MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Taek | 2025-10-24 21:35:02+00:00
Like anything, there are lower and higher quality implementations of Montessori programs. What you are saying here does not reflect the Montessori program I went through myself, and I think I can credit the Montessori program with a great deal of my later stage curiosity and drive to outperform.

I would say the same of the public high school that I attended. The attitude of the teachers and the other students was fantastic, and it really helped propel me forward in life, gave me a ton of lessons that I don't think most people were able to take from their own public high schools.

In both cases, my parents (Mom especially) were so incredibly stubborn about finding the best school for their kids. We literally moved the whole family to the town that had the best public school where my parents could afford a single family home. Love you Mom, thank you for caring, and to all other parents I would strongly advise against picking a school based on its philosophy. The quality of teacher matters much more than anything else.
by asdff | 2025-10-24 21:35:06+00:00
Theres also a lot of college prep going on with private schools. We had far higher college adviser to student ratios than any public school. They started working with you earlier than any public school. No grade inflation and college admissions knew that and knew the reputation of the highschool. Academically the schedule, courseload, workload, things like freedom to pick different electives, were all designed to mirror college.
by Lammy | 2025-10-24 21:35:09+00:00
> I am always surprised that rich text is the default.

It's because RTF support was an early headline feature for NeXTSTEP, and TextEdit was meant to be as much of an API demo for the NS/OPENSTEP/Cocoa† APIs as it was meant to be a usable application.

Peep the NeXT 0.9 release notes: https://vtda.org/docs/computing/NeXT/NeXT%200.9-1.0%20Releas...

“Built-in RTF Support: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a standard document interchange format specified by Microsoft Corp. In addition to opening and saving documents in its own internal format, the 0.9 version of WriteNow supports opening and saving documents in RTF format. Using this format, WriteNow on the NeXT Computer can exchange documents with Macintosh or IBM PC programs like WriteNow or Microsoft Word. RTF documents retain most of their font and formatting information.”

And the NeXTSTEP 3.0 programming book which goes on and on and on about the `Text` object and how good their RTF support is: https://simson.net/ref/1993/NeXTSTEP3.0.pdf#G16.44605

† https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
by ssuds | 2025-10-24 21:35:34+00:00
I just wrote a big thread yesterday responding to someone with similar concerns to yours (https://bsky.app/profile/shreyassudhakar.com/post/3m3w3nra2h...). Copying it here if it's helpful to other folks. FWIW, the challenges you are facing seem to be grounded in bad design and application, which happens more than it should and really sucks. We need to move the bar much higher for the contractors installing heat pumps. Here's what I wrote on that thread:

This is why contractor & homeowner education are so so so important to get this energy transition right! I always hate to see reviews like this from folks that have installed a heat pump.

It’s almost always a combo of poorly communicated expectations & installer issues.

A few thoughts…

1) “Air doesn’t come out hot” is a common complaint. It’s by design! You don’t need scalding hot air to have a comfortable space. If you’re targeting a 70 degree setpoint, even 80 degree air will get you there eventually. Heat pumps work best when you let them run - they soak the space with heat.

Your furniture, walls, floors all equalize in temp and radiate heat. A totally different form of comfort than standing in front of a vent that blows hot air at you for 5 minutes and then shuts off!

2) AC doesn’t reduce humidity as well. Unfortunately, this is a classic problem with oversized heat pumps. The key to dehumidification is runtime. A well sized system will run for longer, which will pull the humidity out of the space. If the system is too big, it’ll cycle on and off & not dehumidify.

Your contractor should be do load sizing calculations to determine the size of your heat pump, not using rules of thumb or matching the size of the existing equipment! The very best contractors use performance based load calcs, where they look at your past energy bills to size your new system.

3) Supplemental heat runs a lot - this SUCKS. Electric resistance heat is really expensive to run. It really should be something that comes on for emergencies, if ever. Definitely not regularly.

Many contractors set the temperature where the supplemental heat kicks on way too high. You could be running the heat pump (which is way more efficient) to a much lower temperature, but it’ll switch to expensive aux heat instead. Fortunately, the fix to this is simple - just a thermostat setting.

In other cases, they’ll install a cheaper mild climate heat pump in a truly cold climate. This might save money up front, but it’ll kill you in operating costs when you’re paying 4x as much as you could be in the middle of winter to heat your home. The lowest bid could cost you in the long run!

PS - this homeowner later chimed in that swapping the thermostat helped reduce their electricity bill roughly $30/month! A lot of heat pump issues actually boil down to a poorly configured system. Choosing the right contractor is probably the single most important decision you'll make when you get a heat pump installed.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-24 21:36:36+00:00
They don't need to enter a market. All they need to do is partner with a retailler like Amazon/eBay - or even just allow other retailers to resell them.

Okay so even if they don't want to do that, all they need to do is not go out of their way to block parcel forwarders. They can just make us click on an agreement that voids warranty and absolves them of any risk, that way, it's not their problem. But no, they don't do that.

Meanwhile, smaller Linux notebook companies like StarLabs have been around for less than a decade, yet have no issues supping worldwide. In fact no other tech manufacturer has this issue, at least not to this extremes - how is that only Framework is in this situation?
by kakacik | 2025-10-24 21:36:49+00:00
I don't think we can just go near speed of light. Even hard vacuum out there contains particles. Heliosphere is chock full of them, then Oort cloud has stuff way bigger than that (or any probe), even if sparsely spread out. Then there is cosmic stuff outside, as Voyager found out.

Getting hit by some random molecule when orbiting Earth or just travelling say 30,000 kmh is one thing. Getting hit by swarms of molecules with say 0.5c can be catastrophic to the material. Now imagine wading through some space dust cloud, or even plasma cloud (ie remnant of some bygone supernova).

Star trek had shields, and for good reasons. Super strong magnetic field may divert some charged particle, but helium molecule is just a helium molecule, no extra charge to play with.
by devjab | 2025-10-24 21:37:00+00:00
If it goes by WIFI and not the wired network it'll be rather of useless in every enterprise organisation I've ever worked in. I'm not sure I've even worked in a place where the WIFI wasn't a guest network. Don't get me wrong, I'd like the feature. I work in a fully flexible place, but part of that is setting your status to be "working from outside the office" when you're not there. If that could happen automatically that'd be great.
by tomovo | 2025-10-24 21:37:06+00:00
If you mean Kotlin Multiplatform, it works pretty well. Not easy to debug, the GC is a bit weaker than the Android implementation and optimized builds can get crazy slow as the app grows. The interface uses auto-generated ObjC headers which are very verbose. Native Swift API is in beta. Overall still worth it for a commercial app, I think.
by lassebn | 2025-10-24 21:37:10+00:00
Hey HN! I'm the author.

I use "transition snacks" with my kids every day - small rituals that help them switch between activities. A cookie, a hug, acknowledging that transitions are hard. It works remarkably well. But honestly it is mostly cookies and chips :D

I read Dave Anderson's article about procrastination [1] and thought: procrastination is just adults struggling with transitions! I really like his framework (acknowledge, examine feelings, mood boost, break down tasks, celebrate) and thought it would be fun to combine it with a virtual snack in the terminal.

So I built a CLI with two modes to help with task transitions and procrastination:

- Quick mode: Instant encouragement with ASCII art (like a quick cookie)

- Guide mode: Interactive 5-step process based on Anderson's framework

Vibe coded in Rust, works on Linux/macOS/Windows. The language is explicitly neurodivergent-friendly (executive dysfunction is real, not a character flaw).

The demo GIF shows it in action: https://github.com/lassebn/transition-snack/raw/master/demo....

I'd love feedback on wheter this is actually useful, or just cute?

[1] https://www.scarletink.com/p/ill-explain-how-i-defeated-proc...
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-24 21:37:37+00:00
There is no choice involved. You either pay Apple the required blood sacrifice or you lose access to more than half of all possible customers for your business.

This is like saying that every American can choose to trash their car and take public transit. It sounds like a choice, but the real world has consequences and in fact most Americans do not have the ability to eschew private transport. That is just simply not how the world works.
by gwd | 2025-10-24 21:37:56+00:00
> software stuck in the last century

OK, but suppose you have a piece of software you need to run, that's stuck in the last century, that you can't modify: maybe you lack the technical expertise, or maybe you don't even have access to the source code. Would you rather run it as root, or run it as a user that's a member of a group allowed to write to that directory?

The systemd maintainers (both upstream and Debian package maintainers) have a long history of wanting to ignore any use cases they find inconvenient.
by JCM9 | 2025-10-24 21:37:56+00:00
I get the optics issue, but companies that want to track this stuff have long had ways to do it. Simple badge taps on doors for example. For example, Amazon has automated reporting that monitors badging in and out of the office so they track what days you’re in and how long you’re in to make sure resources adhere to the RTO5 mandate. HR is alerted in someone doesn’t have enough time badged in.
by jumploops | 2025-10-24 21:39:00+00:00
I’ve long advocated that software engineers should read The Mythical Man-Month[0], but I believe it’s more important now than ever.

The last ~25 years or so have seen a drastic shift in how we build software, best trivialized by the shift from waterfall to agile.

With LLM-aided dev (Codex and Claude Code), I find myself going back to patterns that are closer to how we built software in the 70s/80s, than anything in my professional career (last ~15 years).

Some people are calling it “spec-driven development” but I find that title misleading.

Thinking about it as surgery is also misleading, though Fred Brooks’ analogy is still good.

For me, it feels like I’m finally able to spend time architecting the bridge/skyscraper/cathedral, without getting bogged down in terms of what bolts we’re using, where the steel come from, or which door hinges to use.

Those details matter, yes, but they’re the type of detail that I can delegate now; something that was far too expensive (and/or brittle) before.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
by pipes | 2025-10-24 21:39:03+00:00
I can't figure out what Microsoft's strategy is with the Rog ally X or whatever it's called. The branding is really confusing, even on just the devices. It gets even more confusing with Xbox on pc.

Are they planning on competing with steam and that's how they'll make money? I have a steam deck and I've zero interest in the Rog ally, windows 11 is bad enough on my work pc.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-10-24 21:41:12+00:00
All this push to electrify everything makes me nervous, as it effectively centralizes a lever that someone evil enough could use to coerce the general public in unsavory ways.

I'm doubly suspicious of areas that combine mass-electrification with reducing availability of the most reliable alternate source of electricity (i.e. generators). California in particular is pushing to make generators increasingly hard to obtain.
by Marshferm | 2025-10-24 21:41:21+00:00
If the brain only uses language like a sportscaster explaining post-hoc what the self and others are doing (experimental evidence 2003, empirical proof 2016), then what's special about brains is entirely separate from what language is or appears to be. It's not even like a ticker tape that records trades, it's like a disengaged, arbitrary set of sequences that have nothing to do with what we're doing (and thinking!).

Language is like a disembodied science-fiction narration.

Wegener's Illusion of Conscious Will

https://www.its.caltech.edu/~squartz/wegner2.pdf

Fedorenko's Language and Thought are Not The Same Thing

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/
by benchess | 2025-10-24 21:41:49+00:00
> - It's not possible to set screen time restrictions for Safari.

I thought this too. I discovered it actually is possible though, just doesn't appear in the list. Go "Screen Time" -> "App Limits" -> "Add Limit". In the "Choose Apps" dialog, you won't see Safari in the list. But you can type "Safari" in the search bar and it'll appear.

But I agree with the overall sentiment on this thread. iOS Parental Controls aren't where they need to be.
by jrflowers | 2025-10-24 21:41:50+00:00
You know people get bored right? A person doesn’t have to have delusions of grandeur to get bored of something.

Alternatively, if anything it could be the exact opposite of what you’re describing. Maybe he sees an ecosystem based on hype that provides little value compared to the cost and wants to distance himself from it, like the Keurig inventor.
by viraptor | 2025-10-24 21:42:02+00:00
If they're new models, the webcam issue is not Dell specific, but an Intel / ipu6 thing. It should be integrated into most systems by now though, even as an out of tree module. The rest should just work, especially on xps machines. Without specifying the models/issues, it's hard to take it as more than an anecdote.
by cardanome | 2025-10-24 21:42:14+00:00
> You have a right to observe people in public. You have a right to take notes about these people and publish them.

Not completely. If you keep staring at me, following me around and taking notes I am going to call the police even if you keep to public spaces.

While it is not illegal to stare at people I would strongly advice you to not do so. You will find that some people will react quite badly to it.

> You have a right to hire a person to sit in a public place and record their observations, and to publish these to your heart’s content.

No, you can't. They can write about the people they saw in general terms but once you publish information that directly identifies me and contains personal information about me, I am gonna sue you. Might vary depending on country though.

People are making such high level philosophical argument about why they should be allowed to photograph strangers but no one answers why. It is hard for me to come up with any non malicious reason. Sure, maybe you just like photography but then again photograph people that consent to it.

Not to mention even if you legally can, I doubt that running around photographing strangers will gain you any positive reputation. In practice you are well advised to ask for consent anyway.
by Doctor_Fegg | 2025-10-24 21:42:53+00:00
My favourite Mac app for over 20 years.

I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.

It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.

The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.

Thank you, whoever in Apple maintains TextEdit.
by znpy | 2025-10-24 21:43:20+00:00
> In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker’s location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you’re actually there or not.

I always despised Teams because it was a shitty chat app.

But now I despise it on an ideological level. So much so that I'm tempted to add something along the lines of "Do not invite me for interviews if your company (or your client's company, if you're a recruiter) uses Microsoft Teams for chat" to my LinkedIn profile.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-24 21:43:51+00:00
> Trump is proof you can shift the paradigm in less than a decade.

> I do believe it is possible to create alternative political beliefs and brands (e.g. MAGA) and fully co-opt an existing political party.

Co-opting is a rich man's business, and Trump is indeed a proof of it.

> Old people die. Vision can overpower nostalgia.

Again, that's their playbook too. It's going to be their vision, you can't outshout a bag of money when it comes to new and unproven ideas.

> opponents are stuck trying to take us back to "normal" instead of defining a new [paradigm].

Those opponents got at least that right, America should stick to being America, anything else will be a lot weaker and a lot more susceptible to attacks which are, as I already said, enabled by money we can't match.

I mean, the paradigm is here and well known, keeping the flies away from the honey is the tricky part.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-24 21:44:33+00:00
Well

Mitsubishi sells heat pumps that produce 14kw of heat output all the way down to 5f at a COP of 2.3.

Resistive heat has a COP of 1, by definition.

Do you know the size of your oil burner? It's likely over 20kw output.

It's not that pumping heat cannot work sufficiently at cold temperatures, it's that you are expecting the electric car rated 100 horsepower to go as fast as the gas car rated at 300 horsepower.

An oil burner sized to the same output as the heat pump also would not keep up.

If you installed two of those Mitsubishi heat pumps (which would require two independent 240v circuits), you would be at 28kw output and would not need resistive heat strips. These units also claim 75% rated capacity at -13f so that would be about 21kw of heat output even when very very cold.

If your resistive heat strips activate at any point other than extreme weather events or emergencies, your "system" is not sized properly. They are a massive waste of power and money.

A big part of the problem is that the contractors who are essentially the point of sale for these systems are just obscenely dumb about them. They will sell you utterly undersized units or sell units that aren't rated for cold, as well as just install things so poorly that they drain condensate into your walls and cause mold issues. They had similar problems with Oil burners, but at least those they tended to upsell bigger systems so their ignorance didn't matter. They seem very bad at doing the planning or design required to actually spec out a system, so you have to be your own engineer.

>and that is what the industry needs to work on.

I don't know how the industry is supposed to force contractors to read their very very clear documentation, or follow the very clear instructions (of boiler manufacturers no less) of "You must measure heat load to accurately size a heat appliance".
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-24 21:44:49+00:00
I have thought that's the common definition and doesn't need much thought...

My dictionary absolutely implies that, it even claims that all the sciences were split of from Philosophy and that a common modern topic of Philosophy is the theory of science. The point of Philosophy is to define truth in all aspects, how is that not science? It's even in the name: "friend of truth". Philosophy is even more fundamental and formal than mathematics. Mathematics asks what sound systems are, what properties they have and how they can be generalized. Philosophy asks, what something truly is, what it means to know, what it means to have a system and whether it's real. The common trope of going even more fundamental/abstract goes: "biology -> chemistry -> physics -> mathematics -> philosophy"
by wakawaka28 | 2025-10-24 21:44:50+00:00
It's called being professional. Your coworkers don't exist to be a sounding board for political, religious, or overly personal topics. This is just the baseline. You don't need validation about that stuff to do your work. Pushing people out because they don't have the same "vibe" is counterproductive and makes everyone worse off.

If you told kids in school the truth, it would be that juvenile attitudes die hard. Adults are too often like big kids. Looks and superficial stuff still matter a lot, although you can still get admitted to companies if your job requires actual skills or characteristics that you have.
by palmotea | 2025-10-24 21:45:24+00:00
> MacBooks just provide their GPS location to Jamf thanks to FindMy.

1. Do MacBooks even have proper GPS hardware onboard? Honest question.

2. I wouldn't think GPS would actually work very well, given how cavernous office buildings are--no clear view of the sky for GPS. And if you get a GPS signal indoors at home, it shouldn't be too hard to block.
by em-bee | 2025-10-24 21:45:27+00:00
thank you for that detailed insight. i only had the opportunity to observe ad learn about montessori in kindergarten. what you describe is pretty much what i expected from reading about it, but i haven't seen any stories from actual students who experienced it.

it would seem that some groups in your class could have benefited from more teacher attention. or maybe from mixing up the groups.
by tom_ | 2025-10-24 21:46:07+00:00
Regarding other ports, I've also been pretty happy with https://github.com/nodeca/argparse, which works nicely from Typescript. Looks like it hasn't been updated for a while, but it's not like there's a great deal wrong with it.

https://github.com/p-ranav/argparse is a single-file argparse for Modern C++, which means it's typically straightforward, if baffling in places and a bit annoying to step through in the debugger.

The nice thing about the argparse ports is that provided they take their job seriously, your programs will all end up with a vaguely consistent command line UX in terms of longopt syntax, and, importantly, a --help page.