Hacker News: eszed

New comment by eszed in "The Case for Free Online Books (2014)"

eszed — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:53:06 +0000

When I taught university, I put every required book on reserve in the library. I also about "alternative methods, that you're absolutely not allowed to use. The college gets kick-backs from [book publisher], so your nerdy friend who obtains his books for free is in direct violation of that agreement, and he should absolutely not share anything with anyone in this class".

I encouraged my colleagues to make the same announcement; some did, though others were too square to do it. We all thought it was a racket, though, and tried to minimize costs. Even the colleagues who wouldn't go as far as I did regularly photo-copied pages and pages and pages of material to hand out - I think our general ethos was anything less than a chapter or so shouldn't require a purchase. Maybe that department was better than most, but I know lots of academics are aware of the situation, and think it's terrible.

New comment by eszed in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:06:34 +0000

Fun! I mix white and whole-wheat flour, which we think tastes better. Half and half, and up the baking powder by ~50%.

New comment by eszed in "Dopamine Fracking"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:21:57 +0000

Good points. I expect you're familiar with the Abundance Agenda folks? They're mostly talking right now about energy and infrastructure, which I think is a correct choice, but there is a next step to take with consumer goods, so that we can end up with an abundance of quality and not more engineered addiction.

New comment by eszed in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:56:08 +0000

That's what I took away from it, too. Facebook circa 2008 was great: your friends talked what were up to; everyone posted their pictures from that party last night; you didn't see anything from anyone who wasn't at most a second-degree connection. There were problems - people were jerks, and worse, and some people got pulled into chasing clout, and promoted bullshit - but they were human-scale problems, and you could largely scrub your feed from things / people like that. Unfortunately for the entire world, that sort of use wasn't profitable enough.

New comment by eszed in "Dopamine Fracking"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:26:18 +0000

You're right, too, but also in the European chain stores - Carrefour and Spar, and the like - I see more quality produce and local cheese and regional products than I do in North American equivalents. They're sold right alongside the commodity, international-brand stuff, and usually is price-competitive. The best apples I ate on my last trip to Spain I bought in a motorway services; they looked like they'd been grown next door, and maybe had been.

New comment by eszed in "Dopamine Fracking"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:16:53 +0000

Vibrant city centers in the US have small stores, too - even town centers in high-income areas. In Europe (especially, in my experience, France) they're common, because they've supported and subsidized them in all sorts of un-economically "optimized" ways. Americans prefer them, too, though - when they can afford them; they just haven't made having that kind of economy a political priority.

New comment by eszed in "Dopamine Fracking"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:05:20 +0000

I took essentially no photos in my twenties (long before phone cameras) for exactly this reason - and, in the short term, absolutely did remember events better than the folks who were constantly looking for their next digicam shot. I'm now living the long-term of that, though, and regret that I have nothing "tangible" to show my wife and kid, or even to re-spark my own memory, about all the amazing things I did back then.

I'm a bit more intentional now: I don't pull out my (phone) camera all that often, but I try to look for something that will represent - not record (that's impossible), but spark a memory of - the moment later. By the way, people are more important for this than things, or "the thing" itself. I actually think the selfie brigade are on the right track, for all that they may become annoying by overdoing it.

New comment by eszed in "Dopamine Fracking"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:48:14 +0000

I take your point, but the other argument against scaling in this way doesn't rely on sentiment: it's unsustainable. I actually hate that word, but the point is that current production methods create (unpriced) environmental externalities. We're draining aquifers, exhausting topsoil, pouring fertilizer into rivers, using too much petroleum - and then throwing a massive portion of what we produce away. (And that's just for food; similar arguments exist for fashion, and sometimes for buildings and infrastructure.) That argument gets effectively zero traction - despite, I think, being the better one - so some people who care more about that argue from sentiment instead, which (for the reasons you explain, and rightly object to) has better legs with the general public.

New comment by eszed in "Dopamine Fracking"

eszed — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:25:22 +0000

Try this:

https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-2-minute-hollandaise-r...

I used to make it on the stovetop - even learned how to rescue it when it broke - but I don't anymore. You can decide whether using a hand blender counts as "real" or not, but the ingredients are the same, and I can't tell the difference, only the technique is arguably "cheating".

New comment by eszed in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

eszed — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:55:07 +0000

Which show?

New comment by eszed in "The British university is dying, and it seems that almost nobody cares"

eszed — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:46:24 +0000

Has Brexit played a role in this? When I was in and around British universities, ~20 years ago, EU grants were a significant source of income.

New comment by eszed in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

eszed — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:14:06 +0000

I agree with all of that. The problem in our area - I realize every local (US) school system is different, which itself seems to me to be a problem - is that the after school program is enormously expensive. Our kid is skipping (public) TK to stay another year in his private (all day) pre-school because TK + after-school is only, like, $50 / month cheaper. Not sure why three hours of after-school costs the same as 7.5 hours of Montessori, but it does.

New comment by eszed in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

eszed — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:47:32 +0000

Ignoring whatever you mean by injecting "ethnicity" into the question, I've interacted kids in all of those socio-economic situations and think both that GP's point about innate curiosity is true, and that GGP's unwilling / coaxable / eager concept is a reasonable framework. That's not to say that I'm necessarily optimistic - socio-economic difficulties create absolutely enormous challenges to learning - just that I've never encountered a group of kids, regardless of background, where there weren't students in each of those (unwilling / coaxable / eager) sets.

New comment by eszed in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

eszed — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:25:39 +0000

Yes, to all of this.

The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles.

(This is why many teachers - I was among them - aren't immediately good at teaching concepts or subjects that come easily to them as they may be at teaching things they struggled a bit to learn. If you've had to break something down for yourself then you're ahead of the game when it comes to breaking it down for others.)

For a while I taught an "Improv For Teachers" workshop (I have a theatre background), which was really about listening to your class and being ready to adapt your lesson plan to where they are in their course of work, or even to their mood on the day. It was mostly elementary school teachers, and some of them really resisted that idea. I'm convinced, though, that that's an important skill: the most memorable and successful classes I've taught have happened when I've been able to take advantage of a student question or a student interest and run with it - sometimes not even knowing where it'll go - with the confidence that I'll somehow be able to pivot back to the curriculum. You have to be willing to be a bit vulnerable, and embrace a bit of fear, and risk a bit of failure to do it, hence why the Improv experience is so helpful.

Do you have teaching experience?

New comment by eszed in "They’re made out of weights"

eszed — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:20:59 +0000

I think we agree on all of those points. I'd posit, however, that whatever "it" is, and however you define it, humans are further up the scale than other animals. That's partly why I mentioned language use; it could be the step function that allows further development. Like, sophisticated-enough communication with other conscious entities is the factor that unleashes recursive improvement. This is all highly speculative.

New comment by eszed in "Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years"

eszed — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:02:24 +0000

I read the same piece you did (if it was on HN, anyway), and it described highly-educated-in-Kenya people. Nothing low-class implied. I suspect (though I may be wrong about this) that lower-class Kenyans aren't likely to be literate in English.

New comment by eszed in "Under Notre Dame, a 'dig of the century' unearths 1,700 years of history"

eszed — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:54:23 +0000

You're right, of course, but the post-War consensus in which (most) major powers (mostly) acknowledged international law and (mostly) restricted themselves to economic, rather than military, competition was... nice. It took the two most destructive wars in history, back-to-back, to reach that state of (imperfect, relative) peace, and I'm sorry to see it ending.

New comment by eszed in "They’re made out of weights"

eszed — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:58:13 +0000

Aye, that's the question, and we don't know: everything in this sub-thread my comment kicked off is speculation. The thing is that several large groups of (or at least led by) fundamentally reckless people are racing to build machines that will test these hypotheses, with little regard for the consequences. The rest of us are scrabbling around in their wake wondering what's going to happen next.

New comment by eszed in ""They're made out of weights""

eszed — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:11:53 +0000

Sure, but capacity for self-awareness? I'd guess that hamsters dream, and that their subconscious processes (eg, desires for food and sleep and sex), and maybe even emotions, run much like ours. It's just that humans, with more complex neural networks, have more layers added on top. It's similar to how the brain-stems of everything from lizards on "up" function similarly, but humans have more-developed pre-frontal cortexes and so forth. (Don't hold me to those details, please, I'm not a neuro-anatomist! You can see where I'm going with that, though, right?)

New comment by eszed in "They’re made out of weights"

eszed — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:50:32 +0000

I'd expand a little bit to say inevitably emergent property. That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result. With regards to current AI, we're a fair way away from building something with enough connections, but we'll get there.

One thing that gives me pause about the inevitability hypothesis is that the type of connection, or manner of information processing, may matter: there might be something about neurons that isn't (currently) reproducible in silicon. I don't know, and there's not (yet) any evidence for or against, but it at least seems like plausible speculation. We just don't know enough about any of this right now.