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Funny thing: clicking the "past" button on this submission doesn't work—seems like Cloudflare doesn't like the query and blocks the request.

FYI for anyone on OS X Catalina (and likely Big Sur): this doesn't seem to work, as it's not detecting AVFoundation support in ffmpeg. See this issue: https://github.com/cytopia/ffscreencast/issues/31

I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents: https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel...

A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface:

> This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!”

> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began.

> This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.

> And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.

Thanks for sharing this—I'd heard about the points system but I haven't seen any personal accounts of going through the process before, so it was illuminating to read one.

Unfortunately, there's no scheme to allow foreigners to stay as a resident if they work remotely for a company that doesn't have a presence in Japan, as I do. (I'd even be willing to pay taxes in Japan!)

Of course, such a provision is pretty rare, but it's still a bummer. I wonder if immigration policy might ever consider such situations—such a worker is basically injecting money into the Japanese economy for little cost on Japan's part. But perhaps there are downsides that I haven't considered.

The city of Seattle commissioned a separate study on Uber and Lyft driver pay in Seattle (mentioned in the NYT article): https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Parrott-Reich-Seattl...

The authors of the Seattle-commissioned report have written up their own criticism of their report to the Cornell/Uber/Lyft report: https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Comparison-of-two-Se...

Northeastern University (in Boston) has announced that they're joining MIT and Harvard's lawsuit: https://twitter.com/Northeastern/status/1280961230233100297

But plenty of us are US-born! A glance often isn't enough to distinguish between international and domestic students.

They didn't mention political correctness, though...?

> I think the best way to pick what you want to do is to find [...] what the world values.

> Don’t chase other people’s ideas of what matters.

Er...

SF, Oakland, or Berkeley. My family and friends are in the Bay Area. The weather is nearly unparalleled. The food variety is solid. Transit is not that bad, if you compare the cities I mentioned to the rest of the US.

I guess the tech scene is decent, but the other factors I mentioned mean a lot more to me. (I would almost prefer it if the area weren't as much of a hotspot, actually...)

I'd be shocked if more than 5% (and even that's a stretch) of fresh high school graduates in the US knew what a Markov chain is.

I think that might speak more to the dismal state of cities in the rest of the country, rather than SF being particularly good.

I'm interested in hearing why it's a bad thing to disincentivize working more. Is it so bad for someone to not be working should they have enough money to live on? (I'm not sure if the benefits in this specific case are enough to live on, but I guess I'm thinking about the general principle.)

> I've built tiny servers, parsed plethora of file formats, calculated maths, wrote data, (de)compressed stuff, encrypted things, ...

If you've written code to do all those things, I think you'd be justified in calling yourself a programmer, even if software isn't your main gig. :)

For me, at least, the hardest part is actually executing on what you think you should do.

Is there any advantage (e.g. higher likelihood of admission, or earlier notification) to applying earlier, assuming you apply by the deadline?

CS3L hasn't been offered for the last couple of years. The catalog includes classes that haven't been offered for a long time.

I'm a CS sophomore at Berkeley, and I actually had the same choice. Sure, it would have been better to go to CMU based solely on the school, but the difference in tuition and fees between the two was too great to not go to Berkeley. (I'm in-state and received little financial aid.)

This attitude likely resulted from the lack of TAs rather than the other way around...

The issue is that they weren't expecting there to be so few TAs, and as such the system allowed many more students to enroll than they ended up being able to support. (Granted, the registration system here is pretty old, but it's not as horrible as you describe.)

This is false; you are confusing 161 with 162.

Penn and Penn State are distinct universities; Penn State is a public university (and not an Ivy), while Penn is a private university (and an Ivy).

I went to a CA public school (one of the most competitive ones), and my math teacher had a PhD from Stanford.