Is HN in complete denial about what is happening to the younger generations right now? My whole family are teachers, and they are all sounding the alarm. A majority of kids are basically unable to read books now. Not just children - young adults studying English literature at college...
Parents are up against some of the wealthiest companies on earth, and the fear of socially excluding their kids by limiting their usage. Systemic change is never going to come from parents on this one.
The problem seems to be that many students going to college can't seem to read any substantial texts anymore, while somehow getting themselves into college. It's pretty worrying imo. There's a bunch of articles about this as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
It's their attention span. My SIL is an English professor and she stopped assigning long texts. The kids won't read it, will get an AI to summarize, and then give her poor reviews at the end for making them read.
HN is in denial about a lot of stuff. The tech bubble exists somewhere else to most people's reality.
A lot of my youngest's peers are pretty illiterate still at 13. They have trouble with more than a few minutes of concentration. They track reading age and the average is declining every year as they arrive at secondary school which is causing a big panic in UK education. I think some of this data is driving the legislation changes as well.
I'd have preferred the government to have targeted the social media and attention companies personally. Extremely high taxation would be a good start much as we do for cigarettes and alcohol. If the business is no longer viable at that point they can quite frankly fuck off.
The verification controls are possibly a bigger problem which has serious consequences for society going forwards. Things aren't too bad now but in the future, the information and data that is available makes the nazis and the stasi look like amateurs.
Drawing a false equivalence between the internet and literal chemical poisons that aren't safe at any dose, cause severe physical addictions that take away choice to stop at best, and disable and kill millions of people every year at worst, like alcohol or cigarettes, is a little too on the nose.
At some point, you have to ask how much of the rhetoric is driven by hysteria and moral panic and how much of it is driven by what the actual evidence shows.
From the Guardian[1]:
> Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study
> Research finds no evidence heavier social media use or more gaming increases symptoms of anxiety or depression
> Screen time spent gaming or on social media does not cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study.
> With ministers in the UK considering whether to follow Australia’s example by banning social media use for under-16s, the findings challenge concerns that long periods spent gaming or scrolling TikTok or Instagram are driving an increase in teenagers’ depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions.
> Researchers at the University of Manchester followed 25,000 11- to 14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media habits, gaming frequency and emotional difficulties to find out whether technology use genuinely predicted later mental health difficulties.
From Nature[2]:
> Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health
From the Atlantic[3] with citations in the article:
> The Panic Over Smartphones Doesn’t Help Teens, It may only make things worse.
> I am a developmental psychologist[4], and for the past 20 years, I have worked to identify how children develop mental illnesses. Since 2008, I have studied 10-to-15-year-olds using their mobile phones, with the goal of testing how a wide range of their daily experiences, including their digital-technology use, influences their mental health. My colleagues and I have repeatedly failed to find[5] compelling support for the claim that digital-technology use is a major contributor to adolescent depression and other mental-health symptoms.
> Many other researchers have found the same[6]. In fact, a recent[6] study and a review of research[7] on social media and depression concluded that social media is one of the least influential factors in predicting adolescents’ mental health. The most influential factors include a family history of mental disorder; early exposure to adversity, such as violence and discrimination; and school- and family-related stressors, among others. At the end of last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report[8] concluding, “Available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations, which may be influenced by a combination of good and bad experiences. Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”
Way to cherry pick citations. Have you considered writing a meta analysis for a journal and fail to disclose your interests and funding? That'd really top it off.
I can do the same if I want the other way. But it's not worth my time.
You're going to drop a bombshell like "social media is as bad as alcohol and cigarettes, we need to ban it" and not provide any evidence?
There are a lot of strong feelings around social media, and I'm no fan, but I'm not going to walk head first into a moral panic, or participate in witch hunt, without knowing the facts.
In the end, ad hominem arguments don't affect the validity of evidence. I was hoping to have an interesting discussion, but I see that if you aren't politically correct on this topic, evidence will be outright dismissed and the messenger shot for delivering it.
Society has a responsibility and an interest in parenting your kids as well. That's why it mandates some level of education and offer parts of it for free. It's why it has stores/bars check ID for buying alcohol or cigarettes. It's why banks don't give loans or credit cards to kids. It's why kids that commit a crime are not treated like adults.
So I never really understood that argument that society shouldn't also be worried and want to put some measures in place to protect kids from social media harm.
I don't disagree. Society should reinforce what is good for it. But it should have reinforced parenting rather than introduce draconian controls on everything. Because they always end up creating more problems. On top of that, while the current government may not be an authoritarian dictatorship, that is not guaranteed going forwards so any mechanisms the state build must be compatible with that in the future. This is not.
I reckon the difficulty in the balancing act, and frankly don't have an answer for it.
And I agree that regulation that can help parent do parenting would be a good start, so many services have such poor parental control, or it's behind an extra fee. Or in general, parents are not given support in both appropriate time off, financial, help, and education to be better parents.
That said, there are also so many bad parents, child without one, and so on, as well as external influences where parents can't reasonably be present for 24h/7, that I think there is also room for measures that don't rely on parents. And again, I reckon some of the ideas on what those could be conflict with other ideals, and I have no solution for that, but I think we won't find a solution by simply denying what the other cares about, which I often see happening. Either one side claims privacy don't matter as much as those that care about do, or they claim that children and their safety/health doesn't matter as much as those that care about it do. And I see both often pushing the problem away, like, parents should just not let kids to these things, or privacy conscious folks just shouldn't expect privacy on major platform and not use them.
I’ve got three kids, albeit two somewhat older. It’s not a panopticon prison. There’s trust. The social media thing just isn’t a big thing for them. They all use WhatsApp and that’s about it. I mean one has instagram and that’s marketing for part time job while she’s studying.
Edit: just asked her and she’s on book 7 this year. That’s a whole lot better for you than doom scrolling.
That clearly is required here, but the scale of the existing and potential harm is such that relying on parenting only is the equivalent of using paper instead of plastic straws when the worlds biggest companies and militaries are burning down the environment.
I don’t think that at all. I just make sure they get to experience the rest of the world first. Literature, art, music, games, conversation, meeting people in real life, jumping on a plane and going places and seeing things.
There’s a lot to do in the world. Social media isn’t very attractive if you go and do those things. I’d you don’t then it becomes a portal to a narrow view of the world and then there is trouble.
These are not features of functional websites, these are features that make every website an "app" and deprecate the idea of a traditional website. Google is embrace, extend, extinguishing the web as we know it. If Apple gives in, it's over, every website will just be an app and want access to your contacts, and your family history, and whether or not you are on Santa's naughty list or whatever.
Better PWA support gives users (and developers) more optionality with app distribution. Apple building out these APIs would not take away from their native apps.
The UX of visiting a site and with a single click of a button having an app on my home screen sounds great. I'd also like to have the option of side loading a native app too. And if those options sound unappealing, you can keep using the App Store if you want the assurance of using an 'officially approved' app.
A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
> A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
And it shows through their laggy interfaces and non-native UI/UX. The people don't like apps built with web tech; developers and LLMs like them because they're a shortcut.
Funny you would say that. Because businesses and users have only one choice on iOS: native apps, because the web app isn't viable (and/or available) on iOS.
Yeah that doesn't always work that well. Think you were lucky.
Add high DPI to the mix and things get rough very quickly. Also the common control have weird input issues (try ctrl+backspace in an Edit control). All those little things need to be fixed carefully for something to be ok in 2026.
After bouncing around GUI toolkits (from win32 to SwiftUI) and web for 30 years I have simply run out of fucks. They all suck. Each in their own unique way. Apple aren't worth singling out - they are just their own special isolated variant of it.
Tcl/Tk is pretty good in terms of rapid development. Unfortunately it has stagnated quite a lot over the years.
Gtk on the other hand is absolutely terrible and its developers don't help by completely rewriting things every few years and breaking all existing code in the process.
Have you tried WinForms? It isn’t the latest hotness so Microsoft has to be dragged kicking and screaming to support it in current VS, but they were forced to do so because corporate developers still have some clout.
I still think that WPF was the peak desktop UI framework. Extremely powerful with lots of small composable primitives, can easily do declarative but drop into more traditional event-driven imperative style where it makes sense.
I live in a bizarro universe where I started my career working on an expansive WPF desktop app on .NET Framework 4.0, and am still working on it now on .NET 10. From my perspective it's been WPF the entire time, and it's been pretty okay.
Similarly, I've been doing It development for pretty much the entirety of my career. When I see the struggles to make remotely useable apps in other frameworks I'm very happy I chose this path
You should build your software around abstractions and interfaces which are portable enough to work locally and in AWS or any other cloud and not just AWS specific APIs.
I agree that this is what everyone should strive to do but this quickly hits a limit.
For example, IAM/S3/SQS policy evaluations can have profound impact on an application running but an abstraction wouldn’t help much here (assuming the developer is putting any thought into securing things). There just isn’t an alternative to these. If you’re rolling out an application using AWS-proprietary services, you have to get into vendor-specific functionality.
it's a trade off, a risk. (sure, for many people it doesn't make sense, because they don't have scale or growth anywhere near the numbers where generic/abstracted is not efficient enough)
Indeed. The thing with the black box ICs is you still need to understand the electrical interface to them. Without the fundamentals you are crippled the moment you have a problem.
This is my principal objection to some of the Make and Mimms stuff. It's recipes and instructions not building understanding. You aren't asked to discover stuff or build a mental model, merely replicate and copy.
Loved the transistor, SCR, and op-amp depictions in the Mimms books but was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t understand how the example schematics worked.
After University classes, I realize now they didn’t even hint at biasing or use feedback.
All the resistors in the transistor circuits seemed overly “ornamental” and I could t see their function from the descriptions.
Yep. The Mimms books are actually terrible. Had loads of problems getting stuff working out of them in the 80s. Assumed it was me.
So roll on a few years and our linear circuits lecturer at uni launched into a 30 minute diatribe about how utterly awful they are and to forget everything. And you know what, he was spot on. The points were specifically extrapolations of what you suggest i.e. poor biasing and feedback designs which forced relying on device characteristics. This was damage multiplied by the crappy second rate parts that Radio Shack sold.
I only ever assume people with positive memories of that crap either never built anything or were lucky enough to have parts that were binned as Mimms' were.
The one thing they were good at was instilling excitement and wonder at what simple designs could do.
But yeah, I think only the digital counter circuits made sense to me then.
Wish Mimms had made books showing biasing and calculations for transistors and op-amps. Maybe too much math for too little space…
I feel like the designs could have been kept simple (a not relied on part characteristics) where almost any transistor of a particular type could be have been used.
Surely a simple audio amp or light detector need not be critically dependent on the exact parameters of a specific part…
Oddly, I remember the books covering SCRs and TRIACs, but those were never covered in my university courses… Think we skipped JFETs too…
Don't wish to write my usual rant on this here but that's the curse of electronics books. You get taught by a recipe book but you don't leave with enough skills to design your own one. Nor do you know which recipes should be served together. It requires a much lower level of understanding and that is hard.
I got taught via recipe books then studied EE at university and had to throw everything away. Then I started in industry and had to throw that away again. There's a huge moat between the two ends.
