Hacker News Reader

sgdjgkeirjon Stanford prof calls police after whistleblower exposes $5000/hour gov. contacts

Prof Nelson didn’t call himself “whistleblower “ but it does seem untoward that the main author of the California math framework is also making $5000/hour when the client is not a tech company but a public school district with mostly minority and economically disadvantaged students.

In any case, if there is nothing untoward, why threaten him with “police and lawyers”?

sgdjgkeirjon Stanford prof calls police after whistleblower exposes $5000/hour gov. contacts

https://mobile.twitter.com/boazbaraktcs/status/1511366075035...

for context

sgdjgkeirjon No one cared about my spreadsheets

This is a good point. Caplan makes a huge deal about the fact that a students that drops out one semester before finishing the degree takes a huge penalty to their salary. This is what he calls the “sheep skin effect”. He claims that because such a student gets almost all of the education, their penalty must correspond to the signaling component.

But this is where his math runs against common sense. If you are an employer and see a student that dropped out of college without a very good reason, then that is a very strong negative signal. Even if you as an employer believe that education on its own provides valuable benefits to your employees, this does not mean you’d take a risk on someone that dropped out. There are sufficiently few of them that you can just not risk it.

sgdjgkeirjon Breaking 256-Bit Elliptic Curve Encryption with a Quantum Computer

This is not as comfortable a margin as it seems. If a direct implementation of the algorithm takes a few million qubits, it may well be that both better algorithms, better error correcting codes, and optimizing their combination to the hardware platform will shave a few orders of magnitude. So in 5 years to a decade this could get uncomfortably close to the danger zone.

Main issue is that in cryptography (1) some secrets encrypted now will be secret in a decade (2) changing standard is very hard and takes a long time

sgdjgkeirjon Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

The New Yorker article gives a much more detailed look at the evidence for both natural origins and lab leak.

“ The Mysterious Case of the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-mysterious-ca...

sgdjgkeirjon Neural network from scratch

For autograd from scratch, see https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd and/or

https://windowsontheory.org/2020/11/03/yet-another-backpropa...