MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by programjames | 2025-09-21 19:04:35+00:00
From [1], these are the rankings for CS:

1. Stanford 2. UC Berkeley 3. MIT 4. Caltech 5. Harvard

I'm a little surprised MIT and Caltech are lower than Stanford and UC Berkeley. I know that MIT has a culture of sending its undergraduates to different graduate schools (so, if the top CS students go to MIT for their undergrad and professorships, they often would not have a PhD from MIT, lowering their prestige rating), but that does not explain why Caltech would be lower than Stanford/Berkeley. I know Stanford has a decent CS program, but I'm wondering if there's a gaming network effects thing going on, since both Stanford and Berkeley attract more hustlers.
by hvb2 | 2025-09-21 19:04:41+00:00
A company can craft whatever document they want. That doesn't make them legal. The laws of the jurisdiction they're in always beat whatever you're signing.

Best example in software are non competes.

A company can make you sign something that doesn't allow you to do any software development when you're a developer. You can sign that today then do the opposite tomorrow because that's just against the law.

See:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/did-califor...
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-21 19:05:11+00:00
>I didn't realize it for 30 years, but it's hard to feel connected to nature, animals, and the environment when you are eating something you didn't kill yourself.

Really? I'd think that living surrounded by a modern society whose benefits you fully enjoy does a lot more to really disconnect you from nature than some notion of not killing the meat you ate.

You're still fully participating in the daily destruction of nature, animals and living things just about as much as anyone who eats meat, you've simply removed yourself symbolically a bit more from one specific expression of it, so you can (entirely subjectively) feel as if it somehow makes much of a difference for any real connection to the planet.
by Daniel_sk | 2025-09-21 19:05:58+00:00
I have a 10km walk with some elevation in the nearby woods, I do it several times a week if possible (it takes me ~2 hours). I listen to podcasts during the walks. A few times a months I try to do a fast pace ~20km walk in mountains. Currenly I don’t have issues going 30km fast pace without stopping. A few times a year I do multi-day long distance walks (with some 50-60km days). It seems to bring me a lot of inner peace and better sleep.
by the_other | 2025-09-21 19:06:00+00:00
You’d think that with more context it would get better, but it doesn’t.

My hunches are that the to-and-fro of ideas as you discuss options or make corrections leads to a context with competing “intentions”; and that they can’t tell the difference between positive and negative experiences when it comes across each successive token in the context.

But I don’t make LMMs, so this is pure guesswork.
by davidmurdoch | 2025-09-21 19:06:14+00:00
But that wouldn't make any sense. It's not `plus`; it's `times`. AI is supposed to be a force _multiplier_, at least in the context of a complex organization and product (on small projects where vibe-coding is good enough I think AI is a massive plus!).

If a junior is about 50% as useful as a baseline senior, and today, AI's usefulness is only slightly better than the person using it, then 50% * 75% gives you output equal to about 37.5% of a senior. The junior just ships more junior-level output; and in a complex product and complex orgs, this just ends up being a drain on everyone else.

But in the hands of a senior, 100% (senior) * 125% (ai), we get a slightly better senior.

Its not a perfect analogy, and AI is new territory with lots of surprises. AI code reviews, have been separated from the confirmation bias of the driver of the AI, _are_ where I'm seeing the greatest impact on junior engineers. These AI reviews seem to be getting things closer to a level playing field.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-09-21 19:06:43+00:00
Quite honestly after using Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex extensively for months, I very rarely hand edit code.

The rabbit hole problem is pretty rare. Usually it happens when the model flips into "stupid mode", some kind of context poisoning. If you are experienced, you know to purge the context when that happens.

In personal projects I avoid manual editing as a form of deliberate practice. At work, I only edit when it is a very small edit. I can usually explain what I want more concisely and quickly than hand editing code.

I probably would use more hand editing if I had classic refactoring tools in the IDEs similar to intellij/pycharm. Though cli based tools were a pleasant surprise once I actively started using them.
by sandworm101 | 2025-09-21 19:06:53+00:00
A 100w space heater will produce exactly 100w of heat. A 100w heat pump, properly installed, may turn that 100w of power into 300w of heat output on the hot side. This >100% language is marketing for people who do not understand thermodynamics or who dont want to bother with specifics.

The same is said of those scam "personal" AC devices that blow air over ice. They too are "more than 100% efficient".
by Spartan-S63 | 2025-09-21 19:07:25+00:00
For me, it’s an under-desk walking pad. I’m not super consistent with that yet, but I’ve been infrequently doing something like:

- 3-5 mile run, 5 days a week (one long day at 6+)

- 5 days of lifting (upper/lower, PPL hybrid)

- walking 2-3 miles during the work day to supplement

All told, sticking to this would bring me up to a 1.8-2.5 PAL every day which should confer lots of longevity and body composition benefits over time.
by dpflan | 2025-09-21 19:08:42+00:00
The study you are alluding to is this one by METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research):

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

- https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

""" Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%—AI tooling slowed developers down. This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter). """
by r14c | 2025-09-21 19:10:02+00:00
Yeah honestly. I've made peace with the past being past. Life isn't all sunshine and daisies obviously, but its also not an inevitable depression. Things changing is a part of life and every new stage has different experiences available to it. That's really neat imo. Learning to make peace with that inevitability is not easy, but its a part of having a healthy outlook.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-09-21 19:10:34+00:00
Why is there no responsibility for that? And not just LaLiga, but everywhere?

You can claim copyright on anything anywhere, things get taken down, zero responsibility if it was wrongful, be it laliga streams, be it youtube copyright strikes or whatever?

If there was a law, that if you took down something that you shouldn't have taken down (eg. hundreds of pages), you should be liable for all the damages and income loss for those pages. Same for youtube... copyright strike, proven fair use.. now pay for the lost income of the creator, the creator (webmaster, ...) did nothing wrong, you should be liable for that.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-09-21 19:10:39+00:00
I think Ted had a more optimistic vision than that. More like, go to the library and read whatever you want, but with a meter running so you got charged a microscopic amount per word read. It might come to a couple of bucks equivalent if you spent the whole day reading. At one point (I don't know if he departed from this), you couldn't set your own prices. All paid reading was charged at the same amount per byte. As an author you could freely quote anyone else, like transclude a page of their text into yours. The system tracked the transclusions so the other person would get paid for the part that you quoted, and you'd get paid for your own parts. They basically handwaved the question of unauthorized copying (as opposed to their tracked transclusions), at least for a while, by saying that it wasn't allowed but not explaining how enforcement would work.

I knew the Xanadu tech folks pretty well and hung out with them a fair amount. They were capital-L libertarians with the usual belief that they could squash the real world into their ideological framework. I only met Ted himself a couple of times. I think he was less naive, but I don't know how that fit in.

I remember RMS meeting them and getting a big talk about all the stuff they'd implemented over N years. Afterwards he said he could write the same thing in a few weeks. He wasn't interested in the paid-everything vision though.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-21 19:10:43+00:00
I don't know, let's simulate it! ;)

LGR - SimTower - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4ToEDrhxo0

Yoot Tower: The Sequel to SimTower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqNECXCd9iU
by martin-t | 2025-09-21 19:11:02+00:00
> When a behavior hurts the society the society puts a law against it

Laws are passed by politicians, not society. And the more removed they are from actual working people, the more different their incentives are. You and I as members of society have very little actual control over what gets passed.

On any given issue, there's something between 0 and 30% of the population who actually care.

- Immigration? Maybe 30% cares, the rest doesn't.

- Gay marriage? Maybe 10%, idk really.

- Whether training an ML model is derivative work? Right now, I'd guess close to 1%, hopefully it'll go up.

- Whether online services should disclose evidence of causing addiction? I bet that's maybe 2% now.

- Trans rights? Depending on country, it's between 0 and, say, 10%. This issue is massively hyped up by people who benefit from dividing the population to distract them from other issues. No, seriously, most people should have no need to dictate other people's lives, but frame is as an attack on moral values and you get supporters.

The issue with democracy is that you don't vote on issues, you vote for parties. And even if you live in a democracy which isn't totally broken by degenerating into 2 parties, there are still way fewer parties than combinations of issues. So you can't express your view in any meaningful way.

It's like describing a precise point in N-dimensional space (your entire opinion) by picking 1 of a dozen predefined points. When you realize this, you realize how incredibly dumb is it.
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-09-21 19:11:22+00:00
You might be confident the intended with the substantive. The intended effect is to raise American salaries. The substantive that is the MAGA’s H1-B and larger immigration policies will discourage STEM researchers to come the US. This will hurt US scientific research and is likely the most substantive long term effect on the nation. Any potential effects on tech workers salaries pales in comparison. This potential also includes lower developers salaries as American companies lose their competitive edge.
by koverstreet | 2025-09-21 19:11:22+00:00
That attitude is how you get ahead as an individual at the expense of our whole field.

That's how you end up with decisionmaking that's nothing more than popularity contests and no one even bothering to do the analysis on which option is technically better.

That way leads the death of leadership.

If you want to accomplish something as challenging as a filesystem, you do it by consistently making the right call and sticking to it, over and over and over.

And if you keep doing that, eventually you end up with the most active filesystem community around, and the ability to flip even the kernel community the bird when their weaponized incompetence becomes too much :)
by metalman | 2025-09-21 19:11:35+00:00
the word nostalgia was first used to describe the phenominon as a disease, which perhaps you knew I agree with seeking adventure, as an adult, and I dont long for childhood, but I do treasure the times when oportunity allows me to listen in on children in there more earnest and determined moments and silently wish for there continued insight and wisdom pretending to be fully absorbed in bieng an adult and therefore seen as somehow inert. It's silly to wish for everything, and enough to know that some things exist for others.even only for others.
by 2b3a51 | 2025-09-21 19:11:47+00:00
David Spiegelhalter has had a lot to say about rankings over the years. The paper below contains concrete examples in the educational sphere and in the medical sphere, mostly UK based. TD,LR: confidence interval(s) in the measures that you are ranking on.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cmm/migrated/d...
by godelski | 2025-09-21 19:11:49+00:00
There's a lot of benefits you get by mentoring. When you have to teach you're forced to think more deeply about problems, see it from different angles, and revisit questions you had when learning but tabled at that time. That last one is pretty common. There's always questions you have when learning that you have to avoid because you don't have the knowledge to answer yet, because they would take you down too deep a rabbit hole. But later you have the experience to navigate those problems.

Personally, I've learned a ton while teaching. It's given me many new ideas and insights. But I'm obviously not alone in this. Even Feynman talks about how teaching results in better learning
Show HN: AgentSafe – per-task micro-VM sandbox for AI agents (Go)
by sdeshwal | 2025-09-21 19:13:18+00:00
I was tinkering with AI agents for some time and made some utilities for myself for safe and fast execution. While chatting, I figured I can open source it. Spent some time cleaning and vibe coding some extensions for it.

Here the results from real execution on M1 mac: VM Boot Times: /tmp/vm_final_1.log:VM Boot Time: 0s (Target: <200ms) /tmp/vm_final_2.log:VM Boot Time: 1ms (Target: <200ms) /tmp/vm_final_3.log:VM Boot Time: 0s (Target: <200ms)
by drdaeman | 2025-09-21 19:13:23+00:00
> I'd strongly advise having no public profile of any kind

Unfortunately, this is effectively a suggestion to voluntarily degrade one's ability to have connect with others online. Either you participate and connect with people - and nearly inevitably leave information that can be used to build profiles, or you voluntarily exclude yourself from it. Sterile online profiles do not facilitate connections.
by cybadger | 2025-09-21 19:13:23+00:00
Thank you for the feedback!

I've certainly been misunderstood more than once. I've also misunderstood people who thought they were being perfectly clear.

That particular example is intended to be an example of a well-intentioned manager sending a message but it not being received. Maybe it's time pressure, or an interruption, or just bad wording. "Y'all, we need to change 'Login' ...oh, hang on, I need to take this call."

The next paragraph is an example of exactly what you're talking about—where the team shares information with the manager, the manager learns something about the system, and it leads to improved trust between team and manager.

I think you're taking "there's a good chance your team didn't understand what you told them" to mean "your team is so dumb they don't understand basic words and you need to correct them". It's meant as a value-neutral description of something that's really common in human interactions: someone tries to communicate X, but what's received is different than X. In this case, that's on the manager to fix.

So...how could I edit that paragraph so it comes across better, without trying to incorporate some of the things that came before (admit you're not the expert, ask questions, etc)?

I could make it even more ridiculous: > For example, if you just asked them to change the text on the "Login" button, and they're talking about how that means upgrading the load balancer and switching to a NoSQL database, there's a good chance your team didn't understand what you told them.

I could try to make the error attribution more obvious: > For example, if you just asked them to change the text on the "Login" button, and they're talking about new libraries and rewriting the credential store, there's a good chance you didn't communicate what you thought you did.

I could add some corrective actions later on: > For example, if you just asked them to change the text on the "Login" button, and they're talking about new libraries and rewriting the credential store, there's a good chance your team didn't understand what you told them. Take the time to make sure they understood correctly. If they did, you've got something to learn.

I think you're railing against the exact sort of thing I'm working to fix here: people who think their title means they don't have to listen to their team, or that they're automatically an expert because of their title, or something. So your input on how to make it land with you (because it obviously didn't as originally written) would be helpful.
by andelink | 2025-09-21 19:13:30+00:00
> https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2024/2024-07-17-w...

It’s clear you didn’t read your links because this one concludes with:

> "Scholars in China and at the UN have analyzed these and other data. Not a single person has 'discovered' such a huge discrepancy." ... "China has had at least three censuses since the start of the millennium, and there has been no evidence that more than 100 million people are overreported in China," Wang said.
by rmoriz | 2025-09-21 19:14:24+00:00
I've made different experiences with Rovo Dev CLI (Sonnet 4). I think LLMs are designed to over-engineer because the learning data, typical open source projects, are over-engineered as well by design (they should provide universal services not tied to a single use case). I had to learn the hard way, since I steer the prompt to 1. limit external dependencies 2. don't introduce abstractions when not needed 3. focus on the main use path it works quite well. Since I also have tests and CI in place, hallucinations are caught very early. IMHO it's mandatory to be productive with the current state of coding agents.
by aSanchezStern | 2025-09-21 19:15:29+00:00
Sure, but when you're walking all the time, none of that time is wasted, because you're helping your body and brain function better. When you use a car, you really are wasting all your transportation time. To get the same benefits, you would have to drive places, and then go walking recreationally after, which would clearly take much more time to get the same utility.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-21 19:15:36+00:00
Gotcha, there are still locations where non-GFCI receptacles are allowed in residential homes in the US, they’re required in basements, garages, exteriors, and within a certain distance of a sink/plumbing tap but not in bedrooms or general ‘living space’. AFCIs are required in most areas but don’t protect against ground faults, which aren’t as concerning with a device that is injection molded plastic anyways.

The triple built-in protections alleviate the rest of my concerns, my apologies for overreacting but I’ve seen people plug some scary things into receptacles.
by drillbit | 2025-09-21 19:15:47+00:00
About ten years ago I went to Oxford to study as a postgraduate. The quality of the research I was supposed to be conducting was very, very poor, and I consider some of the practices I witnessed to be borderline fraudulent. It was quite a shock. (I eventually dropped out and studied at a non-famous university—which had its own problems but at least the research was sound.)

It's frankly heartening to see it drop down the rankings, although IMO generally too much emphasis is placed on these sorts of lists.
by spott | 2025-09-21 19:16:15+00:00
I don’t understand judging a knife by any measure of “sharpness”? Sharpness is what the sharpener brings to the knife. Edge retention is the steel, but the skills of the sharpener (against how easy the steel is to sharpen) are what defines the edge sharpness.

This is mostly just a remark on the fact that BESS is probably just measuring the factory edge… which only matters until it has dulled the first time?
by gregsadetsky | 2025-09-21 19:16:31+00:00
No apologies needed, but thanks for your kind words! I think that we’re all understandably “on edge” considering that so much content is now llm-generated, and it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t.

I’ve been removing hyphens and bullet points from my own writing just to appear even less llm like! :)

Great stylistic chicken and egg question! French definitely tends to use certain (I’m struggling to not say “fancier”) words even in informal contexts.

I personally value using over-the-top ornate expressions in French: they both sound distinguished and a bit ridiculous, so I get to both ironically enjoy them and feel detached from them… but none of that really translates to casual English. :)

Cheers
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-09-21 19:16:39+00:00
I'm from Spain, never watch football or pay any attention to it at all, and this year I noticed the day that the Liga started due to the internet suddenly working like crap. After various websites failing to respond I thought "I bet the football season has started again", I googled it and indeed, it started that day. I resubscribed to my VPN right there and then.

This situation (which has already been going on for a year or so) has made my attitude towards football change from "I don't like it, but live and let live" to outright hate.
by reachableceo | 2025-09-21 19:16:54+00:00
Why is that expensive ? I’m genuinely asking. Considering the time / labor / troubleshooting etc to put something like this together yourself , plus cost of materials ?

In my mind , the labor rate for a professional is a minimum of 1.00 per minute. This package would be essentially one hour of billable time at the (lowest) rate a professional would bill themselves out at.

Presuming it’s FLO or at least some kind of simple AT command set and meets all the other requirements, I’m really struggling to understand how it’s expensive ?

I mean , sure if you need 10k of them or something.

Are people really this price sensitive ?
by rmoriz | 2025-09-21 19:17:06+00:00
to me plagiarism is a 100% copy of intellectual property or maybe a high percentage, like 80%+

LLMs don't store the code, only the probability chains of tokens (words). AFAIK this is not plagiarism.

I remember the later 2000s, when a German company called "Rocket Internet" was copycatting companies like AirBnB, Zappos and others. Many consider this lame and some kind of moral freeloading, it's not prohibited.
by ivape | 2025-09-21 19:19:43+00:00
I don't think so? This is a topic on depression and quite frankly, no one has answers. You can't make sense of what I'm saying as a possible reason as to why we're seeing depression in the macro across time periods?

People are depressed today because they were depressed yesterday, and yesterday, and tomorrow and tomorrow. They were always depressed and will always be depressed. So, what do large amounts of people most likely have in common? It's a spiritual issue tied to emotional experiences, and under some ways of life, it's not even considered an "issue", it's considered discernment.

There's a lot of ways to meditate and live life. I can urge you to seek God, but you wouldn't appreciate it if I said that (so I won't say it).
by aunty_helen | 2025-09-21 19:19:48+00:00
It’s like having a malicious mentor. But the frequency of which I’m bailing on reviews on the first line due to stupid stuff that has made it to a commit is quite stunning.

“Oh I thought that would be useful at some point so I just committed it.”

Beating it into developers that they need to review their own work they submit before asking someone else to waste time is the best way I’ve found so far.