This looks like difficult stuff. Age 17 seems very early. When I started studying math at ETH Zurich in 1994, I was 19, and we had barely covered all of this during my earlier school career (but then, we also covered some other topics which seem not to be part of the A level syllabus, see below).

These days, students finish school a year earlier, and few of my students would be capable of solving these problems without some extensive preparation.

But then, here's the crux: How much preparation did you get on similiar types of questions?

I cover a lot of other stuff in my math specialty classes (e.g. differential equations, quite a bit of linear algebra including the classification of conics using eigenvectors, numerical methods for solving differential equations and for integration, spherical trigonometry, number theory and cryptography and more) that's not tested in this test.

So, it's (except for trivial cases) really impossible to compare two math tests from different places and ask "which one is more difficult", if you don't know exactly what's taught in the classroom.

That's nonsense. Who would "rank" schools based on their grade average on a non-standardized test?

A non-standardized exam is not meaningless at all, it provides the students feedback whether they sufficiently understands the topics taught or not and if they pass, tells them that are ready for the next level of education.

Math teacher here (9th to 12th grade). I wouldn't call centrally set and marked exams a blessing. It reduces teaching in classes to "teaching to the test", so you spend all your time practicing again and again the problems that will be on the centrally set exam, which can only test a very limited subset of your overall math knowledge.

Luckily, I can set my own exams and they consist of a good mix of problems the students have practiced (to test if they learned and are able to follow a specific set of steps), problems that are similar but they have to adapt to, and problems that are a little further from the practice problems but can be solved if the general principles learned are properly applied.

A central exam can't do that because it can't adapt to what's actually taught in the classroom, it's the other way around. Central exams change how math is taught in the classroom, because teachers are forced to make sure their students perform well on the central exam, instead of learning math.

Ok, I think the summary and articles are majorly misleading. Not sure where they came up with the "government issued ID", or the 5'000 users (apparently it's a 1'000'000) users, and there's nothing in the proposals about ID. You can check the official government website here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.news.admin.ch%2Fde%2Fn... (article in german, but I'm sure you can use a translation service if you're not fluent).

At first glance it looks like the removal of encryption concerns only encryption applied by the telecommunications provider itself, not by the user (e.g. encryption that is applied by the cell network to your phone connection). It does not apply to end-to-end encryption done by your apps (e.g. messengers, or your own encrypted voice calls, or HTTPS traffic between your and any servers you access on the internet).

As for the democratic process, this is part of a detailed regulation ("Verordnung") that's already cleared by a law that got voted on. Parliament usually doesn't concern itself with these. If the regulation is on conflict with a law, the courts will shoot it down. If parliament doesn't like the regulation, they can just change the law it's based on to render it moot. If regular folks don't like it, they can collect 50'000 signatures and shoot it down at the ballot box.

Saying "Linux runs on Macs" when it's only inside a VM is very much stretching the truth beyond the breaking point. Yes, it runs inside a VM, but that gives you all the limitations a VM has (limited hardware acceleration, usually bridged networking or peripheral access, etc.). For some limited use cases, VMs are a good thing, but Linux does not "run on the Mac" that way.

All the stuff I said remains true, except maybe for the "firmware" thingie, they probably ment to say "driver", but that was a quote anyway and stated as such.

Not sure where you went with the last paragraph, I already mentioned HomeBrew in my original post.

However, don't underestimate the work it takes to create Mac binaries. It's a pain to get all the library dependencies, the process is not always as smooth as it should be, and almost everyone ends up linking statically, which has its own issues.

As far as I know, running Linux on a MacBook is still messy, and requires some fiddling: To quote r/linux4noobs: "Typically what happens is something does not work. You google it. You find that the problem is caused by missing firmware. You google it some more. You find instructions that tell you how to copy the missing firmware from MacOS to Linux."

While I still remember copying my first slackware distro (featuring kernel 0.99something) to a couple of floppy disks to install on my shiny i386, honestly I haven't felt the need to use it on the desktop (my servers still run linux ofc.) since I got a MacBook Pro in 2010. The BSD under the hood fills all my Unix-needs just nicely. Hammerspoon lets me customize the UI enough that I don't miss WindowMaker, I learned to live without "focus follows mouse" and there's not a big difference between typing 'brew' or 'apt-get'.

In short: If you have a MacBook, run Mac OS, on anything else, run Linux.

Honestly, take a test. I recommend this one here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftyping-speed-test.aoeu...

Anything above 250cpm is probably "good enough", but just about any touch typists can easily do 300+ without breaking a sweat, and my faster students in my CS classes can usually do 400+ (myself, I rarely reach that score anymore, but then, I'm old...).

Also, error rate should be really low (1-2 mistakes is probably fine, but any more, and you have room to improve).

Since noone mentioned it, the command is

M-x doctor

Thieves are unfortunately a real thing, but it varies by country. It's more common in the south and east of europe. They are not on the train, they are only boarding the trains at the stops for a quick "grab and dash".

The conductors are not cops, they can't do much about that. But you can protect yourself quite easily. Here's what I told my students to do on our night train trip from Zurich to Zagreb last year.

1) Lock the compartment door from the inside.
2) Don't have *anything* that can be grabbed within 1m of the compartment door.
3) If you hear something trying to open the door, make noise / turn on light etc.

1) Doesn't fully protect you because some of these trains are old and the locks are poor, but 2) usually does the job. The thieves only have seconds to get the job done, so if they don't see anything up for grabs, they immediately move on to the next compartment.

My students at first actually believed I was just trying to scare them, but sure enough, after we crossed from Austria into Slovenia, the thieves were there at one of the stops in the middle of the night. However, nothing was stolen, probably due to our precautions.

I have never discovered anything better than c't. While it was arguably better 20 (and 40) years ago, it's stil very very good. If you don't speak german, you can still get their articles through an online subscription and feed them into the translation tool of your choice.

> That's the publication citation index.

That is a terrible system because it is easily gamed. A group of researchers get together, agreeing to cite (for no particular reason) a certain amount of papers from the other members, and they in turn will cite your paper, inflating everyone's citation index by a large number. H-index suffers from the same problem.

Google has turned SPF validation on.

Here's an example how this breaks forwarding:

Let's say I create an e-mail address (let's call it family@mydomain) that is forwarded to multiple people, and one of them has a gmail account, all mail sent from domains with a hard fail policy to this address will bounce.

The three people with an icloud address will get it (because icloud doesn't do SPF checks yet), but the fourth and fifth recipient with a gmail address will not get it, and the sender will receive two bounces.

If you run your own domain, and want to use multiple virtual aliases for it, but forward everything to a domain that does SPF checks, all mail from sender domains with a hard fail policy will bounce.

So yes, for mail delivery to fail, both the final receiver domain needs to do SPF validation, and the sender domain needs to have a hard fail policy, but there are enough of those to make mail forwarding useless.

Apparently there is a solution to this, at least if the forwarding server is running postfix, and that is to install postsrsd, but I haven't had time to implement and test that yet.

The hotfix was just to not allow any virtual addresses that forward to domains (like gmail) that do SPF checks. But that's also bad because I have no control over when a new target domain starts to implement them. Bottom line: SPF is making my life worse, not better. Apparently one of its main purposes is to help with backscatter from spam, but there are other ways to deal with that that don't require breaking forwarding.

SPF breaks e-mail forwarding, plain and simple. There's so many good reasons for e-mail forwarding, the decision to break it was mind bogginglingly stupid. Also, spammers have hundreds of ways to get around it (proven by how much spam that's still in our filters that passed SPF checks), so it's near to useless.

Please please please don't set SPF hard fail policies for your domains!

This.

To quote Susan Polgar: "When men lose against me, they always have a headache ... or things of that kind. I have never beaten a completely healthy man!"

Most chess players would love to see more women play chess, so we have to make sure they have the opportunity to do so without having to deal with so much bullshit.

Most male chess players behave appropriately, but a few assholes can be enough to ruin the game completely for many women.

You have no idea what the hikes around here are.

This is just 5miles from my house and it's on my todo list:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

This is a comparatively easy hike I've done multiple times, however, still, care needs to be taken:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2FlWGRR1a5TC8%3Ft...

Done this last year:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2F1SnkMSivwuk%3Ft...

This is all very easy for me from a technical point of view (I can climb 5.9 - 5.10), but definitely not mentally. And no amount of exposure so far has changed that much.