Hacker News: lthornberry

New comment by lthornberry in "Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees"

lthornberry — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 02:48:19 +0000

Most academics teach in departments that don’t grant phds. They’re at liberal arts Colleges or regional state universities. True that statistically only a small percentage of grad students will go on to have their own PhD students, but that doesn’t mean there are no jobs for the rest.

New comment by lthornberry in "Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees"

lthornberry — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:23:54 +0000

The fact that you don't understand something is not evidence that it's not valuable.

New comment by lthornberry in "Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees"

lthornberry — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:21:48 +0000

This is Dunning-Kruger in sentence form.

New comment by lthornberry in "Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees"

lthornberry — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:21:03 +0000

The glut is primarily a function of the fact that universities have decided that it's fine to have most of their courses taught by poorly-paid adjuncts. That is, actually, a bad thing. If we returned to having tenure-track faculty do a substantial majority of teaching, most people who get humanities degrees would get jobs in the end.

New comment by lthornberry in "Show HN: Ricotta – Language Learning to Replace Anki"

lthornberry — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 14:49:16 +0000

Yeah, I noticed later that the example sentences used the correct translation. Presumably that's because it's easier for translation software to differentiate among the various meanings of "used" when it's in the context of a sentence.

New comment by lthornberry in "Show HN: Ricotta – Language Learning to Replace Anki"

lthornberry — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 03:04:46 +0000

How are you generating the decks? There are some incorrect translations, at least for for the version of Spanish I learned. Maybe there’s a dialect that says “ser usado” instead of “acostumbrarse” for “be used to”?

New comment by lthornberry in "Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?"

lthornberry — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 03:14:49 +0000

Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.

New comment by lthornberry in "Maybe Bluesky has "won""

lthornberry — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 21:44:28 +0000

The decision to promote blue check replies is a product-level decision that has made the user experience much, much worse

New comment by lthornberry in "Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home"

lthornberry — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 22:05:55 +0000

There are tort firms doing that in every area of tort law. ADA cases are not easy wins and don’t often produce significant awards.

New comment by lthornberry in "Ticketmaster’s attempt to game arbitration services fails"

lthornberry — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 17:55:04 +0000

Basically similar situation in the US, that’s what the article means when in references “formation” issues.

New comment by lthornberry in "The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800"

lthornberry — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 21:19:45 +0000

Eh, I teach in a university and that experience makes me extremely skeptical of most high-school graduates' ability to get an education from online resources. If you can do that, great, it's certainly a much cheaper and convenient route. I don't think we should discriminate against people who got their education that way. But most people need more structure and expert guidance.

New comment by lthornberry in "The evolution of nepotism in academia, 1088-1800"

lthornberry — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 21:17:24 +0000

It also creates conflict of interest problems among the owners. How do you ensure that only your share of the business profit is getting siphoned off to support your kid? Does each owner get one fail-son slot?

New comment by lthornberry in "‘America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty’"

lthornberry — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 17:10:11 +0000

I also support a shift to UBI, but your description of TANF/WIC is not grounded in reality. TANF has a 5 year lifetime, and many states actually have lower limits food stamps do not come close to covering the costs of feeding a family People do sell food stamps sometimes, not because they have more than they need, but because they are desperate for cash to pay for other necessities such as utilities.

The idea that people are getting by for years and years based on these as sources of income is a myth.

New comment by lthornberry in "Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own"

lthornberry — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 19:16:32 +0000

This is the important point. Anyone paying taxes in the US is subsidizing Harvard.

New comment by lthornberry in "Bikes, not self driving cars, are the technological gateway to urban progress"

lthornberry — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 17:04:34 +0000

Cars are also not compatible with many types of disabilities. Cars will need to be part of the transit mix, but they don't need to dominate it.

New comment by lthornberry in "The quiet cost of family caregiving"

lthornberry — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 01:54:24 +0000

That's not what the Canadian system is, though. The state kills people, and not just the terminally ill. There is lots of room for coercion, and more than a few disabled people have stories of someone trying to persuade them to consider MAiD even though they have never expressed any interest.

New comment by lthornberry in "The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal"

lthornberry — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 20:56:12 +0000

For many decades, California has had extremely restrictive building regulations, especially in the most desirable areas. That is slowly changing, but the actual building has always been straightforward. It is getting the permission to do so that is complicated, expensive, and often just impossible.

New comment by lthornberry in "Don’t teach kids to fear the world"

lthornberry — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 18:36:36 +0000

Ironically, I live in the notoriously high-crime city to your north, with kids basically the same age. The older one has free reign of our neighborhood at this point. We live in a walkable neighborhood with streets narrow enough that cars can't pick up any significant speed. Everyone agrees that Columbia is "safer," but I'm way less worried about my kids up here.

New comment by lthornberry in "U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings"

lthornberry — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:34:32 +0000

This kind of thing is much more likely to happen in the discussion section of a large lecture class than in a small seminar, because the discussion section is likely taught by a graduate student with little prior teaching experience.

New comment by lthornberry in "U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings"

lthornberry — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:32:38 +0000

This is a plot point of the season of The Wire set in the school system. In Baltimore, it is definitely tied to funding--schools get per-pupil funding, but students have to actually be in attendance a certain percentage of the first six weeks of school in order to count for the funding formula.