MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thisisnsh | 2025-08-10 22:24:22+00:00
Today, I introduced selective-context capture. It gives you complete, granular control over what the AI can see. Previously, AI Thing offered explicit control over context capture, but this goes further.

Now you can:

1. Capture only a specific portion of your screen 2. Click on one application (out of many) and have the AI use only that for context

No continuous or hidden screen captures or audio recordings.
by eszed | 2025-08-10 22:24:59+00:00
> concert hall full of rich, fancy people

Not to harsh your schadenfreude buzz, but this is not the right image. Classical music was mass culture at the time.

Opera, in particular, was popular with all classes. (There's a delightful sequence in, I think?, "The Leopard" of brick-layers coming to blows over the merits of one singer versus another.) Recordings of famous singers were the first "hit" gramaphone records. Enrico Caruso sold out concerts all over the world - and (in legend, at least) sometimes gave impromptu balcony concerts to disappointed punters gathered in the street below.
by lostdog | 2025-08-10 22:25:04+00:00
Absolutely. I learned so much from my degree. Even at a decent school, the top level classes walked me through algorithms, compilers, operating systems, and graphics in a way I might not have done myself. Plus, the best people in my class were great, and discussing how to problem solve with them for coursework was very very helpful. The whole thing was very helpful as practice in a bunch of different areas of CS.

On the practical end, your degree is still a big filter for how companies screen applicants. A lack of a CS degree makes it way more difficult to get in the door. I know there are counterexamples, but 99% of my coworkers had CS degrees. Unless the money is a huge burden, or the school you would go to really is crap, then yeah, the degree makes the rest of the journey much easier.

As advice, try to get evaluated out of the intro courses and skip to higher level stuff. Often if you can show a prof that you can program (before the school year begins) you can place right into a course that is at your level.

The AI arguments are also facile. A CS degree is still the best training to be ready to use AI effectively. You understand more about how it is built than everyone else, plus you know way more about every tool surrounding the AI, and would have an easier time making your own.

I know some people have success with alternative paths. But the main road is the main road for a reason here.

Edit: Please also look at the best schools for CS, and don't just discard them as options. My coworkers out of these schools got even more out of their classes and costudents than I did. Your son sounds talented, and the best schools can help talent go even further.
by eurekin | 2025-08-10 22:25:24+00:00
I'm still in awe that a local 3090 gpu was able to run the qwen3 coder instruct 30b-a3b exl3 q6 and...

Was able to create a sample page, tried starting a server, recognising a leftover server was running, killing it (and forced a prompt for my permission), retrying and finding out it's ip for me to open in the browser.

This isn't a demo anymore. That's actually very useful help for interns/juniors already.
by esseph | 2025-08-10 22:25:46+00:00
Not one of these laws were put forth or passed by anyone other than Republicans in any of these states, and there is more pending legislation in other states before the end of the year.

If it makes noises like a duck, looks like a duck, does duck things, it's a duck!

I'm not running for office, just applying proper attribution!

The "game" is not worth playing, especially now. Time to bail. Sucks. (Reminder that there are far more registered independents than any political party affiliation.)
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 22:26:11+00:00
I think the Cold War played a role too. Germany was defeated, but its industry was still fairly operational. In contrast to housing, which was bombed into pieces, German heavy industry was remarkably operational until the very end and the British were surprised to find that German factories were, on average, equipped with more modern machines than British ones.

And some 75 per cent of that industry was in Allied hands. It made strategic sense to rebuild the country in face of a Soviet threat and make it a factory for the Allies (notably, the German army was only reconstituted much later, in 1955) instead of destroying it.
by mrbombastic | 2025-08-10 22:26:56+00:00
4 years is a long time, especially these days, it is hard to say what the world will look like in 4 years let alone the CS industry but if he enjoys programming to the extent that it seems like he does to me it absolutely makes sense to study it and build his skills if doing that won’t put you all in massive debt.

My personal belief is that not hiring entry level engineers is unsustainable unless we get AGI capable of both outputting and _maintaining_ software better than humans, and if that happens all bets are off anyway.
by red75prime | 2025-08-10 22:27:02+00:00
> I don't think there's any fundamental difference in the principle of their operation

Yeah, they seem to be a subject to the universal approximation theorem (it needs to be checked more thoroughly, but I think we can build a transformer that is equivalent to any given fully-connected multilayered network).

That is at a certain size they can do anything a human can do at a certain point in their life (that is with no additional training) regardless of whether humans have world models and what those model are on the neuronal level.

But there are additional nuances that are related to their architectures and training regimes. And practical questions of the required size.
by nicbou | 2025-08-10 22:27:54+00:00
I dropped out halfway through because I had a job offer after an internship in Berlin, and working for money and exploring Europe seemed a whole lot more fun than finishing my degree back in Canada. It was the best decision I've ever made, and our tuition was only CAD 5000 per year.

I don't know. Some people will do better if they follow the established path. Others blaze their own trail and don't do well in rigid environments. I know I did not.

Ten years later, the best part of my studies are the ones that felt like a distraction and a waste of time back then: mandatory engineering and liberal arts classes. I would have learned programming on my own either way, but these other things added so much depth to my life!

I think that there are so many ways to live your twenties and grow as a human and as a professional. I strongly doubt that saddling yourself with debt is the best way to do it. Given four years of your full attention, you can achieve so much more, provided that you have the curiosity and discipline to try. I just wonder where the strength to explore the world beyond your main interest would come from.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-10 22:28:43+00:00
>If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army.

Or it must continually conquer new territories to plunder and tax. And that was the Roman model. But finally the empire got too big to manage with the technology of the day. They weren't able to conquer new territories and that meant they could not afford the huge professiomal army. Which led to the collapse of the empire in the west. Or you could argue that it just morphed into the Roman catholic church.

(Not a historian, just been reading a bit about this recently)
by ofalkaed | 2025-08-10 22:29:11+00:00
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is an interesting read on this and explores the rapid changes in a far more human way than anything else I have read on the period. He renders it as the period when technology and knowledge ceased being things of the select few and become a large enough part of the average person's life, and this being what caused the real change; knowledge fundamentally changed society's relationship with the unknown and technology played a shell game with what is inconvenient. His treatment of photography and the development of film is really interesting and does an amazing job of showing what we lost as well as what we gained.
by ponector | 2025-08-10 22:29:26+00:00
>> Many countries have tried giving every incentive possible. Cash bonuses, tax breaks, a year+ of mandatory child leave for both men and women, cheap child care, mandatory flexible hours, housing subsidies, cultural campaigns.

Those incentives are usually meaningless. Like 100€ monthly cash bonus. Could cover food, but nothing more. A year of child leave is good, but what to do during next 5 years untill you can put kids into the school system?

And don't forget massive opportunity costs. Instead of having a single kid, woman can have few more years of advancing in career. Instead of putting all time into one kid, woman can upskill, get a degree, etc.

And with second child it's three times harder.

Also turns out, many baby boomers are not eager to be present in life of their grandkids. If you pregnant - you are screwed. You and the father-to-be will take a massive hit in every aspect of life.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-10 22:30:37+00:00
> People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation.

Before going to far down the rabbit hole, have a look at the fertility rate of TSMC employees. TSMC employees make up 0.3% of Taiwan’s population, they are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan. [0]

The average TSMC woman is highly educated and highly paid, which eliminates most of the usual reasons touted for low the fertility rates in OECD nations. "All" TSMC does is make it possible for their female employees to have a career and raise a family, mostly by providing child care in-house and flexible working hours.

To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.

But a government policy could made it happen, which is another way of saying if a society or country decided they didn't want to wither away to nothing because of low birth rates, it could be done. They could mandate every company adopts TSMC style policies, or they could raise taxes and provide free child care (like they do for education), or more likely some mix that has the same effect. Everyone would have to be willing to be a bit poorer of course, because you are forcing people to spend less on fast cars and big houses, and more of child care.

But does seem like it could be done, so if South Korea (or any of the OECD) had the will, there is a way.

[0] https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-10 22:30:44+00:00
I do believe that time keeping, computers, and other technology are overused and overly relied on. (There is also damaging other stuff due to these technology, which is another issue. There are other issues too; these are clearly not the only thing.) They have their uses, but should not be excessive at the expense of anything else. If they fail, then you won't do unless you know and have not destroyed the older possibility, and if they do not fail, then you may be trapped by them. You should not need to know what time it is to sit down to eat, or to wake up and to sleep, etc.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-08-10 22:32:04+00:00
I occasionally notice that people younger than me seem more impressed by smartphones than me (and I assume, maybe incorrectly, my generation).

One theory I have for this is that younger people are taught by teachers, when they are at an impressionable age, to revere the smartphone as the pinnacle of human achievement.

To me, the smartphone impressed me for a couple years, but it's just one of many miracles of miniaturization I've lived through - and less qualitatively different than, for example, personal computers or the GUI or the internet going public.

My father noticed a similar phenomenon with Rock n Roll. People younger than him saw it as a musical sea-change, but to him it just sounded like the boogie woogie music the radio already had been playing for a decade.
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-10 22:32:50+00:00
> People are under no obligation to accept a job with low wages.

This is the wrong premise you are basing your entire conviction on.

When you don't have an alternative to working then it is not a jobmarket as you are not in a position do not transact.

This is the same reason why the housingmarket is not a market the second people do not have alternatives to buy into overpriced rents.

A free market requires that participants can decide not to transact. A pro-market government makes sure that this is is the case to a reasonable extend.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-10 22:33:06+00:00
Being able to have simplicity of working on a task until it is done when society didn't have these per hour scheduling concepts. I remember hearing this referenced when learning about Amish and Native American cultures. Essentially, this is what were doing. When it is finished, we move on to next. No arbitrary start/stop time because some hand on a dial is pointing at a certain number.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-10 22:33:15+00:00
Can be break the systems that keep leading us to the next such war. For example the lack of true representation for the people. The seige of governments by the rich and "elite". Stupid decisions made by people who kill their kids for a buck (referencing climate change). Dismantling of international conventions that were the result of people from a harder time saying "hold on... this is too fucked".
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-10 22:33:42+00:00
I think I finally found an actual product page: https://bdachelp.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/2319602600002...

The amazon page specifically said 1354 watts, but I think that's actually for the 14300BTU model. 12000BTU is 9.72 amps.

Anyway, doesn't this make my actual argument stronger? These units fit even better into a normal circuit than I thought, and make the mini-split look even worse in comparison.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-10 22:33:50+00:00
Yes, but my recommendation for decades has been to study CS if you want, but if anything else interests you then get a CS minor or double major. If he's designing PCBs of his own, he may be interested in EE or CMPE as a major (and if he does CMPE, depending on the school, it's already effectively a CS minor). Programming is relatively easy to get into without a degree or with an unrelated degree, other disciplines are much more difficult to break into without the diploma.

If he's actually interested in CS, then a CS degree (or minor) makes sense. If he's interested in programming, study just about anything else and minor in CS or double major. Being an AE or MechE that has a much better than average (for the discipline) grasp on programming is a better edge career wise.
by LokiMcGraw | 2025-08-10 22:34:00+00:00
I’ve been using a site called FakeFind lately to check Amazon reviews, and it’s been surprisingly accurate. You just paste in a product link, and it uses AI to analyze the reviews for things like repetition, vague language, and hijacked listings.

It gives you a Trust Score (1–10), an Adjusted Rating after removing suspicious reviews, and a short summary explaining why. No extension or sign-up needed — works right in the browser and supports other sites like Walmart and eBay too.

It’s already saved me from buying a couple of products that looked great on Amazon but turned out to have pretty questionable reviews.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-10 22:34:01+00:00
Look, I'll be blunt. If ISO is keeping you from running any ILP system newer than Aleph and you have a good reason to want to use an ILP system then you should reconsider the benefits of ISO. There's no ISO for LLMs for example, yet you'll have no trouble at all convincing people to get involved, there.

That said, I think Vanilla should be easy to ISO-fy. It's just a meta-interpreter really. It uses tabling and I'm guessing that's not ISO (it's more like the Wild West) but it is not indispensible.

https://github.com/stassa/vanilla/blob/master/src/vanilla.pl

I could have a look, but I have no idea what's in the ISO standard (and that's another bugbear- the ISO docs are not free. What?). I guess I could try to run it on your engine and see what the errors say though.

P.S. Re: "academic codes" I got documentation, logging, and custom errors and that's more than you can say for 100% of academic prototypes plus ~80% of industry software also. I do have unit tests, even, just not many.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-10 22:34:09+00:00
This is a very modern reading of a very ancient situation.

By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening. Most of the local languages were also gone and the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin. They didn't have any Wikipedia or nationalist schooling system to teach them that they were once Celts or Illyrs, 400 years ago.

(Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors. This is a domain of history geeks. No modern German loses their sleep over whether his city was once plundered by the Palatinate forces or burnt to the ground by a Saxon army, and would not dismantle modern Germany just because such atrocities once took place.)

Also, the Roman empire did not dissolve into a vacuum, with the previous provinces simply declaring their long desired independence. It was conquered from the outside, and the attackers would not necessarily treat the subdued population any better. They might, or they might not.
by BobbyJo | 2025-08-10 22:35:03+00:00
The core issue there isn't that the LLM isn't building internal models to represent its world, it's that its world is limited to tokens. Anything not represented in tokens, or token relationships, can't be modeled by the LLM, by definition.

It's like asking a blind person to count the number of colors on a car. They can give it a go and assume glass, tires, and metal are different colors as there is likely a correlation they can draw from feeling them or discussing them. That's the best they can do though as they can't actually perceive color.

In this case, the LLM can't see letters, so asking it to count them causes it to try and draw from some proxy of that information. If it doesn't have an accurate one, then bam, strawberry has two r's.

I think a good example of LLMs building models internally is this: https://rohinmanvi.github.io/GeoLLM/

LLMs are able to encode geospatial relationships because they can be represented by token relationships well. Teo countries that are close together will be talked about together much more often than two countries far from each other.
by Havoc | 2025-08-10 22:36:35+00:00
Not a big fan of "uninsurable". They'll happily insure high risk stuff, for an appropriate premium. It just becomes unaffordable to the average family.

As a side note there is another insurance disaster in the making - shadow fleet carrying millions of barrels of oil in old ships with opaque ownership and even murkier maintenance history...they don't do the whole insurance thing. Only a matter of time before the world faces a very awkward "who's picking up the bill" discussion. Small one already happened in the Black sea.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-10 22:36:38+00:00
> Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."

So just describe it as "don't let the greedy landlords have their way" because the greed landlords want to limit housing supply.

> But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious)

I kind of figured, but actual communists will occasionally show up to say the same sort of thing and then it's just Poe's Law again.

> What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.

And there are a lot of people who would willingly be serfs if it meant stability.

The trouble is, it actually doesn't. Monopolies and unaccountable bureaucrats have short-term stability, where short-term is often something like a few decades. But being insulated from competitive pressure makes them long-term unfit, and then they eventually crumble. And the years leading up to the fall have a tendency to be increasingly unpleasant.

> The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.

This is one of the other reasons that system tends to fall apart.

Suppose you need something that doesn't come from within your jurisdiction. You haven't got any rare earths in the ground where you are etc. Well, you can just buy them from whoever has them, but then that country is never going to want to join your system because then you'd be taking their natural resources and sending back politburos instead of cash money.

Meanwhile the same thing happens to anyone there who is producing more than they consume. They want to leave. The Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep the Americans out.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-10 22:37:26+00:00
I noted the data point of the civil war in Syria: 20 times as many people moved as were killed. That's good news as far as it goes - to run is better than to die - but that doesn't make the Syrian civil war a good time for the people involved. They were running for a reason - the threat of death was too high if they stayed put. So they left. They left their homes, their belongings, their jobs, and ran to a very uncertain future somewhere else.

So I'm not sure that "the death toll wasn't that high" should be casually interpreted as "it wasn't that bad for regular people". Yes, most of them lived. That doesn't make it benign.

(Hmm, I seem to have used a lot of dashes in the first paragraph. No, I'm not an AI.)
by gnulinux | 2025-08-10 22:38:07+00:00
Maybe, ever since I graduated from college I learned again and again that pretty much anything worth thinking about in life boils down to math for me. I'd maybe/probably study CS, as a minor or double major, but Pure/Applied Math programs can be more intellectually enriching in this day and age. This is a completely person analysis, it'll change for everyone.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-10 22:38:20+00:00
Bit of an aside but Larrabee didn't fail. Intel inexplicably abandoned the consumer GPU market but the same tech was successfully sold to enterprise customers in the form of Xeon Phi. Several of the largest supercomputing clusters have used them.

https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20...
by the_gastropod | 2025-08-10 22:38:50+00:00
+1 this. This was the route I took. I'm old now, so my experience is maybe less relevant. But the price difference seems even more extreme now.

I also think it's worth a real discussion about what your son hopes to gain out of a college education. If the value for him is more vocational, then this strategy above seems almost like a no-brainer. If he's hoping to get that kind of intangible university life experience, community college probably isn't going to deliver.