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Unrelated to the laptops. Also, please don't link low quality sources (Yahoo) on HN.

> Unrelated to the laptops

From the article:

  In written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology.. Horvath blamed.. tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning.
> low quality sources

Fortune Magazine? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)

  The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles.

Which is all fluff until someone links to a peer reviewed study.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volum...

  Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds across the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores.

Let's see what this study actually says, shall we?

> Students who spent up to one hour per day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher in mathematics than students who spent no time, even after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, and this positive relationship is observed in over half (45 countries and economies) of all systems with available data.

That sounds like school laptops to me.


>peer reviewed study..

So you trust the peer, but not the author? How come?


The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification, and the paper provides details that can be directly looked at.

>The peer review process provides a minimal level of verification

But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author. Because both the author and the peer are not accountable to you or to mostly none.

So "peer review", without any other qualification is as good as shit.

Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.


> But this is only true if you trust the peer more than the author

Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy. Not one. Not the other. The failure mode is that BOTH are untrustworthy and not that EITHER is untrustworthy on their own. This is different from no peer review where the author is a single point of failure. There is furthermore the overall system of peer review with some level of checks within it if a peer or author end up being visibly untrustworthy. Not perfect however the same can be said for every single part of human society.

> Every time I see people go "BUT IS IT PEER REVIEWED !??" I can't help but chuckle.

And I sort of chuckle at people like you who don't realize that all of human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework. It's not about absolutes but about levels of trustworthiness and system level checks.

Edit: In this case, for example, the quote is based on a study that the speaker did not publish. The study actually says the exact opposite. So now there's THREE levels of trust that can cross verify. The speaker, the original study authors and the peer reviews. In this case the speaker clearly is not trustworthy as their own source material disagrees with them. Had I simply blindly trusted the speaker this would not have been evident but due to having a study I can verify.


>Peer review means that EITHER the author or the peer are trustworthy.

The point is that trusting two is not better than trusting one when both of them have equal chance to be malicious.

> human society if built on the exact same vague fuzzy framework.

May be, but we can try to call a spade a spade and not pretend that something is more trustworthy than it is.


> have equal chance to be malicious.

Is A has a p chance of being malicious and B has a q chance of being malicious then the chance of them both being malicious is pq. pq <= p and p*q <= q.

I'm honestly not sure why its so hard for you to understand that TWO people being malicious at the same time is less likely than either being mailicous on their own.


This is why "scientists" cannot be trusted. They "thinking" is disconnected from real world dynamics.

> both being malicious is pq.

Not if p -> q. If p is malicious, a malicious q is most probably maliciously picked by p to review this study.



laptops are to cognitive capabilities as syringes are to heroin overdoses.

It's just one of the many delivery mechanisms for brainrot in the 21st century.


There are two you can take with you into a classroom:

* laptop

* smartphone


Yahoo is a common, accepted source: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yahoo.com

That's nice. The rest of the world has price caps on what these companies can charge for drugs.

It's one or the other. You can have your ''patents'' and ''intellectual property'' respected...but that requires you not charge an outrageously higher price in certain markets, like the US.


The rest of the world is free riding.

The solution is a law preventing drug firms from pricing in the US higher than (some small multiple of) what it charges anyone else in the world.


> The rest of the world is free riding.

The rest of the world isn't free riding - the USA has just setup a market where there is very little bargaining power for consumers because of how the US medical market and insurance works.

Novo and Eli are still making plenty of money in Europe where these drugs cost a fraction of the price, and where there aren't other significant suppliers for GLP-1's like is being implied.


No, they're free-riding. If drug companies can't charge higher prices in the US, they will do less drug development. Everyone involved in the business/investing side of pharma knows this; it's not even an argument.


I think we have a different definition of free riding.

If you and me both buy the same car, but i'm better at negotiating than you and get a lower price, I'm not free riding because you 'funded the design of the car with the extra money you paid', you are just bad at negotiation.


In this metaphor, the car manufacturer only invested R&D in new models because it expected to be able to recoup that R&D spending from my higher purchase price. If I start paying the same low price for cars as you do, the manufacturer stops investing as much in R&D for new models. Your access to new models was free riding on my higher prices.

When we all negotiate lower prices, we get fewer new drugs. Maybe that's better than the status quo (for Americans). Maybe it isn't.


The free riding is referring to outcomes rather than causal links.


Somebody has to pay for the drugs development, the poor can't pay, if the rich (US) won't pay, there simply won't be any drug.


That's why I pay Apple extra money to develop the next big thing. If I only pay the sticker price of the iPhone, there won't be any more innovative products. But if we all get together and pay double the sticker price, we'll get some true innovation!


Nobody is suggesting paying Novo up front, they footed that bill, we are talking about paying a premium after product lunch, which people certainly did for the iPhone.


In a free-market approach to drug development, if the expected loss of attempting to develop as drug is negative, and the cost isn't too high, then there is an incentive to develop that.

The best public policy outcome in such an approach would be for losses to be only slightly negative. Positive or zero expected losses mean no drug development, and highly negative expected losses mean the drug is more expensive than necessary and reduces the accessibility of the drug.

However, current patent law allows companies to minimise their expected loss, with no controls to prevent highly negative expected losses.

There are alternative models - such as state funding of drug development. This model has benefit that it is possible to optimise more directly for measures like QALY Saved (Quality Adjusted Life Years Saved) - which drug sale revenue is an imperfect proxy for due to some diseases being more prevalent amongst affluent people, and because one-time cures can be high QALY Saved but lower revenue.

The complexity of state funding is it still has the free-rider problem at a international level (some states invest less per capita in funding). This is a problem which can be solved to an extent with treaties, and which doesn't need to be solved perfectly to do a lot of good.


Excessive profits from patented drugs are controlled by development of competing drugs. These competitors arise until profits are driven down to the point further development of competitors is inhibited.


The US has zero credibility w.r.t making international treaties these days. And generally is completely set up for a few peoples maximum “expected negative loss”. Sure things could theoretically be structured differently, but for the foreseeable future they aren’t.


The poor can pay for the drug development quite well. It takes a rich country to pay for all the regulatory capture.


Nicely put :)


Nah modern mega corps are free riding on all our backs. They use the power of the state and frivolous mechanisms like the broken patent system to create monopolistic situations for themselves.


Without the patent system the drugs largely don't get invented, so that's a bad argument.


Remind me from whenceforth come Bayer, Novo Nordisk, Moderna?


These are international companies that depend heavily on profits from the American market. Their C suite knows this; their investors know this.


Remind me from whenceforth comes the money that they depend on to make a profit?


The European Central Bank system prints it


Let me rephrase that. Where do the resources come from to develop new drugs? Printing money doesn't create resources.


They are born from wombs through vaginas, approximately 9 months after males inject their semen into females for a myriad of reasons.


Nope.

That would require those same companies from not abusing our political process to obtain illegal political outcomes - outcomes that are unconstitutional - like Citizens United, which led to PHrMA dumping unimaginable money into bad faith political advertising/lobbying.

Until or unless they stop being bad actors, everyone should pirate their stuff. Free Luigi.


Holy non sequitur, batman.


Whenever someone cites Citizens United, I'm 99.9% sure they have no idea what that ruling was about.


In other words: you are a reactionary who thinks little of others. Noted.


No because you literally have no idea what the citizen united ruling was based on what you wrote. Those 99.9% of people use “Citizen United” the way you used it. As a catch all for “corporate political contributions” except it wasn’t that impactful of a ruling regarding that.

If you actually know what it was then answer how does limiting non-electioneering advertisements from PACs for 30 days out of the year changes anything?


What percentage of global rich, obese people live in the US? This is the main market and the product would not exist if it could not command a high profit here. Besides that, I think the US prices are so high due to the insane medical insurance structure, not because the drug companies really make much more than in other countries.


Hn is loaded with bots and this thread in particular is full of things that somehow have less political literacy than the typical American 8th grader.


That is not really rare among engineers. Being able to write code does not require much political literacy, and I met more than a few political illiterates who were decent coders. In person, no bots.


You are good.


Heroin is addictive. Physical compulsion is addiction. What you are talking about is not addiction. It shares some elements, but no one is breaking into cars so they can scroll Instagram.


They are lying and stealing from their parents to “scroll instagram”


And the parents feel entitled to the truth...why? Children are not property.

What specifically do you mean by 'stealing'?


From the original comment

> lied and deceived extensively to gain access to devices, and repeatedly sacrificed relationships and trust for more screen time

It’s not about truth, it’s about lying to gain access to devices. Lying to gain access is a type of theft therefore stealing.


I disagree with that analysis. It strikes me that a parent is denying a child access to something that the vast majority of other children have access to while that child is forced to live under a structure that prevents them from generating enough income to obtain their own device independently.

As that entire structure is illegitimate, the actions of the child are understandable.


Exactly. And what worries me is that they are essentially greasing the groove for these synapses, growing the neural network around deception and dishonesty. If they get into gambling in 5 years or so and happen to have a partner, they will already be somewhat adapted and practiced in hiding this activity quite effectively rather than seeking and accepting help. It's worrying. It's all foundational to very self-destructive habits from my perspective.


This is pseudo-intellectual nonsense - we are strangers to ourselves, we do not truly know how the mind works.


Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.


> Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

What?

I didn’t realize Apple with in the habit of hiring people straight out of high school instead of after going through enough university education that ends up with candidates in their early to mid 20s


Yep. They hire talent. University grads will work alongside red team folks that are maybe 22 years old and have been at Apple for two years. It's a thing.

I personally know more than one person who has a background along those lines.


I was more pointing out that 22+ year olds aren’t people who were “recently children” unless we’re continuing the trend of infantilizing adults farther into their 20s.

I was also under the impression that the faangs hired a larger % of post docs into their first industry job than most companies, so you’re also getting 27+ year olds as entry level engineers and scientists


I think someone who is 22 was 17 in the not that distant past.

Apple hires talent, they don't care about anything else. Again, I am speaking to things I know from my actual life and people I know in the physical world.


> Apple hires talent, they don't care about anything else. Again, I am speaking to things I know from my actual life and people I know in the physical world.

How many people do they hire without college degrees?

I am legitimately asking. I understand that was a thing in the tech world decades ago but my understanding was that big tech’s idea of “talent” has evolved to include mandatory education credentials like at least a bachelor’s degree if not further education.

18 is recently a kid

22 is someone whose been an adult for an entire Presidential term. I might be splitting hairs but I struggle to view that as “recent”

Edit: removed an unnecessarily aggressive paragraph that added nothing to the conversation


[flagged]


Where are the faangs hiring people with skills sans the credentials? Everyone I’ve talked to at faangs has basically described it being the next step after college for everyone they hire, other than Amazon


Ah, too late to edit but this is another sub year account making statements like

> 22 is recently a kid. We have nothing further to discuss; you are unreasonable.

Using a semicolon correctly while claiming another human held position is unreasonable. Definitely regular human activity.

@dang, is this forum just going to be humans talking with a forest of bots are you guys going to have any moderation


We don't see everything, and we don't see anything instantly, especially at this time of day/week/year. We've said many times that bots and LLM-generated comments are banned on HN but we can only take action if people use the mechanisms that have been in place for years – flagging bad comments and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com) to draw our attention to things.


You remain an awful person. I am happy to go through any form of humanity/identity verification that staff want me to. My posts are written by me and never AI - I strongly oppose genAI.


All those companies are, or used to be, based in the US. Those 22 year olds have only been allowed to drink for a year so by one measure they were recently children.


The Gabb thing is the fault of the parent.

By buying a child a locked down device - a hostile device that few would have accepted for themselves as a child - they marked them as 'being a child' rather than blending in with the rest of the people on the Internet.

By marking them this way, they advertise the child to the predators of the world.

This is someone who is twelve. They aren't six. Life involves risk. Stop playing with account controls and let the person play Minecraft. This really isn't that hard.

Having thoughts about physically breaking a child's holiday gifts - of doing that in front of them - is suggestive of being a pretty awful person. You can't figure out something that the child does not want, so you want to break their stuff?

How much longer do you intend to keep this routine up? Is your objective for them to go no contact? What are you seeking here?


Hetzner is also sinkholed by lots of EDR products because they host a ton of malicious garbage. They are a bad actor.


Why is it their job to be the arbiters of what customers are allowed to do on their platform?


To be fair, most hosting platforms have those in T&S, some even explicitly say you can't torrent pirated movies and even monitor your activities.


Same as AWS. I've added quite a few AWS ip ranges to my firewall.


It's almost like Clouds are really good at scaling and some rented server isn't! Perfect, almost poetic.


It’s entirely possible for a rented server to host a site that gets millions of views. It’s also entirely possible to make an AWS setup that chokes with 100.


I use Cloudflare in front of my personal stuff. Then it's just a quick DNS switch to go direct if I need to.


It's almost like nobody cares about scaling their blog.


Idiotic piece - the purpose of 'the cloud' is to scale large demand applications. Rental hardware can't really do that.


The post is about that 99% of companies that will never go large scale. Its point is that they don't need cloud, buying a server or two is all they need.


I once worked at a bookmaker with millions of customers where they had extreme reliability demands during very popular events, since any bets that the punters couldn't place during live betting was lost money. They had one massive server with a big pipe and an identical hot spare in another location. It worked very well for them. That was a decade ago, you can get even bigger servers these days, there's a lot of room for scaling without needing to go beyond one machine.


An argument which begins by reducing an entire industry down to a single "purpose" is not convincing.


The vast majority of businesses are not "large demand applications".

> Idiotic piece

That's unnecessary; please don't do that here. Weird that you created an account just to post an unsubstantive comment.


You can automate scaling rental hardware too


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