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The only function of the thumbs up/down buttons are to give feedback to Google. As a user it's pretty obvious that's the purpose of the button.

I've never quite understood negative electric/gas/oil prices.

Are you literally paid for agreeing to receive the energy?

MIT does pass/fail for first semester, but the reason they give is "to allow students to adjust to collegiate workload" -- I'm 100% aligned and support with that.

What I'm not in favor of is a college doing the same thing, but using "mental health" as the motivator. If mental health is really the issue, maybe the kids they're trying to help aren't actually ready for college.

MIT describes the purpose of Pass/Fail during the first semester as:

> giving you time to adjust to factors like increased workloads and variations in academic preparation and teaching methods. [0]

I can 100% get behind that logic.

I can't get behind a college saying they're doing it to "curb a mental health crisis".

[0] https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...

I agree that the environmental change is immense and that it's stressful.

Do I think a consequence free first semester is needed to address that? No..

Starting your first semester in college shouldn't feel like "being thrown in the deep end". You just spent 4 years of high school preparing for it!

But I agree that kids are awfully unprepared for the real world, so maybe coddling kids into early adulthood is unfortunately necessary? The whole situation makes me very sad.

The majority of US jobs are offered by small businesses.

The idea of “ease in” periods is nice, but it’s incredibly challenging when the business is understaffed (and hence hiring) for a specific role. You don’t have a lot of extra bandwidth on the existing team to cover for the new guy while he settles in.

For some reason that doesn't make me feel better.

If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible.

Creating a consequence free semester is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In the real world, you get a job, and you're on probation for your "first semester" when the scrutiny is at its highest. You don't get the privilege of easing into the job, you're thrown in. Shouldn't be any different for college kids.

The safety bubble we're building around kids + young adults is not going to end well.

Gmail's AI is particularly guilty of robbing the writer of their style.

Meanwhile, Tesla drivers are driving around with a dozen cameras mounted on their vehicle pointing in every direction.

Who would have thought that would be socially acceptable in 2026.

Imagine if AOL keywords had stuck around.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416005

This is also how Y Combinator operates.

Founders are first. Ideas are second.

Wait, that's an example of something that's supposed to be better?

Looking at their 13f filing (filed in may 2026), they had $8 billion of leveraged put options.

Sure, but that's okay because you don't need 100% of spam calls to be recognized as spam for the incentive to do its job. The system still sounds like it could still work even if a large percent of calls weren't flagged.

Where I live, you typically share house cleaners with your neighbors or family members.

My parents, aunt/uncle, grandparents, and one of my neighbors uses the same house cleaner.

If she stole from me, I’d immediately tell my family and she would lose basically all of her clients.

That makes it easier for me to trust her.

(It works similarly in NYC apartment buildings - a single cleaner often services many people in the same building, so they have a reputation to uphold)

I would never use random online cleaning services.

That's a lot of words to argue that we shouldn't be separating prompts from the (often untrusted) data the prompts are acting on.

I still don't see your point.

How does it compare to hiring a human?

I pay $200 every 2 weeks to have a 3000 sq ft house cleaned.

That's about $5200 a year to fully clean a house. And it's a human, so they can also tidy up, clean out the refrigerator, do my laundry, water my plants, etc.

You're posting on a tech forum that includes readers from the highest income sector of the economy.

There are a lot of 1 percenters here.

Well duh.

You can also post a random AI malware prompt, and I can assure you nothing will happen.

What's your point?

And salaries are lower than SF.

He probably means JSX mixing HTML with Javascript...

function Greeting({ name }) { return <h1>Hello, {name}</h1>; }

The person I was responding to says "HIV is not a solved problem" and "we need a new tool to solve it, a vaccine!"

My argument is simply that new tools are great, but it's not what's going to solve the HIV problem. Distribution, cost, access, stigma, etc are the larger problems to deal with. (We need to solve all the reasons why people aren't using the existing tools)

Taking teen pregnancy as an example: we have the tools to avoid it. We have condoms, we have birth control, we have the morning after pill, we have abortion. We have all the tools -- are more tools really going to help? The fact that teen pregnancy is still an issue is not because we lack the tools to solve it.

HIV prevention is similar. We already have the tools. We have condoms. We have PrEP. Sure, a vaccine would be nice, but if someone is unwilling to go on PrEP, why would they suddenly be willing to get a vaccine?

Another tool isn't going to hurt, obviously. But it also isn't the #1 highest leverage place to be spending our time if the goal is to reduce HIV transmission. (It is, however, a great use of time to develop a vaccine if you're profit-motivated. HIV prevention is a massive business. 1 year of PrEP in the US costs $20-30k, although luckily ACA mandates $0 copay. I could imagine a $50k HIV vaccine being a blockbuster drug especially if ACA also mandates $0 copay - tons of money to be made! Ugh)

Edit: To be clear, I'm excited there's a promising vaccine. However, I am not getting my hopes up that a vaccine will magically cure all of the social/political issues getting in the way of a vaccine actually being widely distributed and administered.

The alternative (throwing books away for no good reason) isn't much more reasonable.

The problem is 1) the Nasdaq 100 is where the majority of gains are coming from, and 2) it very well might be another 3+ years before anything unravels, if it unravels at all.

If you're truly at retirement, absolutely cycle out. But if you're still young and trying to maximize portfolio growth, it's not obvious that a non-tech strategy would yield better returns.

Perhaps you can answer this for me.

Why do some people get very defensive when you suggest AI isn’t comparable to humans?

Like, where is it coming from?

Why do people seem to want to ascribe human traits on the tech? It’s just technology. Why do we need to draw parallels to biology? Is it actually helpful? My position is “no” because the parallels only seem similar, but fundamentally aren’t.

You asked for my parrot's take, not how to disprove a conjecture.

Edit: And not a great example to use to prove human-ness considering humans didn't disprove the conjecture?

My parrot doesn't have a take, but it sure can repeat one it heard on Reddit.

Parrots can also sound extremely human, but it’s only mimicry.

How do we know the difference?