ropable

You mean that there is a rule which prevents for-profit companies offering personal health insurance from pocketing more than 20% of revenue?

Those poor, benighted shareholders. What a socialist hellscape.

"New account". Meanwhile, the account is 4.5 years old with 2600 karma and has hundreds of thoughtful comments.

It gets across just how ridiculously energy-dense liquid petroleum fuels are.

Alternative story: they take these still-perfectly-functional finished products and find other markets for them. This isn't second-hand, damaged clothing, it's unsold new product.

I have a colleague who (inexplicably) doesn't trust Postgres for "high performance" applications. He needed a database of shared state for a variable number of running containers to manage a queue, so he decided to implement his own bespoke file-based database, using shared disk. Lo and behold, during the first big (well-anticipated) high-demand event, that system absolutely crawled. It ran, but it was a total bottleneck during two days of high demand. I, who has made a New Years resolution to no longer spend political capital on things that I can't change, looked on with a keen degree of schadenfreude.

Just. Use. Postgres.

Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.

From my perspective, the US is foot-gunning itself into geopolitical irrelevance through the destruction of its soft power and undermining the NATO alliance. For all its many, many faults, the CCP's actions around establishing itself as the Asian regional superpower are patient, strategic and consistent over the long term. They're playing it far too smart to get into a shooting war with the US, and I'm in agreement that they'll probably end up consolidating Taiwan peacefully in a decade or so.

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing.

I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered. There was an enormous existing corpus of accepted answers around fundamental topics, and technology just doesn't change fast enough to sustain the site. Then the LLMs digested the site's (beautifully machine-readable) corpus along with the rest of the internet and now the AIs can give users that info directly, resulting in a downward spiral of traffic to SO, fewer new questions, etc.

Vale, Stack Overflow. You helped me solve many tricky problems.

If China does invade Taiwan, I feel like most people are going to have bigger problems than the Nvidia stock price.

A social circle is like a garden, inasmuch as you have to put in work to tend and maintain it. You have to put yourself in a position of potential awkwardness or rejection, which isn't easy. Interacting with people (especially strangers) also takes practice - small talk is a skill like any other.

If you already have a friendship circle, start being the one to propose meetups (cafe, pub, picnic, hike, etc.) If you don't, it's harder - join a social sporting league, group fitness class, dance class, DnD group, anything where people have to talk with each other. When you arrive, turn your phone off for the interval. It might take a couple of goes to find something that sticks or the right environment.

I think that the real trick of "solving" the loneliness epidemic is that it isn't spread evenly. Everyone has their own individual level of opportunity for social interaction, so the solution is hyper-local and individualised. There's no one size fits all solution.

I continue to be broadly in favour of this idea. I agree that there's some wiggle room around the specific age (15 vs 16), but for a population-level change you just need to pick an arbitrary value, implement, and re-assess later. I also acknowledge that 1) online age-gate mechanisms tend to suck, 2) the evidence of harm is weak, and 3) it really should be up to parents to manage at the individual level. But ultimately, I feel that a restriction like this would be a net positive for the mental health of the vast majority of young teens.

Make the change, assess the effects, adjust/repeal as needed (just like everything else). It seems like the kind of change that's well-suited to undoing later, in case of unintended consequences. It's not like we're going to be permanently stunting the growth of an entire cohort or something.

> But OK let's assume social media is always bad for kids and also that someone invents a perfect age gate... kids are just going to find places to hang out online that are less moderated and less regulated and less safe.

Straw man argument, much? Might as well argue "We can't make any changes, ever, just in case something else happens!

We'll address the next issue when/if it happens, same as always.

I came here to comment on this specific issue. The level of unsustainable groundwater extraction and inefficient consumption by agriculture and industry in Iran is just wild.

Good points, thoughtfully made. As a resident of Perth, I (largely) endorse that description.

So much of the wealth of our middle- and upper-class is dependent on property ownership and rent-seeking, it's depressing. That population essentially needs to vote against their own self-interest to help improve housing affordability, so it's hard to see that ever happening. The best I could foresee is a government forecasting a stepped reduction of relevant tax benefits over time (e.g. in three years negative gearing gets reduced by half, then half again the following year, etc.) and then future governments honouring that commitment. As you pointed out though, it's a surefire way for any Australian political party to shoot themselves in the face.

I sometimes wonder how strong the demand needs to get for more-affordable housing before the market responds enough to matter. State and local govt could likely have a role in unlocking infill developments and increasing the allowed densities, but I'm not plugged into the planning system. I also strongly agree that state government should be more proactive as a housing supplier (in conjunction with private industry).

In Australia we've treated the family home as an investment, a primary mechanism for wealth creation (rather than an essential for life) for far too long. I fully agree that supply is the #1 driver for housing affordability, but like many things it's mult-factorial. Tax incentives, market forces, town planning, land use regulation, etc. all play their role.

I'm hopeful that successive governments over here show the courage of their convictions and enact enough change that my kids have a chance of getting into their own places, same as I did.

Tangent: how should we approach changing the housing mix in a city like Perth where 95% of new homes are large four-bedroom detached houses? It's all very well saying "That's what the market wants" when that's also all the market supplies. How do we bootstrap the idea of smaller, denser, affordable, more-diverse housing options?

On the face of it, this initiative seems like solid nutritional advice. On the other hand, I'm a little dismayed to see animal protein sources given equal billing to vegetable and fruit on their new pyramid, and whole grains placed right at the bottom (below butter!) It's my understanding that people in the developed world already over-consume animal proteins to a large degree.

On the other hand: it's not like anyone ever followed the old food pyramid either. I'm now over here waiting with baited breath for the US federal govt to introduce some kind of regulation around the amount of additional sugar, salt and fats in processed food sold in the US (which makes up a large proportion of what people are eating right now).

The food landscape is complex and multi-factorial. I hope that they follow up with other initiatives to improve nutrition at a population level, like regulation and nutrition programs.

Working fully remote during the COVID times taught me one thing quite well: that I am nowhere near the introvert I thought I was. Turns out that I really missed hanging out with friends in the same location (albeit a bit less often than some other people).

These days I treat active IRL socialisation similar to other health-promoting activities such as physical exercise. Even when it feels like a chore, it has a benefit. It's worth maintaining that practice, too; socialising in person is a skill like any other, which you can get better at.

Maintaining a good social circle is a bit like maintaining a garden. It rewards consistent low-level effort over a long period.

The best non-fiction book I read in 2025 was "The Fabric of Civilization" by Virginia Postrel. It was completely fascinating, and made a good argument that the production of cloth/textiles might by one on the most import core developments that allowed modern, organised society to arise.

Highly recommended.

This author writes in ESL better than 99% of the people I've worked with in an English-native country, including myself. It's fascinating to read just how much more emphasis good-quality written English seems to have in Kenya than it does here in Australia (at least in the public education system where I have experience). I suppose that it's understandable, given that it gates access to higher-level education opportunities.

I don't really understand the aversion some people have to the use of LLMs to generate or refine written communication. It seems trigger the "that's cheating!" outrage impulse.

I wanted to chime in to say: this is me, I do/have done this, and am also seeking to change this behaviour. It has never once occurred to me to try using spaced repetition for something like this, so thank you to putting the suggestion into my brain! I intend to put this into action as soon as I'm able to.

It's beyond satire that US conservatives are now somehow upset about certain fonts being woke.

Sigh, I'll bite (even though I know I shouldn't, and it's pointless).

> So, you haven't identified any actual problems with them being on social media

Anonymous cyber bullying (multiple times), performative social exclusion (multiple times), anonymous death threats (twice), deepfake porn with their faces spliced in (twice).

Your straw-man example is absurd and TBH it comes across as patronising. I'm trying to avoid assumptions, but it reads like someone who hasn't needed to grapple with this issue personally as a primary carer. Apologies if that isn't the case; everyone has their own view for what parenting should be.

Somehow we've seen fit (as a society) to regulate the minimum age for sex & marriage, obtaining alcohol, acquiring a vehicle licence, etc. We (as a society) recognise that there are good & bad tradeoffs to these activities and have regulated freedoms around these (primarily via age). Somehow, our society hasn't spontaneously regressed into North Korea.

I fully support this legislation, and government regulation around this topic. Given the current (2025) state of the social media landscape, I believe that the positives of restricting access to them for teenagers well outweighs any potential harms.

As the parent of a teenager affected by this ban (plus one who has aged past it): I wish that it had been in place 8-10 years ago, before either of my kids got smartphones. We tried to be reasonably conservative in their introduction to devices and social media, on the rationale that it would do them no harm to delay using those for a couple of years through their early brain development. The real difficulty turned out to be the network effect of their peers having access to social media, which increased the social pressure (and corresponding social exclusion) to be online. Not having access to Snapchat/Discord/etc. at that point meant that they were effectively out-group, which is a Big Deal for a teenager.

We ended up allowing them onto social media platforms earlier than we'd have liked but imposed other controls (time and space restrictions, an expectation of parental audits, etc.) These controls were imperfect, and the usual issues occurred. My assessment is that it was a net negative for the mental health of one child and neutral for the other.

I realise that HN is primarily a US forum and skews small-government and free-speech-absolutist. I'm not interested in getting in a debate with anyone about this - my view is that most social media is a net negative with a disproportionate harm to the mental health of non-fully-developed teenage brains. This represents a powerful collective-action failure that is unrealistic to expect individuals to manage, so it's up to government to step in. All boundaries are arbitrary, so the age of 16 (plus this set of apps) seems like a reasonable set of restrictions to me. I am unmoved by the various "slippery slope" arguments I've read here: all rules are mutable, and if we see a problem/overreach later - we'll deal with it in the same way, by consensus and change.

I'm pretty sure that we can remove the word "software" from the article headline and it remains just as true. I don't believe that software projects are unique in this regard: big, complex projects are big and complex, and prone to unexpected issues, scope creep, etc. Throw in multiple stakeholders, ineffective management, the sunk cost fallacy etc. and it's a wonder that any large projects get finished at all.

Ooof. Occasionally you read something that hits different in the feelings, and this article was one for me. The regret at all the lost time and opportunity for all concerned. The might-have-beens. Sometimes, the shackles placed on us by our society, our family and ourselves are unbreakable.

There's something maliciously satisfying about seeing your own self-hosted stuff working while things behind Cloudflare or AWS are broken. Sure, they have like four more nines that me, but right now I'm sitting pretty.

It's just a couple of local Aussie nerds beefing again. Simmo broke up with Jonno's sister via IM, so feelings were hurt.

An awful lot of commenters are convinced that it's AI-generated, despite explicit statements to the contrary. Maybe they're wrong, maybe they're right, but none of them currently have any proof stronger than vibes. It's like everyone has gaslit themselves into thinking that humans can't write well-structured neutral-tone docs any more.

It's almost as though the LLMs were trained on all the writing conventions which are used by humans and are parroting those, instead of generating novel outputs themselves.

I really, really wish that Youtube would start tagging this category of video to increase the visibility to end users. My feeling is that the main reason this content might be "winning" in the market is the sheer volume.