MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sersi | 2025-10-25 13:17:56+00:00
One factor that has been studied has having a major impact on quality especially in younger years is teacher to student ratio, the less student per teacher, the better the quality. It usually also helps with retention :). I do think that retention is a good element, when looking for my son's school, I read the reviews on Glassdoor and on https://www.internationalschoolsreview.com (paid site) to get a better idea of what teachers thought of the school.

If looking at Montessori, check for certifications. Are they AMI or AMS certified? Those are the two most serious qualifications. If they are not certified, then I think you should be sceptical. Not being certified doesn't mean that the school is necessarily bad but there's a lot of school that trade on Montessori just for marketing purposes and it doesn't bode well for the quality of education when the owner is willing to mislead parents by claiming they're Montessori when they don't try to become certified.

Within alternative schools, Regio Emilia can be good but, from my experience, it's even more dependent on the teacher since there's less structure and it falls on the teacher to take children's input and guide the class toward interesting discussion and group projects. My son went to a Regio Emilia pre-nursery (2 to 3 years old, 2 hours a day) and didn't like it as much as he likes his current Montessori kindergarten. He complains anytime there's a public holiday because he would like to go to school.

I recommend against Waldorf because even though they have some aspects that look good (nature, play based), the underlying philosophy is bat-shit crazy.

Resources if you're interested: - Montessori: The Science behind the Genius by Angeline S. Lillard. Rather academic discussion on the different elements of Montessori education and what studies and research supports it. It's interesting if you're interested in education. I do think that sometimes the author is a bit biased and tries to stretch the meaning of studies to fit her preconceived notion that everything Montessori related is the best thing since sliced bread. In particular, within Montessori there's a weird belief that fantasy elements (like stories with talking animals, etc) are not suitable for children below 6 because they can't reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality. It's something I personally disagree with and the studies that she tries to use to support that point are not really that convincing. - Cribsheet by Emily Oster has a chapter on picking pre-schools that can be useful (and I think applies well to Kindergarten). (I don't always agree with that writer but I do feel that she sometimes has useful points of view)
by drob518 | 2025-10-25 13:18:04+00:00
Indeed. The SaaS model allowed the software companies to have perfect control of their users. You might pay more and have unused accounts, but you’ll never pay less. It also was great for adoption because there was nothing to install. Salesforce was notorious for selling to penetrating an account by selling to individual sales people, then to sales teams, then sales departments, and only when everyone was already using it to the rest of the company and IT departments. The sales person could get started with a single account using a corporate credit card. Then, once hooked, there was value in getting a whole team onboard, etc. it was really brilliant.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-10-25 13:19:41+00:00
That's a bit unprofessional. The comment may be about a non-blocking issue. There is something wrong with the diff, and you should look into it.

Ignoring the comments is a tactic of a careless coworker. The diff may get merged and they can move on, sure. But come review time, they may find something else in their work environment is being rejected and removed.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-10-25 13:19:52+00:00
It’s a bitter monkey paw irony: when you ask FOSS advocates how developers would be paid in a fully FOSS world where piracy cannot exist because all software is free, the answer is often “service contracts.”

The monkey paw curls. Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.
by jdietrich | 2025-10-25 13:20:27+00:00
>no experiments have been able to prove danger

Which is strong evidence that the danger is very small, very rare, or takes a very long time to develop.

You don't need a large clinical trial to prove that being shot in the head is harmful; you do need a very large trial to detect that, say, a drug increases the risk of cardiovascular disease by 4% in a specific sub-population.
by m0dest | 2025-10-25 13:20:51+00:00
It looks like Mozilla does use DNS to verify requests to join the list, at least.

$ dig +short txt _psl.website.one @1.1.1.1 "https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/pull/2625"

Doing this DNS in the browser in real-time would be a performance challenge, though. PSL affects the scope of cookies (github.io is on the PSL, so a.github.io can't set a cookie that b.github.io can read). So the relevant PSL needs to be known before the first HTTP response comes back.
by crote | 2025-10-25 13:21:17+00:00
The problem is that companies are deliberately kneecapping their products by making cloud subscriptions mandatory and third-party repairs impossible. Refusing out-of-warranty repairs or discontinuing cloud services for obsolete products because it is no longer profitable wouldn't be such a big deal if third-party providers were able to replace OEM support.

Traditionally, if I buy a $500 dishwasher, the OEM is responsible for repairs under warranty. When the warranty lapses it'll still keep working perfectly fine, and if something breaks I can go to one of a dozen repair shops in my local area. Same if the manufacturer goes bankrupt: it'll keep working, and I can still get it repaired.

These days, if I buy a $500 tech product, it can turn into an expensive brick literally the next day, and there's nothing I could do about it. Even worse, it can happen because the OEM feels like it, not just because they went bankrupt! The fact that I own and possess the product has become completely meaningless, its fate is permanently in the hands of the manufacturer.

Somehow we've ended up with all the downsides of renting/leasing, and all the costs of purchasing. It'll only get worse unless we start punishing companies for behaving like this.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-10-25 13:22:41+00:00
In my humble opinion, great software, and the ideal to work on is unachievable, because it is great software built in house to solve the house problems, not anybody else's problems, sure you can start with a solid base, but in the end every organisation and every department inside this organisation has their own requirements.

Of course we can't pretend that each business, or government institution is going to be able to have a handful of full stacks around just to keep up with the business requirements, but in reality, if that was the case, thing would operate much more smoothly.

Software for the masses is another category completely separate from anything that is going to help you achieve more at work, social media is an example and I think AI to a large extent is the same, since a generic gpt, one without knowledge of the past and present of your organisation, deeply ingrained in your culture will also fail to provide that particular set of knowledge that you can call invaluable for your use case.
by imiric | 2025-10-25 13:22:45+00:00
> Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.

I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice. For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.

So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place. Personal satisfaction from thinking they're helping others by providing code only? Building their personal portfolio or brand? For demonstration purposes? I honestly find it puzzling.

> Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become

And that's fine as well. No project will satisfy the use cases of everyone. The line has to be drawn at some point, and this should be made clear. Upstream code contributions often add additional maintenance burden to core developers, since the contributor will likely disappear once their code is merged. Forking is always an option when visions don't align. I get all that.

But it's one thing to have a clear focus for the project, and another to make it completely closed to contributions. Or to have this confusing in-between state where you have a website to promote the project, provide user documentation and places for community discussion, but then alienate your users by being hostile, not open to feedback, etc. It sends mixed signals to anyone interested in the project and willing to give their time and energy to improve it.

This is why I strongly believe that OSS only works when there is an environment of mutual good will, respect, and collaboration that allows a community to thrive. This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses because it doesn't need to be. It should be common sense that the alternatives lead to everything OSS is opposed to: less freedoms for users, and proprietary software that benefits only a select few.
by blfr | 2025-10-25 13:23:15+00:00
A good enough solution on par with the competition is exactly the right choice for a business 95+% of the time though. Your company probably shouldn't compete on email/calendar/vpn/filesharing/OS/spreadsheets/CRM/reporting... all of these are great as SaaS.

And Google Workspace is a vastly superior solution to its predecessor offline or semi-online office suites, allows live collaboration and works across devices. Hubspot has a real, usable mobile app. Even Power BI is a step up from whatever pile of excels used to pass as reporting.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-25 13:23:27+00:00
I didn’t grow up with SMS or internet video but I have no trouble understanding the idea of SMS scams and fake videos. This is not akin to a foreign language. People who grew up with movies or television are deeply familiar with the idea that things you see in moving pictures may not be real. People who grew up with mail and telephones are familiar with the concept of unseen people trying to trick you to steal your money. It’s not hard to apply these same concepts when the video and text is on a handheld device rather than a box in front of the couch or paper in an envelope.

The ones I know who fall for this stuff the most have always been gullible. They were getting taken by cell phone tower investment scams and anti-vac hoaxes decades ago and the only real change is the medium.
by em-bee | 2025-10-25 13:23:46+00:00
that anecdote leads to the same conclusion

not quite. your claim was that with a bad situation at home, school does not make a difference. while i understand the opposite. the worse the situation at home, the more of a difference school makes for them.

i see it like this:

good home + good school = good outcome good home + no school = good outcome bad home + good school = ok outcome bad home + no school = bad outcome

so for a good home school does not matter. for a bad home it does. (i am ignoring bad schools, they probably make things worse in either case)
by al_borland | 2025-10-25 13:24:11+00:00
This sounds very plausible. If I had to make a list of ways to identify a child, not yet having a cell phone would likely be on that list. I think I’d assume older people without one would be those who have limited internet activity, or none at all.

I don’t like this assumption, but so many things these days assume a mobile phone, and even a smartphone, that it seems hard not to have one. I need one just to login to my laptop for work. On top of that, a significant number of businesses I need to interact with have automatically opted me in to 2FA using text messaging. QR code scanning is being required more and more, even just to go out to eat.
by sholladay | 2025-10-25 13:24:51+00:00
We had a heat pump installed last year. It’s advertised as a cold-climate heat pump and it’s “good enough” for us, but it’ll never again be toasty on a cold night, just relatively warm. When under heavy load, it also has some kind of loud vibration issue, I think in the lines that run from inside out to the condenser. The system is an Ecoer, which is a Chinese company that pretends to be a U.S. company. And it has a really suspicious 4G cellular IoT modem that, of course, feeds all the data to their cloud, with no end-user access.

I will say, it keeps the temperature very stable, which is nice. And it saves money, paying for itself within 10 years. But there’s actually quite a bit that can go wrong during installation and it’s not easy to get them to fix everything, maybe because U.S. installers aren’t used to all of the nuances of heat pumps yet. Our aux heat strips still aren’t working properly, after multiple service visits.

If I could do it over again, I would still get a heat pump. But I would go with a Mitsubishi system and a more experienced installer. The extra cost is worth it.
How are developers adopting API-First design in 2025?
by sainbux | 2025-10-25 13:25:13+00:00
I've been exploring the growing shift toward API-First development — where teams design, document, and agree on APIs before writing backend or frontend code.

This approach helps streamline collaboration between developers, reduce integration issues, and improve scalability — but I’ve noticed it’s still not universally adopted.

I recently wrote an article about this trend and some practical lessons for modern teams: API-First Development: An Introduction for Modern Developers

I’d love to hear how others are approaching API-First workflows in 2025:

Are you designing APIs before implementation?

Which tools or standards (like OpenAPI, Postman, or Stoplight) are helping your teams?

What challenges or trade-offs have you faced?
by gethly | 2025-10-25 13:25:21+00:00
I would not say SaaS is a problem in itself(I built and run one myself). Software as a Service simply means that you can run an application on a remote machine, which you do not have to manage yourself and can pay only for what you need. That makes perfect financial sense.

The problem with SaaS today is that the subscription-based model is getting out of hand - the value proposition no longer makes sense, in many cases.

And secondly, vendor lock-in. You cannot get your data out. Or if you can, you will be less likely able to migrate to another provider or local application which means there is no free market where various providers can compete with better features, customer support, availability or price. Therefore, in the end the provider will hold you hostage via your own data. This is, after all, Amazon AWS's famous moat. It is often very expensive and painful to migrate into some in-house solution. And often it is simply not possible at all as it might require such a massive rewrites of your own application(understand as dependency on the provider), that it is not in the realm of possibility.

So with like everything else, you are responsible for your own choices and if you make a bad judgement, like tying yourself to one provider, that is all on you.

People keep yapping about monopolies in tech, yet they vehemently dislike decentralisation or taking care of their own stuff and want to have all the things on one place. But when things do not work out as they wanted, then these monopolies become a problem that is too late to mitigate.

tl;dr do not use SaaS of mission-critical functionality and you'll be fine.
Show HN: I made prompts creation an easy process with ArtisMind
by SebastianRoot | 2025-10-25 13:26:32+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a new solopreneur, and this is one of my first public launches.

While building AI products, I kept running into the same issue - spending endless hours crafting prompts, fixing broken outputs, and worrying about security. I realized that writing prompts manually wasn’t scalable or safe.

So I built ArtisMind - a tool that helps you engineer prompts, not just write them. It generates clear requirements, builds structured prompts using multiple AI models, tests them for quality and security, and even lets you add context files for better accuracy.

Now I use it daily for my projects, and it’s saving me tons of time and frustration.

It started as a small fix for my own pain - but I hope it helps others too.

Would love your feedback, Sebastian
by thinkcontext | 2025-10-25 13:29:27+00:00
> For African startups like EqualyzAI, DeepSeek is “orders of magnitude” cheaper than competitors, Adekanmbi said. DeepSeek Chat, for instance, charges 27 cents to process one million tokens of query sent and $1.10 for every million tokens it generates in response. OpenAI’s GPT-4o charges $5 to process the same amount of tokens of query sent and $15 to produce the same amount of tokens in response. If EqualyzAI used GPT-4o, the startup would pay about $12,500 a month to train a small-language model for an e-learning platform, as opposed to the roughly $2,700 per month it now pays DeepSeek for the same task.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-25 13:29:43+00:00
>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.

Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.

Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).

It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
by em-bee | 2025-10-25 13:29:59+00:00
rather it wasn't montessori period. as it has been mentioned multiple times, the name montessori is not protected. anyone can claim to be a montessori teacher even if they didn't get any training. my wife went through AMI training. i have observed it at times. it is rigorous. and i have observed classes with trained teachers. the difference is noticeable

what i am saying is more like: if you didn't learn math in school you didn't have a good teacher. because no good teacher would fail at teaching you math. that's the very definition of what a good teacher is, and it is the definition of what good montessori is. the no true scotsman fallacy does not apply here.

if the expected outcome is not achieved, they were not doing it right.
by fadvibe | 2025-10-25 13:31:27+00:00
I’ll be glad when this brief interlude of “OMG AWS go down! We stupid? Cloud bad?” posts are over and we go back to normalcy.

Yes, we never needed the cloud. We could’ve kept the servers onsite or in data centers like we used to and pay much less to do much more. I worked in a startup that had hundreds of servers, and that was enough, and that served phones from cellular customers and mobile devices from some major cellular companies and media companies. Not many IT staff were needed for that and as devs we never had to think of how it was hosted, even though I did from my former experience.

Now, when I develop, I have to have at least a basic understanding of AWS since our production code is built and hosted there.

We have so many risks now. We can’t even use a package manager without worrying about secrets being stolen. We give away our secrets and code to an LLM that knows our intellectual property before we do, because it’s creating it.

Development has been an increasing dystopia from the beginning.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Silo, but if you have look at the monochrome graphical fileserver-ish UX that they use in the first season. I love that. I wish our shit were like that.

But no. Instead we keep developing features no one asked for requiring new expensive equipment. Our aging parents can’t even operate a TV because instead of an on/off switch with volume and channel buttons, it’s either a complex UI or a cable box/TV combo with input selection- what is HDMI 1? They don’t know.
by lor_louis | 2025-10-25 13:31:27+00:00
Handling text is a minefield. UTF-8 is great but when you get into graphemes, there's basically no way to handle them properly unless you write some code to generate graphene recognition based off the spec which is rather large and continuously updated.

Same for font rendering, there is a reason why harfbuzz is used everywhere. Getting an 80% working renderer is easy but the remaining 20% can take years.

It really "handling text correctly"should be a masters, and I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
by aflag | 2025-10-25 13:31:30+00:00
It's hard to pin point what creativity is. But in your example, the more creative thing was really coming up with the scenario of pigeons selling balconies as real state. What followed was just applying usual tropes for that sort of joke on the subject matter. I feel like LLMs are not very good at coming up with something novel. I'm not even sure they are capable of that. It's not as if coming up with something novel is easy for humans either.
by afavour | 2025-10-25 13:31:32+00:00
I think that kind of criticism is a reaction to the lack of critical examination of the industry standards.

I don’t think React is straight up bad by any means but I do think it is chosen unthinkingly in scenarios where it isn’t necessary. And what of Preact? It’s a 3kb library (compared to > 100KB for React) and is a drop in replacement for probably over 90% of React sites. That wastefulness speaks to an inattention to detail.

I see articles like this as a provocation to pay more attention rather than a serious proposal.
by necovek | 2025-10-25 13:32:09+00:00
We are getting philosophical, but I wouldn't say the "world is wrong": the world simply is.

Yes, people engage on a topic they have spent few thoughts on. But let's be honest, many who have spent many thoughts on something do not really come up with some genuinely interesting insight either. Thus I have doubts that humans as a whole can "re-learn context", and even those who can, will usually not invest enough in the topic the other side might care about.

I applaud you for your desire to "fix the world", but over time, I've learned to accept it for what it is, and I don't feel the same annoyance you seem to when I am being misunderstood even when I state things plainly (I am mostly — I admit — smugly amused, except when it's the person who can directly affect my life).

Anyway, as long as you are not overly frustrated, keep doing what you are doing (which sounds like building great free software for de-clouding robot vacuums), and fighting the fights that matter to you!
by m0llusk | 2025-10-25 13:32:59+00:00
There are some subtleties here. One of my friends and I are both interested in camping and outdoor gear. This keeps causing YouTube to recommend videos on prepping and guns. Go ahead and block channels and select less of this and it sort of works for a while But then it comes back with more. There are lots of prepping and guns channels. Maybe a pepper who talks about gardens gets highlighted or a gun thing that has a manufacturing complication or business hook comes up. There are many such channels, lots of content, and the connections are very strong, at least with YouTube recommendations.