MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aorist | 2025-07-16 22:58:47+00:00
This study can't see past its own midwit view that there is an objective “detailed, literal” reading that necessarily produces the same interpretation of the text that the authors have.

The students in the study are responding in a rational way to the way HS English is taught: the pretense is that you're deriving meaning/themes/symbolism from the text, but these interpretations are often totally made-up[^0] to the extent that authors can't answer the standardized tests about their own work[^1]. The real task is then to flatter the teacher/professor/test-setter's preconceptions about the work — and if the goal is to guess some external source's perspective, why shouldn't that external source be SparkNotes?

This ambivalent literalism is evident in the paper itself: - one student is criticized for "imagin[ing] dinosaurs lumbering around London", because the authors think this language is obviously "figurative". But it's totally plausible that Dickens was a notch more literal than only describing the mud as prehistoric! In the mid-1850s the first descriptions and statues of dinosaurs were being produced, there was a common theory that prehistoric lizards were as developed as present mammals, so maybe he's referring to (or making fun of) that idea? - the authors criticize readers for relying on SparkNotes instead of looking up individual words in the dictionary. But "Chancery" has ~8 definitions, only one of which is about a court and "advocate" has ~4. Is it more competent to guess which of those 32 combinations is correct, or to look up the meaning of the whole passage instead? There's whole texts dedicated to explaining other texts, especially old ones — does pulling from those make you a bad reader? - they say that a student only locates the fog vaguely rather than seeing that "it moves throughout the shipyards". That's not in the text though: the fog is only described as moving laterally in two of the locations, and never between different parts of the yard. Maybe the fog is instead being generated in each ship and by each person, as is the confusion in the High Court of Chancery? (More pedantically still: are all these boats just being built? If not, wouldn't they be at docks or wharfs rather than shipyards?)

I think the underlying implicit belief is that there is always one correct interpretation of the text, at one exactly correct level of literalness, derivable from only the text itself. But by the points students are in college they will have been continuously rebuffed for attempting literal interpretations that don't produce the required result, and unsurprisingly they end up unsure which parts of understanding are mechanical and which are imaginative.

[^0] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-... [^1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...
by jlack | 2025-07-16 22:59:29+00:00
At my company, we have increasingly been experiencing interns reneging on their offers. Students will accept multiple offers and then bail on the one they don't want last minute which prevents us from replacing them with someone else. We bring in hundreds of interns every summer and the reneg rate is approaching 20%. It sucks because it prevents people from getting an internship(and us getting the intern).
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-07-16 22:59:59+00:00
I would be surprised if you got in trouble for occasionally calling emergency services to clearly communicate you were testing if it works. During normal operations they should have extra capacity and they presumably also would like you to be confident you can reach emergency services in an emergency.

EDIT: I should specify a great way to be sure this is okay is call the non-emergency number for your local law enforcement and ask them if you can place a test emergency call. In a lot of cases, you will end up speaking to the same people who answer emergency calls, and they can tell you if now would be a good time or not.
by legitster | 2025-07-16 23:00:21+00:00
The irony is that a significant proportion of the sugar in "old" Coke in the US was not actually cane sugar, but from sugar beets.

But the obsession over types of sugar is largely ephemeral. All sugars are highly processed and refined and equally bad. HFCS's only crime is it's cheapness and ubiquity.

Funnily enough, for interesting chemistry reasons, it doesn't matter which type of sugar you put in, it all breaks down into glucose and fructose anyway! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo
by deepsun | 2025-07-16 23:00:26+00:00
Hey, you forgot useless comments for each method:

get_field1(self) -> int: """ Gets Field1. @rtype: int @return: the field1 """ self._field1

And use double underscores for private fields, because, you know, encapsulation.

Seriously though, in Java you don't need get*() either. Typically you either:

1. use `record` types (since Java14, 2020), or

2. use Lombok that auto-generates them [1], or

3. use Kotlin `data class`, or

4. just raw field access. I don't buy the encapsulation thing if my code is not a library for wide internet to use.

[1] https://projectlombok.org/features/GetterSetter
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-16 23:00:39+00:00
I don't think a construction companies bank account cares about whether money is going to the time component or the physical act of going to city hall to apply.

Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-07-16 23:00:58+00:00
There’s generally a vast chasm between the expertise companies think they need, and what they actually utilise.

The problem is this expertise is what they evaluate at interview, and so if you want to remain marketable you need to keep up.

Maintaining and expanding that expertise then falls to you as a recreational project for your personal time, because you’ll get to a point where your day job teaches you nothing new.
by Kynsofficial | 2025-07-16 23:00:59+00:00
EchoVaults is an offline-first, encrypted legacy vault that stores your final wishes, messages, and important information — accessible only in case of death, disappearance, or emergency. It doesn’t rely on servers, cloud, or biometrics. It runs 100% on-device, with zero internet exposure, and uses AES-256-GCM with PBKDF2 encryption. Once set up, no account is needed, and it operates without any background activity or data collection.
by theendisney | 2025-07-16 23:01:51+00:00
I want a thick clunky device without a screen that can run for 4-7 days without charging. Then i want 1) a normal size device, 2) a tiny one and 3) a tablet. These should be terminals, little more than a screen, a battery and some radio to communicate with the herefore mentioned brick that does all of the heavy lifting. It needs only 20-30 meter range. The brick may also feature a webserver captive portal with public bluetooth and wifi access.
by alexjplant | 2025-07-16 23:01:54+00:00
> Too little too late to be the #1 language of choice for serious server-side software that it is today?

I was replying to

> Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python,

not to mention that there are an awful lot of qualifiers in your statement. There are certainly plenty of Java jobs to be had but all the usual suspects like PYPL, TIOBE, SO (disregarding the old adage about damn lies and statistics) put Python squarely above Java in terms of popularity.

This is all to say that if I got conked on the head and lost all of my programming knowledge and had to make a living I'd restart with Python. This isn't a value judgment - the JVM and Python ecosystem are on roughly equal footing in my mind. It's just how things are.
by citizenpaul | 2025-07-16 23:01:58+00:00
A lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload.

Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
by lispisok | 2025-07-16 23:02:32+00:00
When I was in school in the early 2010s I was working in a professor's lab and overheard conversations that the administration was telling profs/TAs to pass kids who profs/TA's thought should have failed. I've since seen the required coursework to graduate become less rigorous. There were students I worked with personally I graduated with who were very bad. I'm sure there still great students who care about learning but I cannot imagine how bad the average student is with ChatGPT being able to do student's assignments.
by linguae | 2025-07-16 23:02:53+00:00
I teach computer science at a community college in Silicon Valley. Even before generative AI became available to the general public, cheating has been an issue with CS programming assignments.

One way I try to disincentivize cheating on projects is by having in-class paper exams, including weekly quizzes, as well as in-class paper assignments, and making sure that these in-class assessments are weighted significantly (roughly 60% of the overall grade). No electronic devices are allowed for these assignments. This forces my students to be able to write code without being able look up things online or consult an AI tool.

I still assign take-home programming projects that take 1-2 weeks to complete; students submit compilable source code. Practical hands-on programming experience is still vital, and even though cheating is possible, the vast majority of my students want to learn and are honest.

Still, for in-person assessments, if I had the budget, I’d prefer to hand out laptops with no Internet connection and a spartan selection of software, just a text editor and the relevant compiler/interpreter. It would making grading in-class submissions easier. But since we don’t have this budget, in-class exams and exercises are the next best solution I could think of.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-16 23:03:09+00:00
It's the same reason he's against EVs, against wind, against solar, against power-efficient lighting, against improved shower heads and toilets:

To claim power. To reject the world and assert oneself. To deny change. To soak attention with negative energy, to hide from the actual things a president should or could be doing that would be at all worthy of their time. To keep people mad and riled up, following after what Ivanka reported in 1990, that he kept Hitler speeches by his bed, admired him (his ability to rile people up & thus be manipulable). The praxis of the dark side is to be ongoingly aggresive, to always bring out the worst in people. This is just another swing at that.
by bruce511 | 2025-07-16 23:03:24+00:00
I'm so old I remember when calculators started appearing in general people's hands. Schools first banned them (what da ya mean you can't add a column of numbers by eye?) But gradually we switched over. We had a flirting interaction with log tables, and never did get to use a slide rule. I've no doubt old-school businesses were aghast at our ineptitude.

I'm so old we learned to program with giant C reference books. There was no internet, much less Google. We didn't have no fancy auto-complete, crumbs a text editor was considered advanced. Them youngsters coming to us couldn't program without Googling syntax, or using an IDE.

So yeah, sure, AI is changing the game. It's hard to evaluate students because the tools they are using are different to our experience. For decades we "make them code" as a measure of ability. In 3 years (their college experience) the toolset has changed.

Good students, good employees, are those who understand the problem and can adapt to a solution. AI is a tool that can be wielded well, or badly. Our approach to hiring will need to adapt as well. But good people are still out there, and good people make good workers.

To be honest I never was much in love with the leet code measure of hiring. Past a certain coding skill level I was more interested in the person than their ability to memorize an algorithm. Today that necessary skill level is lower, or at least harder to evaluate, but the problem-solving-mind is still the thing we're looking for.

So be careful of seeing the use of new tools as a weakness. The history of the world is littered with obsolete technologies. (Here's a sextant, where are we?) Rather see people who use tools for what they are, tools. Look for people who are curious, who see patterns, who get things done.

And to students I say, mastery of tools is a necessary step, but ultimately an uninteresting one. See beyond them. Be curious. Look under the hood. Ask questions like "is this code good enough to be running 30 years from now?" Because a huge amount of what you see now has foundations in code written a long time ago, and written well enough to stand for decades.

College is not "learning to program". College is learning how to adapt to an ever changing world, that will require your adapting many times over your career.
by bruhbruhroblox | 2025-07-16 23:03:26+00:00
Here's a pretty cool, feature-rich app for managing your Mac's clipboard. It's new, and I haven't used for long, but it seems pretty cool

Not Show HN because this isn't an app I created. I just happened across the post launching the app on Reddit, and the app looked good.

The developer also seems like a really nice guy. He gave me a discount code, and you can also get one by DMing him.

[Original Reddit Post](https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1m1gt72/comment/n3...)
by AI_beffr | 2025-07-16 23:03:27+00:00
exactly correct. millennials decided to sleepwalk forward and ignore reality. millennials are not out there solving societal problems even today. millennials also benefit from being raised in one of the most prosperous and nurturing environments that has ever existed. the only thing millennials ever did was spawn AI in a completely irresponsible and regrettable way. now our kids have to grow up not even knowing whether or not they will make it.
by system2 | 2025-07-16 23:03:57+00:00
There is Unihertz, but their 5G model is crap. They also don't update their OS.

I believe the big manufacturers don't want to make a small phone (as other users have indicated) because of the big screen's addictiveness. Also, they can't fit a large battery in them so battery life would be a few hours with 1000mp 16k cameras.

I'd rather carry a 1" thick, 4" tall phone than a 0.3" thick 8" tall phone. No pants pockets look normal anymore, and it is even more awkward to walk with tight pants.
by thijson | 2025-07-16 23:04:17+00:00
I remember the airplane tail had the number 386, or 486. It was difficult to get a seat, but it was based on first come first serve, so you just had to be diligent on the booking web site.

Coming out of San Jose, the plane would enter this corkscrew to gain altitude. I guess to avoid SFO airspace.

I would often see high level executives on the same plane.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-07-16 23:04:30+00:00
First a caveat - I’m not a manager. I am at the top of the tech tree in a large org, which carries with it “leadership responsibilities”. I’ve also worn many hats over the years in various employment, so I know a thing or two about management.

I think you are generally wrong. Yes, ‘manager’ carries with it a certain amount of administrative and organisational responsibilities, not to mention the important ‘soft skills’ with conflict resolution and the like. But to deny or minimise the value of providing leadership is to miss the forest for the trees. The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense. They are the cool, rational, respected hands that provide guidance, break ties in debates and help drive the team/s forward. They are required to think strategically at times, and are certainly invaluable tactically.

We are all accountable to someone, all the way up to the CEO (who is accountable to the board). To diminish the role and contribution of managers at the bottom of the management stack is to be wilfully ignorant of the value they are providing.
by groby_b | 2025-07-16 23:05:02+00:00
If you are professionally responsible for infrastructure, and you haven't thought very hard about the "how do we rebuild from scratch" case, you're committing professional malpractice.

The problem is environments like hospitals, who'll "cost center" their IT department to death, where even the most seasoned pro has no chance to ever do the right thing. There should be liability at the board level. There never will.
by overfeed | 2025-07-16 23:05:12+00:00
> it feels like one of those creeping issues that might seem small at first but deters important activity

Charles Dickens was writing about pickpocketing in London in 1837 - it's not "creeping" but something close to a tradition.

> Why isn't there a bigger crackdown on such petty crime?

When have crackdowns ever worked in an area where the have-nots get to interact with the haves daily?

If I had to choose a way to lose my belongings, a pickpocket is a safer bet compared to getting robbed at knife- or gun-point
by jonah-archive | 2025-07-16 23:05:47+00:00
Huh, I was just thinking about something sort of like this after camping with some friends and our kids this weekend -- we brought FRS walkie-talkies for all of them (cannot recommend this enough!) and on the drive home my four-year-old was asking if he could call his friends on the radio -- rather than getting him a Technician's I was thinking about finding or making some push-to-talk cell/wifi devices for them. It seems like a few of these things exist but they're marketed toward the enterprise (in at least some cases, with a family-style product unfortunately but unsurprisingly being discontinued: https://relaypro.com/families/ ), but it doesn't seem like it would be a hard build aside from making a durable/kid-friendly enclosure for it.
by pclowes | 2025-07-16 23:06:01+00:00
I just don't see the value add anymore and the company appears to have lost its product vision and the design sensibilities are slipping. Apple is controlled by a geriatric board and a logistics expert and it shows.

I feel I am more frequently encountering software bugs, vaporware,(dESiGnEd fOr ApPle InTelLiGeNce), and ridiculous "innovation" (genmoji). I feel the hardware advances are not very relevant to me, I don't need VR or augmented reality. I want a computer to get out of my way and solve problems for me so I can spend time in plain old reality. The hardware upgrades I DO care about are ridiculously overpriced (Ram upgrades are abusively expensive).

While I prefer my computer to be a tool to get a job done and don't want the computer itself to be a hobby. I also do not want to be forced to use AI. I also dislike the rent seeking and toolbooth behavior of iMessage and the App store. Now that linux has more paved paths, things increasingly "just work" and hardware has basically caught up I don't see a good reason to support Apple's non-vision with my money.
by krater23 | 2025-07-16 23:06:29+00:00
I want it too. And I have it: https://www.unihertz.com/en-de/products/jelly-star

I have it since more than a year. I had the first one two weeks because I lost it as it fall through a hole in my pocket. So fix your pockets and buy this phone. I'm really happy with it :) And didn't found bugs since I have it.
by eszed | 2025-07-16 23:06:44+00:00
I've set up voip instances, and not liked it, but would be willing to do it again for my kid. I'd not be willing to set them up (and be tech support!) for all of his friends' families. That's the value proposition here, for me.

We've got a group of parents around us who'd likewise like to delay their kids' smartphone access for as long as possible - but if a smartphone (or even a dumbphone with no meaningful parental controls) is the only way for kiddo to make calls, then I know some of them will defect. Selling them all on this kit (or something like it) would keep the agreement intact for a while longer.
Why Every Founder Struggles to Find Their Audience Online (Until They Try This)
by Taikhoom10 | 2025-07-16 23:07:15+00:00
Hey HN, Recently I have been flying with the amount of traction I have got for my early stage startup mvp. (Worked at a couple early stage ventures previously) But it wasn't always like this. Outreach is pretty painful if you don't know what your doing. In previous ventures I didn't even look in the right place. And cold outreach conversion rates speak for them self. Once you identify your TA you have to find where they are so you can reach out. Manually doing so, was a pain. Took time, and honestly I wasn't very good at it. So I thought let me head over to Chatgpt. Maybe it can help. And then I was welcomed to Hallucination hell. Sometimes it would just give me fake communities plainly. So I realized this wasn't reliable. So how did I get my traction up if I wasn't able to even figure where my TA hangs out online. I built a solution to my own problem. Soya a platform where founders find where there target audience hangs out online. It gives you a clear list of communities and outreach strategies community specific that are actionable. Not a generic load of advice from Chatgpt. So check Soya out here : https://soya-platform.vercel.app/ And feel free to drop any feedback.
by redserk | 2025-07-16 23:09:24+00:00
Our entire profession is “how can we make thing difficult enough to not be used incorrectly”

That applies from user experience: “how do I get user to click button”, to security “how do I lock things down enough to prevent most attacks I can think of”, to hardware design: “how do I ensure the chipset won’t melt down under really stupid software conditions”

Starting with the low hanging fruit isn’t always the worst option. Sometimes it’s enough to dissuade people to give up.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-07-16 23:09:38+00:00
The opinion I got from Louis's content is that in a sense he is right, but also almost every brand is even worse. Apple does pretty much nothing to help 3rd party repair and sometimes actively impeeds it, but most other tech products do that while also not even having 1st party repair options.

I remember when Samsung had removable batteries, I went in to a Samsung store to buy a replacement for my S5 battery and they told me they didn't sell them, only new phones. Meanwhile I can take my iPhone in to any Apple store and they will replace the battery for me.

So yeah Apple does need to be forced to massively improve their practices but so does pretty much the entire tech industry aside from a few small projects that focus on being repairable.