Hacker News: Loughla

New comment by Loughla in "Unearthing a 31 year old Easter egg in Ecco the Dolphin"

Loughla — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 03:55:40 +0000

Ecco and super ghosts and goblins are my trigger words.

New comment by Loughla in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

Loughla — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:45:52 +0000

Yeah but HN sort of bills itself as better than most places. It just simply is not; there's just a special sort of self confidence here that masks a ton of ignorance.

New comment by Loughla in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

Loughla — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:48:15 +0000

The first time I saw the comments here on an education article (my area of expertise and career focus), I realized just how full of shit most of us are. It made me really closely consider every comment here through a VERY critical lense.

The articles are usually close but not quite accurate. The comments are usually entertaining but overall wildly inaccurate.

New comment by Loughla in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

Loughla — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:45:12 +0000

I've worked in colleges for 2 decades. It's rarely purely academic issues that cause bad grades, in my experience.

It's everything else with self regulation. Where most college prep goes wrong is at home, in not allowing appropriate agency for the child to make decisions before college. When you go from having to ask to go to the bathroom to being entirely independent in 2 months, bad shit happens.

This lesson has held true everywhere I've worked, from small junior colleges to D1 state schools.

Subsequently, college has gotten harder, but so has k-12, so proportionately, no it's not more difficult now

New comment by Loughla in "To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes"

Loughla — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:11:19 +0000

I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.

New comment by Loughla in "To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes"

Loughla — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:07:39 +0000

What is the purpose of what you're saying? Because people lived like serfs and slaves for a lot of history, we should be okay with that?

I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?

New comment by Loughla in "LinkedIn Feed Blocker"

Loughla — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:26:53 +0000

Ew. What purpose does that serve?

New comment by Loughla in "Don't use your phone while you poop"

Loughla — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:38:20 +0000

I'm certain that national geographic only exists in bathrooms. That's the reason we have a subscription. . . And my aunts and uncles and parents and cousins.

New comment by Loughla in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

Loughla — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:06:41 +0000

I was homeless for a year. My experience is that the best way to help homeless people is in giving them housing while mandating extensive drug/alcohol counseling and/or extremely invasive mental health treatments. There are some people who have just fallen on bad times (I was that), but a WIDE majority of the people I was around that year needed extreme help. When I say extreme, I mean borderline removing their agency to make decisions for themselves.

It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.

It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this

New comment by Loughla in "Nyctography: A substituton cypher by Lewis Carroll"

Loughla — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:22:13 +0000

Or just cut a piece of cardboard. That's what I did for my kid who loves secret codes and languages.

New comment by Loughla in "The lost civic life of movie rental stores"

Loughla — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:28:50 +0000

I'm not sure if you're joking, but I think it was implied that OP called the people.

New comment by Loughla in "The lost civic life of movie rental stores"

Loughla — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:27:56 +0000

Join a club. Lions, Masons, knights of Columbus, Oddfellows, woodworkers guild, something like that. They're dying for lack of youth membership and they're still around.

New comment by Loughla in "Underwater oxygen loss threatens earth's stability, researchers warn"

Loughla — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:13:26 +0000

Stop taking public input on public infrastructure. That would go over life a lead balloon.

New comment by Loughla in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

Loughla — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:43:52 +0000

Announcing your medications at a public work function is kind of weird though, regardless of what they are. Is that just me?

New comment by Loughla in "Minecraft Java raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition"

Loughla — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:36:47 +0000

I would agree.

They honored my account, and I originally bought the game when you had to send Notch money directly for him to send you a copy.

Microsoft was great in this instance.

New comment by Loughla in "Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth"

Loughla — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:33:47 +0000

I'm moving my timeline up from 40 years now.

New comment by Loughla in "Teaching Kids Forth"

Loughla — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:05:10 +0000

I'm betting the mask and pronouns. Because no one can do anything anymore, even if that thing has zero impact on anyone else, without having their mental fitness attacked.

New comment by Loughla in "Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth"

Loughla — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:02:30 +0000

>hopefully address before it turns into a problem.

Ron Howard's voice "They didn't."

But in all seriousness, there will be zero stomach for limiting launches for the ozone layer. I'm calling it now. Group 1 won't believe it's a problem. Group 2 will say it's just lefty elitists trying to ruin the economy. Group 3 will say there's no such thing as satellites.

Check back in 40 years. I bet I'm right.

New comment by Loughla in "Show HN: I mapped every US golf course"

Loughla — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:01:06 +0000

There's already one club I can see on there that doesn't actually exist.

Is a running gag in the area where I grew up, and made it on this list somehow. So that's weird.

New comment by Loughla in "The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras"

Loughla — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 19:49:06 +0000

Not to be too cynical but

>No Federal agency may purchase, deploy, operate, access, or contract for any automated surveillance system that identifies, tracks, or records individuals [. . .]

Emphasis mine.

Am I wrong or does this 1. not outlaw the purchase of the data, just the systems themselves, 2. not outlaw the use of the data unless it was obtained by the federal government through a system they have purchased, and 3. not outlaw local or state law enforcement from buying it, just outlaws the use of federal funds to buy these systems.

So flock feed the data through brokers instead of directly, correct? Or am I reading this wrong?