MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ytoawwhra92 | 2025-12-15 23:59:05+00:00
> No, we should ban the technology, at least until we can somewhat verify the students understand the underlying concepts.

I didn't learn how to prove addition until advanced math in late high school, so obviously there's a point at which we're comfortable glossing over the underlying concepts with young students and skipping to the parts that are actually meaningful to the learning outcomes that we've decided are appropriate for their age.

> Like, yes, we allow calculators for highschoolers. But we'd never give a calculator to a 3rd grader learning their times tables. Because then they'd never learn that 9 * 9 is 49, and now they're permanently handicapped in math. And now, when they are in high school, the calculator doesn't even matter, because they can't do math at a basic level.

Research doesn't support this.

> Or, consider reading. Certainly high schoolers can use audio books. But imagine if we didn't teach reading at all, and just used audio books, from kindergarten. Would anyone know how to read? I doubt it.

Right, so if the learning outcome is "the student knows how to read" we'd judge that teaching method a failure.

I'm saying that our focus should be on helping students achieve learning outcomes, not on the tools we use to evaluate whether or not they've reached those learning outcomes.

The point of education is the learning, not the evaluation, so when the tools used to complete the evaluations become useless due to technology we should be replacing those tools rather than clinging to them desperately.
by kragen | 2025-12-15 23:59:14+00:00
It's hard to compare across countries. No other country has anything like the US's research-university system, although China is working on it. But foreign students in China probably aren't hoping to be able to live there for the rest of their lives—China's immigration policies are considerably more xenophobic. The UK might be the closest comparison?

Generally speaking, American exceptionalism is nonsense. The US isn't the only free country, the freest country, the only democratic country, the most democratic country, the richest country, the most diverse country, a city on the hill, divinely inspired, uniquely blessed by God, the only capitalist country, any of that nonsense. It was some of those when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, but it hasn't been for decades. But the US's research university system is unique in the world, and nobody else even comes close.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 23:59:41+00:00
I was kind of in OP's shoes a few months ago. My 2000-2010 era stereo receiver crapped out and I was looking to see if I could simplify my system a bit. Unlike OP, I didn't need anything that could extract audio from the TV. My requirements were:

1. A decoder with at least 5.1 output since that's how many speakers I have

2. At least 3 HDMI inputs + 1 HDMI output to my TV

3. An amplifier with a volume control

That's it! I don't need an FM tuner. I don't need multiple zones. I don't need wild listening modes and DSP effects. I don't need an on-TV setup display. I don't need fiber optic digital audio inputs. I don't need fucking rows and rows of 20 RCA jack inputs, composite video, component video, S-Video. You'd think I could find a small cheap box the size of an AppleTV that I could just hide somewhere that could do this, but I couldn't find anything sufficient. So I got another $20 gigantic, ugly, old 18-inch receiver again from Craigslist and just leave all those features and inputs unused.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-15 23:59:53+00:00
First, cost != price. Pricing is in part based on competitive product availability. So if the cost of a product + tariff is greater than the cost of a competing product, there is pressure to reduce that cost. There's also pressure to produce elsewhere, such as domestically to avoid the tariff altogether.

This is a large part of why the tariffs have in fact not had the dramatic impact on all pricing that some have suggested would happen. It's been largely a negotiation tactic first, and second, many products have plenty of margin and competition to allow for pricing to remain relatively level even in the face of tariffs... so it absolutely can, in fact be a burden borne by Chinese manufacturers by lowering margins instead of US importers simply eating the cost of tariffs.
by munificent | 2025-12-16 00:00:00+00:00
The article itself does an excellent job spelling out the background:

> This style has a history, of course, a history far older than the microchip: It is a direct linguistic descendant of the British Empire. The English we were taught was not the fluid, evolving language of modern-day London or California, filled with slang and convenient abbreviations. It was the Queen's English, the language of the colonial administrator, the missionary, the headmaster. It was the language of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the law. It was a tool of power, and we were taught to wield it with precision. Mastering its formal cadences, its slightly archaic vocabulary, its rigid grammatical structures, was not just about passing an exam.

> It was a signal. It was proof that you were educated, that you were civilised, that you were ready to take your place in the order of things.

Much of writing style is not about conveying meaning but conveying the author's identity. And much of that is about matching the fashion of the group you want to be a member of.

Fashion tends to go through cycles because once the less prestigious group becomes sufficiently skilled at emulating the prestige style, the prestigious need a new fashion to distinguish themselves. And if the emulated style is ostentatious and flowery, then the new prestige style will be the opposite.

Aping Hemingway's writing style is in a lot of ways like $1,000 ripped jeans. It sort of says "I can look poor because I'm so rich I don't even have to bother trying to look rich."

(I agree, of course, that there is a lot to be said for clean, spare prose. But writing without adverbs doesn't mean one necessarily has the clarity of thought of Hemingway. For many, it's just the way you write so that everyone knows you got educated in a place that told you to write that way.)
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-12-16 00:00:19+00:00
My understanding is non rad hardened method get around this by basically doubling or some multiple of repeating calculations and chexking data often.

Random errors will occur you just need to be checking fast enough to fix and update that bad bit flip.

I am sure there's all sorts of fun algorithms in this space but I am under the impression there is SOME tax to doing this. What is the tax? Is it 10% ir 60% I have no idea would love to know!
by _heimdall | 2025-12-16 00:00:45+00:00
Yes, when crimes are committed it is often hard to prove and you won't catch them all. That's by design and a fundamental part of how our legal system was designed in the first place.

Having a duopoly as you described isn't in itself a crime, nor should it be. If they are skirting the rules such that they are breaking the rules, enforcement should step in as there is actually something to enforce. If the only "crime" is winning market share, what's the problem?
by sgarland | 2025-12-16 00:01:05+00:00
Perhaps this is my bias coming through. I work with DBs day in and day out, and the main problem I face is performance from poorly-designed schemas and queries; next largest issue is referential integrity violations causing undefined behavior. The security issues I’ve found were all people doing absurdly basic stuff, like exposing an endpoint that dumped passwords.

To me, if you’re relying on having a matching PK as security, something has already gone wrong. There are ways to provide AuthN and AuthZ other than that. And yes, “defense in depth,” but if your base layer is “we have unguessable user ids,” IME people will become complacent, and break it somewhere else in the stack.
by moomoo11 | 2025-12-16 00:01:15+00:00
I’ll do it regardless because any time I’ve tried to chase optimization early like this, hardware has always evolved faster.

We have all faced issues where we don’t know where the data will ultimate live that’s optimal for our access patterns.

Or we have devices and services doing async operations that need to sync.

I’m not working on mission critical “if this fails there’s a catastrophic event” type shit. It’s just rent seeking SaaS type shit.

Oh no it cost $0.35 extra to make $100. Next year will make more money relative to cost increase.
by maqp | 2025-12-16 00:01:25+00:00
>What do you use now?

Signal mostly.

>separate ids for every connection and group

The thing is, there's Akamai and Runonflux, two companies hosting the entire public SimpleX infrastructure. If you're not using Tor and SimpleX Onion Services with your buddies, these two companies can perform end-to-end correlation attacks to spy on which IPs are conversing, and TelCos know which IPs belong to which customers at any given time. Mandatory data retention laws about the assigned IPs aren't rare.
by kaipereira | 2025-12-16 00:01:39+00:00
That's a really cool idea!

I have a couple idea's on how I wanted to do it: - Belt printer fitted into a briefcase (the harbor freight case form factor would be good for that!) - Positron style - Maybe mess around with double four-bars

Making it self-contained with a battery is also a really cool concept I'll have to explore!
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-16 00:01:43+00:00
It's the product of an evolutionary process. You could scrap capitalism entirely and still get cartel formation, since you have agents with varied traits competing to gain the resources to be selected to reproduce [their continued existence, into the future].

A couple other ways of looking at it come from Bataille, Odum, Prigogine or Schmitt.
by reliefcrew | 2025-12-16 00:02:29+00:00
> some of your users are low value monetarily but do provide value by being on the network

That's not how advertising works. If you're not looking at the advertising, you don't provide any value, nothing. In that case you're now a losing proposition and they don't want those users because they're lowering margins and ROE. It's about good decisions that make money... goodwill only goes so far on the balance sheet.

Now, you got my full explanation. If you still don't understand why it's not as bad a design as you first thought... we'll just have to disagree ;-)
by SimianSci | 2025-12-16 00:02:38+00:00
I would implore you to empathize with the American working class, who have seen their living standards continuously deteriorate over multiple generations.

I know the hackernews audience skews more affluent and wealthy, with demographics pulling from more developed coastal cities, but the vast majority of citizens do not exist in such living conditions. Focusing entirely on the development an prosperity of only a handful of our cities is what has created the perfect fertile soil for Xenophobia to grow. I dont see the rhetoric as the cause, just the motions of opportunists taking advantage of a situation that we are all at fault for. Despite all the freedom, peace, and prosperity, its so unevenly distributed that many citizens live in squalor rivaling some destitute underdeveloped nations.
by Ataraxic | 2025-12-16 00:02:53+00:00
Scott Manley had a video about this last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-YcVLq98Ew

The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues.

Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.
by dashundchen | 2025-12-16 00:04:30+00:00
My theory is the Trump Mafia doesn't care if people think they are idiots.

This admin is so transparently corrupt, and they're making out like bandits.

Trump and his family have made billions of dollars on the crypto rug pull. Everyone knew it was a shitcoin from the start.

Trump has pardoned violent criminals and felony fraudsters for business deals and "donations".

His family's net worth has estimated to have risen billions this year alone.

Elon Musk essentially bought his way into the control of the government and tried to buy off votes.

Kristi Noem funneled at least one sole source contract worth $220 million dollars to a firm closely tied to her and her previous political campaigns.

Ron DeSantis spent $250 million dollars of no-bid contracts for essentially a tent interment camp, many of questionable value and to politically tied companies

They don't care if you don't like them and I don't think they care if they accomplish what they ran on. They have done a bang up job enriching themselves and their donor class, however.
by crapple8430 | 2025-12-16 00:04:37+00:00
> a whole chain of removed software freedom

Indeed. But this already has happened for most people. All non-jailbroken iphones and most Androids cannot have their bootloader unlocked, and even if they can, the stuff you can run is often still substantially controlled by Google.

Though in theory this can also be done without involving the OS at the device driver level. It's not hard to imagine a CNN running inside your display controller to detect a bbox and blur out the nudity. It'd still suck and be a middle finger to the owner, but I don't feel like this is much worse than what's already there. Given the popularity of porn, I can easily imagine this sparking a general public sentiment against all this nonsense.
by bastawhiz | 2025-12-16 00:04:53+00:00
I am uninterested in purchasing proprietary hardware running a proprietary operating system that'll work (maybe) for some amount of time. Sure, it's technically self hosted. But you can't extend it (without their proprietary app store). It doesn't seem like you can write your own apps without registering, or side load them. Details are extremely thin on the site, so let me know if I'm wrong.

Hell, all the compelling software isn't even theirs! They're just running other OSS apps, and god knows whether you'll be able to manage or upgrade it.

Arguably, this is the worst of all worlds: you're paying the overhead of closed hardware, running closed software that you don't control, and sort of just crossing your fingers that they don't pull the rug out from underneath you. You'd be infinitely better off buying a comparable NUC and spending an afternoon loading up Docker on it. Shit like this is genuinely insulting to the demographic of folks who should be the target audience.
by kanzure | 2025-12-16 00:05:11+00:00
Oh it's much older than 8 years... here is one such proposal from 2011: https://groups.google.com/g/enzymaticsynthesis/c/6GZT8zFNOfo...

I myself was bitten by a radioactive grad student in 2008 that was obsessed with this idea at the time, and have since learned that almost every major household name lab PI has thought about this in one form or another.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-12-16 00:05:17+00:00
> With UNIX domain sockets it is absolutely possible to determine the PID of the process that you are talking to and use pidfd to validate where it is coming from.

Validate what? You're just moving the responsibility to whatever answer you give here. If you say "validate the exec name is firefox-bin" then the next person who comes in will say "I hate $your_new_fangled_ipc, you can make it dump all your secrets by renaming your exec to firefox-bin". (This is just an example).

> And how exactly does the app container service store something encrypted securely on disk? That's literally the point of a secrets service on a modern desktop.

The more I think of it, the less sense this makes. If you already have a system where applications cannot read each other's data, what is the point of secret service? What is the security advantage?

If you want to encrypt with TPM, fingerprint, or anything else, that's encryption, which is separate from storage (you can encrypt the password with say a PCR but the application gets to store the encrypted password in any way they want).

Password encryption in the desktop keyrings are for the situation for when every application can read each other's data files easily (again, as in the desktop). In which case, it may make sense to use encryption so that such data is not (trivially) accessible from any other application (otherwise https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords applies) .

If your applications are already running sandboxed, a keyring sounds to me like useless complexity? Just make each application store its data into its sandbox. What's the threat vector here, that super-user-that-can-escape-sandbox can read into the sandboxes and extract the password?

> You can actually do decent code generation for it without having to have like 5 competing ways to extend the XML to add basic things like struct member annotations (and then have things like Qt's own DBus code generator unable to actually handle any real DBus service definitions. Try throwing the systemd one at it, doesn't fucking work. The code doesn't even compile.)

Yes sure, another problem resulting from the lack of standarization. But my point was -- standarize (write a spec), instead of adding more to the problem by creating yet another competing standard which will obviously NOT solve the problem of lack of standarization.
by richardfeynman | 2025-12-16 00:05:33+00:00
This is you admitting you were never discussing history in good faith. You started with “adequate evidence of the Truman bombing attempt.” When asked for records, you pivoted to “it would certainly be classified.” Now you say you “don’t really care” whether it happened. That is not an argument. That is a bluff collapsing in real time.

Your “pushes up glasses, Mandatory Palestine” sneer is also a self-own. You accused “Israel” of an act in 1947. Israel did not exist in 1947. Correcting the actor and the date is not “apologia.” It is basic competence. And I literally called the King David Hotel bombing terrorism and said I’m not defending it, so your “terrorism apologia narrative” is just you lying about what I wrote.

The “classified” excuse is especially weak because this has been FOIA’d. The Secret Service response that’s publicly posted comes back “no responsive records.” Agencies do not answer “we found nothing” when they are sitting on a neat classified case file that exists. They either locate records and exempt them, or they Glomar. “No records” is what it says on the tin.

Then you retreat into “Classic Z tactic,” which is just coded insinuation for “I can’t support my factual claim, so I’ll smear you as part of a tribe.” You do not get to throw that kind of ethnic shorthand around and then pretend you are the one worried about “conflation.”

Bottom line: you used an unverified rumor to call me a denialist. When challenged, you switched to “classified.” When cornered, you admitted you don’t care if it’s true. That tells everyone exactly what this was.
by climb_stealth | 2025-12-16 00:05:43+00:00
Just want to say that I appreciate you giving it a good go!

I feel a bit of guilt reading it though. I followed your app from when you first announced it on hn. I liked the idea and still think it's great, I am in theory the target demographic of wanting to learn languages as a couple, and yet it didn't stick.

For what it's worth none of the other language apps stick either.

Maybe it's hard to compete with the heroin-like hyper-optimised attention-drain apps that left all sense of ethic and morals long behind :/
by kaipereira | 2025-12-16 00:05:46+00:00
4 layer boards actually make it easier instead of more advanced in my opinion. You can have a dedicated ground and power plane which makes routing much simpler, and the fields are much easier to predict.

It's also just double the price, so I can get 4 layer boards for like $8 from JLC and it just makes everything much more easily.

You still do want to build up to it though, I made a macropad, then a keyboard, and then made this, so it's definitely not just an immediate jump, but I built those 2 projects within the span of a couple months!
by zbentley | 2025-12-16 00:06:42+00:00
> Nothing like putting in a multi decade civil service career and coming in one day to find a 20-something installed over you

GS grade does not correspond directly to manager/managee relationships at plenty of federal agencies. Someone getting hired at a higher GS grade is not automatically “over you” in the formal reporting hierarchy. That’s not to say this never happens (GS:org chart level is the case more often than not, I’d guess), but it’s not a given.

Now, if your issue is that agencies sometimes offer high (by the standards of current employees) GS grades to attract talented hires, then I agree that is a problem! The solution to that is to improve government pay scales and fix fed hiring more generally: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/dear-mr-kupor-please-fix-fede...

Until that is done, (good) policies like the Pendleton Act cannot help that much.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-16 00:07:00+00:00
I find words in the same category as "country", "nation", "state", etc are increasingly used interchangeably. Largely because they tend to be far more specific than people mean to be... but also because generic terms like "polity" never caught on in the mainstream. A similar thing is how "nation-states" would appear to be the only type of place worth worrying about highly organized attacks from in infosec, until you ask them to define what they consider a nation-state.

That said, I don't think it's accurate to paint Curaçao as just another normal Dutch island the same as any other. It's really a constituent country that's part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just not a sovereign state or a nation.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-16 00:07:14+00:00
there are more non-crucial suppliers of Micron based ram than Crucial... they can pick up the slack... Micron simply wanted to redirect resources to supporting larger contracts to other suppliers over direct consumer support. The market isn't shrinking as a result.

I would suspect the same with Samsung exiting SATA (not NVME) drives... their chips are likely to be used by other MFGs, but even then maybe not as SATA is much slower than what most solid state memory and controllers are capable of supporting. There's also a massive low-end market of competition for SATA SSDs and Samsung sales are likely not the best overall.
by btown | 2025-12-16 00:07:41+00:00
Thanks for this history, I wasn't aware. It's an interesting point that if this is happening anyways by Apple's fiat, it's in the legacy CAs' interest to even further accelerate the mandatory timeline, so they can pivot to consulting services for their existing customers.

I do still feel that "that blog/publication that had immense cultural impact years ago, that was acquired/put on life support with annual certificate updates, will now be taken offline rather than migrated to a system that can support ACME automations, because the consultants charge more than the ad revenue" will be an unfortunate class of casualty. But that's progress, I suppose.
by mmooss | 2025-12-16 00:07:43+00:00
> They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.

Ugh. They say different things. The first describes the policy mechanisms and impacts. The second says nothing about those things; it describes your emotions.

The biggest communication problem I see now is people, especially on the Internet, including on HN, use the latter for the former purpose and say nothing.
by notahacker | 2025-12-16 00:07:46+00:00
It becomes worthwhile if its actually cheaper (probably significantly cheaper given R&D and risk), or if you're processing data which originates in space and the data transfer or latency is an issue

You can set up plant manufacturing chips in shipping containers and sending them to wherever energy/land is cheapest and regulation most suitable, without having to seek the FCCs approval to get launch approved and your data back...