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That’s really neat. I wonder if that model that shipped recently with Chrome is also accessible similarly?

Funny, OP wants them to force a feature via regulation, and regulation is the reason they won’t even deliver the feature in question. Death by regulation.

The business model is the reason they won’t deliver the feature (allowing the end-user to choose the backend model).

This just means the feature has little ROI or market value

Yes, it doesn’t have enough ROI potential with the given regulation.

Because this group likes to go against the status quo. The status quo currently is to AI-ify everything. Some of us think there is a hype-reality-distortion-field-bubble occurring which goes contrary to conventional knowledge. It’s good to have healthy critical opinions instead of group think.

I guess it depends on whether you want to write application code with the Temporal SDK or use this new SQL soup. I’d rather stay out of messy SQL land for something like this if I can avoid it, but I can see the value if you already have Postgres and don’t want to introduce another component.

There’s something lopsided about education for boys. The system appears to favor girls heavily. There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. I think this is a systemic issue with school being built to favor a certain philosophy that isn’t well thought out for 50% of the population.

It's not that the system favors a particular gender. The system favors personality traits like self-regulation, organization, and conscientiousness. These traits develop earlier on average in girls than in boys.

i'm not sure if it's an issue of the educational system, but for at least several decades there has been a societal push to correct historical gender imbalances by encouraging girls to do well in school, go to college (especially STEM), get a career.

This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen and i think that has an effect.


> This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen

This feels too vibes-based. I never saw messaging like this when I was a teacher, nor when I visited the schools my mom taught at, nor when I visited schools to help with kid hackathons. This would be in California, Texas, the PRC, Japan, and Taiwan. Mostly I saw little nonsense alphabet stickers, famous buildings, chemical symbols, or like, comically diverse but in the end harmless bits of bric a brac like an astronaut in a wheelchair.

What specifically have you been seeing that would lead you to think boys in schools are being held back by messaging?


It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys. I don't think it's about the "girl power" nonsense, it's about the ability to sit down, focus on something, and produce work that meets a certain standard of achievement.

I would say the more harmful slogan has been "you're okay just the way you are." I'm not saying we go back to harsh discipline and abuse, but there has to be a middle ground where we hold children, especially boys, to a higher standard.


> It turns out that when you level the playing field, girls do better than boys.

Why is it that when boys/men where outperforming and out-earning women, people were willing to move heaven and earth to correct this terrible injustice, but now when outcomes have reversed (for years at this point) it's considered acceptable to say "Welp, that's just how it goes. Boys just aren't good enough."

Hmmm...almost like, it's not a level playing field??


Approximate shares of undergraduate enrollment by sex:

  Year    Male     Female
  1970    58%      42%
  1975    53%      47%
  1980    48%      52%
  1985    46%      54%
  1990    45%      55%
  1995    44.5%    55.5%
  2000    43.9%    56.1%
  2005    43.3%    56.7%
  2010    43.0%    57.0%
  2015    43.6%    56.4%
  2020    42.7%    57.3%
  2025    42.7%    57.3%
So men have been in the minority for at least 46 years, and the skew is as large as it was in 1970, but reversed.

This is true and interesting but it's also incomplete. Men still dominate most STEM degrees, and unlike law or business it doesn't seem to be evening out over time. I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from this.

> I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from this.

My suggestion would be: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Take your thumb off the scale."


Until someone can show a real biological difference we should level the playing field.

We do know boys mature later which may be reason to not level the field completely, but we should still not allow that as an excuse.

If someone shows another difference I will have to think in depth about the details before I can comment.


> We do know boys mature later which may be reason to not level the field completely, but we should still not allow that as an excuse.

I am quite a long ways from right-leaning but this sure does lend credence to their claims of discrimination. If it weren't boys, we'd say that a biological disadvantage is absolutely acceptable as an excuse, and we should try to correct for it.


So you claim that biolgically males and females are the same?

For the purposes of 'intelligent' which is the topic here.

Structural misandry. I'm telling you the Zoomer/Alpha boys have taken notice and are checking out of the system. Chickens coming home to roost in a few more decades as the West goes longhouse and gets economically pounded by the East. I was an early bird in MGTOW, but now it's common knowledge and operating strategy for most young men.

Boys don't owe society squat, and now they know it!


MGTOW nonsense most certainly is not the common mode of operation for young men. Where are you getting this idea?

I disagree. There's cases where girls do better and cases where boys do better. This blanket statement is just as bad as saying that all men/boys are smarter than girls.

Exactly, girls and women can do astonishing work in fields that favour more or less their mutual traits and vice versa, no need for "hehe we are better because GPA said so".

Boys have been sitting down, focusing, and producing work that meets a certain standard for most of recorded history. That ability is really not a uniquely feminine trait, and suggesting it is is honestly bizarre.

Boys have also been doing more destructive things, but that's a different issue.

Boys and girls do struggle with different issues socially and culturally, which is upstream of struggling with them academically.

What's consistently missed that education is downstream of socialisation. The experience of learning as a first introduction to culture shapes consequences more than individual techniques do.

Part of that is challenging all gender stereotypes. The traditional stereotype was that girls were frankly rather stupid and couldn't handle anything rigorous and challenging.

Now the stereotype is that men lack focus, are disorganised, and have poor communication skills.

One stereotype has been challenged, the other seems to have replaced it, and younger men have almost been encouraged to live down to it.

I don't think as a culture we're emotionally mature enough yet to handle these issues in an effective way, and both education and socialisation will remain problematic until we do.


> One stereotype has been challenged, the other seems to have replaced it, and younger men have almost been encouraged to live down to it.

Orthogonal to age and gender both, we got to witness an entire third of the US take "deplorable" as an aspirational goal and live down to it.

> I don't think as a culture we're emotionally mature enough

You can say that again.


> There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population.

We're well past that. In fact, the gender gap in college graduation is now worse than it was when Title IX was passed. But because the gap favors women no one gives a shit -- many 'progressives' even celebrate it and continue to insist we need all these programs specifically to get women into college.


> projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population

Projections? Aren’t we already there in reality? That future is today.


What philosophy? The gender based outcomes people never seem able to come up with any coherent explanation of what they think the problem is other then to play to stereotypes.

The explanation that I’ve seen floated is behavioral. Boys are active and physical and don’t focus as easily as girls, who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention. The idea is that the current predominant K12 style favors students in the latter behavior group.

I have two kids in K12 and I don’t think it’s that simple. Not that I have a good explanation of my own, mind you.


>who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention

Is this explanation not making a blatant assumption here that girls are statistically less hyperactive and distracted than boys?


"Hyperactive and distracted" is not necessarily the exact reason, but there is a large, well documented gap in performance for boys vs girls in elementary school (at least in the US).

Is that controversial (assuming otherwise normal children, excluding anybody with ADHD, etc)?

What confuses me is that the education system, especially the college track, was designed for men and boys. Lots of colleges didn’t even admit women, and they were largely excluded from learned professions like medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, etc.

I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.


> What philosophy?

They might be referring to the TED Radio Hour "Beyond the manosphere" by Richard Reeves. I think it was on NPR a while ago, I looked it up because the "school isn't designed for boys but girls" sounded familiar.


This.

A math test is a math test is a math test.

What's the math teacher supposed to do?

I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?


If the public wants to own half of the AI company, then they should invest enough to buy half of it. Taking private property away without compensation is stealing. What the government did with Intel where they got 10% in stock was a bit better because Intel got money.

You basically described taxation. 25-75% of all your income is confiscated at the source and then you get… whatever it is that Washington does. I guess remit the money back as programs and direct payments or services so thousands of people can wet their beak in the process?

In practice, we’re OK with theft. We just argue over who gets the loot and which segment of the population gets harmed.


There is a line between tax and unlawful taking. The constitution forbids taking of property without due process or compensation. No, the government can't just take whatever it likes from anyone and call it a tax.

Taxes generally demand payment in the form of general assets, but taking targets specific identified property. Likewise taxes are raised from a general category whereas taking singles out one or a few properties. Now if it was just the targeting of AI companies you could argue it's a one-time AI tax rather than singling out those companies for taking. But once you state that the tax must be paid by shares (and not just assets equal to 50% of market cap) that looks less like a tax and more like appropriation of equity for public good without compensation.

There are other vulnerabilities too - income taxes are explicitly exempted from apportionment. This "tax" would probably run afoul of apportionment.


Eminent domain. It can be made to apply to AI.

Is income tax stealing?

I mean gen AI is based on theft, I don't really see that as a deterrent. I don't want the companies to exist, and having government ownership sounds like a convenient way to get bailed out when the bubble pops

That only is true if you agree with IP laws. China doesn’t, and you won’t be able to take 50% of the Chinese AI companies. American AI companies won’t be able to compete against Chinese ones if we take that stance.

This is why public ownership makes sense. The public allows AI to get the data that it would otherwise need to steal in order to be globally competitive, and in return, the company that builds the AI allows the public to own it.

SQLite is more efficient for large data sets. A single markdown or JSON file needs to be streamed to locate a piece of data O(n). Updating an existing entry in a sequential file is even worse because you have to rewrite the file. SQLite has the data structures to quickly find data in O(log n) time.

Loopholes are possible from excessive regulations. Regulating everything will never stop. Vote with your money and support game studios that provide the best online support. Or buy games that are standalone purchases that don’t require online services.

Voting with your money on its own rarely accomplishes much unless it is an overwhelming majority vote. There are also a huge number of things that simply cannot be managed properly, to the overall benefit of society, by demand-side market forces. There is a time and place for regulation, carefully considered and designed, with a change/revision process in place.

A big problem with lawmaking systems in the USA at all levels of government is that the change/revision process is virtually nonexistent. Laws are not adjusted as requirements change and understanding shifts. Regulation is hard in that environment, but the optimal amount of it is certainly much greater than "none at all".

It's simply not possible to maintain a functioning society without regulations on at least some things at least some of the time. Anti-regulation dogma is just propaganda by rich people who would become richer if their preferred bad behavior wasn't prohibited by regulation.


Excessive regulations? Or insufficient regulations and regulatory capture?

You can keep plugging holes, but each time you plug you are using a narrower specification of who is at fault or who is exempt. That creates loopholes. This is known as “Whack-a-mole regulation”.

If the only alternative to imperfect solutions you'll accept is no solution then I disagree. I think the treatment here is still better than the disease.

Or vote with your vote and support lawmakers that make good laws.

I use this to push changes to a local encrypted sparse bundle image, and then I periodically rsync that image to a remote disk. Git has no built in encrypted storage, so pushing directly to a remote means you trust that remote.

The software world is different today. People expect you to release security updates as vulnerabilities are discovered. They expect you to fix your application so that it works on the newest macOS that deprecated and broke the old APIs you used (or switch architectures). We expect continuous maintenance for a fixed price. I wish Textmate had a yearly charge to keep their team running instead of the one time purchase that starved them.


You're making this up to justify subscription model guilt. Nobody (besides those on here) EXPECTS this. In fact, most would rather live with the risks than deal with subscription model, let alone the headaches of updating and it breaking everything (i.e. causing a chain reaction that you have to update EVERYTHING in order to fix a small non-issue).

I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.


I think you’re in the minority. There are products out there that suit you. They are not mainstream products.


Mainstream behavior doesn't necessarily mean what people want. Many try and fail to stop Windows updates, for instance. I would guess that the majority of the users of the TicketMaster app would rather not use it.


Hmmm I can’t think of a subscription app that truly doesn’t have a free/upfront/unupgraded alternative - its just that usually they come with quality issues or poor support, so people choose the better, subscription-based, auto-updating ones.


I can think of plenty of apps that have perfectly fine non-subscription options, and then turned subscription only.

People use them because the products were good or industry standard. They don't prefer them because subscriptions somehow magically enabled them to be better.

They already preferred them over alternatives before subscriptions. If anything, people often complain that they got shittier after the subscription was introduced, once many are onboard and captive.

And people use their subscription versions because a non-subscription version is not made available anymore. The real comparison of what users prefer wouldn't be "X subscription software vs Y non-subscription". It would be "X subscription or X non-subscription".


Don't you think that if people preferred it strongly, a competitor would gobble up that opportunity if the model was viable?

Regarding your last point, there's plenty of software offering both options ($$$ lifetime vs $ monthly). I don't have the data but I bet they see a TON more sales for $ monthly.

E.g. Final Cut Pro for macOS is available as a one-time purchase for $299.99. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Apple Creator Studio for $12.99/month or $129/year


I consider my phone scrap as soon as it stops getting security updates. Same goes for almost all proprietary software.

Open source needs updates too, but somehow we take that for granted.


I'm with you. I also hate automatic updates. Times when I want my software to behave differently from the day before without me requesting it: Zero.

It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.


MeThree.

But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?


I dunno, what does Jordan's Furniture do about the fact that the recliner I'm sitting on is feature complete and has been since 2005 and seems to be sturdy enough to last me for the next twenty years? Try to sell me something better, try to sell me different things, try to sell things to other people, and succeed or fail at those goals.

I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.


I think there is one major difference that separates the two eras: in ye olden days you bought software for a fixed price and while it's understood you might only receive updates for a limited time, you could continue using it so long as you had the ability to run it. For example, you didn't have to upgrade to Windows XP if you were satisfied with Windows 98. With subscriptions, it's a recurring fee to continue accessing the software at all.


Windows sells more copies of its software the OEM route. Also, they sell specific versions that eventually end support. Today you might consider Windows almost a loss leader since Microsoft is diversified with many services on top of windows.


It ignores the point. If I've bought BBEdit 13 for 60 USD three years ago and I'm still happy with it, I can keep using it for the rest of my life without paying more. If I want the new features, then I can pay 40 USD to get the latest version.

This is a sane AND a sustainable model for companies, and actually creates MORE incentives for the developers to align with the user's interest: if the new update sucks and has features no one asked for, then nobody will pay for the new version and keep the old one.

There is no reason why previous versions of the software you paid a license for should effectively "disappear".


I’m a fan of the subscription model where if you stop paying, you continue to have a license for the last version you got during the subscription.

I’ve appreciated that in a few apps where my need for them on a daily basis evaporated but I still need to briefly touch that system once every few months.


Software today is worse in every possible way. Subscription solicitation is one such dimension.

BBEdit, Sublime et al. are beacons of what software quality, distribution and pricing ought to be.

three quarters of the saas industry is built around such made-up needs. Not much to be proud of there with a handful of exceptions.

as for price, it feels 100% fair to bleed your enterprise customers to subsidize individual customers.


Yep. Give people two choices.

1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.

2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.


Or use "The Dutch Model":

Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.

If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.

This is what Reaper, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.

Edit: This comment contained Forklift as an example before, but they have changed their model, so it's removed.


I’m a big fan of JetBrains model for this. Buy the software on a subscription, and the subscription gets cheaper for the first 3 annual renewals. While you’re subscribed you get access to the most current version and when you stop subscribing you have a lifetime license for the latest major version (and it’s patches) that you’ve paid for at least a year of. The subscription helps fund the continuous development that is expected of modern software but you still get to keep something for having invested that money when you’re done.


Forklift only sells you a year of updates at a time now.


Yeah, you're right. I remembered it now. However, they have stopped doing "major" releases at the same time, too.

Let me update the comment.


^^ This. ^^

Choices!

As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.


One should be able to write a text editor without security vulnerabilities.


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