MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What should CS students do to prepare for the job market after college?
by APoorStudent | 2025-09-03 20:33:05+00:00
There has been article after article talking about the high unemployment rate for new CS grads (mostly due to AI taking entry-role positions), even at world leading universities like MIT and Stanford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44157365)

As a junior CS student this is rather despairing

Before you tell me to ride the wave and learn about AI, I hate AI. I've used it, I've built with it, I've hacked it, but I simply refuse to work in it for my career.

It's not that I'm never going to use AI in my job, it's just that I don't want my career to revolve around it

But the thing is, I love computers. I'm not in it for the money, I'm not here to build the next Google, I just love building systems and seeing them work

I also want to go into cybersecurity, not just plain software development (but I do like building software on the side)

I have a number of side projects that I'm invested in, I'm in a number of CS and non-CS clubs at my university, I work in research on and off campus, I don't want to be super market-y in social media, I want to go to grad school, but I just can't shake the feeling that I'm not going to be able to get a job out of college and all of my work in CS will go to waste

So what can a CS student who hates AI prepare for the post-college post-AI work market?
by pferde | 2025-09-03 20:33:10+00:00
I guess that's country-specific. Over here, Google Maps has woefully outdated business info, apart from big names like McDonald or Starbucks. And I'm not even talking about building shapes, sidewalks, paths, or even roads.

Meanwhile in OSM, everything is much more detailed and kept up to date. I know, because I'm a mapper myself, and help keep it that way.

Google Maps seem like just another ad platform, for companies to pay if they want to be shown in higher zoom levels.
by tmountain | 2025-09-03 20:33:11+00:00
It’s a very nicely designed language that can run on BEAM or compile to JavaScript. I played around with it a while back and loved it, but I don’t have any projects that align with its niche, so I basically forgot about it. That said, it hits all the right notes if you want a simple functional language with great type support, pattern matching, etc, with minimal syntax to learn.
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-03 20:33:44+00:00
Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.

Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?

If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
by anikom15 | 2025-09-03 20:33:47+00:00
I can type in Dvorak, Qwerty, Zhuyin, and Kana direct input. If you are a slow typist, the problem is not the layout. It is an overreliance on looking at the keys and not taking the time to learn the layout by muscle memory. My keys only have labels for Qwerty but I can touch type in four different formats because I forced myself to use them. That process works. The individual layout does not matter much. How ergonomic the keys are also doesn't matter much. The limit is likely you.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-09-03 20:34:09+00:00
A lot has changed since January. You absolutely should worry about being disappeared, and about your family and friends ratting you to ICE/FBI/etc (the distinction is moot under the unitary executive theory under which our new regime operates). It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
by tomhow | 2025-09-03 20:34:16+00:00
Previously:

Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42820449 - Jan 2025 (4 comments)

Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032334 - March 2023 (32 comments)

Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23828196 - July 2020 (9 comments)

Show HN: A minimalist blog based on Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19615895 - April 2019 (74 comments)

Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633102 - Nov 2017 (59 comments)

Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10555319 - Nov 2015 (26 comments)

Tufte CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10012360 - Aug 2015 (103 comments)
by orsenthil | 2025-09-03 20:34:18+00:00
Just look at the principle - "Disagree and Commit." It sounds correct when a group of peers have discussions and debate and in order to move forward, the owner takes this call. The disagreeing opinions are heard, and commitment actually moves the ship for everyone.

Now, when the CEO says "Disagree and Commit" to the entire company for (returning to office 5 days week or quit), the meaning of the principle is entirely different.

The principles are not used in practice as they meant to me. They are inherently ambiguous and in practice, are used as tools for performance management usually by dirty or opportunistic managers.
by antonvs | 2025-09-03 20:34:28+00:00
> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.

Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.

In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.

How would you describe the distinction?

> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"

Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
by dang | 2025-09-03 20:34:28+00:00
Related. Others?

What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 - May 2023 (117 comments)

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments)

A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)
by slightlyoff | 2025-09-03 20:34:38+00:00
That's simply a misunderstanding of how features come to the web. There is no immaculate conception for web APIs. No magical room in which they are dreamt up, or spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus.

Instead, they come from open, honest, iterative design (when done well), and shipping ahead of others is risky, but that's why we designed the Blink Launch Process to demand so much pre-work (specs, tests, origin trials, good faith attempts to include other vendors in design, etc.) in order to launch that way.

Some background on these points here:

https://infrequently.org/series/effective-standards-work/

https://youtu.be/1Z83L6xa1tw?si=939PBH4_idtZGI6Y

As to, "should Apple follow Chromium's lead", perhaps ask "how would that be different than today?"

See:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission...

And:

https://infrequently.org/2025/06/the-ghost-of-christmas-past...
by zippothrowaway | 2025-09-03 20:35:02+00:00
No one is forcing parents to vaccinate your kids. It's just that in sane societies we say you can't use a public school if you're not vaccinated and otherwise healthy.

A moment's thought will tell you that it's to protect kids that are at risk from infectious diseases (e.g. immunocompromised cancer patients) that cannot be vaccinated.

So most people would agree that it's unfair that a cancer patient cannot attend a public school, through no fault of their own, because a parent wants their healthy kid to attend the school unvaccinated. We balance the rules accordingly.
by balamatom | 2025-09-03 20:35:19+00:00
habr is an institution. it's like the "runet hn", minus wild west vc ecosystem, plus integrated blog posting like lj ogs intended to. probably helps a lot with original work like TFA getting traction. more power to that!

runet sites of that era are often born out of the hacker's characteristic contrarian attitude "because we can". attempts to monetize them in more recent years are bound to accomplish little more than fuck up the content quality and/or the "owner cashes out and opens cafe" thing.

nevertheless, to this day, when i think habrahabr, i think way higher bar for technical competence than hn. it's all in the attitude.
by syndeo | 2025-09-03 20:35:19+00:00
Thank you for the quick fix! Your steps worked perfectly.

In any case, I'd like to add that I'm hoping an ACP adapter for OpenAI Codex is in the works; I've grown pretty fond of GPT-5, and would like to be able to tap into my existing ChatGPT Plus subscription; I'd rather not use API pricing at the moment. I prefer using Claude Code vs directly hitting the Anthropic API for the same reason.

Heck, an ACP adapter for Cursor CLI (itself based on Gemini CLI, right?) would even be useful; as that would also let me pick GPT-5.
by aredox | 2025-09-03 20:35:42+00:00
Ethics board have already discussed the topic at length, where you "argue" with a single sentence - but ok, let's admit vaccination obligations are unethical. Then you do admit infecting others is unethical as well? Now, science has advanced far enough we can retrace who I texted who through genetics; therefore, if you want to abandon compulsory vaccination, it must be compulsory that each and every infection must be investigated like a poisoning is and people who infect others be prosecuted as severely as polluters.
by the_af | 2025-09-03 20:35:46+00:00
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.

If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?

How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
by hedora | 2025-09-03 20:36:30+00:00
The only people I’ve worked with that insisted on code of conduct files also were the only ones that routinely harassed colleagues until they quit.

(The victims of harassment were not violating the code of conduct. This had nothing to do with left-or-right, race or gender. Instead the aggressors used their faux-inclusiveness as a shield against escalations of hostile work environment complaints to upper management. They targeted people that were more technically competent than they were.)
by harrall | 2025-09-03 20:37:07+00:00
Your average person who wants to use Snapchat, if given a choice between a phone that runs Snapchat versus one that doesn’t, simply chooses the one that can. (Windows Phone never had Snapchat.)

Same with Photoshop. Neither Windows Phone or RT had any software support. It’s like buying a game console with no games — what’s the point?

No regular person even knows what a walled garden is. It’s not a decision factor.
by kelthuzad | 2025-09-03 20:37:12+00:00
>One thing that still suffers is AI autocomplete. While I tried Zed's own solution and supermaven (now part of Cursor), I still find Cursor's AI autocomplete and predictions much more accurate (even pulling up a file via search is more accurate in Cursor).

It's not only the autocomplete. I've never had any issue with Cursor while Zed panicked, crashed and behaved inconsistently often (the login indicator would flicker between states while you were logged in and vice versa, clicking some menus would crash it and similar annoyances). Another strange thing I've observed is the reminder in the UI that rating an AI prompt would send your _entire chat history_ to Zed, which might be a major red flag for many people. One could accidentally rate it without being aware of that and then Zed has access to large and potentially sensitive parts of your company's code - I can't imagine any company being happy with that.

>I am glad to hear that Zed got a round of funding. https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed

There are plenty of great VCs out there, going with Sequoia will definitely come with some unpleasant late consequences.

>This will go a long way to creating real competition to Cursor in the form of a quality IDE not built on VSCode

There are many "real competitors" to Cursor, like Windsurf, (Neo-)Vim, Helix, Emacs, Jetbrains. It's also worth being aware that not everybody is too excited about letting AI slop be the dominant part of their work. Some people prefer sprinkling a little AI here and there, instead of letting it do pretty much everything.
by I_dream_of_Geni | 2025-09-03 20:37:26+00:00
"Software developers are the absolute most offensive use of the word "engineer".

This, exactly this! I am a retired Aerospace engineer. 8 years of engineering studies at college and 2 years of work study before I was hired.

My son considers himself a "software engineer" and I have told him many times that he is NOT an engineer. He was homeschooled (so, pat my back there), never went to college, never studied programming at all. Yet he makes between $200K-$250K per year, 5 TIMES what I made as a Senior Engineer at Boeing. smh
by CurtHagenlocher | 2025-09-03 20:37:29+00:00
Even if true, it would only be for one of the narrowest possible definitions of "crime". What can Flock do about mail fraud? About domestic violence? About wage theft? About falsified studies that lead to substances being misclassified as harmless? About price fixing? Does the majority of criminal activity even take place in "public" spaces?
by geye1234 | 2025-09-03 20:38:31+00:00
Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).

If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
by Vinnl | 2025-09-03 20:38:32+00:00
> Since its FOSS you can presumably just compile it yourself if you wanted to bypass the paywall (the ethics of this are left as an exercise for the reader).

You don't even have to do it yourself - F-Droid does it too. (Which is why it's called OSMand~, as a nod to OSMand+.)
by nine_k | 2025-09-03 20:38:47+00:00
I frankly don't see any trouble in paying for open-source software once. I see it as a way to support the development. I often buy "premium" versions even if they add nothing on top of the OSS version.

As of OSMAnd, $40 might look like a steep price even for a lifetime unlimited license, but they regularly run sales where the same costs $25.
by chatmasta | 2025-09-03 20:38:49+00:00
This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?

It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s one of the most regressive and heinous business models someone could spend their time building.
by strbean | 2025-09-03 20:39:08+00:00
Parents don't have sole discretion about their child's well-being. As pointed out by another reply, "I thought it was best for them" doesn't hold up when the wealth of evidence shows they are endangering or harming their child.

> The vaccines work, so parents who choose to vaccinate their kids will be protected.

This is false for a number of reasons.

1) Vaccines don't provide perfect protection, breakthrough infections can occur.

2) Some people can not receive vaccinations due to health conditions.

3) Immunocompromised people are not protected by vaccines.

We managed to make it illegal to beat the crap out of your kids even though there are still plenty of Americans who think not beating your kids is harmful to them.
by the_af | 2025-09-03 20:39:20+00:00
> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person

I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?
by bondarchuk | 2025-09-03 20:39:58+00:00
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”

I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.

>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?

No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
by bluGill | 2025-09-03 20:40:18+00:00
I could probably do it - but you wouldn't like it. My dictionaries would be a linked-list, looking for a key becomes a linear search... (if you gave me C++ I'd use std::map) I'm assuming you will allow me to use the C standard library, if I have to implement strlen or malloc in that 500 lines of C I'm not sure I can pull that off. 500 lines is aggressive, but IOCCC gives me plenty of tricks to get the line count down and the language isn't that big. I'm also going to assume 100% valid python code is fed in, if there is a bug or error of any sort that is undefined behavior.

Note that most of what makes python great isn't the language, it is the library. I believe that large parts of the python library are also written in C (for speed), and thus you won't be able to use my 500 line python compiler for anything useful because you won't have any useful libraries.
by vehemenz | 2025-09-03 20:40:54+00:00
When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
by lm28469 | 2025-09-03 20:41:09+00:00
Read into heard immunity, not everyone can be vaccinated, not every vaccinated person gets full immunity, more vaccinated people = safer for everyone.

This doesnt work anymore because people are more individualistic than ever, unless something will directly harm them in a very obvious way in the next hour it's as if it didn't exist in their mind

Kind of like spouse of illegal migrants who voted trump, or people surviving thanks to medicaid voting against their own interest, they're so blinded by rage/outrage that they can't even understand basic logic. I personally think we're at a breaking point in most of the west and it'll only be going downhill from now on, so just as you I don't see any solution. The education system can't fight social media, and you can't "force" people you've been brainwashing for decades into believing the be all end all of human life is their little unlimited personal freedom
by Dig1t | 2025-09-03 20:41:26+00:00
I can tell you that whatever education you think has been put out there, it’s absolutely not reaching its intended audience, and much of what does land is actually doing the opposite of what it intends to do. Example: Colbert’s “The vax scene” episode did more to damage the reputation of vaccines than I think anyone realizes.

Yes discrediting Andrew Wakefield helps, but you have to fight the incorrect ideas about the vaccines themselves not just one of the people who pushed these ideas.

One example: many skeptics ask the question “if vaccines are so safe then why are they immune to lawsuits?”. This is a very reasonable question for people to ask! And honestly, responding to this common sense question with derision and insults hurts your cause. The establishment needs good responses to questions like this and they need to be repeated in a non-hateful way.

99% of media and online conversation is just condescending. Like look at the comments in this HN post, most people are extremely unkind.

“Extreme derision and insults” is going to make the problem so much worse.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-09-03 20:41:27+00:00
It's unethical because vaccines don't work 100% of the time so if the disease is allowed to spread, some vaccinated people will also get the disease and suffer the consequences. If some of these horrific diseases actually start circulating again commonly, it will mean a LOT of vulnerable people will basically not be able to go out into the public at all. Many of the diseases we vaccinate against like measles or polio have horrific lifelong consequences. It's condemning many people who didn't make that choice

This is ethical only in the extremist libertarian view where personal choice trumps all. Some parents probably believe that beating their child or otherwise abusing them is good for the child.. so should we just let them do that? There IS an end to personal liberty, it's not unlimited. "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins"

I totally get what you're saying about these people not trusting the vaccines and the education problems though, and maybe the solution will have to be to meet these people where they are and try to educate them out of the misinformation hole. Here's one small example of how that goes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o69BiOqY1Ec (it does not go well..)

It's very very hard to change these people's minds and we genuinely don't have any answers to how to do that. It's a very hard problem because all of us take an experts word for it at some level of reasoning, the anti-vaxxers just believe in different "experts". You can't go deep enough into the science and papers and experiments to really undeniably show everyone the truth, so how does anyone prove anything? Not to mention these positions often aren't reasoned into, and can't be reasoned out of. Most of us have some experience in trying to change someone's mind on one of these issues and know it fails. A lot of the time some visceral experience has to hit them or something internal has to shift within them and we don't know how to do that.