The vast majority of the times I use ^/$, I actually want the behavior of matching start/end of lines. If I had some multi-line text, and only wanted to update or do something with the actual beginning or end of the entire text, I’d typically just do it manually.

A lot of time I want to check for valid identifier:

    if not re.match('^[a-z0-9_]+$', user):
        raise SomeException("invalid username")

as written, the code above is incorrect - it will happily accept "john\n", which can cause all sort of havoc down the line

For real! I just unlocked my memory of the Star Wars asciimation. Totally forgot it existed until now.

I tried reading the article but after the third time the page’s scroll state reset on its own due to all the dynamic ads/popups/notices, I had to give up.

On mobile the site is unreadable. The red banner at the bottom goes from taking up half the screen to a quater when using the caret to minimize. I was then immediately served a full page ad about Ron Howard when I tried to scroll down..

Something something, "it's arrested development"

Yeah and then there's also tons of ad squares between the article text, and some annoying video player.

Popular belief holds that the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, not the fence.

It’s always been this way; previously we just had to play to the old white men’s biases.

Maybe in the US, but not elsewhere. Lots of places just sort by grades or test scores. Part of the reason for the weird US system is the low ceiling: school is relatively easy compared to developed countries, so there are way too many people with identical scores at the top.

Some other countries just use test scores and exam results.

I mean contrary to the comment above this is how American universities used to be. They had standing exams... Show up on admission day, take a test, highest scores get admission. Easy

That’s not unbiased though. You still have the question of what’s tested and how it’s graded.

Blind review to same rubric works reasonably well. Same test with same expected learning goals should remove nearly all issues.

Come on. For math/physics/chemistry/CS the exams are easy. Just written questions and answers. Grading is also simple, just check if the answer is correct. For high-school-level questions, all the answers can be trivially checked. We're not talking about PhD-level problems.

It's a bit more complicated for humanities, grading essays is more subjective. But we also have solutions for that: have 2-3 people independently grade each essay, and have a special group review all the cases where the graders disagree.

Yeah, there’s really no way around it when you have more qualified students than slots, unless you just mark each applicant as qualified or not and run a lottery.

But they do have to “craft a class” to some extent. An obvious example is athletic recruiting, but some schools are consciously thinking about populating other extracurriculars, like marching bands or orchestras.

And you also don’t want a class that’s all computer science majors or zero philosophy majors. I imagine they consider other factors as well. The admissions staff may be liberal, but I’m guessing at most schools they deliberately admit some outspoken conservatives.

You could have quotas for each program. And then just set exams differently for each. Removes the "general education" as major, but most other countries find that one insane thing in first place. University is already for specialisation. High school is place were general education should happen.

No they don’t “have” to do any of this as evidenced by the fact that the US is the only country where it happens. In most countries it would (rightly) be considered strange to care how good someone is at sports or marching band when evaluating their ability to study academic subjects (the actual purpose of a university).

That feels like a fairly narrow view of what the purpose of a university is.

Look at the charter of any university and they do not just say: "create students who excel in their academic subject of choice".

The vast, vast majority of higher education mission statements/charters include goals like: "helping students develop their identity", "pursuing meaning", "strengthening community", "sharing perspectives", "helping others", etc. etc. etc.

Things like "can this person work on as a team (did they play sports?)" or "have they been a part of a community (like marching band?)" are hugely important for building a community at the university that can successfully achieve those mission statements.

> Look at the charter of any university

Any university in the world? Or any university in the very idiosyncratic US system?

Again, nobody else does stuff like this, and their universities seem to be working fine.

Yea I'd say any university. Here's the results of maybe 3 minutes of quick googling for universities around the world:

University of Mumbai: "The Fruit of Learning is Character and Righteous Conduct" - highlights character and behavior as key to learning

University of Tokyo: "The University of Tokyo aims to be a world-class platform for research and education [and] ... nurture global leaders with a strong sense of public responsibility and a pioneering spirit [and] ... to expand the boundaries of human knowledge in partnership with society." - yes it's academically focussed, but again highlights strong civic duty and partnerships

University of Sydney: "We make lives better by producing leaders of society and equipping our people with leadership qualities so they can serve our communities at every level." - pretty focussed on creating leaders who serve communitities

Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia has a listed value: "AAU pursues innovation, research, and development through team spirit and partnership within the institution, with the communities it serves and with its global partners."

So.. yea most universities? Are there exceptions that are just ultra focussed on being exclusively robot-generating education factories? Sure. I'm not sure where you live that they are so common, but a quick survey of Africa, Asia, and Australia I was able to find universities that check the box for what I claimed.

But again, sorry for being so US-centric on the US website focussed on discussion (mostly) US news (and in this case discussing literally only US universities????), and the goings on of US tech start ups where most everyone speaks English and is active during the US timezones peak hours.

More accurately, the issue is male athletes in women's sports. For whatever reason, the political left seem determined to die on this hill, despite the obvious disadvantage to female athletes.

I can’t say I’m the kind of guy who faces bootlicking with a gastronomic interest. The taste of the boot doesn’t change what’s being done.

One random little thing to add on to the list of shitty things about Windows 11: the new default image-viewing program (Photos), is incapable of rendering multi-page TIFF files. No error message or anything, just displays the first page and acts like everything’s fine. The OLD image viewing program (Windows Photo Viewer), displays them no problem though…

These kinds of issues can be incredibly disruptive and distressing for non tech-savy users. You update your OS and suddenly it looks like a lot of your data are corrupted, with no explanation of how to get it back.

Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Unreasonable Effectiveness: How Lies in Titles are Damn Near Unreasonably Effective

Also how most of the articles with this kind of title (those posted on HN at least) are about computation/logical processes, which are by definition, reasonable.

It’s really frustrating how the Trump family is abusing the presidency to get rich on every front. Qatari jets, golf course deals, building permits, government contracts to companies they’re involved in, and whatever this turns out to be (presumably their key donors will get the contracts to extract and refine Venezuelan oil and minerals).

What’s the solution though? The entire Republican Congress is silent or openly supporting everything Trump does. There is no check and balance to contain Trump. And at the end of four years, he and his family get to keep the billions they gained corruptly with no way to get it back.

And with those Billions comes influence.

Washington D.C. (Donor Controlled)

Where does the energy to lift the cars up in the first place come from? Another set of “freely available gravity” cars down the street?

Excess solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear power.

this is an energy storage ("battery") system, not a generation system.

ahh that makes total sense lol