I remember getting special permission to carry a cell phone in school in 2002 because of my mom occasionally needing help at home due to a progressive illness. Only needed to use it once, thankfully, but I wonder if the schools will allow for similar circumstances and how much that's going to be exploited?
Given so many people had no problems plopping their kid in front of an iPad/Phone/etc. since birth, I doubt they'd have problems signing a permission slip for cell phone use in school.
Should an emergency arise, shouldn't the school be able to quickly locate the student and inform them? A call to the teacher in charge, the PA system.. "Jane Smith, please report to the principal's office."?
Or... maybe children benefit from the capabilities of phones and it's not the place for schools to fully take them away.
In class? Sure, zero tolerance.
But between classes and at lunch? What's a rationale that DOESN'T pretend like these kids aren't going to be connected 24/7 _outside_ of school?
On top of that, smartphones ARE the only computers that many people use these days. I think HN would agree that kids should have access to computers; I think there's an element of culture shock when folks here are reminded that the smartphone is still the device of the future.
That's without even bringing up ChatGPT, which anyone who went to high school can tell you, has been immediately adopted by lazy students and definitely changed the way that essays are written.
We live in a world of instantaneous communication and cheap, ubiquitous computaters. It hasn't made education less important, it's made it MORE important and highlighted which skills are uniquely human.
We should adapt our schools to reflect that instead of succumbing to "old man yells at cloud" syndrome.
The question I always have... Do you really expect people to behave like it's 1980s? Nobody - not the teachers, not the kids, not the parents want that.
I went to school when mobile phones were just beginning to be a normal thing. It took just a year or two before the teachers were like "why the hell don't you just phone your mom yourself?" and "Miss, there is no need to involve us, just call your child and resolve it yourself".
I used to get pretty bad headaches, I just called my mom for permission to go home and went. It'd be much more painful if I had to chase a teacher and convince them they need to call my mom and tell her I need to go home.
LangGraph is the primary reason I use LangChain - being able to express my flow as a state machine has been a boon to both the design of my platform as well as my own productivity.
People, some more so than others, are essentially house plants. They need light, water, and to occasionally be shaken vigorously to encourage strong growth. This dorm seemed more akin to a Kennett Square mushroom farm than a greenhouse - better suited to fungi.
I'd say it's relevant as the investment in for-profit transit-as-tech companies has coincided with the chronic under-funding of public transit. Focusing on the US here, but if public transit was accepted as a public good, and the populace accepted that funding things for the public good was an acceptable use of government funds, then these companies wouldn't be as sound of an investment for VCs.
I agree: The solution is to change government spending so that public goods are sufficient to render other options moot.
But the VC investment didn't cause the underinvestment of infrastructure. Rather, they stepped in to fill the void with other viable options when government initiatives failed to materialize. Example: where's my high-speed rail?!
If I recall correctly, a certain South African entrepreneur who overstayed his visa pitched a vacuum-based transport system which he provably knew will not work at critical funding stages of high-speed rail projects in California.
Definitely agree with the solution - but unfortunately the transit-as-tech organizations (as well as auto manufacturers, the oil industry, real estate, etc.) also lobby to ensure that funding remains low and infrastructure decays or that costs/time become prohibitively high for infrastructure expansion.
It's definitely one of those things where the goal is clear but the changes necessary to get there are complex.
My least favorite version of this is when non-technical leadership skips a level or two and talks to junior technical staff rather than the senior or leadership technical staff who have enough experience to know to ask clarifying questions, establish a timeline, expected outputs, etc. It's something I've seen often at various campaign and political tech organizations.
I frequently see these attempts to bypass hierarchy like this, and it never works well. The junior technical staff understand the chain of command, so when higherups break that (either intentionally or unintentionally) it creates confusion and chaos.
No one is saying it, but a part of the reason is that a long power distance makes it difficult for a junior to object or negotiate a request. It’s usually a plain “yes, I’ll do it”, no matter the consequences.
In that case, CC the engineering boss while discussing with the IC; otherwise what's really going on is the nontechnical is trying to hide their impact on the IC's workload from their boss.
This leaves aside for the moment that I don't think nontechnical leadership belongs in a technology company.
Or it's a relief because the request will get watered down and / or expanded upon the more management layers it goes through. Are those layers of management even needed? I've read some anecdotes from people working at google and co where it seems a massive management party and nothing of value is done.
I have an extreme instance where the ceo bypassed everyone to directly drive a group of sde1s. When pushed for same day deliveries and the sde1s pushed through, and everyone else were publicly humiliated for taking much longer to deliver. It resulted in weekend marathons and all nighters being a regular occurence for the group he directly took charge of, and the demands escalated to timelines needed in hours instead of days, and a mess of code. The already popular copy paste driven write once development pattern became the only means of survival to many. (code so bad that it's only written once, nobody had the confidence to modify. New, similar request? Copy paste, modify, and manually test.)
I am so glad to have escaped that, for many more reasons. Still working off that near burnout and putting off getting back to work since a few months. (burnout not due to overwork, I escaped that madness, but other dysfunctional things in the organisation.)
Almost by definition, junior engineers are incapable of distinguishing "this is the literal request from the stakeholder" and "this is what the stakeholder is actually trying to accomplish."
I’m not leadership, but if I was, I feel like I would probably be guilty of this. The junior engineers are often the ones doing the actual, physical work and are best suited to answering certain types of questions that those with a higher-level view would not be able to answer as well. Why play a game of telephone when you don’t have to?
Junior engineers might be doing some of the actual work, but by the nature of being junior tend to lack any context around how their work fits into or impacts the overall system. Mix that with being too green to feel confident pushing back at all, and you get someone who will say yes to nearly any question you ask them.
“Hey junior front end engineer, how long will it take you to change that passcode from 4 digits to 6?”
The junior responds with “There’s nothing to it. A day tops.”
But the junior doesn’t realize that the devices that are integrated with the system are statically allocating memory to hold that passcode and can’t change the length without shipping new firmware.
Of course that kind of thing can happen when asking a more senior person as well but it’s much, much less likely.
Exactly this. Context is king - and as someone else stated below knowing how to get to the actual ask vs. how the ask is being phrased is something that comes with experience.
That said, it should also be the role of the more senior technical leadership to involve junior technical staff in the process so they have the opportunity to grow. For example, CEO asks CTO how long it would take to add X feature so CTO loops a junior engineer into the conversation and demonstrates how to get to what the CEO is actually asking (which may or may not be X) vs. just providing a time estimate for X feature. Hopefully the CEO learns something here too but ymmv.
Because there’s always additional context that the junior and higher ups need that they aren’t aware of, the most obvious being time/capacity.
I used to manage an engineer who was responsible for a critical part of our system and he would frequently get hounded by higher ups who went around me and it ate up all of his time to the point where my manager thought this engineer was just unproductive. I wasn’t able to stop those requests entirely but I was able to establish a paper trail and show my boss that this engineer was actually being overworked.
I think this is a good argument but also an example why it should probably be technical people defining the product and requirements rather than this made up role we've created of product owners.
If you feel the need to drill down, skipping levels to ask what the people in the weeds are doing, you are probably micro-managing and should start working at a higher level.
"It's something I've seen often at various campaign and political tech organizations." If you're already in hell, what's a few more degrees here and there going to matter to you?
"experience to know to ask clarifying questions" I have seen this happening in sales also: An inexperienced vendor "project coordinator", plus a vendor technical person who is used to the coordinator doing the job, plus a client who is new to the circus and you have a potential mess on your hands.
They watch it themselves (and sometimes make reaction videos to it). They watch it with their parents. They watch it as part of a class. They study history and watch it. There are so many ways in which this statement is demonstrably false.
Different strokes, but the context in which something is built can be just as interesting as what is built when it is unusual. See also the post recently about the open source contributor working from a prison in Maine - that's interesting for a ton of reasons.
In this case there are two interesting things: that they built a debugger and that they are 17. The latter information might also lead to more interesting helpful comments for the kid versus a "okay, and?" series of responses.
And at the end of the day, every Show HN has a bit of "hey, notice me!" in it - whether or not age or other identifying information is included. I don't think that's bad.
I can only speak to the US, but this didn't stop school administrators - their interpretation was more important than credibility when it came down to decisions made immediately post-Columbine. Parents demanded action from the administrators, even if none was needed, and so administrators needed to demonstrate that they were doing something. Bans on long coats, primarily black outfits, discussing video games, etc. weren't uncommon.
Activities done outside of school that were discussed in school absolutely made it onto this list and would result in suspensions.
> A few weeks later, I even started receiving political flyers in the mail. I guess you can just buy a voter registration database for this purpose, and it includes temporary addresses.
This is (mostly) public information. The Secretary of State in most cases makes this available in some form or another for raw consumption but the preferred method is to buy a cleaned and collated version of the national voter file from one of the vendors. Usually this is also joined to a consumer file which includes additional demographic and contact data.
In California, that would be PDI who also offers a CRM for voter contact. Nationwide, from the Democratic side of things, you're looking at Targetsmart or Catalist - unless you're a campaign or other hard side organization receiving access via the state or national party. On the Republican side it'd be the Data Trust. There are "non-partisan" third party voter file vendors out there too but the data isn't as reliable as the partisan options.
Given so many people had no problems plopping their kid in front of an iPad/Phone/etc. since birth, I doubt they'd have problems signing a permission slip for cell phone use in school.