ameminator

But if the drop between 2018 and 2022 was AS LARGE as the drop between 2022 and 2026, this implies that something happened that was as large as a global pandemic for students' education happened in the last four years. I believe the OP is implying this could have been AI. However, something else could be happening, such as use of phones and other devices or another fundamental problem in the education system.

Sometimes people down vote for no reason. Unfortunately, when one complains about it, they look like a whiner.

I mostly agree, except for the blatant calls for genocide from the Israeli side, and the blatant calls for genocide from the Palestinian side. I honestly don't know who to support - neither side wants to live with the other, and it seems, eventually, one of those sides will get their wish. To the detriment of us all.

While I appreciate your candor, words matter. I wouldn't call Israel an apartheid state if, in fact, it was two different countries warring to the death over not enough land. I think that situation is closer to reality, with the "victorious" side refusing to completely destroy the loser and the loser refusing to surrender to the "victor".

That situation has changed for the worse in recent years, and the world should step in, if it can. How the world should step in is not obvious - especially if the thorny history of the region is considered.

Finally, on the "current vs future 'genocides'" - dismissing Israel's legitimate security concerns would be as wrong as dismissing Israel's obvious warcrimes, in my opinion. I can't, in good conscience, advocate for action that would replace one genocide with another and it's important to me to consider my actions and words in that light. You may think differently, but maybe you value human life and morality differently than I do.

It's obvious you've made up your mind, but I don't think you've convinced anyone who hasn't already made up their mind, nor have you addressed, what I believe, are very valid questions about the conflict.

While I actually have sympathy for people on both sides of the struggle, I also find it hard to answer "yes" to both questions, mostly because of how muddied the definitions of everything are. It's obvious to me, that both the Israeli government and Hamas are both committing serious warcrimes, and that there no good actors here, here are some questions I don't have an answer to.

For example, is Palestine its own country? Is Hamas is its rightful government? Does that extend to the West Bank or only in Gaza? Palestinians seem to say that Palestine is its own country, Israelis say that Palestinians are not a part of Israel - so how can it be an apartheid state if BOTH sides say they aren't part of the same country at all?

Is Israel committing a genocide? Well, what does a genocide look like? Israel is still distributing food in Gaza, to this day. I don't think it would look like this, but at the same time, there are terrorists on both sides (Itamar ben-Gvir being the most prominent on the Israeli side, in my opinion).

There are more issues and questions and uncertainty around the problems in Israel, Palestine, the Levant as a whole, Iran's involvement and so on.

Even worse, for most Israelis (who are 70% of Arab descent), the country of Israel no longer existing could mean a real genocide for the Israel side! (A counter-genocide?) Regardless, if this issue were easy to solve, it would have been solved already.

Honestly, the situation seems to complicated to boil down to two "simple" questions and I admire that you can have such an "obvious" outlook, but the more I look at Israel and the Middle East (and read, and research), the more questions I have.

Uh, probably it would have been a place to be avoided for a non-Arab

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's hard to convince the Israel government, since the last time Israel withdrew from Gaza (in 2005), a terrorist organization was elected and it resulted in multiple wars and waves of violence, leading up to the current conflict.

First, 60-70% of Israeli Jews are of Arabic descent, not European.

Second, while it's possible to complain about the circumstances of the creation of Israel, I'm not sure that doing so now, in context, offers anything constructive. It seems that by most reasonable definitions, Israel is a country, if a small one. Do you suggest that Israel be eradicated? If so, what happens to all the Israelis, who likely wouldn't be welcome in the area after the country's destruction? Is it any more justifiable to ethnically cleanse one group from the area than another?

I don't have an answer to this conflict, but it isn't clear to me that suggesting "this country shouldn't have existed at all" is an answer either.

Currently, housing availability is not a factor in immigration policy. Canada allowed over 1.2 million new residents last year. There were approximately 200k new houses built in that same time frame. Interpret this as you will.

Canada is in the top end of the OECD when it comes to building housing. The problem is that the rate of new house construction has been severely outpaced by population growth. Canada has the highest rate of population growth of any developed nation and it is largely spurred by immigration.

As a supplement to this excellent breakdown of laser cutting, can I recommend the Guerrilla Guide to CNC [0]. To this day, it's the best reference I've ever read on small volume fabrication with a CNC machine and/or 3D printer. If you enjoyed the original post, you may enjoy this as well.

[0] https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/

Spoiler:

If the first person did not want to eat, he would have answered "No, we are not ready". Him not being ready is enough to negate the whole thing. He doesn't know if the both of them are ready to eat though, because he doesn't know that the second man is ready or not (the second man hasn't revealed his state yet).

Therefore, the second man knows that the first is ready to eat, since the first's answer is "I don't know". Since the second man knows that he himself is ready to eat, he can answer: "we are both ready to eat".

Aviation in general is very safe. However, there is clearly something wrong in Boeing's design and manufacturing process that's persisted for many years. I would not feel comfortable flying in any of the new 737 MAX's and will avoid flying in one as much as possible.

There are crazy over-engineered solutions with strict requirements and insane dependency management with terrible trade-offs and compromises. I've worked in the aerospace field before, so I've seen how terrible this can be. It's also possible to have unit tests, have a design and have documentation without the above and would go a long way to solve the original 3 issues.

> They are also less productive when coding than the scientists because they care too much about the quality of their work and not enough about getting shit done.

You can't solve the first 3 issues without having people who care about software quality. People not caring about the quality of the software is what caused those initial 3 problems in the first place.

Believe it or not, you're argument strongly resonated with me. However:

>It makes me wonder: is the topic so toxic that no conversation can happen at all?

I believe that the topic is so toxic and emotionally charged that it's almost impossible to have meaningful conversation about it. It's the "abortion" of geopolitics, where everyone is emotionally invested in their own way, distrusts/hates the other side or has such absolute positions that there is no point in arguing.

Now, it may still be worth the attempt (which I believe is the HN moderators' position on this matter). You have a really strong point that we should put in the effort to make space for this type of conversation. Unfortunately, all the evidence has convinced me that "polite, productive conversation" and "Israel/Palestine conflict" are mutually exclusive.

I see Hacker News as a tech-related with some general interest forum. I appreciate the high standards of dialogue and commentary on this website as well as the "intellectual exploration"-esque philosophy behind it. If a topic cannot conform to the above standard, I don't think it should be here - and that's out of necessity, to protect the environment of intellectual openness here.

Unfortunately, it may also be true that it's hard to find an alternative space to discuss this in society, that perhaps friends and family or your local community is not open to this discussion. That sites like Reddit are not great places for this discussion.

But HN cannot be the "everything" place and it's in this spirit that I think we should strongly consider limiting how much of this topic we welcome here, in the interest of protecting at least one great place for tech-related (with some general interest) intellectual pursuits.

I will let you be the judge - do you really find the rest of this thread constructive?

It's not that I don't have an opinion (or even a strong one!) on this subject. The point is that everyone (and their mother) has a strong opinion, not only on the absolute morality of a side's actions, but on the morality of each source, of each agency involved, with various amounts of prejudice and superstition baked in.

Even worse, not one side is willing to really compromise. Even for the root issue of the Israel/Palestine conflict itself, it's impossible to "square the circle" on both the rights of each side, the motives of each side and the actions of each side. There's so much history and (mis) information flying around that it's hard for anyone to make a logical argument or contribute in a meaningful way.

I believe all of the above to be true and I believe the above could be overcome with earnest effort from both "sides" (if we are calling it that). Very, very rarely have I ever seen any attempt at compromising or meeting in the middle or having even a respectful conversation about this subject. So, inevitably, the conversation devolves into a mud-fight.

It's like "Godwin's Law" of geopolitics: any conversation about the Israel/Palestine conflict inevitably devolves into mud-slinging where both sides compare the other to Nazis.

So, forgive me if I want my tech-related forum to remain "mud-free".

I (and many other users of this forum) have expectations on the minimum quality of discourse. Moreover, I am happy this forum exists with its quality of discussion. I am interested in preserving this high level of civilized interactions.

Time and time again, when it comes to the subject of Israel and Palestine, it has been shown that the discourse never meets the minimum standards I usually enjoy here. To the point where I am not sure if it's even theoretically possible.

To use your metaphor - if this were a forum about juggling, I would generally expect people to have an honest interest in juggling, and to have discussions about juggling. If every discussion about curling, on my juggling forum, devolved into abuse - it would be reasonable to avoid discussing curling (at a certain point).

I'll let your comment speak for itself.

We did give lots of aid to Ukraine and we somehow were able to have discussions about whether we should continue to do so, in a relatively civilized manner. [0]

Somehow, when it comes to Israel and/or Palestine, all nuance gets lost, my "side" is "right", and the other "side" is an unholy abomination, morally disgusting or some other thing without room for earnest discussion.

I'll let the rest of this thread speak for itself.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37101187

In my experience, the "benefit of the doubt" has been lost in relation to this subject. I no longer believe it is possible to have any thread about this remain civil. It's tragic and a tragic subject, although I dispute the "there couldn't be a more significant current event" - lots of events are equally (or more) significant and relevant. I hope to be proven wrong, but I have doubts.

You're also absolutely right - I hadn't considered that point of view, and that we also shouldn't be "de facto" censoring subjects. I implore the community here to not ruin the general HN forum with the usual insanity around this subject.

I'm not sure the Canadian government ever pretended to 'fight for the people'. 'Rights' in Canada are completely different to what most consider a right and mean something very different to rights in the US. The Canadian government model is characterized by 'Peace, order and good governance' - it just so happens that 'good governance' means protectionist policies for this administration.

I honestly don't think this subject should be on here. I don't think it's possible for a coherent or respectful or even useful conversation to happen here. I haven't seen any conversation about this topic that hadn't gone to hell.

NTSB may want to consider regulating the size of new trucks and SUVs, which are disproportionately causing deaths and damage, instead of inventing new problems for themselves.

I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. Maybe the public school system is failing its students. However, it always seemed unfair to trap parents who would otherwise have other options in a failing system. Yes, this does suck for the children of uncaring parents - but for the parents who DO care, shouldn't they have a means of meeting their obligation to their children?

As a side note, as of today Firefox has something like 2.79% of the browser market, coming in fifth, behind Opera, Edge, Safari and (of course) Chrome. Firefox only comes slightly ahead of Samsung Internet which I have only just heard of today. It's really sad to see how far Firefox has fallen.

The stats: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

I don't disagree, but now imagine Quebec having deals with (for example) France and Switzerland and Ontario only having agreements with Italy and Spain (but only for medical licenses), while Alberta may evaluate accreditation on a case-by-case basis. This is somewhat incredible to behold, as if 10 different countries had their own licensing treaties and then we bolted on a federal immigration system on top of that.

This is actually a terrible deal in disguise. According to recent reports (which I don't have on hand at the moment), over 70% of immigrants to Canada are under employed or under utilized. While the federal government controls how many immigrants, the provinces control certification and expert recognition. This means that foreign-trained doctors (as an example) can easily get a federal visa to enter the country, but the province will refuse to recognize their medical training, forcing these skilled immigrants to work low-skill jobs instead. It is not rare to find foreign-trained engineers working as taxi-drivers or for PhD-holders to be slinging coffee.

Unfortunately, I don't think programs like these will have any beneficial impact until Canadian society can fix its abysmally low productivity (and productivity growth) as well as the severe under-utilization of skilled immigrant labor. All this will accomplish is exacerbate the housing crisis in metropolitan areas and further expose Canada's extremely poor economic performance - expected to be the absolute lowest in the OECD in upcoming years.

However, one CAN do "object-oriented" programming in C. There are ways of modeling what a piece of data is (a struct with its members). There are ways of modeling how a piece of data can behave (functions operating on those structs/pointers to structs). Perhaps this is lacking in features and expressiveness compared to OOP-first languages like C#, C++ and others, but object-oriented concepts can apply in C - look to the compiler to organize private, public functions and ownership.

I've had vertical tabs in Vivaldi for a little while now. I hope you guys enjoy it over on Brave as well, they change how you use tabs. Strongly recommended.