Almost all parents I know just let their kids use their phones. It's wild.

Tbh I've never understood why a strict non-negotiable ban on phones in schools hasn't been in place. This is an easy win with no negative consequences for adults.

It already exists in the schools near where I live in the UK, but only came into place in some of them in the last year. I was surprised that they had been so slow about it.

It’s happening in my area, too (US, not UK).

I was also surprised it hadn’t been the case. Apparently there were some policies against phone use during class but the enforcement was so toothless and sporadic that teachers and kids alike were ignoring the rule.

Now the rules are firm, universally applied, and have actual consequences. That last part seems to be the key. You can try to say phones are banned but until there are actual consequences it’s not really going to make a difference.

Round here they have a locked pouch they have to put their phone in during school which seems to work reasonably well (although I'm sure not perfectly). It makes it more clearcut if they do find somebody with a phone not in their pouch anyway that they've definitely broken the rules. They get locked at registration at the start of the day and then unlocked when they leave school at special points.

I too don't like all this "age-verification" approach, but how does banning phones in school prevent kids / teens from using social media?

The goal is to prevent phones and social media from being a distraction during school time.

The schools in my district did it. Several kids ran huge campaigns with flyers and news media involvement trying to protest it, but after that died down the response has been very positive.

It’s not going to satisfy the people who think that all children everywhere must be banned from social media at all times whether their parents agree or disagree. It does have a very positive impact at schools.

Oh ok. I agree with you from that perspective - phone are indeed a distraction and should be banned in school. I do find that whole debate strange though because in India, schools (not government) have never allowed phones in the first place and our society has been largely fine with that practice. Nobody has accused any school of "overreaching" or made such mandates a political issue. In fact, my mischievous nephew's phone was confiscated by his school Principal who told his parents that she wouldn't return it till the term ended because they shouldn't be giving a phone to him at his age!

it was the case when i was younger and phones were still dumb. We've gone backwards

That basically kills the business model and would wipe hundreds of billions of $ in capital away

Not that I disagree

Good!

Perhaps using anonymous registration-free platforms like Session

Alternative title: ID verification to be required for all UK citizens to use social media

Well I needed a good reason to quit social media. This can be it.

HN is not "social media," in a conventional sense, far from it. For one, it is completely anonymous, at least if you want it to be.

But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).

If Reddit is "social media", so is HN.

hn is a user-to-user service

Which was not contradictory, as they were saying they wanted to quit. I also want to quit all social media, including hackernews, in the same way I want to quit eating Mcdonalds and getting high all the time.

And as usual, no pro-privacy or pro-freedom groups were asked to give a comment for the article. I guess nobody objects on those grounds!

You might want to read this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

Your map example only concerns the standard library, not the language.

Its behavior is dictated by the language.

The context of this thread is that someone stated that the C++ standard library sucks, and someone replied to them saying that it's just some implementations that suck, but that's separate from the language. The point I'm trying to make, in response, is that it is about the language. It's not just "some" implementations - there is no implementation of the C++ standard library that doesn't have these inefficiencies, because the language's own standard requires them.

(This is tangential but - this is why I often say that C++ is not actually the most complex language in the world, it's just over-specified. If you took almost any popular programming language and wrote a document dictating the behavior of every single feature and library to the same level of detail, you would end up with a document similar in length or even longer than the C++ standard.)

In my reading, they didn't say it's due to bad implementations, though. They were trying to separate the standard into two parts, the one about the language syntax and semantics, and the one about the standard library. And I think this is a fair separation actually. But that doesn't make the core language any better ;-)

Hm. You're probably right.

> obtuse error messages

With concepts and constexpr-if and consteval it's increasingly less of a problem

The median terraced house (entry level family home) in London is actually £642K

'Inner London' and it goes up to £876K

Yeah, but they probably have a £700K mortgage and will have to bulldoze one career to have kids.