MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baxtr | 2025-08-09 20:45:18+00:00
> Coding bootcamps have been a mainstay in Silicon Valley for more than a decade. Now, as AI eliminates the kind of entry-level roles for which they trained people, they’re disappearing.

OK, so I think there is a fair chance it will play out like this: the younger generation won't study CS anymore / learn how to code. Instead, they'll all vibe code.

This will lead to a massive increase in demand for seniors to clean up the vibe code, which isn't working properly or needs maintenance.

This demand increase will be exacerbated by the fact that there will be no new seniors since no one learned how to code...

Fun times ahead.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-08-09 20:45:25+00:00
64bit RISC5 is cheap & has significant advantages around address space, computational efficiency, and suitability for high-performance applications while being more future-proof for complex systems.

It is cheap also, with the F133*, priced at approximately $1.00 to $1.50 per unit in bulk

If looking more for US stuff (fabbed in South Korea), PIC64GX1000 can be as little as $21 but much more capable.
by ghaff | 2025-08-09 20:45:38+00:00
I think it depends on the school at the time. I got rejected by one school probably because I didn't have a varsity letter and had a so-so interview. I got accepted to at least two others that were at least as "good" at the time.

There's a lot of luck of the draw when you're applying to schools with a pretty low admittance rate.

I joke with someone I know pretty well in my alma mater's alumni office that I'd probably never get in today and they smile and follow it up with an "oh well, you're fine." :-) And they're not unhappy that I'm an alumnus. 3 people from my school's 59 person graduation class got in; certainly would never happen now.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-09 20:45:45+00:00
> Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless.

That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.

It might not be practical to build enough housing in one city to house the entire global population, but who is proposing that anyway? Build more housing everywhere.

> Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?

By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.

Suppose you have a mining town somewhere until the mine is exhausted. What are the people who used to live there supposed to do other than move away? There is nothing there for them anymore.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-09 20:45:58+00:00
> There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US.

Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.

> All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.

The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above

> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.

Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
by justsomejew | 2025-08-09 20:46:05+00:00
The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-09 20:46:15+00:00
Here is an overview of the impact of direct regulatory credits:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/22/business/tesla-regulatory...

Overall, Tesla got >$10B of free profit from direct regulatory credit sales over its lifetime.

Indirect ones (7500$ subsides to car buyers) are going away end of September. While it's not a direct benefit to Tesla, it was a huge boost to sales and profits.
by mafuy | 2025-08-09 20:46:32+00:00
SSH is absolutely not a core CS skill. I use it daily, and I think students should pick it up somewhere along the line. But it still is a mere tool, not a concept that should be taught in mandatory classes. Same goes for latex and git and C.

All of that is, or should be, vocational, because anyone can learn it given some time. Universities are about the hard stuff that is difficult to get right at even a mediocre level.

If your company requires it, include it in your regular training program. Don't dilute the material because you don't want to be bothered. If you think people spend too much time on hard stuff, hire BSc instead of MSc.
by hinkley | 2025-08-09 20:46:51+00:00
Since we were getting low latency data inside HTTP responses we could work off of the response header clock skew to narrow origination time down to around one second, and that’s almost as good as NTP can manage anyway.

As RPC mechanisms go, HTTP is notable for how few of the classic blunders they made in 1.0 of the spec. Clock skew correction is just my favorite. Technically it exists for cache directives, but it’s invaluable for coordination across machines. There are reasons HTTP 2.0 waited decades to happen. It just mostly worked.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-08-09 20:47:32+00:00
"Agent" in the context of LLMs has always been pretty closely intertwined with advertising how dangerous they are (exciting!), as opposed to connecting to earlier research on reflexes. The first viral LLM agent, AutoGPT, had the breathless " (skull and crossbones emoji) Continuous Mode Run the AI without user authorisation, 100% automated. Continuous mode is not recommended. It is potentially dangerous and may cause your AI to run forever or carry out actions you would not usually authorise. Use at your own risk. (Warning emoji)" in its readme within a week of going live, and was forked into ChaosGPT a week later with the explicit goal of going rogue and killing everyone
by RagnarD | 2025-08-09 20:47:58+00:00
An RTX 6000 Pro (NVIDIA Blackwell GPU) has 96GB of VRAM and can be had for around $7700 currently (at least, the lowest price I've found.) It plugs into standard PC motherboard PCIe slots. The Max Q edition has slightly less performance but a max TDP of only 300W.
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-08-09 20:48:26+00:00
>Have a sub-agent read the data and extract a structured request for information or list of requested actions. This agent must be treated as an agent of the user that submitted the data.

That just means the attacker has to learn how to escape. No different than escaping VMs or jails. You have to assume that the agent is compromised, because it has untrusted content, and therefore its output is also untrusted. Which means you’re still giving untrusted content to the “parent” AI. I feel like reading Neal Asher’s sci-fi and dystopian future novels is good preparation for this.
by Eisenstein | 2025-08-09 20:48:47+00:00
Exactly. The problem isn't that MCP is poorly designed for enterprise uses, it is that LLMs are being used for things where they are not appropriate.

> In financial services, this means a trading AI could misinterpret numerical types and execute trades with the wrong decimal precision.

If you are letting an LLM execute trades with no guardrails then it is a ticking time bomb no matter what protocol you use for the tool calls.

> When an AI tool expects an ISO-8601 timestamp but receives a Unix epoch, the model might hallucinate dates rather than failing cleanly.

If your process breaks because of a hallucinated date -- don't use an LLM for it.
by jack_h | 2025-08-09 20:48:59+00:00
I tend to be in the camp that believes capitalism will generally produce better results than socialism but it will not produce anything close to a utopia. However, I don't believe capitalism is a stable economic system within a democratic society. It will inevitably lead to some results that are repugnant to the electorate who will advocate for political action to prevent such outcomes from occurring in the future. This will lead to stronger government authority and increasing market manipulation which will (potentially) prevent those outcomes but simultaneously it can produce different negative outcomes[1]. In the end it seems as though despite good intentions we end up with a system that nobody understands, nobody is satisfied with, and nobody can fix. I suppose it's like software engineering in a way, we want perfection but instead we are constrained by trade-offs and we never reach a state that everyone is happy with.

[1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to shortages.
by hansvm | 2025-08-09 20:49:02+00:00
It's easy to accidentally accumulate more than you need. E.g., when I got married we each were previously living our own lives. Big things like mattresses we consolidated, but an extra set of sheets is zero maintenance.

It's also nice to be able to make the bed right away. Maybe you want to take a nap while the clothes finish. Maybe you have time now and not later (and can defer the folding to "later" as well). You could have one of those shitty high-efficiency dryers that incorrectly detects whether your clothes are dry and doesn't have an override to apply heat anyway, requiring 12h of air drying to actually have dry sheets. You could not have a dryer or otherwise prefer air drying more generally.

You could also have an extra set of sheets for a pull-out couch or other sort of place where you don't normally waste the space having the bed always down on the ground.

Etc. Life is complicated. There are 8B of us, and we're not clones.
by thelock85 | 2025-08-09 20:49:48+00:00
If you reduce the choice to public funding vs wealthy alumni stewardship, and there seems to be no meaningful pathway to circumventing the current assault on public funding, then why should you alienate your wealthy alumni?

Obviously the situation is much more complex and nuanced, but this framing (amongst others I’m sure) seems appropriate if you are thinking on a 25,50,100 year time scale in terms of impact of your decision. The country is littered with public and private universities who made poor moral choices across the 19th and 20th centuries but I’m not aware of any institutions suffering long-term reputational harm (or threat of insolvency) as a result of those choices. (Then again, maybe it’s because the harm was swift and final at the time)
by no_wizard | 2025-08-09 20:50:13+00:00
This reminds me of a documentary I watched some time ago, I wish I could remember its name. This is what I remember about it:

The entire premise was following 2 people, one guy barely graduated community college, the other was incredibly intelligent. Went to an elite university, got a masters really young, and I believe was a member of Mensa.

The difference was in other areas. The first guy had a lot of persistence and didn’t stop when things got hard. Ended up becoming a very successful person, married with kids, had their own business.

By contrast the other guy despite being legitimately one of the smartest people in the world, simply withered into obscurity, had trouble maintaining gainful employment, relationships etc. A very stark contrast to the first person.

I realize the point of a documentary is to highlight extremes but I think it does say something about the relative value of intelligence as it correlates to successful outcomes
by nymanjon | 2025-08-09 20:50:52+00:00
I could see it used for something like that. But it is more general as it can act upon any HTML element. So, you could use it for masking an input element or any other local state based element. Granted, it doesn't need to be limited to local, but at that point HTMX, Datastar, html-form, etc might make more sense.

html-form is the one I made out of those and it is more single focus using the native platform.
by Mars008 | 2025-08-09 20:51:18+00:00
What about FireFox, does/will it support file system access? I'm not an expert, just thinking this way and don't like Chromium. The idea is to use light web server in application + browser with JS. This makes it easier and more convenient as it can naturally run remote, on microprocessor. Also LLMs are good at generating such UIs.
by daveguy | 2025-08-09 20:51:33+00:00
> LLMs are great at forming models of language

They really aren't even great at forming models of language. They are a single model of language. They don't build models, much less use those models. See, for example, ARC-AGI 1 and 2. They only performed ARC 1 decently [0] with additional training, and are failing miserably on ARC 2. That's not even getting to ARC 3.

[0] https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough

> Note on "tuned": OpenAI shared they trained the o3 we tested on 75% of the Public Training set. They have not shared more details. We have not yet tested the ARC-untrained model to understand how much of the performance is due to ARC-AGI data.

... Clearly not able to reason about the problems without additional training. And no indication that the additional training didn't include some feature extraction, scaffolding, RLHF, etc created by human intelligence. Impressive that fine tuning can get >85%, but it's still additional human directed training and not self contained intelligence at the level of performance reported. The blog was very generous making the undefined "fine tuning" a footnote and praising the results as if they were directly from the model that would have cost > $65,000 to run.

Edit: to be clear, I understand LLMs are a huge leap forward in AI research and possibly the first models that can provide useful results across multiple domains without being retrained. But they're still not creating their own models, even of language.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-09 20:51:44+00:00
Well, I don't know which trendy distro the dev is referring, but Debian is complete opposite of Trendy. It's a bedrock distro silently running almost everywhere in some form or shape.

Most of the Linux-based (enterprise and/or embedded) appliances are built upon Debian, for example.

P.S.: The total number of Debian installations and their derivatives are unknown BTW. Debian installations and infra do not collect such information. You can install "popularity-contest", but the question defaults to "no" during installation, so most people do not send in package selection lists, unlike Canonical's tracking of snap installations.
by onetimeusename | 2025-08-09 20:52:12+00:00
> Stanford has considered alumni and donor status for academically qualified students in the past

I have an argument to make in favor of allowing legacy status for admissions. I am basing this on personal experience and some analysis of data done at similar schools when they were forced to release it due to lawsuits.

The way admissions works in the US now it has basically become a lottery for qualified students. We have more qualified students than we have seats at the top schools. The idea that there are some unqualified students who make it in only because their parents are alumni, at least at Stanford I have never seen. The top schools are all so competitive that they are all pretty similar and they would not do things to jeopardize their reputation or standing. So I think it's just not the case that there are unqualified legacy admits. At Harvard for example the legacy admits had higher SAT scores than the average admitted student which makes sense when you think about it. Children of alumni are probably better prepared for admissions.

So when choosing, Stanford might have to make a choice between two students with the same GPA, the same SAT score, the same interests, etc. and legacy status could decide it and I am ok with that. Building a campus network of people is a huge competitive advantage a school can have. You would be surprised how many people who are non legacy admits have pretty well known parents anyway or have parents who went to an extremely similar school. Singling out legacy admissions is not extremely meaningful and I don't think it's used to let in unqualified students at all.
by Baeocystin | 2025-08-09 20:52:41+00:00
Interesting. I never knew there was a name for this phenomena. It happened to me every now and then as a kid, too, usually when I was sick and in bed. In my case, it made me feel vertigo, like size scales were shifting around so fast I'd lose my balance and fall over, stuff like that, but I don't remember any particular fear reaction per se, other than feeling kind of gross when it happened. I found that dim light (like a nightlight in a child's bedroom, with long shadows) was the worst trigger, and either bright light or complete darkness helped avoid it.
by H8crilA | 2025-08-09 20:53:24+00:00
The problem is you'll probably live on something like $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable internationally - think like food stamps but for everything. Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura, i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University admission is handled by a similar circle.

Let me quote the text:

> An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”
by mafuy | 2025-08-09 20:53:35+00:00
You're simply wrong about CS. CS is a science. You are not looking for scientists, you are looking for apprentices. Don't hire an architect to paint your wall. Don't hire scientists to be code monkies. Universities are not the right place to look at.

Except if you instead just want smart people, yea, they tend to aggregate at unis. There, you can hire an athlete to paint your wall, if that's what you need.
by cle | 2025-08-09 20:53:56+00:00
This is deterministic, it is validating the response using a JSON Schema validator and refusing to pass it to an LLM inference.

I can't gaurantee that behavior will remain the same more than any other software. But all this happens before the LLM is even involved.

> The whole point of it is, whichever LLM you're using is already too dumb to not trip when lacing its own shoes. Why you'd trust it to reliably and properly parse input badly described by a terrible format is beyond me.

You are describing why MCP supports JSON Schema. It requires parsing & validating the input using deterministic software, not LLMs.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-08-09 20:54:29+00:00
It had a meaning that predated the LessWrong crowd, but the LessWrong meaning had taken over pretty completely as of the GPT-4 paper, only to get swamped again by the new "agentic is good actually" wave. From the GPT-4 paper:

""" 2.9 Potential for Risky Emergent Behaviors Novel capabilities often emerge in more powerful models.[61, 62] Some that are particularly concerning are the ability to create and act on long-term plans,[63] to accrue power and resources (“power- seeking”),[64] and to exhibit behavior that is increasingly “agentic.”[65] Agentic in this context does not intend to humanize language models or refer to sentience but rather refers to systems characterized by ability to, e.g., accomplish goals which may not have been concretely specified and 54 which have not appeared in training; focus on achieving specific, quantifiable objectives; and do long-term planning. Some evidence already exists of such emergent behavior in models.[66, 67, 65] For most possible objectives, the best plans involve auxiliary power-seeking actions because this is inherently useful for furthering the objectives and avoiding changes or threats to them.19[68, 69] More specifically, power-seeking is optimal for most reward functions and many types of agents;[70, 71, 72] and there is evidence that existing models can identify power-seeking as an instrumentally useful strategy.[29] We are thus particularly interested in evaluating power-seeking behavior due to the high risks it could present.[73, 74]"""
by bbqfog | 2025-08-09 20:55:01+00:00
People were saying this about coding bootcamps just a little while ago! "All of these bootcamp coders don't really know what they're doing and us seniors will have to clean up after them". Same with outsourcing before that. Most people (seniors included) suck at coding. AI is already better than all but the the very best. It will continue to improve.
by MPSFounder | 2025-08-09 20:55:31+00:00
Maybe I am not. But then again, maybe you are just academically inclined. I was responding to the ethnic argument the OP posted. Just becuase you tested well does not make you intelligent buddy. Any user here is welcome to compare you and I's accomplishments. I am willing to share my Linkedin with a 3rd party, you do the same. And theyy come up with a verdict. Here is a tip btw. I shared my opinion, you shared yours. Insulting my intelligence makes it no wonder you lived in tents. It is disrespectful. I guess life has yet to kick vulgarity and lack of class out of the tent boy, did it?
by wredcoll | 2025-08-09 20:55:51+00:00
vim is in fact easier to use than vi.

windows 10 is easier to use than windows 95.

osx is easier to use than mac.. whatever they named their old versions.

It goes on and on. I can have 50 browser tabs open at the same time, each one hosting a highly complicated app, ranging from media playback to chat rooms to custom statistical calculators. I don't need to install anything for any of these apps, I just type in a short string in my url bar. And they all just work, at the same time.

Things are in fact better now.
by madars | 2025-08-09 20:56:10+00:00
Integrated Intel GPU and no graphical system, just KMS VT (text console). That's what made it so frustrating - only displaying a console should not result in kernel panics under CPU load! Admittedly, the experience was anecdotal and years ago and I heard Debian is doing less of a RHEL-style "frankenkernel" now.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-09 20:57:02+00:00
Minidiscs are the most practical physical media I’ve come across. The used discs I’ve bought are 20-25 years old and don’t have a case or anything and still play like they were recorded yesterday, even when their contents make it clear that they were recorded to shortly after the disc was manufactured. The CDs and DVDs I’ve burned of the same age are comparably in much poorer shape, some being entirely unreadable.

Their size is great, too, being about as small as you can get while still being easy to handle across the gamut of human hand sizes yet too big to easily lose, and they’re more fun than SD and CF cards with their outer plastic casings coming in all sorts of colors and patterns.

A new media format that takes these strengths and fuses them with those of flash storage would be wonderful. The only thing is that I don’t know how you’d solve is the bit rot problem flash has when spending extended time powered down — maybe dedicated storage for parity data? Capacitors that hold just enough juice to keep the flash “alive”? Redundant flash chips? This isn’t my area of expertise so I’m just throwing things at the wall haha.