Hacker News: andmikey

New comment by andmikey in "Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK"

andmikey — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 06:43:29 +0000

As in, having observed the UG experience at Edinburgh first-hand but at Cambridge only second-hand. Whereas the GP did the reverse.

New comment by andmikey in "Oxford loses top 3 university ranking in the UK"

andmikey — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 18:46:41 +0000

This was also my observation but in the reverse direction. I turned down a place at Cambridge to do my undergrad at Edinburgh a few years ago (for various reasons, not relevant here). It was only the top n% of students in the cohort who'd turn up for tutorials (prepared, or indeed at all), do assignments without cheating, ask questions in lectures, etc. Getting high grades in exams was mostly a memorization game. There was a really high workload but that was more due to busywork than intellectual challenge.

New comment by andmikey in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

andmikey — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:54:11 +0000

Some counties in England still have state grammar schools and still follow the 11+ process. The 163 that the poster above you is referring to are state, selective, schools, rather than private grammar schools. There's a list linked in the Wikipedia page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...

New comment by andmikey in "Former Meta staffer reveals she had to ‘fight for work’"

andmikey — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 21:40:38 +0000

My first job out of college was like this. My manager knew I had no work and had no particular interest in letting me take on anything I proposed or found. I ended up quitting a few months in because (on top of a few other issues) I found it way too soul-destroying to have nothing to do.

New comment by andmikey in "Ask HN: Laid off employees, did the company ask you to return equipment?"

andmikey — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 06:42:05 +0000

Same situation for me (albeit left the job at the end of the contract, not laid off). I’ve had the laptop for over a year now because IT refused to pay return shipping. I’ve followed up a few times and been told it’ll be sorted, but never hear back…

New comment by andmikey in "Goodbye, data science"

andmikey — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 21:30:22 +0000

Yeah, I wish I'd had "free time" in college. 60-70 hour work weeks were normal - 20 hours a week in class and then a full-time load of courseworks / readings / labs etc. I couldn't afford to take time off on weekends for the first 3.5 years. It was horrendous.

Once I started full-time work it was like a revelation - finally I don't have to work on evenings and weekends! I actually get free time to myself! I can have hobbies!

New comment by andmikey in "Ask HN: Better way to create Anki cards?"

andmikey — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 15:42:43 +0000

I've put them in a Gist for you: https://gist.github.com/andmikey/4da65e0085104e514286678c431.... The script I run is wiktionary_scraper.py, it assumes you've got a vocab_main.xlsx that contains a "lookup" sheet with the first column being all the words you want to look up. Definitions and related words are put into a new file, vocab_defns.xlsx.

I will warn you - it's not very clean code and mostly based on scripts I'd found on GitHub. It's something I threw together over a summer because I needed to learn a lot of Swedish words very quickly, and my usual Anki-adding methods were too slow. Worked out well, but I do keep meaning to come back to it and make it a proper bit of software...

New comment by andmikey in "Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall"

andmikey — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:32:45 +0000

Yeah, it's something I can time myself: I'm on about 6 years of daily usage at this point so it comes very easily. Anki also lets you set a time-out on cards as well. I'll know just from looking at the front of the card whether or not I know the word. If I do, space then 'good'; if I don't, space then 'again'. Very rarely I'll know a card but only after a longer moment to think about it - that's a 'hard' card.

New comment by andmikey in "Ask HN: Better way to create Anki cards?"

andmikey — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:31:22 +0000

CSV import (from Excel / Google Sheets) is my go-to for this as well. Added bonus is being able to script things - I have some Python scripts that will do a lot of the hard work for me when making cards for a new language (looking up definitions and example sentences from Wiktionary, adding synonyms / antonyms, etc).

New comment by andmikey in "Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall"

andmikey — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 09:22:20 +0000

One way you can achieve this using SRS is forcing very short recall times. I average under 2 seconds a card in review: my view is that if I can't recall it in under 2 seconds (what would be realistic in a real-life scenario when speaking a language) then I don't know it. It's a method that's trained me to be very fast at recalling words when needed.

New comment by andmikey in "Ask HN: Has any one successfully pivoted away from tech?"

andmikey — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 21:59:32 +0000

I’ve just graduated in Computer Science and I’m trying this pivot as well, but without the b-school (yet). ~2 years of tech work experience during my degree and I realised tech just doesn’t work for me right now. Starting in a much more generalist business role soon where it’s really helpful to have tech knowledge. Glad to know it’s worked out for you :)

New comment by andmikey in "Grade Inflation: Over 82% of Harvard '22 Graduating With Over a 3.7 (A-) GPA"

andmikey — Fri, 27 May 2022 19:34:12 +0000

UK unis are a lot better at using the full grading scale, in my experience. 70% gets you a 'first class' [0], but there's a lot of room in the 70-100 range to differentiate performance. It was a nice system because there's almost always space for able students to really push the boundary. The idea is that getting >80% is for students doing really exceptional / original work.

[0] A "1st" (A) is between 70-100%, "2:1" (B) is 60-69%, "2:2" (C) is 50-59%, and "3rd" (D, lowest passing grade) is 40-49%. UK degrees are awarded one final grade at the end, rather than a GPA, usually based on your last two years of study only.

New comment by andmikey in "Hacking attractiveness biases in hiring? The role of beautifying photo-filters"

andmikey — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 21:39:37 +0000

Not sure how long ago this was - photos on resumes is definitely not a thing in the UK anymore. Very common in some European countries (e.g. Germany), though.

New comment by andmikey in "Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?"

andmikey — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 10:13:17 +0000

For my Thinkpad (Thinkpad 13, I think it's called L-series now) installing Ubuntu was no trouble at all - set up a bootable USB, install, and done. Ubuntu actually runs much better than Windows!

New comment by andmikey in "People Keeping BlackBerry Alive"

andmikey — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 08:04:23 +0000

Government apps no - both require a 'modern' Android or iPhone.

Banking apps partially - I can't use the web browser on my phone (it doesn't support modern enough crypto) but I can use the web browser on my laptop. Mostly it's that I've not been able to try any of the online-only challenger banks ;)

New comment by andmikey in "People Keeping BlackBerry Alive"

andmikey — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 19:19:58 +0000

I've been using a Blackberry Passport since early 2019 - as a replacement for the "dumb" phone I used for many years. I love it! The build quality is fantastic. The keyboard is a beauty to type on. The camera is great quality. In terms of build it's my ideal phone. What I wouldn't give for an up-to-date version of this [edit: at an affordable price]!

Unfortunately the software limitations mean that I'm likely going to need to switch to a "modern" phone soon. Per the article you can't run Android apps beyond Android 4.3 and even those often don't work - means I can't use banking apps, or government apps (eg. Track&Trace or recently the EU Settled Status app), or Spotify, or most chat apps. Many websites don't work on it either.

New comment by andmikey in "Why did the A-level algorithm say no?"

andmikey — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 07:11:18 +0000

> They make offers expecting that the vast majority of them will be met, rather than over-offering and expecting A-level results to prune the numbers significantly.

Notable exception to this would be Cambridge maths, who over-offer significantly for Mathematics (last year: 541 offers, 253 acceptances). Quite a lot of people miss their STEP offer so colleges can choose on results day who to take based on STEP, UMS, interview, etc. Though STEP unlike A-Levels was sat this year, so they're still able to do that selection.

New comment by andmikey in "Using an old BlackBerry as a portable SSH or Telnet terminal"

andmikey — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 17:39:07 +0000

Huh. I'm in the UK and no problems... moving to Germany in a few weeks so we'll see if I have the same problem!

Such a lovely phone though. Now that I have it I can't imagine using anything else.

New comment by andmikey in "Using an old BlackBerry as a portable SSH or Telnet terminal"

andmikey — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 10:22:43 +0000

Interesting. I bought a Passport cheap last year to replace my old feature phone - works a treat, no problems with signal. I wonder if it's a US vs EU thing...?

New comment by andmikey in "Show HN: I made a minimalist spaced repetition tool"

andmikey — Sat, 25 Jul 2020 17:36:32 +0000

Basically everything described above is in Anki / AnkiWeb [0]:

- Pre-made decks of cards on a range of subjects available on the web ("shared decks").

- Cloud storage of cards (AnkiWeb).

- Syncing reviews between platforms (desktop app, phone, web).

[0] Full disclosure - I've used Anki daily for over 4 years now on ~30,000 cards, and I haven't tried any other tools.