Hacker News: gsquaredxc

New comment by gsquaredxc in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

gsquaredxc — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:55:37 +0000

I would like to offer some additional reassurance: I send my friends articles I see on HN that might interest them. A (in my view) very good litmus test is when someone asks where I saw it, because this demonstrates some desire for continual learning. I find that anyone that asks that question seemingly trusts an interface like HN more because of it. My suspicion is that this is probably because at a certain point you see stuff like Agner Fog's work, LWN, or a number of other minimalist websites and realize that a website that is popular despite the lack of overindulgence in UI must be popular because of the content. It doesn't hurt that the best courses in my university experience have had websites that have not changed much since the late 1990s (one did change the lime green text on turquoise background on their page after the recession to a color scheme that didn't cause headaches in students).

I do find that my peers that now read HN used to be judicial about curating a Reddit feed and mostly otherwise limited on other sources. Short-form content is addictive and as nearly as unavoidable as sugar, but many of my brighter peers work on reducing that intake. Long-form YouTube is also something I find to be a marker of someone who is seeking knowledge. Many of my peers do scroll Twitter and TikTok all day, but I find that those who are easiest to chat with are those who have already scrolled HN today and want to discuss a particular article they know I would have seen. I've had conversations that start with "Did you see that TikTok?" and conversations that start with "Did you see that article on HN?" and the latter is always more engaging.

New comment by gsquaredxc in "The effect of ChatGPT on students' learning performance, perception,and thinking"

gsquaredxc — Sat, 10 May 2025 20:14:55 +0000

This study I feel is misleading at least at a headline. They found 6621 studies and narrowed it down to 51 studies to analyze. This is somewhat fine as meta-studies do need to narrow from the initial scope, but this is more aggressive than I have seen in the past. I haven't had time to view all of the studies, but from what I can tell most of the studies are somewhat specific. That is, they are asking "If we give students ChatGPT in specific situation (specialized prompts, supervised environments, etc) then can students succeed?" I worry that the headline is quite misleading in this instance. The overall study seems to ask "if we can align the stars would ChatGPT be helpful?" This is a useful question to ask, but certainly not equivalent to "is ChatGPT helping students learn right now?"

New comment by gsquaredxc in "CrowdStrike CEO summoned to explain epic fail to US Homeland Security committee"

gsquaredxc — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:04:06 +0000

CRWD is a member of the S&P 500. Are you truly suggesting that every holder of the S&P 500 should be put in prison? Realistically, this means that nearly every American and a very large number of international average workers just trying to save for their retirement would have to go to jail. Sounds like a good way to inflate those private prison stocks.

New comment by gsquaredxc in "I couldn't escape poison oak, so I started eating it"

gsquaredxc — Sun, 19 May 2024 14:50:33 +0000

This isn't true. H1 antagonists, which is the group of drugs commonly referred to as antihistamines, contains two subgroups of pharmaceuticals. There are the first generation antihistamines, which are generally more popular and earn the reputation of making you drowsy, and the second generation antihistamines. The second generation antihistamines are significantly more selective for the H1 receptors you want to block versus the ones in your brain. Doxylamine is a first generation drug marketed under the brand name Unisom for insomnia, whereas a common second generation antihistamine loratadine commonly includes the phrase "non-drowsy" on the box. It still increases sedation, but at a substantially lower rate than the first generation drugs.