Apps operate in sandboxes. We would need actual information to show that the app was being given special secret permissions, and Apple and Google would likely refuse or at least make public what was being asked of them, in order to maintain their own reputations in being honest about what they track and what they don't.
There's no value in assuming everything is conspiratorial. You'll go crazy.
Tbh I do not know but I'm sick and tired of seeing these threads devolve in the most cringe way possible. Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping. And reading some of the comments in this thread that assessment was spot on.
> Tech already has a bad reputation in this respect and HN really isn't helping.
You are part of HN, now is your chance at helping.
Discussion means that you will see opinions that are plainly wrong. That's a good place to argue and present better opinions. If you don't present better opinions, no one will be convinced. If you don't voice your opinions, you might not known that they are wrong or harmful. I've voiced a lot of opinions on HN, which after correcting by others, helped me become a slightly better human.
> I would happily bet that I've done more to help HN and its denizens than you have.
I would agree, I sometimes browse your comment history for insightful comments. But it was a suggestion that you can help out some more on this specific topic.
> Besides, after 18 years here some things have become a little predictable.
Maybe that's why "the problem" is not corrected yet, because it's harder to make money on strong independent men who do everything themselves... Otherwise someone would already make an LLM to help men.
I believe poverty is the natural state of man and I wonder how non-capitalism (= socialism?) makes people rich?
What I think you mean is that equal access to education is a promise of the state that is too often broken.
But then we're talking about incompetence or corruption at the state level, paid for and sustained with your taxes, and you have those problems in socialism, too.
I suppose that was irony to highlight they're usually exempt.
Also, they are paid by the people to work for the people, so during the exercise of their functions they could in theory be contractually obliged to use a company phone
That’s an interesting topic. In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject. And 11 states don’t even require a parent to simply notify the state that they’ve pulled their kid out of school.
That's because there are roughly two types of home schoolers, and they're at opposite ends of the achievement spectrum. The high achiever cohort are the ones you see who outperform students in their GPAs, SATs, and get into highly selective colleges. The others don't even finish HS much less apply to college so you don't hear about them.
Sure, I don't contest that. Parents can definitely fail to educate their children properly at home. Students in government schools suffer from the same problem though.
The point is that the average result appears to be better.
My point was that the average result doesn't account for the lowest performers because they're not even included in those scores that are being averaged. It's skewed towards the high performers.
> And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs.
I'd love to see your citations on that.
Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.
Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).
At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.
You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.
"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
If you look into these you'll see people arguing against Ray's studies saying "the population is overly white, overly married parents, and overly Christian, it doesn't represent potential results for the wider population". That's definitely true, but it's also a fact of the home-schooled population that those groups are wildly over represented, and the results of that actual population being called "meaningless" is what I was responding to.
It is fair to argue that home-schooling isn't a panacea, and wouldn't work for everyone. I never intended to say it would. I did include the second study which is specifically about black American home-schooled students and their results.
As for the rest of your post, I understand your opinion, but don't share it.
The guy you're replying to only posts simple takes to derail conversations. He doesn't have citations.
Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
> Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
I'm not sure what I said that made you think I'm arguing against this point. Government Education is absolutely necessary and a common good. It's a bare minimum that keeps a lot of children from a life of total ignorance and squalor.
I do think that government education has some pretty major flaws, but I didn't say anything to setup some zero-sum competition between the two approaches. I was
replying to the statement "In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject", which is a bit ridiculous and, in context, is trying to paint home-schooling as some backdoor approach to child labor.
Put the 14-year-olds on shift after school, put the adults on shift during the day. The teenagers won't have time to do homework but the schools aren't funded well enough to ensure a quality education anyway.
> the schools aren't funded well enough to ensure a quality education anyway
The US spends more per pupil than every other OECD country except for Luxembourg, and exceeds the average by over 50%. If US schools aren't funded well enough, essentially no one is.
Educational spending in the US is individual to the state, and even more locally within school districts within states, so it makes no sense to look at it from a national average
Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought in America there’s no obligation to attend school ever, because you can just be homeschooled and then take the GED? I think it’s dumb but I don’t know for sure.
It's complicated. There's a broad requirement that you receive a K-12 education. There's also a huge amount of pushback against most things that would infringe personal freedoms, so "I'm handling that myself, go away" is permitted but the exact details vary between states.
At least where I grew up if you drop out and don't file all the necessary homeschooling paperwork the police will visit you.
It's a sort of a grey area, and varies a lot by state and which way the political winds are blowing.
Miss too many days of government school because your family are poor and you had to help your parents put bread on the table? The truancy officer may show up to arrest you.
Announce you are homeschooling your kids to avoid liberal indoctrination? Sending your kids to work in a factory? A-ok in a number of states.
I have the same issue with "15 minutes before" instead of "2025-09-29 01:13:30".
(Which is wrong once the site doesn't update)
Needless to say, those are all "features" dumbing us down in the long run.
A philosophical side question: I want to opt out of this but I can't. So is this is case where my peers are limiting my intellectual development? I.e. preventing me from a) doing the time calculations in my head, b) writing my software such that is uses leading zeros?
We built scape in 9 months and ran it for 9 months, if I recall. We were all young and naive — it just felt like we failed to make something that “clicked.” Facebook had very few features (pokes and the wall), but they weren’t competing on features. We struggled to get more than a thousand people to sign up across a few NE colleges.
We had this whole social blogging and communication system — it was really very cool in concept. But we had too much of a “if you build it, they will come” marketing plan.
We gave up after a year and a half. We ended up selling a version of it to Teach for America.
I’d consider it a failure — we gave up. I rather wish we’d have tried to raise money, though.. I can’t believe we got as far as we did — different times
I think the correlation between "spying" and "saying that you're spying" is 0 or negative
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