People (and employers) who can truly appreciate calculus wouldn't be impressed with a taken calculus course (thousands of students take calculus every year) or even a math BSc, and those who can't, how would they assess how hard your calculus course really was? There is no competition in a typical calculus course. Better ways of signaling the ability of doing hard things, especially for kids, in my opinion, are math/programming/etc contests. That's where you have a real competition and can show what you are capable of relatively to other people who participate and want to win. Also, it's important to note that passing a calculus course includes not only watching lectures or reading a textbook but also extensive problem solving. Typically "hard" college math courses are about memorization of abstract concepts, and taking any of them doesn't really prove you can do hard things (I'm not talking about PhD where you need to make novel contributions, thats crazy hard if you want your research to be competitive). Thats my experience and perspective but I'm living in my bubble.

I feel like you have missed the entire point. The point of the article was not to "signal" that you can do hard things. It was to build up the inner confidence. Competition is great, but largely orthogonal to the concept of having kids learn that they can do hard things.

Nice list! Reminds me of this: http://imperium.lenin.ru/~verbit/MATH/programma.html

A snippet of pandas code in a notebook I saw when learning pandas, it looked like this:

  def to_minutes(df, col):
    df[col] = df[col].dt.minutes
    return df

  (
    pd
    .read_csv('data.csv')
    .assign(dur=df.finish-df.start)
    .pipe(to_minutes, col='dur')
    .query('dur < 30')
    .sort_values(by='dur')
    .pipe(
      seaborn.relplot,
      x='dur',
      y='distance',
      hue='city'
    )
  )

It's a simple snippet but the code structure is clever in many ways. The enclosure of the whole expression, starting with pd, into () makes it possible to split method chaining into multiple lines without backslashes and start each line with ".". Now we can treat DataFrame methods similarly to verbs from dplyr data grammar and "." similarly to %>% operator. Its now easy to rearrange, add and delete whole lines without thinking if we forgot to add "." to the line above or below. Everything is immutable, no side effects, it's safe to copy the code in a new notebook cell and tweak it a little without worrying about tens of temporary df2_copy1 variables. The .pipe method allows to avoid "df = df[...]" junk, to reuse code fragments and even to use plotting libraries in ggplot fashion. If the chain becomes huge, just put it in a function and apply in to df using pipe method, etc... I wonder if it's possible to add memorization to pipe method to avoid recalculating the whole construction every time when rerunning the cell during debugging.

Can you please give a link to original source?

Procedural landscapes are such a fun thing.

When I was in high school I read about perlin noise landscape generation technique in a random blog post. I shared the technique with a friend and he was very excited. A week later he presented a program which rendered Minecraft-style landscapes in ortho projection. A few more weeks passed and he added 3D perspective (using alien tech called "projection matrices"), water reflections, grass and day-night cycle animation with shadows from Sun and stars. All this using Pascal and some primitive bundled-in 2D graphics lib.

Another related high school memory is Audiosurf game, where the road and environment are generated using an algorithm based on music tempo. What if we replace this algo with a modern generative model? Probably literally a bad trip.

I guessed correctly by the title that the article is about coding a 3d image, but was waiting for the classic "two balls and a cylinder" scene, which college students naturally come up with in path tracing assignment in computer graphics courses.

This is a national meme in Russia. War and Peace is mandatory reading in schools, but it's always only 3-4 students in class who really read it. Most students just skim through ("read diagonally", as we say), use summary or watch the movie.

War and Peace is fairly interesting, in the sense the battle scenes really detailed and action packed, even more than can be shown in movies.

In Moscow metro they sometimes ask (but do not enforce) via speakers to stand on both sides of the escalator. I heard this practice was brought by McKinsey from London. In my experience this sometimes works on very short escalators, and on the longer ones people seem to ignore the suggestions. I wonder about the psychological reasons of this behavior.

There is a fun story of a guy who was making several thousand $ a month for a couple of years from a side project, a bunch of fan websites about reality TV show. Unfortunately in Russian, but Google translated version is tolerable:

https://vc.ru/life/189035-doooooom-2-s-shestyu-nulyami-kak-y...

What if give it the same promt but "with subtitles in French" for example?

Suppose a hacker group get their hands on a valuable exploit. They are like LAPSUS$ and are going to make the exploit public access, but also want to make some $. I wonder if the following scheme is theoretically possible:

1. Put the encrypted exploit file into some kind of Blockchain 2. Create a crypto wallet and announce a fundraising 3. As soon as the sum on the wallet reaches, say, $5M, the exploit is automatically and consensually decrypted by the Blockchain system and released to the public.

And what purpose does the blockchain serve in your example?

Exactly right, this is why a market for assassination is unlikely to ever really emerge as a result of blockchain tech. People seem to forget that the only reason it works is because of the structured aligning of potentially competing objectives. There really isn't a way to decentralize an escrow service... I mean, you could try to leverage all the participant's competing interests - but that is a massive presumption and it doesn't even address the question of how. Not through PoW, because turtles all the way down, and not through PoS, because lol Ripple.

Is there another system that allows you to implement an anonymous assurance contract without a trusted third party?

How do I know that the encrypted payload actually contains the exploit and not the picture of a cat?

I agree with you, but hackers sell exploits to others all the time? One can never be sure that hackers gonna send the actual exploit. You're right the scheme does not protect from that, my initial shower thought was more about the "release to the public" part, so the public can be certain about they will get something when the amount on the crypto wallet hits the threshold.

You don't. You have to rely on reputation for that piece. Blockchain solves the problem of the assurance contract.

So, whether a blockchain is used or not, there's no way to know that I'll get what I paid for or an empty text file.

So the blockchain serves no purpose in this instance.

Asking people to send you money, and them trusting you'll send them the exploit is exactly the same and no blockchain is needed (except maybe the bitcoin one, since of course you don't want to use paypal)

It's pretty obvious that you can't implement a trustless assurance anonymous assurance contract without a blockchain.

So, a simple RSA or any asymetric key encryption works too?

Assuming you can establish a zero trust, publicly declared swap of crypto for said key... A smart contract could be established to act like a bounty program for this purpose and could be re-used for sharing other secrets.

The point people have been making is that the smart contract actually does not remove trust as a requirement and so is extraneous.

It removes trust from several components of the system. It does not, in this case, remove trust from all components.

You are missing the point.

You are basically asking me to send you $5M for a car (the exploit) supposedly parked into a garage (the encrypted exploit) whose location is stored on the blockchain (the encryption key).

At the time of me sending you $5M, I do not know whether or not there actually is a car in this garage.

All I can do is trust your words that there is a car in this garage.

Now that I sent you $5M, the blockchain contract reveals the location of the garage.

Now that I have the location of the garage, I make my way there; 2 things can happen:

- I open the garage, there is a car inside

- I open the garage, there is no car inside

At what point in this whole transaction did putting the location of the garage on the blockchain help me (the buyer) in any way? What matters to me as a buyer is getting a car, not the assurance of _maybe getting a car_.

You could have sent me the location by email, fax, pigeon, blockchain contract, facebook messenger, telegram, signal, whatsapp, the outcome would be the same.

You have confirmed that the garage exists and that it will be opened when certain conditions are met without further human intervention. The alternative would not come with a guarentee of the above. Just because the entire process is not zero-trust, does not mean it is not an improvement of the status quo.

If this were to become a recurring endeavour, you can introduce reputation into the system and a refund mechanism if X of Y funds required to unlock the payload are not happy with the contents.

It guarantees that the group will receive the money and the exploit will be released if the fundraising is successful.

What guarantees me that I’m getting an exploit and not an empty text file?

Trust. I know a blockchain is a zero trust network and all that, but if it is a trustworthy group that can prove ownership of an address/the exploit, then I'd think it could work.

I'm a blockchain hater as well, but I'm interested. What is a better platform for something like this, assuming that you trust the actor who owns the address?

> I'm a blockchain hater as well, but I'm interested.

This seems to imply I'm one. I'm not.

However, in this specific instance it doesn't make sense. See my comment above. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30775834)

Reputation, I suppose. It's a bit like how IRA bomb warnings used to work.

> As soon as the sum on the wallet reaches, say, $5M, the exploit is automatically and consensually decrypted by the Blockchain system and released to the public.

For that, all nodes in the blockchain would need to be in possession of the decryption key - which would allow anyone to decrypt the secret as well.

Stop trying to make Blockchain a thing.

> consensually decrypted by the Blockchain system

how would this work in practice? if the contract is to guarantee decryption, wouldn't the key(s) also need to be on chain? how do you keep the secret?