Hacker News Reader

educationdataon China Announces Punishments for Intellectual-Property Theft

I have heard in many areas the official rule on the book has already been changed. Foreign companies are longer required to joint ventures with Chinese partners. However, in reality it could be extremely difficult to operate without a Chinese partner. Local government agencies will just give you so much trouble that you will eventually find out that it is much easier to have a Chinese partner to deal with those issues.

educationdataon We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/12/665597190/families-of-the-dis...

"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. "If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."

By simply having relatives overseas, you lose 10 points. Now imagine how many points you will lose if you have a relative signed this letter.

educationdataon We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

There are not many Chinese names in the signed letter, and I can fully understand. If you are a Chinese H1B or green card holder, and you signed this letter, it is almost certain the Chinese government will contact your family in China.

educationdataon Charter, Comcast don’t have First Amendment right to discriminate, court rules

Yes. It is better to ignore implicit bias. Every time you talk about it, you are reenforcing it. Because every time you talk about it, you are more likely make more people to have this idea, instead of making less people to have this idea.

educationdataon Charter, Comcast don’t have First Amendment right to discriminate, court rules

"In addition to recounting Entertainment Studios' failed negotiations with Charter, Plaintiffs' amended complaint also included direct evidence of racial bias. In one instance, [Charter VP of programming Allan] Singer allegedly approached an African-American protest group outside Charter's headquarters, told them "to get off of welfare," and accused them of looking for a "handout." Plaintiffs asserted that, after informing Charter of these allegations, it announced that Singer was leaving the company. In another alleged instance, Entertainment Studios' owner, Allen, attempted to talk with Charter's CEO, [Tom] Rutledge, at an industry event; Rutledge refused to engage, referring to Allen as "Boy" and telling Allen that he needed to change his behavior. Plaintiffs suggested that these incidents were illustrative of Charter's institutional racism, noting also that the cable operator had historically refused to carry African-American-owned channels and, prior to its merger with Time Warner Cable, had a board of directors composed only of white men. The amended complaint further alleged that Charter's recently pronounced commitments to diversity were merely illusory efforts to placate the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)."

- The evidence of discrimination is extremely weak. None the things mentioned ("get off of welfare", "handout", "boy", "change his behavior") is necessarily racism. But the result is not surprising, since the ruling is from the 9th Circuit.

A side note. This kind of law suit properly will increase implicit racial bias, because it is trying to reenforce the idea that welfare and bad behavior only or strongly links to African Americans. See: Even completing a Race Implicit Association Test increases implicit racial bias: https://psyarxiv.com/vxsj7/

educationdataon China scours social media, erases thousands of accounts

It is so ridiculous to claim individual news media accounts in China as "a major source of fake news, disinformation", when in fact the government official news media is shamelessly spreading fake news every single day on TV and newspaper, and they have the total control over how you report major events.

The government controls what can be reported, how it shall and shall not be reported. You blame individual news media accounts?

For example, the government is sending massive amount of people (village by village) to reeducation camps in Xinjiang province. Do you think the official news media will report any of this? Do you think any formal report from serious journalists will be allowed to appear on news media? Of course not! So yes, there are all kinds of rumors about Xinjiang in individual news media accounts. Who should we put the blame on?

educationdataon Medium is a poor choice for blogging

Medium makes reading comments extremely difficult. It must be intentional, i.e. it is a feature not a bug?

educationdataon Elon Musk: The Recode interview

Joe Rogan interview of Elon is much better: https://youtu.be/ycPr5-27vSI

educationdataon Show HN: Tableau-Like Data Visualizations in JavaScript

Do you support exporting the chart as png, pdf, etc.?

educationdataon State education rankings are riddled with methodological flaws

The article is about ranking states, not ranking schools.

For the point of ranking schools, there are statistical methods to measure student growth, instead of achievement, such as SGP (student growth percentile) and VAM (value-added modeling), which kind of address part of your question.

educationdataon New Evidence of Hacked Supermicro Hardware Found in U.S. Telecom

In the U.S., there is a very high bar to accuse defamation. You not only need to prove the report is false, you also need to prove the reporter knew it was false and had bad intention to cause damage.

educationdataon PayPal ends business dealings with Alex Jones's Infowars

Paypal's own words:

"We undertook an extensive review of the InfoWars sites, and found instances that promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions that run counter to our core value of inclusion."

The problems are:

1) There are many websites "promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions". As an atheist, I would say I have seem many atheist websites doing this.

2) This may not be fair. Nobody would believe Paypal has reviewed the speech of all the websites using their service. So why did they pick InfoWars? For what reason? Was that because there were lots of complains? Paypal not only need to explain why InfoWars should be banned, they also need to explain why they picked InfoWars.

3) There is no due process. Does InfoWars has a chance to appeal the decision? Were they informed before the decision was made? Were they given time for transition?

4) Yes. Paypal as a private company can make this decision. But nobody here is claiming that Paypal's decision is illegal. Many people feel this is dangerous, and there are good reasons to feel this way:

a) The nature of Paypal's business has nothing to do with speech. It is dangerous for a financial company to censor speech. It is different from facebook or twitter, which are speech platforms, so the content of speech are important to them. Why should Paypal even care about the speech on other websites? We do not need financial companies to shape the world of speech.

b) InfoWars promotes hate speech, but it is not illegal in the U.S. It is not a terrorist group. If it really incited violence, law enforcement will handle it. The difference between law enforcement and business: law enforcement has to follow the due process, but business makes arbitrary decision.

educationdataon Google Scientist Resigns Over “Forfeiture of Our Values” in China

What Google really should be doing is improving the uncensored Chinese version of Google, also funding projects which help Chinese people break the censorship.

educationdataon A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

Is there any data to support that Tokyo has more affordable apartment than New York?

I have seen numbers compare rental price of 1/2/3 bedroom(s) in Tokyo to New York [1,2], but I do not trust those numbers, because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. I don't have a statistics for this, but there is an example [3].

OK. I found a table of comparison by sq instead of # of bedrooms [4].

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/one-bedroom-apartme...

[3] https://www.lifewhereimfrom.com/lwif-x-ep4-what-is-an-averag...

[4] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/average-rent-in-tokyo...

educationdataon Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

When I made that claim, I meant at the national /societal level. Of course I didn't mean there is no single successful education experiment.

On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.

In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.

Interestingly, Taleb just made a twitter this morning: "What works on a small scale almost NEVER expands to large scale." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1035121052886728704

educationdataon Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

Who says racism exits ONLY against black and brown people? Historically, it has existed against Jews and Asians.

The admission policy of Harvard (an institution) has been used against Jews, now it is used against Asians. By your definition, it is racism.

educationdataon Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support

Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.a...

educationdataon Trump unblocks more Twitter users after U.S. court ruling

Does this mean all public officials are not allowed to block twitter users? Or this court ruling only works on Trump?

educationdataon China’s Re-education Camps

How does this have anything to do with Communism?

The Chinese Communist Party has the word "Communist" in its name, but it has nothing to do with Communism.

educationdataon USA Temperature: can I sucker you?

Again. Seriousness and stupidity are two different dimensions. Non-serious mistake can still be very stupid.

educationdataon USA Temperature: can I sucker you?

Impact of getting it wrong and stupidity are two different dimensions. Non-serious mistake can be more stupid than serious mistake.

educationdataon USA Temperature: can I sucker you?

Seriousness and stupidity are two different dimensions. Non-serious mistake can be more stupid than serious mistake.

educationdataon USA Temperature: can I sucker you?

Typo, should be 1900. Fixed.

educationdataon A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R

One common thing across most the "real" programming languages makes them unfit for data work: 0-based indexing.

It is just ridiculous to call the first row in a data set as 0th row, and the last row as (n-1)th row. It does not make any sense for data analytic work.