Hacker News Reader

laveryaon Cities Skylines 2 runs with 20fps on an Nvidia RTX4090

Yeah, but generally those games that push for new GPUs look spectacular, not like SimCity 5 from over a decade ago.

laveryaon Meta is banning people from advertising after running ads for Python and Pandas

That actually makes sense to me, then. Not a 'normal' residential IP = higher chance of fraud.

laveryaon Roughly 80% of Grades Given at Harvard Are in the 'A' Range

> If you feel that grades should be used to separate or weed out students who don't perform as well you're trying to twist "education" into something that it's not: A caste system.

I would say I am trying to return education to its original purpose, instead of the world's worst but also most common form of daycare.

laveryaon Roughly 80% of Grades Given at Harvard Are in the 'A' Range

> If everyone gets 90% or better on a test that reflects what you're supposed to learn then it should be celebrated as a teaching success. It is not a problem.

Then perhaps there should have been more available to be learned. If most people are above 90%, then you're holding the best back. (If you're saying that more should be taught, but not be on the test... Why?)

The only way for everyone to reach full understanding at the same time is for everyone to be the same or for some people to have been held back. I view the latter as being far more achievable than the former. I would also say that holding the best back... is probably not what we want the #1 ranked University in the world to be doing.

> A perfect educational system would have every student getting 100% on every test, right? That's the ideal. Unless, of course, that the purpose of the educational system isn't actually to educate people but instead to weed out certain classes of people.

No, a perfect educational system would not have every student getting 100% on every test because not every student is the same and also such a test fundamentally provides no information to the tester.

A perfect system would probably have every student on an individual (or near-individual) learning schedule, and even there I would expect perfectly calibrated tests to average around 50% with adjustments as required for psychological impact or to improve recall. From that, you can identify what elements need to be covered again, and what can be skipped when moving forward because they are already known.

> "We want the best" is what every employer will always say but the truth is that they really only need someone who can do the job. We as a society put way too much importance and faith in credentials.

This is probably correct for your average community college. It might be correct for a average state school.

When you get to 'literally the number one Univeristy on the planet', perhaps employers are also actually looking for the best people on the planet.

laveryaon Roughly 80% of Grades Given at Harvard Are in the 'A' Range

> They got into Harvard

Harvard admits quite a few people who would normally not qualify as the cream of the crop. Above average, even good - but the worst Harvard admit is probably on par with the smartest kid at the local community college. They might bring other things to campus! But that doesn't mean you want them handling your legal defense or managing your money.

> and were subsequently successful there.

If 80% of the grades at Harvard are As, this just means you're not in the bottom 20%. I would also generally assume that this 80% is not uniform - some classes or even majors will give out higher percentages of As than others.

laveryaon US citizens with permanent disabilities get free lifetime pass to National Parks

"Back and forth all day long while doing drugs" is literally one of the failure cases.

"Back and forth begging/busking" is another.

laveryaon Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

> "Fire" in a movie theater is the classic example of the court deciding what sort of speech consitutes compelling action.

"Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is an analogy that was used to justify banning antidraft activism in the first world war. It is very much allowed under current precedent.

"Directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action" is the current standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

laveryaon Qatar Airways flying near-empty planes in Australia to exploit legal loophole

You can't legally sell domestic flights in a foreign country. (for these purposes, the EU is one country)

This is true for Australia, for India, for the USA, for the EU - an airline like Delta can fly to Sydney from LA but not sell domestic flights from Sydney to Melbourne. (Or, for that matter, international flights between Sydney and Singapore)

However, there is a catch! Airliners did not used to have quite the range they do today, and so the treaties allow things like refueling stops. And they (sometimes!) allow passengers to embark/disembark at those stops - but those passengers still have to be flying the international leg, or else it would be a domestic flight.

There's a Wendover video from years ago that's relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqbjA2DC-E

laveryaon EU tells Apple to open everything up to its rivals

I think a lot of Android manufacturers would be willing to pay Apple for iMessage access/licensing. I strongly doubt that Apple would be willing to sell that without the EU forcing them to.

laveryaon The End of Scantron Tests

My recollection is that the "key" there allowed a teacher to give out multiple tests with questions in different orders, and then you would mark the letter for the test that you were given in that section. So test A would have questions in order 1 2 3 4 5, while B would be 2 5 4 3 1 and C would be 3 4 1 5 2. They could also change the letter of the answer, or really whatever you imagine.

Presumably it reduced people copying answers from their neighbors.

laveryaon Musk Wanted to Spy on Drivers to Defend Tesla from Lawsuits

I think you're confusing the point of security clearances. There's no blackmail risk in that drug use, and so it doesn't interfere with the clearance.

laveryaon The Other 9/11: Salvador Allende and Chile

https://archive.ph/7JLzW

> In May 1973 the Supreme Court accused the government of flouting judicial decisions and the law. The medical and bar associations took a similar stance. On Aug. 22 the lower house of the Chilean Congress passed a resolution denouncing Allende’s power grab and calling on the military to uphold its oath to the constitution.

Not exactly the sort of coup that's normally portrayed. Allende getting a lower fraction of the vote than Hitler is also cute. (Slightly less than 37 percent vs slightly more than 37)

laveryaon Morocco earthquake kills more than 1,000

At least part of the reason that individuals traveled freely is that only rich individuals traveled.

Paupers from London didn't get on ships to the new world - not without selling themselves into indentured servitude.

When the economic barriers to migration fell to the point that subsistence farmers could travel between continents, we were always going to see either an equalization of living standards or the rise of political barriers.

laveryaon FAA closes SpaceX Starship mishap investigation

Only if you don't count active war zones. I'm pretty sure HIMARS has killed thousands in Ukraine over the past year, for instance.

laveryaon A case for dynamic scoring of high-skilled immigration

The payment should be by the employee, not the employer, but perhaps pre-tax.

This way the difference between an H1B and a real citizen employee is transparent to the employer, and the employee can move between companies without issue (or even take time off work, as long as they still pay)

laveryaon Driverless Cruise car collides with SF fire truck, injuring passenger

Okay, but this isn't a Cruise car colliding with a SF fire truck - it's a fire truck colliding with the car! Now, it's still not good that they didn't yield to the fire truck properly. But that's a very different level of fuckup than "ran into a fire truck".

laveryaon Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

Yeah, executing drug dealers/smugglers at scale would require significant and likely negative rollbacks to our system of jurisprudence. The US used to do things like this though!

(I say likely negative because a system of trials that didn't cost 100k+ and take years for an actual defense would be a dramatic improvement)

laveryaon Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

The Singapore (and rest of Southeast Asia) solution set might work here, but there's no way we have the political will for it. If we won't execute the vast majority of murderers, there's no way we'll do it for people just running a kilo of coke or weed.

Not to mention "works" and "worth it" are not quite the same thing.

laveryaon Can you simply brainwash an LLM?

"Japan has a higher GDP per capita than Alabama" is fake news. It's also confidently repeated by most LLMs. https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1681554646664634368

My assertion is that things like this will happen whenever LLMs are tuned to match political beliefs.

laveryaon Can you simply brainwash an LLM?

Isn't this done with every "sanitized" LLM? Fake news is all according to perspective!

laveryaon The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

It's almost happened before! https://youtu.be/nfDoml-Db64

laveryaon Zenbleed

The patch for this exploit is to load AMD's updated microcode.

laveryaon Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

Essays are incredibly biased though! Do you really think that for some reason essays actually have to be written by the person applying, and can't be gamed with money? That an overworked public school teacher is going to write a better letter of recommendation than a private school teacher? That a rich kid is going to have worse extracurriculars, portfolio or achievements?

The Common App is great, but it's not magically less open to bias than standardized test scores.

laveryaon Children of alumni no longer have admissions edge at Carnegie Mellon, Pitt

Is there literally any test in which:

"Students of Color" receive scores in the same distribution as white/asian/hispanic students (same fraction of 1s, 2s ... 35s, 36s on the ACTs for example)

AND

Top scores are meaningfully distinct from the population average? (because the first condition can be trivially fulfilled by having everyone score the same)

laveryaon Why was the F-117 retired so quickly?

> nobody used low frequency at the time

I don't think this is true. Low frequency was and continues to be the best option for early warning and over-the-horizon use cases.

> good enough to throw up flak, though - and that's how the one that was lost got hit

It was hit with a 1960s era SAM after running the same route again and again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

laveryaon Deep space experts prove Starlink is interfering in scientific work

Bluntly, the people with the power to stop you from doing so. For SpaceX, that means the US government via the FCC.

laveryaon A $182B Chip Maker: AMD's Labs – Full Documentary [video]

Depends on what you mean. If you want to be a fab, the answer is "hahahahahahaha how many billion dollars do you have?"

If you "just" want to send custom designs to an existing fab that's far easier.

laveryaon Plane crash rates by model

There are 6 times more "events" listed for the 737-NG variants as there are for the MAX, so there wouldn't be much inflation.

(There's also more than 100x more flights with the NG than the MAX)

laveryaon Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

There's certain to be natal/genetic/etc differences in the kids, though. (Are infants put up for adoption more likely to have been born to mothers who are in poverty? Who smoke, drink or use drugs? Who are younger or older? Does IVF itself have positive or negative effects? Etc)

Really the ideal test would be, in order of preference:

1. randomization (some parents get the classes, some do not, chosen randomly)

2. geographic (parents in state/area A get classes, rest do not)

3. temporal (parents after year X get classes)

4. twins (parents of twin A get classes, twin B do not)

laveryaon China solar module prices keep diving

This is the idea behind Terraform Industries: https://terraformindustries.com/

They're capturing carbon to turn into a useful product (fossil fuels) though.