for you to accept. It's not an impressive moral feat to extend welcome to those who you already felt were on your side.

My personal bias here tends toward reflexive dislike of DEI stuff because it feels cult-y to me, but the message of toleration it's rooted in (even if that's not always practiced by its proponents) is obviously the only alternative to fighting over whose values will be imposed on everyone else.

At some point, it's federalism live-and-let-live or it's war, kinetic or memetic.

https://weatherspark.com/ has great data, too. Excellent graphs for temperature, humidity, clear skies, etc.

Being able to read both Galileo's contention that the sun does not move and the church's condemnation of his theory.

Being able to read both the corporate press's arguments in favor of invading Iraq and independent voices critiquing those arguments.

Being able to, in short, inform myself of competing views on an issue.

As Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts."

If arguments are obviously wrong, they are easily refuted.

Censorship leads invariably to tyrrany, which is why the USA's bill of rights enshrined the right to free speech and free press as the first and most fundamental guaranteed right.

Freedom of speech truly is the eternally radical idea [1], it seems.

[1] https://www.thefire.org/what-is-the-eternally-radical-idea/

This had been my impression of PTP too, and I think in many circumstances it's true, but I recently listened to this episode from Jane Street's Signals and Threads podcast that gave some interesting explanation of why they chose to base their synchronization system on NTP: https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/

Preview: "Yeah. I think that’s roughly the conclusion I came to, that that’s what makes PTP more accurate than NTP, which was surprising to me. And then I did a bunch of research and was talking to various people in the industry, and at various conferences and stuff, and there was some agreement that you can make NTP also very accurate you just have to control some of these things, so there are… in addition to being able to do hardware timestamping with PTP packets some cards, these days, support the ability to hardware timestamp all the packets, and if your machine is just acting as an NTP server and most of the packets it receives are NTP packets, well then you’re effectively timestamping NTP packets. Some cards also will timestamp just NTP packets. They can sort of recognize them and timestamp only those, but it was sort of like “Okay if we have the right hardware, we can get the timestamping bit of it. That’s kind of an interesting thing. With the different NTPD implementation, chrony being the other implementation I’m talking about as opposed to the reference one, you can turn that knob for how frequently you should poll your server, I think as much as like 16 times a second. There’s a bit of like diminishing returns there, it’s not always better to go lower… point being, you can tune it to at least match sort of what PTP’s default of once a second.

And the more I dug, and the more I talked to people, the more people told me, “Hey, you definitely do not want to involve your switches in your time distribution. If you can figure out a way to leave them out of it, you should do so.” I was happy to hear that in some ways, because right now the reliability. or the sort of, the responsibility of the time distribution kind of lies with one group, and that’s fine. When you then have this responsibility shared across multiple groups, right, it becomes a lot more complicated. Every switch upgrade, suddenly, you’re concerned. “Well, Is it possible that this new version of the firmware you’re putting on that version of that particular switch has a bug related to this PTP stuff and is causing problems?”

Given all of that, I started to believe that it was possible that we could solve this problem of getting within 100 microseconds using NTP and I sort of set out to try and see if I could actually do that."

Ah ok, thanks for the prompt reply and I really admire the moderation work you do here!

Hi dang, my mistake on the diagnosis, then. I thought that because I saw an error message that said " Sorry, we're not able to serve your requests this quickly." and after that the edit button was no longer visible for me on my comments. I often access this site through a ProtonVPN connection, so maybe there was some suspicious IP address heuristic involved?

The edit button is still not showing up for me, though. Do you have any idea why that might be or if there's something I can do to fix it?

Imgur screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/ZEWIJeW

Edit: Was there a thread-level edit ban or something? Because I can now edit this post.

https://imgur.com/a/b7H00ny

I appear to have rate-limited from editing that comment after double clicking on mobile, but this is what I was going to add:

Edit: As I note in the linked comment, this channel is openly supportive of the protests. As I also write there, a quick YouTube search will yield a large variety of other sources. The important thing is finding sources with long and unedited footage. As Jacques Ellul observed, "propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins." (This seems to be the primary driver of interest in long-form podcasts.)

I chose to share a channel with a positive bias because 1.) in my view Frei does a respectable job engaging counter-protestors with opposing views and 2.) in my view, mainstream coverage of this skews more negative than is warranted based on having watched many hours of livestream footage.

Here is a YouTube channel that has been doing extended livestreams from the ground with both protestors and counter-protestors: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzGiDDKdphJ0GFvEd82WfYQ/vid...

As I wrote elsewhere in this thread [1], I recommend taking a look at this channel or other extended livestreams to get a view from the ground if your impression of this event has been mostly shaped by articles. That recommendation goes for all major protests, especially if you think you disagree with the people protesting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30340938

Negative coverage is much easier to come by than positive coverage if you mostly consume legacy/corporate media on this issue. If you're interested in a deeper understanding of people who support this movement than you can gain from a few embedded tweets in an article or a reporter's attempt to summarize the motivations and backgrounds of a large group of people, here's a YouTube channel that has been doing extended live streams from the ground in Ottawa: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzGiDDKdphJ0GFvEd82WfYQ/vid...

The channel owner is a Canadian lawyer named Viva Frei. Frei's personal attitude toward the protests is broadly supportive, but the valuable thing about his coverage is that he speaks to anybody who is willing to talk to him as he wanders around the streets of Ottawa, including counter-protestors.

A livestream can never be a true replacement for being there in person, but this is the best that I've found. Coverage from other livestream channels is also easily available on YouTube.

It's very easy for lack of understanding to lead to distrust, fear, and hate. You can (and very well might) disagree with people after having heard them out, but you will almost certainly view them as more human, and is that not the central feature the empathetic mindset is supposed to be about?

If you have the time, I recommend making an effort to watch extended and unedited interviews with the people behind any protest movement you intend to form a strong opinion about (not just this one).

Remember that the literal definition of "prejudice" is something close to a "decision formed without due examination of the facts or arguments necessary to a just and impartial decision." [1] If you don't wish to be prejudiced, don't let yourself form a strong opinion without first having learned what people you think you disagree with have to say for themselves.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/prejudice#etymonline_v_19410

Wow, there's some intriguing information about chimpanzee behavior in here that I had not encountered in the traditional lore about them:

"Since the 1970s, researchers have known that chimpanzees — especially those in Tanzania or Uganda — use medicinal plants. They consume fruits with antimicrobial properties; sometimes they combine them with other substances to reduce the toxicity. Other chimpanzees eat flowers with antibiotic properties or leaves with antiparasitic ones, which act as laxatives or even induce uterine contractions. Chimpanzees also tear off bark and lick the resin to kill internal worms; the compounds, tests in vitro have shown, slow the growth of cancerous cells.

Significantly, practices of self-medication vary between chimpanzee populations. When chimpanzees feel sick, they seek out a particular tree and ingest a few leaves. The bitter leaves contain molecules that are quite effective against plasmodium parasites, which cause malaria. But chimpanzees also consume about ten other kinds of plant to combat these organisms."

While chimpanzees' speed, volume, and fidelity of cultural transmission aren't supercharged the way early human communication was after our development of complex language, this reads pretty clearly to me as early stage cultural evolution in action. Compare with, for example, the history of human manioc cultivation recounted by Joseph Henrich in "The Secret of our Success". Review here with relevant passages: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Will take a look

"In 1996, five economists, known as the Boskin Commission, were tasked with saving the government $1 trillion. They observed that if the CPI were lowered by 1.1 percent, then a $1 trillion could indeed be saved over the coming decade. So what did they do? They proposed a way to alter the formula that would lower the CPI by exactly that amount!

This raises a question: Is economics being used as science or as after-the-fact justification, much like economic statistics were manipulated in the Soviet Union? More importantly, is anyone paying attention? Are we willing to give government agents a free hand to keep changing this all-important formula whenever it suits their political needs, simply because they think we won’t get the math?"

This was written by Edward Frenkel, a math professor at UC Berkeley who was born in the USSR in 1968 and so, we can assume, had some familiarity with statistical games played by regimes trying to hold onto power.

I invite you consider that you might extend too much faith toward federal institutions that have presided over a ceaseless rise in inequality and erosion of rights in recent decades.

https://slate.com/technology/2013/02/should-algebra-be-in-cu...

I see, I thought you were listing your understanding of the death toll that had already been reached in actuality and not the theoretical potential death toll without vaccine intervention. That makes more sense.

Approximately 3.5 million globally have died from covid according to the WHO: https://covid19.who.int/

If you include deaths from related factors, like increased poverty or unrest, I'm sure the numbers go up a bit, but not to tens of millions.

I don't state this as an attack, by the way. Covid and its entangled cultural and political issues are enormously emotionally charged, and, one way or another, that tends to skew our perception of even relatively simple facts.

One thing I think the Hacker News community does well, at least aspirationally, is try to keep sight of the fundamental technical details of issues. For a pandemic, having an accurate intuition of its scale falls into this category IMO.

Well said. I think your observation about the centrality of meaning not only rings true in the specific case of developer experience but also echoes the meaning crisis endemic to modern American life.

Put another way, the capacity for human accomplishment in the context of WWII or the Apollo Program boggles the mind somewhat less when you consider how much these projects meant to the people involved.

The meaning vacuum is distorting the culture beyond bullshit jobs, too, as is increasingly visible in people losing themselves in ideology or hatred for The Other. For many, these feel like the most foundational things they have to believe in.

Agreed that New York City is an outlier in a number of ways, but there does appear to be something interesting going on with regard to rising U.S. costs for a variety of things besides just construction (e.g., health care and education). Slate Star Codex did an interesting though definitely inconclusive piece on this in 2017: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

What do you make of this study by professors from Princeton and Northwestern that finds that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence"?

Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

What do you make of Jimmy Carter saying in 2014 that "America doesn't have a functioning democracy right now"?

Source: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/nsa-affaere-jimmy-car... Translated from German: https://archive.is/Lhlq2

It might be unpleasant to acknowledge, but there is increasingly overwhelming evidence to suggest that the major American political parties are indeed "outside and beyond the reach of 'normal' citizens".

In 2017, the DNC argued in federal court that, as a private corporation, it was entitled to select whichever candidate it preferred for the general election regardless of the preferences of "normal citizens" who voted in the party's primary election. This was in a hearing for a lawsuit filed by Sanders supporters who weren't happy about the DNC working with the Clinton campaign and against the Sanders campaign, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Source: https://ivn.us/posts/dnc-to-court-we-are-a-private-corporati... and, for convenience, https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/independent-voter-network-ivn...

Growing up in a blue household, social group, and state, I'm less familiar with the history of the anti-democratic machinations of the RNC, but my understanding of the Trump phenomenon was that, at least early on, many Republican voters were attracted to the idea of a political outsider who they hoped wouldn't sell them out like they felt RNC-affiliated Republicans had been doing.

Some contemporary sources seem to back up that interpretation: https://archive.fo/2Vidx (Wall Street Journal) and https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/...