tbihl (u/tbihl) - Readit News

tbihl commented on Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine solarshades.club/p/dispat... · Posted by u/notarobot123

jay_kyburz · 3 months ago

I think having one huge exam at the end is the problem. An exam and assessment every week would be best.

Less stress at the end of the term, and the student can't leave everything to the last minute, they need to do a little work every week.

tbihl · 3 months ago

Too much proctoring and grading, not enough holding students' hands for stuff they should have learned from reading the textbook.

tbihl commented on How to live on $432 a month in America shagbark.substack.com/p/h... · Posted by u/cactusplant7374

jvanderbot · 3 months ago

Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely disingenuous.

But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons

This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.

Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.

tbihl · 3 months ago

"Disingenuous" is a bridge too far (and worth mentioning because it impugns intent.) It's easy to get drawn to the cities with friends and high pay, then feel like path dependency precludes one from returning to the lower COL hometown. You tell your story in the third and fourth paragraphs because you find it worthy of mention.

tbihl commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y

staticautomatic · 3 months ago

It costs him the only thing he cares about: his ego

tbihl · 3 months ago

I see two risks with your analysis. First, you generally underestimate a person if you try to distill his personality into one negative trait (or, for that matter, if you select a bunch of negative traits but assume no positive.)

Second, he's still the president, so I don't see what pull the Penn degree has vs. that.

tbihl commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y

ethbr1 · 3 months ago

The intent of agencies was three-fold:

1. As the US grew and the workload required to govern it grew, Congress' ability to directly and quickly manage the country was outpaced. Consequently, agencies served as the grease between Congress' high-level actions/funding and the low-level implementation.

2. Due to the ever-adversarial nature of Congress, it was recognized that most Congresses operated slowly, and consequently didn't have the capacity to micromanage at the level required for direct control.

3. Circa 1900, civil service reform by the then-progressive wing of the Republican party pushed for greater isolation of the expertise that drove good government outcomes (in civil service employees) from politicians (administrators).

The flaw Trump revealed was that the President has too much direct power over the civil service, if he chooses to ignore tradition.

This wasn't always the case, and laws that previously restrained the President's ability to fuck with the civil service were substantially relaxed in the 60s - 80s (?).

tbihl · 3 months ago

Conversely, the flaw of the civil servant plan during Trump 1 was that stonewalling the top of your org chart can really bite you if he sticks around too long or, maybe worse, comes back.

In any case, the President will keep having too much power until Congress starts taking theirs back.

tbihl commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y

jostmey · 3 months ago

For every person that went through these elite schools, they must have rejected five or more other people. These schools pride themselves on turning people away. Perhaps, they have far more enemies than friends, explaining their seeming lack of influence in this situation

tbihl · 3 months ago

They absolutely prize having large pools of applicants to reject. Admission percentage is a prestigious statistic.

tbihl commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y

jaybrendansmith · 3 months ago

Penn should support Harvard and publicly revoke Trump's degree. Bullies only understand force.

tbihl · 3 months ago

What force does that possibly employ?

When you revoke the degree of a sitting president, that costs him...?

tbihl commented on Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students nytimes.com/2025/05/22/us... · Posted by u/S0y

paulryanrogers · 3 months ago

They're afraid of losing to a primary challenger if they break with Trump. It used to be a Trump endorsement would hurt your campaign. Now a Trump critique is believed to be a scarlet letter. He's got a lock on the racist zealots that make up the most consistent voting bloc in the GOP.

tbihl · 3 months ago

They never picked off Newhouse, IIRC.

tbihl commented on The scientific “unit” we call the decibel lcamtuf.substack.com/p/de... · Posted by u/Ariarule

timerol · 3 months ago

> 2 mW / 1 mW = 2 = 10^(3/10) = 3 dBm

It's worth noting that this is wrong, in exactly the way that makes decibels confusing. 3 dBm is an absolute power figure (about 2 mW). 2 mW / 1 mW is a ratio of 2 (about 3 dB).

2 mW / 1 mW = 2 = 10^(3/10) = 3 dB.

2 mW = 2 * 1 mW = 10^(3/10) * 1 mW = 3 dB (1 mW) = 3 dBm.

tbihl · 3 months ago

Similarly, but in a very different context:

I have to teach non-engineers C programming for an undergrad course, which is basically trying to teach very explicit attention to punctuation (among many other things). "Watch those double quotes!", "single quotes, not double!", "where's your semi-colon??", and so on.

Then, three weeks into the course, we're passing values by reference with &, and I get the question, "isn't that scanf missing the and-sign in front of the string name?", and I'm forced to answer, "that punctuation doesn't matter, this time," because the C standard makes & do nothing in front of a string specifically because so many people were confused about that fact that a string's variable name is already passing by reference.

tbihl commented on Show HN: Test your license plate identification skills shub.club/games/good-or-b... · Posted by u/forthwall

tbihl · 3 months ago

Virginia has a national park license plate with a picture of a black bear. I recently saw it, vanity letters, "AHHBEAR", googly eye glued to the bear.

tbihl commented on UnitedHealth paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

maest · 3 months ago

Is this in the US? There are plenty of scandals here in the UK, but nothing so systemic as what you are describing.

tbihl · 3 months ago

Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, my mom trained by brothers and me to forcefully demand to call her if we thought 911 had been called so she could race down to intercept and send them packing, lest we get a crazy ambulance ride bill. The calls ranged from total non-issues to things that in no way required ambulance transport, though a hospital visit be necessary.