MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zaphar | 2025-11-21 21:47:48+00:00
I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood.

Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.

[Edited for clarity in some sentences]
by inetknght | 2025-11-21 21:47:51+00:00
> I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people.

Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.

I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-11-21 21:48:29+00:00
> they don’t actually get you out of having to handle errors

I wrote a durable system that recovers from all sorts of errors (mostly network faults) without writing much error handling code. It just retries automatically, and importantly the happy path and the error path are exactly the same, so I don’t have to worry that my error path has much less execution than my happy path.

> but the part of that transaction that failed was “charging the customer” - did it fail before or after the charge went through?

In all cases, whether the happy path or the error path, the first thing you do is compare the desired state (“there exists a transaction exists charging the customer $5”) with the actual state (“has the customer been charged $5?”) and that determines whether you (re)issue the transaction or just update your internal state.

> once you’ve built sufficient atomicity into your system to handle the actual failure cases - the benefits of taking on the complexity of a DE system are substantially lower than the marketing pitch

I probably agree with this. The main value is probably not in the framework but rather in the larger architecture that it encourages—separating things out into idempotent functions that can be safely retried. I could maybe be persuaded otherwise, but most of my “durable execution” patterns seem to be more of a “controller pattern” (in the sense of a Kubernetes controller, running a reconciling control loop) and it just happens that any distributed, durable controller platform includes a durable execution subsystem.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-21 21:48:29+00:00
>It's from more than a century ago when the point was to tame the children and turn them into good Prussian soldiers.

If you judge by the outcome, that is probably the greatest education system of all time.

>You don't have to start with anxiety, shame, and dominance - you can start with curiosity, a base of common understanding, and then experiment and problem solving.

You can. The kids will learn nothing though.

School nowadays is a joke. An absolute waste of time. In a single semester of rigorous mathematics I learned more than in years in school. It is cruel to waste childrens time like that.

School needs to be authoritarian, rigorous and selective.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-21 21:48:41+00:00
The lower power versions have collapseble pins though:

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/mgtv4b/a/40w-dynamic-p... (the clonking sound is extremely satisfying!)

The high watt chargers are heavy regardless

Does that US version even stay in the socket given the weight?

Tbh it's pretty tiny price to pay. And 5 -pack of double sockets costs £13 btw! ($17 ish)
by purplezooey | 2025-11-21 21:48:50+00:00
Part of the reason PE succeeds is their choice of things that have a large or lengthy startup cost or other supply restrictions. Most towns will support only 1 hockey arena. Or lately, with veterinarians. New supply is complex and doesn't appear overnight. If PE is to be controlled (so they don't ruin everything), we need to lessen the barriers to create more supply, like in housing. Also, perhaps it would be good to make them actually pay some taxes, if only to mitigate a fraction of the problems they cause. PE is sort of like cigarettes. They exist, and do damage to everyone.
by KK7NIL | 2025-11-21 21:48:54+00:00
No, they don't.

Their "7 nm" relied on multi patterning DUV which leads to restrictive design rules, more steps and masks and lower yields, which is why I put it in quotes and said it's uncompetitive.

The last DUV node was 10 nm, that's the best logic node they have which is comparable to TSMC/Samsung/Intel's 10 nm.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-21 21:49:39+00:00
Yeah, along with any community's attitudes to risk and quality, there is also a varying, er, chronological component.

I'd prefer to upgrade around the time most of the nasty surprises have already been discovered by somebody else, preferably with workarounds developed.

At the same time, you don't want to be so far back that upgrading uncovers novel migration problems, or issues that nobody else cares about anymore.
by bri3d | 2025-11-21 21:49:43+00:00
It's different definitions of "easy."

With hardware, you have about one billion validation tests and QA processes, because when you're done, you're done and it had better work. Fixing an "issue" is very very expensive, and you want to get rid of them. However, this also makes the process more of, to stereotype, an "engineer's engineering" practice. It's very rules based, and if everything follows the rules and passes the tests, it's done. It doesn't matter how "hacky" or "badly architected" or "nasty" the input product is, when it works, it works. And, when it's done, it's done.

On the other hand, software is highly human-oriented and subjective, and it's a continuous process. With Linux working the way it does, with an intentionally hostile kernel interface, driver software is even more so. With Linux drivers you basically chose to either get them upstreamed (a massive undertaking in personality management, but Valve's choice here), deal with maintaining them in perpetuity at enormous cost as every release will break them (not common), or give up and release a point in time snapshot and ride into the sunset (which is what most people do). I don't really think this is easier than hardware, it's just a different thing.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-11-21 21:50:05+00:00
I've thought about and asked this question. One potential idea: AI was sold as the "death of SaaS" and hit their share prices accordingly. If you think this is not true (at least in the near to mid-term) you could buy stock at (what you perceive as) a discount. I might look at a company like Constellation (a big vertically integrated portfolio of mature, decent revenue-generating SaaS) as a proxy for a fund focused on this strategy.

This sort of approach is pretty aggressive and definitely contrarian to the general market, but some alternatives to mitigate the coming pain (if you believe it's near) would be shifting into a more liquid position to take advantage of tightening liquidity, i.e. big companies may see their shares tank but will likely still be able to service their debt. In the meantime you'll miss out on a market that still seems pretty strong.
by BeetleB | 2025-11-21 21:50:40+00:00
> If you have an objectively crappy life, but not just ignore it and instead are incapable of even noticing

Noticing it is very different from being depressed about it.

> What does "normal" even mean in this context? Are we talking about something measurable?

Let's take a trivial example. Person A is depressed because he is unhappy that he doesn't make enough money to travel and buy nice cars. Now take all the people who are unhappy that they cannot afford to travel and buy nice cars. Most will not be depressed - they will merely be unhappy about it.

Person A isn't depressed because he can't travel and buy nice cars. He's depressed and he can't travel and buy nice cars. He's mistakenly coupling the two.

Another tell for these kinds of things: Ever know someone chronically depressed who blames it on X? Then somehow, X is resolved. There may be a temporary improvement, and they go back to being depressed again, only they now blame it on Y? Somehow Y gets resolved and some months later they're blaming it on Z.

Everyone has problems. Including those who are not depressed. Fixing X, Y, Z, AA, AB, and whatever else is not going to take care of the depression.

On the flip side, people who do not suffer from depression make the same mistake: They claim they are not depressed because they "choose" not to let the problems get to them. Self serving beliefs!
by anonym29 | 2025-11-21 21:50:44+00:00
When lobf posed the question "can you name a single example of a police department, union, or office paying out a settlement? Has it ever happened?", I read that as a rhetorical question that was meant to point out that an overwhelming majority of such cases are paid out by taxpayers, not a serious assertion that police officers themselves have never been held personally financially accountable a single time.

Would you at least acknowledge that US taxpayers are on the hook orders of magnitude more often then the offending officers themselves, and that there's a clear conflict of interest presented by this de-facto outcome? Yes, there are exceptions, as you've diligently pointed out, but those are noteworthy because they are the exceptions that prove the general rule of thumb.

Do you know of any US taxpayer who would explicitly, voluntarily, and freely offer to pay for the settlements resulting from the abusive, corrupt, or criminal conduct of police officers in their town, if that were an optional choice that every US taxpayer made distinctly from the implicit, collective choice to comply with public taxation to fund public services writ large?

If every city in the US had a ballot measure in the next election that allowed citizens to vote on whether they would voluntarily accept personal financial responsibility for the misconduct of their police department, OR, mandate that all future settlements come out of the police union / pension fund / guilty officers' personal finances, how do you think those votes would tend to go, across the country?
by bigyabai | 2025-11-21 21:50:44+00:00
There is no $25,000 Tesla - most of those the conscientious objectors weren't even in Tesla's target audience anyways. The "gotcha" of all luxury tech is that it's only a branding distinction.

Which puts Tesla in a similar spot to the Apple situation, where the majority of customers are the least-likely to demand value, quality or moral consistency from their OEM. Your CEO can embarrass himself in interviews, ship nonsense thousand-dollar novelty products and kiss ass to authoritarians, but people who consistently buy a certain product won't abandon their brand loyalty. In fact, both Apple and Tesla seem to benefit from the influx of liberal and conservative customers who feel "represented" by superficial gestures like interviews, novelty products and asskissing.

It feels safe to assume that both Apple and Tesla will persist long into the future, eager to amend their horrible misgivings coerced under authoritarianism.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-21 21:51:19+00:00
I've done both. There are difficulties with both but overall I would say software is significantly more difficult than hardware.

Most hardware is actually relatively simple (though hardware engineers do their best to turn it into an incomprehensible mess). Software can get pretty much arbitrarily complex.

In a way I suspect it's because hardware engineers are mostly old fogies stuck in the 80s using 80s technologies like Verilog. They haven't evolved the tools that software developers have that enable them to write extremely complicated programs.

I have hope for Veryl though.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-21 21:51:23+00:00
For 10yrs, I supported 1-3 agencies that owned/ran group homes for developmentally disabled adults.

These included homes for clients who were non-ambulatory, clients who had profound health issues and one home for dd-so. Besides living and healthcare expenses, the agencies had regulatory overhead imposed by 3 different governing agencies.

Even with all of this, the clients had lives with daily offsite activities, jobs, public events, theme parks, etc.

The per-client budgets of these group homes were tiny compared to nursing homes. They were funded by client SS disability payments, supplemented by some modest public funding.

These homes where founded and administered by boards made up of the client's families. Importantly, they were non-profit; they lacked the massive overhead that comes with shareholder obligations and executive salaries+perks.

They've been providing superior care for over 4 decades. After I left, they began to experience a persistent risk of funding cuts. These were driven by a major hospital chain executive who became governor and then state senator.
by lysace | 2025-11-21 21:51:26+00:00
I noticed something similar when working with (unlike the post's author, non-marxist, as far as I know) Russian developers who had made the jump abroad (EU).

When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique.

This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.
by soiltype | 2025-11-21 21:51:39+00:00
> 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.

I mean, this is obviously not a novel take: It's the position of basically the most evil characters imagined in every fiction ever written about AI. I wish you were right that no other real humans felt this way though!

Plenty of people believe "a machine will never be conscious" - I think this is delusional, but it covers them from admitting they might be ok with horrific abuse of a conscious being. It's rarer though to fully acknowledge the sentience of a machine intelligence and still treat it like a disposable tool. (Then again, not that rare - most power-seeking people will treat humans that way even today.)

I don't know why you'd mention your toaster though. You already dropped the bomb that you would willfully enslave a sentient AI if you had the opportunity! Let's skip the useless analogy.
by rolph | 2025-11-21 21:52:20+00:00
its called alaska, and as i said, the blame goes all around, its called a swiss cheese failure, in HN parlance.

numerous mistakes by numerous parties combine, to culminate in failure and consequence.

here in alaska, you dont just assume, you have the right place, you take measures to be sure you are where you actually think you are.

that means when you walk onto private property not your own, you call out to make contact, and you dont carry a firearm onto property unless given specific permission to do so.
by jgerrish | 2025-11-21 21:52:31+00:00
I don't know if I'll use Arduino in a professional project, but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.

Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.

It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.
by catigula | 2025-11-21 21:52:34+00:00
I wouldn’t contend that it’s interesting or not that, or even if, “you” perceive the “inner processings of your own mind”.

Re: qualia. Let’s put it aside briefly. It isn’t inconceivable that a system could construct representations that don’t correspond to an “objective” reality, i.e. a sort of reality hologram, as a tool to guide system behavior.

The key question to ask is: “construct representations for whom?”, or, to put the challenge directly, “it’s not surprising that an observer can be fooled. It’s surprising that there is an observer to fool”.

The world, in the standard understanding of physics, should be completely devoid of observers, even in cases where it instantiates performers, i.e. the I/O philosophical zombie most people know well by now.

To circle back around on why this is difficult: you have in front of you a HUD of constant perceived experience (which is meaningful even if you’re being fooled, i.e. cogito ergo sum). This has, through acculturation, become very mundane to you. But, given how we understand the rules of the world, if you direct your rationality onto the very lens through which you constantly perceive, you will find a very dark void of understanding that seems to defy the systems that otherwise serve you exceptionally well. This void is the hard problem.
by zozbot234 | 2025-11-21 21:52:52+00:00
There's plenty of "relatively compact" ARM-based handhelds targeting the retro market already, but many of them are shipping with a pitiful amount of RAM (1GB or so) making them an absolute non-starter, while others (selling for significantly higher prices) run crappy Android-based OS's that will never be updated. There is a gap in the market for a good-quality retro-like handheld shipping with a Linux-native OS (or even just enabling one to be installed trivially after-the-fact, with everything working and no reliance on downstream hacked-together support packages).
by agumonkey | 2025-11-21 21:53:41+00:00
SSRI can have annoyances (to stay polite) if you ever need a fix so much that you go that route, be sure to ask about them. Didn't help me really but I believe that sometimes, a bit of chemical (placebo or not) relief can help staying afloat enough to work your way back up quicker.

I understand your comment, my issues were due to life circumstances and not a low level neurological imbalance, and I too dismissed these treatments almost entirely, mostly because they felt like blanket solutions from medical professionals who didn't really listen to symptoms.
by zaphar | 2025-11-21 21:53:50+00:00
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.

What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
by alphazard | 2025-11-21 21:54:41+00:00
The vulnerability that you are describing does not affect all implementations of democracy.

For example, most countries give out the right to vote based on birth or upon completion of paperwork. It is possible to game that system, by just making more people, or rushing people through the paperwork.

Another implementation of democracy treats voting rights as assets. This is how public corporations work. 1 share, 1 vote. The world can change endlessly around that system, and the vote cannot be gamed. If you want more votes, then you have to buy them fair and square.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-11-21 21:55:39+00:00
There is a way, and if anyone tells you we have to go full Hitler or Stalin to do it they are liars because last time we let inequality cook this hard FDR and the New Deal figured out how to thread the needle and proved it could be done.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics on tap at the moment.

Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course, but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get very serious very quickly and we have to start making better decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.
by mlinsey | 2025-11-21 21:56:26+00:00
I predict as soon as it is possible to give the LLMs states, we will do so everywhere.

The fact that current agents are blank slates at the start of each session is one of the biggest reasons they fall short at lots of real-world tasks today - they forget human feedback as soon as it falls out of the context window, they don't really learn from experience, they need whole directories of markdown files describing a repository to not forget the shape of the API they wrote yesterday and hallucinate a different API instead. As soon as we can give these systems real memory, they'll get it.
by bena | 2025-11-21 21:56:40+00:00
I have this, I've so far solved every day this year. And I think the last week of December, because I also received this for Christmas.

Some days are incredibly easy due to the day before. Some days, you can flip the orientation of one block and be done.

The most difficult days are when entire sections have to be rearranged. Like going from one week to the next or starting a new month.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-21 21:56:59+00:00
I have an iPad Air 3rd generation with an A12 processor and 3GB of RAM from 2019. It runs iOS 26 fine. But it ain’t a great experience. If anything they should have added all of the capabilities they have now shortly after they started putting M series chips in them.

The issue with non micro transaction games is that mobile users are cheap. Every time that a company tries to release a non slimy app with a one time purchase price of even $10, no one buys them.
by Redoubts | 2025-11-21 21:57:35+00:00
> It's hard to understand the mindset of "I'd rather just be powerless in the job I have because that seems easier."

Because that’s not the case? In America it is still extremely easy to find alternative lucrative work, or simply start your own business; because in software development the worker basically owns the means of production - himself. This is an extremely powerful bargaining position and it’s why SWE pays so well here.

Athletes, actors, doctors, and other professions still have to negotiate with centralized capital to some degree in a way SWE never will
by neilv | 2025-11-21 21:57:48+00:00
Some of those old phones are nicely slammable.

What's even more bulletproof are vintage street payphones.

Nothing keeps a daily standup call on track like a payphone atmosphere of being on the run. ("Quick, what's sprint status and blockers?! We've got 60 seconds before they complete the trace!")

Add an accelerometer, and you can detect when the handset is hanging from the armored payphone cable, because they dropped it as they ran away. Trigger dial tone sound, to mark end of meeting.

A variation on this theme is using a "burner" flip phone for meetings, so that you can end each one by snapping the phone in half, and stomping the pieces on the ground. Which is cathartic, but less environmentally sustainable.