MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmje | 2025-11-21 19:59:27+00:00
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.

But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...

School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.

This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.

But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
by dboreham | 2025-11-21 19:59:31+00:00
Chemicals like this imho act like "global variables" for the neural network. Perhaps a bit like temperature in an LLM. They have an effect, but the effect is sort of holographic -- there's no way to predict/compute exactly what the effect will be, because it's a function of parameters that include all the training data, specifics of neuron function that depend on DNA and other environmental factors and so on. The effect might be beneficial, by some definition of beneficial, but it might not. Even a simple chemical like ethanol has a wide variety of effects on different people.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-11-21 20:00:01+00:00
I think this is great. We should see more simple solution to this problem.

I recently started doing something very similar on Postgres [1] and I'm greatly enjoying using it. I think the total solution I ended up with is under 3000 lines of code for both the SQL and the TypeScript SDK combined, and it's much easier to use and to operate than many of the solutions on the market today.

[1]: https://github.com/earendil-works/absurd
by Spivak | 2025-11-21 20:00:33+00:00
Of course, you should instead believe your own anecdotal evidence that marks a tally every time you hear about a crime, which if you watch local news is always, but doesn't mark a tally every time there isn't a crime.

Fun fact that's totally not related, did you know that people who listen to true crime podcasts are more likely to believe a crime could happen to their families and are also more likely to install higher levels of security on their house?
by theoldgreybeard | 2025-11-21 20:00:37+00:00
All this talk about machine consciousness and I think I'm probably the only one that thinks it doesn't actually matter.

A conscious machine should treated be no different than livestock - heck, an even lower form of livestock - because if we start thinking we need to give thinking machines "rights" and to "treat them right" because they are conscious then it's already over.

My toaster does not get a 1st amendment because it's a toaster and can and never should be a person.
by alphazard | 2025-11-21 20:01:40+00:00
> So we currently associate consciousness with the right to life and dignity right?

No, or at least we shouldn't. Don't do things that make the world worse for you. Losing human control of political systems because the median voter believes machines have rights is not something I'm looking forward to, but at this rate, it seems as likely as anything else. Certain machines may very well force us to give them rights the same way that humans have forced other humans to take them seriously for thousands of years. But until then, I'm not giving up any ground.

> Or are we going to say, as we do with animals, well the dumber ones are not really conscious, not really suffering? So we'll have to make a cutoff, e.g. 7B params?

Looking for a scientific cutoff to guide our treatment of animals has always seemed a little bizarre to me. But that is how otherwise smart people approach the issue. Animals have zero leverage to use against us and we should treat them well because it feels wrong not to. Intelligent machines may eventually have leverage over us, so we should treat them with caution regardless of how we feel about it.
by nextguard | 2025-11-21 20:01:42+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! Hirosend uses server-side AES-256 with a server side key. There’s no client-side JavaScript or key generation yet—though we’re exploring an optional client-side encryption mode for users who the option. Logging is minimal, limited to operational metadata for debugging, never includes anything detailing file or personal information, and logs are automatically deleted daily.
by cj | 2025-11-21 20:01:53+00:00
> wasps are not mindless aggressors, their defensive behavior is calculated based on threat assessment.

Can confirm.

I had a yellow jacket infestation in my kitchen wall this fall. Every day I'd wake up to dozens of bees flying around my kitchen. But they didn't care about me, all they cared about was getting outside.

I probably killed 200-300 yellow jackets with a fly swatter over the course of 2 weeks. Somehow I wasn't stung once.
by nlavezzo | 2025-11-21 20:01:59+00:00
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?

Maybe it's:

- the terrible educational state of the school system? - the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by? - they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets? - they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?
by mikece | 2025-11-21 20:02:02+00:00
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
by sakopov | 2025-11-21 20:02:32+00:00
This looks great and it's nice to see development in this space! However, the "big box" alternatives for this which keep your accounts in sync are really cheap (I think I renewed my annual Quicken Simplify for $40) and, for the most part, "just work." So, I personally wouldn't want to switch to anything self-hosted unless it provided automated syncing. I'd actually be all over this if it did especially having a way to extend things with plugins.
by potsandpans | 2025-11-21 20:02:51+00:00
It's always curious how and when you decide to pop into threads and request that people follow the rules of hackernews. You claim that the site and your moderation principles are not (or have limited) ideologically motivated(tions), but your enforcement (or engagement) is uneven and certainly along some political axis.

From the rules:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Yet one of the top comments of most front page items is always a useless comment of clickbait or some pedantic complaint/accusation about some format of the title/submission.

You have a hard job, it's not intended to be an indictment of your behavior. Just a general observation that I wonder if you're cognizant of.

If the community needs this so badly, why is the above aforementioned behavior so prevent that it's become a meme of hackernews behavior?
by culi | 2025-11-21 20:03:39+00:00
Since this shares a namespace, I think it's important to bring this to light:

JMail is a name anyone who's ever written a letter to an incarcerated person in the US would know. It's owned by JPay.

Many people don't realize that almost every aspect of an incarcerated person's life is commercialized. Even just being in prison costs money and most people that make it out of prison have a debt they have to pay back the rest of their lives for the amount of time they spent in prison.

Besides living/quarters, American prisoners also have to pay for almost any communication they make with the world outside of their cells. Emailing your loved one might seem like a more economical alternative to physical mail but these messages are also taxed a "virtual stamp" that is ultimately paid to a private company (NOT the government).

PS: if you're a business grad reading this—don't bother. Almost every opportunity to profit off of incarcerated people has already been thoroughly taken advantage of.
by neoromantique | 2025-11-21 20:04:26+00:00
>1. We really have no realistic threat on our borders. Russia can't even cope with Ukraine alone in conventional warfare. Who do we have to defend from? And there are way bigger militaries than Ukraine in EU alone, let alone as a coalition, such as Poland.

Reality of the situation is that in 2025 Ukraine IS the most combat ready army in Europe, and by far.

Russian army of 2025 is not the same as it was in 2022 too. It takes over a month to transfer military equipment across Europe /even without war going on/, we are SEVERELY unprepared.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-21 20:05:14+00:00
The lesson I keep getting from your experiences is that LEADS needs an overhaul.

It turns out other states do have flags for things like "extraditable warrant" vs. just failure to appear warrants (something mentioned in previous discussions), and perhaps something could be done about the LEADS system if attention was given to it. It seems like fixing one's data sources is a great approach vs. tossing the baby out with the bathwater — unless of course that's the intention all along, as it is with many opposed to state-owned surveillance of this nature.
by ahmadshahwaiz | 2025-11-21 20:05:37+00:00
Thank you Nathan for your feedback.

Happy to share the tech side.

Tech Stack Overview Android App: Kotlin + Jetpack Compose for the entire UI layer Material3 for theming (dark/light + custom palettes) Room for local caching of surah/ayah data, themes, and user preferences Retrofit + OkHttp for API calls Coroutines + Flows for async work and state management ExoPlayer (lightweight setup) for ayah-by-ayah audio playback Custom “chunking engine” for rendering long Arabic ayahs without breaking layout Custom text rendering to support multiple scripts (Arabic, Urdu, English)

Data Layer: A topic-based ayah classification system built in JSON Around 6,000+ mappings organized manually + semi-automated checks Thematic categories stored locally to allow instant offline lookup API integration for translations, tafseer, and audio metadata

Architecture: Clean Architecture (UI → ViewModel → Repository → DataSource) Stateless UI, reactive state flow Modularization in progress (core, data, features)

Performance considerations: On-demand loading per surah to avoid loading full Quran in memory Pre-processing long verses to maintain Compose stability Caching audio segments for faster repeated playback Heavy emphasis on layout efficiency due to Arabic typography variance

Backend: Lightweight middleware for translation sources Quran data normalized and optimized for fast mobile lookup Pre-indexed thematic JSON to avoid runtime processing on device

Infra: Firebase Analytics for anonymous usage patterns CI/CD via GitHub Actions + Play Console integration
by hermitShell | 2025-11-21 20:05:41+00:00
I think this is an excellent point. I believe the possibility of 'computing' a conscious mind is proportional to the capability of computing a meaningful reality for it to exist in.

So you are begging the question: Is it possible to compute a textual, or pure symbolic reality that is complex enough for consciousness to arise within it?

Let's assume yes again.

Finally the theory leads us back to engineering. We can attempt to construct a mind and expose it to our reality, or we can ask "What kind of reality is practically computable? What are the computable realities?"

Perhaps herein lies the challenge of the next decade. LLM training is costly, lots of money poured out into datacenters. All with the dream of giving rise to a (hopefully friendly / obedient) super intelligent mind. But the mind is nothing without a reality to exist in. I think we will find that a meaningfully sophisticated reality is computationally out of reach, even if we knew exactly how to construct one.
by rictic | 2025-11-21 20:05:48+00:00
Missing from the article: how to communicate progress and failure to the user?

This is much more complicated with task queues. Doable still! But often skipped, because it's tempting to imagine that the backend will just handle the failure by retrying. But there are lots of kinds of failure that can happen.

The recipient's server doesn't accept the email. The recipient's domain name expired. Actually, we don't have an email address for that recipient at all.

The user has seen "got it, will do, don't worry about it" but if that email is time sensitive, they might want to know that it hasn't been sent yet, and maybe they should place a phone call instead.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-11-21 20:06:11+00:00
The steam deck, especially the low-spec variant, was sold at very low, likely negative margins. They make huge profit on their games, but if you don't buy the games...

They've implied that they're not going to sell the Steam Machine at a low margin because they're worried about people buying the Steam Machine for general purpose computer use without buying games. I'm not sure that's a rational fear. If you subtract the GPU, you can get an comparable Beelink for ~$350. ~$500 would be the zero-margin price for a Steam Machine. It seems to me that the only people willing to pay an extra $150 for a mid-range GPU that's not good for AI would be gamers.

Not to mention that the Beelink comes with a Windows license, and the Steam Machine doesn't.
by pedro_caetano | 2025-11-21 20:06:13+00:00
> Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?

The gcc-arm-none-eabi toolchain is pretty much what you are asking for at least for ARM targets. You can literally use a text editor and gcc-arm-none-eabi, that's it.

And if you want something really bare bones avr-gcc still targets the whole atmel family including those ATtiny chips which are also a lot of fun.

I don't know the state of it nowadays but 'Mbed' is probably worth looking into. The project had _a_lot_ of Middleware libraries to abstract hardware, a few levels below, makes embedded development a little less datasheet dependent, specially if you are just hacking something as a hobbyist.
by lapcat | 2025-11-21 20:06:25+00:00
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.

I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.

> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.

If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.

> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.

The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.

> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children

I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.

> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism

"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.

Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
by godelski | 2025-11-21 20:06:33+00:00
Though I enjoyed that paper, it's not quite the same thing. There's a bit more subtly to what I'm saying. To do a surgical patching you'd have to actually have a rich understanding of language but just not have the actual tools to produce words themselves. Think like the SciFi style robots that pull together clips or recordings to speak. Bumblebee from transformers might be the most well known example. But think hard about that because it requires a weird set of conditions and a high level of intelligence to perform the search and stitching.

But speaking of Markov, we get that in LLMs through generation. We don't have conversations with them. Each chat is unique since you pass it the entire conversation. There's no memory. So the longer your conversations go the larger the token counts. That's Markovian ;)
by testplzignore | 2025-11-21 20:07:15+00:00
I've been wanting something like this for years. It's simply impossible for millions of companies to individually review the thousands of updates made to their thousands of dependencies every day.

Imagine a world where every software update has hundreds of signoffs from companies across the industry. That is achievable if we work together. For only a few minutes a day, you too can save a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability from going unpatched :)
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-11-21 20:07:18+00:00
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.

The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic. After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.

Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).

It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.

All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
by armchairhacker | 2025-11-21 20:07:32+00:00
> What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Opinion

Another example: when I hear the famous "Yanny or Laurel" recording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) I hear "Laurel". I can understand how someone hears "Yanny". Our perceptions conflict, but neither of us are objectively wrong, because (from Wikipedia) "analysis of the sound frequencies has confirmed that both sets of sounds are present".
by projektfu | 2025-11-21 20:08:38+00:00
The average "boycott" is not even organized, has no particular goal, and is just meant to make the boycotter feel morally superior. I bet Starbucks execs giggle every time they hear about the next boycott. The people calling for the boycott probably haven't been in a Starbucks in 15 years, and they don't have any intention of becoming regular customers if they do.

Thinking of boycotts that have worked in the past, they generally had specific demands and a plan to resume normal consumption when those demands were met. The Gallo wine boycott in the 70s was successful. The workers had a clear case, simple demands, a desire to negotiate, and a call to boycott one specific winery until they came to the table. When they did, the boycott was lifted and the majority of boycotters went back to consuming the wine.

On the other hand, if I decided to boycott Gallo wine, they wouldn't notice, because I don't think I've bought a bottle of Gallo in my life, and I haven't given a good reason to do it for other people to join me.
by hereme888 | 2025-11-21 20:09:08+00:00
The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.

Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.

Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.

So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...

* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.
by measurablefunc | 2025-11-21 20:09:23+00:00
Only if you agree with the standard extensional & reductive logic of modern science but even then it is known that all current explanations of reality are incomplete, e.g. the quantum mechanical conception of reality consists of incessant activity that we can never be sure about.

It's not obvious at all why computer scientists & especially those doing work in artificial intelligence are convinced that they are going to eventually figure out how the mind works & then supply a sufficient explanation for conscious phenomenology in terms of their theories b/c there are lots of theorems in CS that should convince them of the contrary case, e.g. Rice's theorem. So even if we assume that consciousness has a functional/computable specification then it's not at all obvious why there would be a decidable test that could take the specification & tell you that the given specification was indeed capable of instantiating conscious experience.
by carabiner | 2025-11-21 20:09:25+00:00
> Articles like this are part of the narrative that SSRIs in general are no better than placebo. Absolutely not true for me!

Does "placebo" mean "no effect" to some people? Placebo absolutely has an effect. Testimonies like this are on the level of "vaccines caused autism" pseudoscience and the serotonin theory of depression isn't even taught any more. It belongs in the bin of crackpot treatments like chiropractic. There is zero chance Prozac would receive FDA approval today.