blahedo

> Most people hit the standard deduction,

Is this still true? After they raised the deduction and capped the sales/local tax deductions (and some others too I thought), I assumed a lot of people that used to hit the standard deduction now didn't.

I've ridden almost all of the long-distance Amtrak lines and not seen what you describe. There are "long stops" where there are crew changes and refill and restock, but they are not primarily for passengers to visit the train station (and through-passengers that wish to get some fresh air are explicitly warned not to leave the platform, though this is not generally enforced if someone wants to take their chances).

Your last paragraph suggests your understanding of US healthcare is entirely theoretical. In practice, COBRA is frequently so much more expensive that it wouldn't be affordable even if you hadn't just lost your job. In practice, millions of people are trapped in jobs they don't want but can't leave because they need healthcare and will lose access to healthcare if they lose the job. It's a stupendously shitty system that gives US employers even more of an upper hand than they would otherwise have.

> like single digits F

Wait, so in conditions that wide swaths of North America reliably get every year, the car doesn't charge? How is that not a deal-breaking problem?

> Chains are for snow. They’ve got nothing to do with clearance.

Yes, and you were the one who mentioned chains in response to clearance issues. GP was asked to provide examples, and did. That's not arrogance.

> ...sufficient bus routes running...

* cries in American *

Your entire premise ("duplicating public and school buses") assumes a public bus infrastructure in the first place. That... is not in general a good assumption for any but the largest US cities.

> which usually isn't the case

Where do you live? There are many, many places in the US where it is indeed usually the case. (Possibly depending on your definition of "far away")

> apparently too feeble

In my county the kids are not permitted to walk or bike to the school; they can only take the bus or be driven (and they have to be picked up by a parent or someone on an approved list). I assume that stops when they're of driving age but I wouldn't be shocked if the 16-year-olds are allowed to drive but not to bike....

Way back in 2008 or so, shortly after the "ribbon" arrived in the MS Word interface, I was teaching a CS class that had a unit on UI, so we spent a bunch of time deconstructing it and comparing it to the menu-based interfaces we were all (then) still used to. I was careful to point out that unfamiliarity with the new interface wasn't necessarily the same as it being bad, especially if with a little additional training and practice we could become more efficient and/or it aided in discoverability for newer users. Although I didn't use the same words as the OP I was unironically suggesting that MS must have done a bunch of research to show that these interfaces would be an improvement in usability.

Joke's on me! Fifteen years later and I still can't fucking find anything I want to do in the ribbon. I use various MS products at least a couple times a week (though day-to-day is more Libreoffice when it can't just be vim) and despite regular use I still find that I routinely have to google "how do I X in Microsoft Word/Excel/etc" for values of X that are very standard tasks that I am deeply confident I would be able to find on my own in a menu. And once I do find out how to do something, even if it's something I'm going to be doing a bunch, there's no indication of a shortcut or keyboard equivalent that I could train myself on, to become an actual power user of the interface. It's all completely maddening.

Yes! It is as a direct result of that book that I now know without having to look it up that a ksec is about a quarter hour and a Msec is on the order of a fortnight, which comes in handy when doing back-of-envelope estimation more often than you'd expect. (I'd already known that a Gsec was about a third of a century thanks to Tom Duff's observation.[0]) I don't see us moving to such a system anytime soon in general (tying to the circadian cycle is just too convenient) but I'm a little surprised I don't see it more often in discussions of humans in space.

[0] "How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury." --Tom Duff

I had to view them in maximised full screen to see the comparison, but it looks really good. Interestingly the scaled-up version of the IBM logo has made the right edges of the B stripes be—quite understandably—flat legs of a trapezoid rather than part of the rounded B shape, but everywhere else I looked it seemed like the program scaled just as you'd want it to. Nice!

Firearms are the second-leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the US. 15%. [0]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754

My county's schools actually forbid kids from walking to school. Must be dropped off/picked up, in a car, by a parent. Ugghghgh

The interesting and relevant parts are a few paragraphs down:

> That natural problem, he said, was exacerbated in the post-Vatican II period by a tendency to install speakers in churches that emit sound simultaneously from a variety of different points, which, he said, means that the acoustical centrality of the altar becomes lost.

> As a result, Carbone said he designed a system in which sound is not projected from all the speakers inside the basilica simultaneously, but passes through roughly 80 speakers with millisecond delays regulated by digital technology, creating the impression of sound originating at the altar and then spreading out through the church.

Fun historical note: Mac keyboards until the late 90s or so had the bumps on the D and K for the middle finger. In a vacuum either's a reasonable choice but going back and forth was always fun.

Yes, but remember that the polite fiction of the rideshare companies is that they're providing a service to the drivers by connecting them with riders. So the gp's point is a sound one even in this context.

Wasn't Barcelona's metro mostly either new or newly rebuilt as of 1992? Spain may not have had an ADA equivalent at that point requiring great accessibility at that time, but that's still way different than all the century-old Paris metro lines.

> in Chicago. ...

And the sad thing is, in this respect Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US and way less bad than many (most?) cities in other countries, including many that are much more progressive than the US. Chicago has been working on curb cuts for years and is in the midst of a years-long quest to upgrade all El (metro/subway) platforms for accessibility, and the ADA---33 years old---has much stronger requirements than, as far as I can tell, even current legislation elsewhere. In Canada, France, Spain, Germany I've seen whole rows of storefronts that are a half-storey up or down from street level, curb cuts are rare, and it's more usual for stores and other business to have steps than not. In other realms of accessibility, I've also noticed a lot more Braille and/or headphone access on ATMs and public kiosks in the US, and fire alarms that are rigged with lights as well as sound.

It's not a perfect mechanism, and the US gets a lot of other things wrong, but the ADA is something we got really, really on the right track (and keep improving).

As also pointed out in some other threads: it's less that it's dispositive evidence, and more that it corroborates. If you have what seems like a good linguistic theory backed by language phylogenetics or other linguistic-only evidence, and then you do some DNA work and it lines up, that tends to make the linguistic theory stronger, because it at least verifies that humans were moving in the patterns suggested by the language drift. But it's not a "strong signal" by itself, because there are many ways for languages to disperse other than within family groups.

Even before trackpads were good enough, scroll wheels were a thing (and I still prefer them). Your dismissive "mostly a progress indicator" is burying the lede: yes, I've seen scrollbars as primarily progress indicators for more than a decade now, and I'm still irritated when they're not there!

(They're also useful to quick-jump to a specific portion of a page or to scan very quickly without swiping a million times, but those aren't as important as their progress-indicator function most of the time.)

At Brown it was common to applaud at the end of the last lecture of the semester, which I always thought was nice, but usually not a standing ovation. Haven't seen it elsewhere.

Fellow IMSA alum here, also underage (skipped 3 grades). I'll cosign most of what atdrummond says here, but shift emphasis: to me and the majority of my friends (many of whom I'm still in regular contact with 30 years later), it was specifically being around other kids like us that was a godsend. The diversity was also broader than at most of our previous schools. The academics were an important part of it (not least to justify the state funding) but the unique value for a lot of us came from the nonacademic parts.

Re the OP, I wonder what's next for him. I know that college was a little weird but manageable as a freshman at 15; a junior at 12 is going to have an even more different experience (and then... grad school at 14?) But if he's motivated and it's not just his parents driving this, he'll come up with something and do fine, I'm sure.

> In other words: trigger warnings are counterproductive in that they cultivate sensitivities instead of counteracting them.

Or, they give people with a sensitivity a moment to fortify themselves, or delay reading/looking until they know they'll have a moment where they can afford to get a little derailed. Of all the people I know who value trigger warnings/content warnings/content notes and use them to adjust their own behaviour, exactly none of them use them to avoid their triggers 100% of the time. I'm sure such people are out there, but they're a small minority. Rather, they make mental distress a little more predictable and easier to navigate.

Your advice to seek out exposure to the sensitivity is, as a sibling comment says, perhaps better done under supervision a little more professional than a HN comment, but more importantly, also suggests a certain mindfulness about managing the sensitivity. Getting exposed to the sensitivity might well decrease its pull, but getting surprised by the sensitivity is more likely to re-traumatise.

I love them and wish I'd had this font to give to my intro students—mistyping a curly for a paren is annoying enough when you're experienced, but when you're new to programming and the error messages are not yet super helpful to you and you can't quickly spot the difference between curlies and parens, it can be a really rough ride.

The rest of the font looks good too! I love a good coding monospace that fully distinguishes all the characters.

Even from a purely human natural-language-linguistics standpoint, negation is hard! It's often hard to figure out how it distributes ("I could not go" may have the "not" scoping over either the "could" or the "go" depending on inflection and context), and its meaning is often not especially compositional in an obvious way: "red" might mean something like "the set of all red things" and "table" could be "the set of all tables" and so "red table" might be seen as the intersection of the two sets. For the majority of adjectives X, an "X Thing" is also a "Thing" (but not every Thing is an X Thing). [0] But a "Not Thing" is, to a first approximation, the set complement of "Thing". Which is tricky. If you've ever learned a foreign language to at least an intermediate level, you'll know that clauses that involve any but the most basic negation are a magnitude more complex to build and interpret than ones that don't.

Coming at it from the neural network side, I'll also point out that at the simplest level of neural networks, operations like AND and OR and basic NOT are doable, with a single neuron, but the seemingly-simple XOR just can't be done without an extra layer. (The formal description of the problem is that XOR is not "linearly separable", which I will handwave as "not a simple composition of its parts".) This is not precisely the same thing as the negation problem for LLMs, but it feels like it has the same basic flavour.

[0] An interesting exception is certain adjectives like "former", as a "former teacher" is generally not a "teacher", and semantic models that can handle this are more complicated!

I was stuck on level 4 for a while; even when I thought I was sidestepping its restrictions, it seemed to understand what I was asking for and blocked it. The trick I used to pass level 4 managed, I think, to bypass its direct instructions, but at level 5 the bot's "GPT friend" seems to translate what I'm asking for into something truly semantic, and block it, so now I'm a lot more stumped. I'll have to percolate on this for a bit. :)

The article kept mentioning that it was the re-building of the bridge that added noise and soot and such. But... there was a Bay Bridge there before, right? That island isn't very big, so the bridge couldn't have moved that far... how is the new bridge so categorically different for the view/air/noise of this house than the old one was?

I'm not sure what to say here other than this statement is demonstrably false:

"Before word processors were available, text-editing programs offered the basic editing capabilities of word processing but without WYSIWYG."

There are many, many, many of us who not only have heard of but actually once used word processors—programs or even devices that were called "word processors" as such—years before GUI, WYSIWYG word processors came on the scene.

This is the article you're referencing:

https://www.britannica.com/technology/word-processor

but the corresponding Wikipedia pages have more of the history of word processing, and an image search for "word processor" will turn up plennnnnnnty of images of things that are emphatically not WYSIWYG.

Fascinating---most of the examples they showed were immediately legible to me, and not at all examples of "bad handwriting".

But even here in the US, on both the left and the right, Obama was frequently painted as much more leftist than he ever ever actually was or claimed to be. Wishful thinking on both sides, I guess. Europeans that weren't following US politics exceedingly closely could be forgiven for being surprised at Obama's more-centre-right-than-expected policies even if they knew in general that the US Dems would be comfortable among the centre-right parties of Europe.