<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: brnaftr361</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brnaftr361</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 05:18:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=brnaftr361" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "The origins of the school system aimed to produce independent, critical thinkers (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The title of pt. 2 is <i>How our education system is far from its original ideals</i>. It's available on apple and audible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:13:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708046</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708046</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708046</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming.<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:16:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383596</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383596</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383596</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Illusions of understanding in the sciences"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, while going through college I had that exact thought, I wonder if in many fields we're at a tipping point where we should be conveying what we don't know more than what we do.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 16:24:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48170351</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48170351</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48170351</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Illusions of understanding in the sciences"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Y'know it's funny how, at least in my experience, education worked.<p>We're handed a bunch of simplified models then build on them. The consequence being that the landscape is very narrowly revealed.<p>This itself is a consequence of the architecture, at least in the US we don't really specialize until college/university.<p>Nobody really comprehends the depth of things until then, and troublingly enough we don't understand that until we're 2-3 years in.<p>For instance we have DNA, right? It gets replicated in cells via mitosis and in specialized cells called gametes via meiosis, the latter form is used for sexual reproduction. That's the gist you get in High School, you might talk about the polymer, nucleotides, nucleotide construction (which are superficial)<p>That isn't even close to the end, just off the top of my head there are elements in the DNA that code for several processes like methylation, allow interfacing with proteins which have myriad effects like up or downregulating transcription, they can also change the local topology forming loops that facilitate the process. There's a bunch of crazy shit that happens at the histone level.<p>And any one of those Substituent parts is probably worth discussing for a week in lecture at least but they're glossed over for more advances classes. For instance those regulatory molecules, in sufficient concentrations, can overpower histones that keep genes turned off, and that has downstream consequences in general regulation and cell differentiation.<p>I think that in the long run it compromises mental rigor. It also allows people to carry with them a sense of complete understanding when it's superficial and shallow. Having never experience the depth that the real world goes to kind of limits the horizons of people that aren't naturally curious and never shows them the potential for how deep shit can really get and when it does it is still superficial by the dint of the expectation placed on students being so narrow.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 13:53:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168932</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168932</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168932</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a 2018 WRX and I was considering removing the "telematics" module and updating the head unit to something more modern so I could use Android Auto but I was thinking that through and was immediately irked by the idea that I'd then be using google in lieu of Subaru. It's already bad enough as it is. Of course the head unit probably talks to and through the phone. I suppose the benefit would be that at least the new head unit would be anonymized but the use pattern would be obvious and explicitly correlated to me.<p>Kinda makes me want to buy a standalone navigation system at this point.<p>I don't even speed, I'm just sick of the idea of being watched always and forever.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 14:10:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148829</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148829</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48148829</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It feels like there's been a significant cinching of personal rights recently. I wonder if it has anything to do with crypto's relatively recent adoption by institutional movers. NordVPN offers crypto payments, I expect virtually every other operator would too. Seems like a good way to get adoption rolling. Tunnel to somewhere that providers will service without an ID check and stay more anonymous by the dint of the crypto exchange.<p>Maybe I'm trippin.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 16:17:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123931</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123931</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123931</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They need real, tangible, meaningful threats. Corporal or social.<p>Doling out talkings-to, ISS, OSS, bad grades and repeat courses are a relative joke. I spent uncountable hours in ISS for truancy, was made to walk miles to school, kicked off the bus and walk miles home, served community service, and had many talkings-to. None of it was effective.<p>Expulsion is treated as far too extreme and should be far more regular as both an incentive to the student and to the parents. For many of these kids school is an impediment and a detractor and they would do far better for themselves in the work environment gaining experience over the course of the 3-4 years anyways. There are far more permissive environments in workplaces than there are in school that are better suited for the nature of certain inclinations and measures than that of school. There's also the possibility of restarting vocational education, which frankly, is a good compromise. But the current system is bullshit. And the bar is so low that diplomas are given out to nearly 90% of students which is flatly <i>wrong</i> as from what I've seen there are a lot more people who are either academically or behaviorally unsuited for employment or voting by any reasonable standard. Setting up clear failure modes are the guidelines by which many of these people would derive structure and meaning in their education, instead they're allowed a de minimis exception and passed into the world as acceptably educated and competent when the opposite is true. And <i>that</i> totally erodes the meaning of the accomplishment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 14:59:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064177</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064177</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064177</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Singapore introduces caning for boys who bully others at school"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think corporal punishment makes sense when it makes sense. If a kid runs out into the road without looking it makes sense to slap em upside the head, a much milder surrogate for getting hit by a car.<p>I think it ceases to be a good form of punishment when it's repeatedly used. I built a resilience toward spanking. In one hand it meant that the threat of the punishment, and the punishment itself was ineffectual, and in the other to regain efficacy it would've required escalation—fortunately for me it began and ended at spanking.<p>I think the issues are manifold, though. People willing to step outside the line and assault and or batter students are <i>willing</i> to break the rules for one reason or another. For instance the aforementioned resilience.<p>The natural social dynamics one would reasonably expect to play out are fettered by the rules, irrespective of the nature of retaliation. Fighting in retaliation, bullying in retaliation, shunning, shaming and so forth—all beyond the pale.<p>Teachers and admin are then deferred to, but the tools at their disposal are, from what I experienced and saw, pretty minimal. However they carry the unnatural burden of handling belligerents while maintaining professionality is a difficult tight rope to walk, and frankly ineffectual, but this is worsened when the students can be part of a protected class. At this point the school assumes legal liability for their treatment.<p>With a chronic misbehavior you end up with a treatment-resistant student, and with that it saddles the parents almost exclusively with the governance of their children. This can have mixed outcomes, if you can imagine, spanning from extremely responsible to complete absenteeism.<p>I think in an ideal situation the prevailing culture would be one where students self-police, within reason, as they're allotted the most freedom in interacting with one another, but we've largely wrested their hands in these contexts and bred a culture of bystanders in so doing. And I think that is seriously problematic and has had long-running consequences on the culture at large.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 14:26:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063728</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063728</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48063728</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As a vegetarian that regularly uses plant-based substitutes: I'm super reluctant to believe a market for a product like Beyond ever existed. Between Beyond and Impossible they've got this weird chimera market, especially the latter, with their too-realistic product. If meaters cared they'd switch, there wasn't really a whole lot of fence sitting I don't think—not in reality. I think people were pretty well committed. I also think the sympathetic market of vegetarians and vegans didn't find the premise of these too-realistic products especially thrilling. And I don't think that's a huge market in the first place, at least not in a large portion of the US.<p>Then you factor in the costs and it's <i>Beyond</i> insanity.<p>And frankly I don't know if Beyond was doing anything legitimately novel. Impossible was over-engineering their burger to the extent that I wouldn't eat one from any restaurant because I couldn't tell whether it was be'f or beef. Beyond just seemed to be nu-gardein which I'll grant you—it's a Monsanto subsidiary—but the product is palettable, consistent, and available almost universally and has been as long as I've been on the diet, 12 years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 03:12:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408149</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408149</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408149</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Just the Browser"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon.<p>The UX is also awful.<p>But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?<p>And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.<p>And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:17:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647221</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647221</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647221</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Mind-reading devices can now predict preconscious thoughts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Split brain experiments have been called into question.[0]<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170125093823.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170125093823.h...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:07:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037837</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037837</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46037837</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "WorldGen – Text to Immersive 3D Worlds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would think the argument for this is that it would enable and facilitate more advanced environments.<p>There's also plenty of games with fully explorable environments, I think it's more of a scale and utility consideration. I can't think of what use I'd have for exploring an office complex in GTA other than to hear Rockstar's parodical office banter. But Morrowind had reason for it to exist in most contexts.<p>Other games have intrinsically explorable interiors like NMS, and Enshrouded. Elden Ring was pretty open in this regard as well. And Zelda. I'm sure there are many others. TES doesn't fall into this due to the way interiors are structured which is a door teleports you to an interior level, ostensibly to save on poly budget, which again, concerning scale is an important consideration in both terms of meaning and effort in-context.<p>This doesn't seem to be doing much to build upon that, I think we could procedurally scatter empty shell buildings with low-mid assets already with a pretty decent degree of efficiency?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Nov 2025 22:38:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018948</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018948</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018948</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Make product worse, get money"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't yield relative? Take a bell pepper for instance, perhaps one grown in x soil another in y, the nutrient contents will vary even if one is clonal.<p>There have been some rumblings about the nutrient qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated, indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0]. There's a researcher that took historical records of micronutrient measures and compared them against modern cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents.<p>I think it begs several questions about modern practices in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which is associated with micronutrient deficiencies.<p>[0] <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:22:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017478</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017478</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46017478</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There isn't presently a good solution to this. I think regulations like that will probably have downstream effects, kicking the can down the road.<p>Google is already bad enough at government collusion, divulging data, as are other infrastructure providers.<p>Best-case is gutting Alphabet and breaking it up to the effect of decentralization of its pieces.<p>I think if anything regulating the current instruments would just harden their social/political position which furthers their interests more than anything.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:30:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45751068</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45751068</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45751068</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "How Apple designs a virtual knob (2012)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I didn't read the writeup. The result was pretty gnarly. The active area on a phone left me scrolling up and down and I had to go very slow once I got purchase on the knob or it would rotate back after a quarter turn.<p>Please no.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2025 18:56:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551676</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551676</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45551676</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Apple expects to notify 100M people that they have hypertension in a year"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That privacy policy is <i>hilarious</i>.<p>Is that how we sibsidize the advertized cost of $1500 down to $200</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:07:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188076</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188076</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45188076</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you have a point, at the resolution of personal liability shit is and has been cooked. Without being able to hold people to account for their misdeeds, misdeeds are de facto allowed and especially when you can obfuscate information. It's Goodhart's law in action, the sector looks good because we're shooting for targets in a heuristic measure but the reality is glum.<p>Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.<p>Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:54:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184807</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184807</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184807</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "AI surveillance should be banned while there is still time"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I expect that r.i.c.e. was overfit. Asian imports are called riceburners, ostensibly because asian cultures consume a lot of rice. I guess it could be contrived as racist, but it's relatively harmless in the scope of things...<p>I'm speculating further: but the imports were cheap and had a thriving aftermarket of bolt-on parts e.g. body and turbo kits. The low barrier of entry afforded opportunities for anybody to play. Ricing was probably a perjorative issued by domestic enthusiasts that was adopted ironically by Asian import enthusiasts. If you can imagine there was a lot of diversity, people who would bolt up body kits to clapped out Civics to people that would push 700hp with extensively tuned cars with no adornments. I think in particular ricing was the more aesthetically motivated of the crowd.<p>This was later adopted by computer enthusiasts that like to add embelishments to their desktops, things like rainmeter/rocketdock and Windows/Linux skins and etc...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Sep 2025 19:49:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161535</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161535</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161535</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Toothpaste made with keratin may protect and repair damaged teeth: study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Toothpaste is <i>not</i> a complicated compound to make.<p>The question is one of optimization. What size (mechanical) or what type of keratin is most suitable, or do we depolymerize (chemical) it first or let oral enzymes do it..? Is brushing as-is sufficient or do we need a longer dwell time..?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:00:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44924571</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44924571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44924571</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by brnaftr361 in "Toothpaste made with keratin may protect and repair damaged teeth: study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Root as in seed [crystal], as in nucleation point is what I would surmise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 Aug 2025 14:41:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44923870</link><dc:creator>brnaftr361</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44923870</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44923870</guid></item></channel></rss>