stbullard

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error.

(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)

I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words?

Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:

> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.

> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:

> 1. Core Basics ~3,000 words > 2. Intermediate ~7,000 words > 3. Advanced ~10,000 words > 4. Expert ~25,000 words > 5. The Obscure ~40,000+ words

> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.

> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)

Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.

They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.

Cute, but wrong on many counts.

Also, I'd like to see the inverse of it: a model trained only on the last few weeks - or even minutes - of published information, or only on scientific papers published in the last year or two. Should present some interesting psychoses!

USER: What will the future hold for computers?

TALKIE-1930: Computers in the future may be employed in offices where calculations are required to be made, and where the nature of the business does not demand a very high degree of knowledge. The occupation will be a steady one, and the remuneration will be sufficient to afford a comfortable livelihood. The hours of attendance will probably be from ten to six.

USER: and digital computers?

TALKIE-1930: Computers who make use of machines will be distinguished from digital computers, who perform their operations by means of the fingers alone. The former will be employed in offices and public establishments, where a great number of calculations have to be made; the latter in private houses, and by individuals.

(for those confused, "computer" was, at the time, a human occupation)

I love this.

Arrow shafts: $5-10 for a ~30”-long, high-precision high-modulus carbon tube.

Could they have crashed it because of security/safety concerns for President-elect Trump, who was there as a surprise guest, watching the launch with Elon?

Per NYTimes: “It was pretty epic on Attempt 1,” Kate Tice, a senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX, said of the last test flight’s tower catch on the company’s livestream. “But the safety of the teams and the public and the pad itself are paramount.”

Not sure what would have changed compared to the first launch, other than Trump’s presence - and they haven’t described any anomalies.

A launch is one thing: lots of explosive potential, but the kinetic energy is quickly dispersed.

The KE of a botched landing of what’s essentially a ballistic missile would be a whole lot more concentrated…

Or maybe they just didn’t have time to file a modified flight plan for it to enter even-more-specially-restricted controlled airspace.

Misleading/clickbait “journalism”:

* The FARS data is “normalized” by unpublished internal iSeeCars estimates of miles driven; the underlying “study” is a marketing blog post for their company.

* FARS data distinguishes between driver and occupant fatalities - the “study” looks only at occupant fatalities, which is not what most people would reasonably expect given the headline.

* One might reasonably suspect Tesla’s long history of touting 5-star safety ratings and advanced safety tech could lead to passengers being lulled into a false sense of security, and being less likely to use seatbelts.

Driver fatalities and seatbelt use are right there in the FARS data - one wonders why these weren’t considered and incorporated in the “study”.

Anyhow, a note to the HN user: don’t upvote FUD-sowing headlines based on blog posts about unscientific “studies” that are really just submarine PR; they carry none of the credibility of the underlying studies, and are a disservice to the scientists and public servants who rigorously and faithfully collect and analyze this data.

HN used to be better than this…

Nothing in this article gives any reason to believe that the voice on the other end of the phone was AI-generated.

Occam’s razor suggests it was more likely a human pretending to be her daughter.

I’m guessing after she realized that the voice wasn’t her daughter, the mother convinced herself it must have been a deepfake to explain herself having been so easily convinced.

Lol. At SJC? Almost always a value-add. That said, what people are like once they’re out very much depends on the person.

Think of it like the light and dark sides of the force: skill in rhetoric can just as easily be used to derail conversations or slide into sophistry as it can to explore the foundations of an idea, argument, or position in search of insight.

Intellectual honesty tends to require a certain restraint from the practitioner, whereas resentment and anger can feed into deliberate conversational malice.

The forms of discourse at St. John’s contribute greatly to earnest inquiry in the classroom setting: the system of formal address, for instance, in which other students are addressed as, say, “Ms. Klein” or “Mr. Armstrong” in class creates an incredible separation between daily life and the classroom - enabling you to treat someone’s statements and arguments at face value.

My experience with St. John’s was that the Tutors (called professors anywhere else) generally managed to guide and keep conversations on track with a light, deft hand on such occasions as intervention was called for - this was increasingly rarely over the course of the Program, however, as keeping things directed and on track was primarily enforced by one’s fellow students, whose urgent pursuit of truth and understanding brooked no interference, and suffered very little foolishness.

My guess is your former coworker was probably just as argumentative before he came to St. John’s as when you met him. The school isn’t formative in the sense of changing your nature; it’s formative in the sense of giving you the tools to better understand the world around you. Most people left with the same personalities and political views they came in with.

True, but the name of the school predates the curriculum in question by more than a century; the school has for many years been in no way associated with any religion.

(Likewise, at its founding in 1696, the college was called King William’s School; a name that probably sounded a bit off in post-Revolutionary America, leading to the adoption of the current name in 1784, a year after the War.)

RE 3: as an SJC alum, I found my reading speed slowed drastically both during and after four years spent reading and discussing these books. I found myself thinking while reading more often, making more connections within and between works.

That said, reading alone misses the meat of “The Program” (always capitalized!) - it’s the searching, pointed, urgent discussion of a work with others who share a common language (from all having read and discussed the earlier works in the Program) that provoked deep thought and reflection, held me to account for intellectual rigor, and built up my faculty for critical thinking.

I for one would love to see HN do a quarterly/yearly FOSS project donation drive. The more we can do to encourage the development, maintenance, and improvement of tools we all use and sometimes take for granted, the better!

How “hidden” the importance of proprioception is in a sport depends on the sport. In archery, improving proprioception (not strength or visual acuity) is the primary object of training.