MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danans | 2025-11-30 05:19:50+00:00
> The percentage of American adults over age 25 who have a college degree was only 20% as recently as 1990. When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%.

Due to automation and the great advance of technology, the floor for most jobs has risen such that the skills/knowledge that a 1950s school dropout had would be insufficient for anything but the most menial jobs today.

Outside of a few sectors like agricultural or physical service labor, our economy just doesn't need less educated people anymore.

That doesn't mean everyone needs a 4 year degree, but to make a sustainable living at least a degree from a trade or service school focused on some advanced technician skill is required, and that must be followed by apprenticeship and licensing. In the end, it requires as much time as University, but might cost less if the education is at a public community college.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-30 05:19:57+00:00
If you can buy a house for $300k, you can invest the money instead. If you choose "house", you're going to have a much harder time accumulating wealth.

I wish I hadn't bought a house instead of investing it all in MSFT. I know people at the time who borrowed every dollar they could and plowed it into MSFT. They became very, very wealthy. I was too chicken. Bwaaack, cluck cluck!
by tptacek | 2025-11-30 05:21:48+00:00
I agree with you about (2) but not with (1). In fact, for a lot of my bikey friends, theft is a huge consideration for which bikes they'll take where. I think the big point you're trying to make here is well taken! I just wouldn't want to create the impression that CPD is going to do anything meaningful about bike theft. :)
by hc12345 | 2025-11-30 05:21:51+00:00
Most of the world has severed the two. A lot of what you'd consider key parts of the university experience just doesn't exist in most of Europe or the highly developed parts of Asia. In practice, it's attaching job training to a very, very expensive resort, regardless of who is paying for it. It's pretty nice, in the very same sense that spending 4 years in a beach resort ls also great, but one needs to be absurdly wealthy to choose this model if an equivalent was available without all the features that most of the world has abandoned. The US system would already have been in trouble years ago if it didn't have a government license for being the safest, more reliable way to immigrate into the US. Get rid of the F1 practical training to work visa pipeline, and see many US institutions in serious economic trouble. We can keep trying to keep it working as-is by pushing other people's money into the expensive vacation environment, but without major subsidies, we are already seeing more people realize that the risks are way too high when you have to get loans to attend. There is no idealism separate from economic incentive in institutions that charge 60K per year, plus often a whole lot more for mandatory on-campus housing, without financial aid.

But as it's normal with failing institutions, they'll be extended, kicking and screaming, until they completely collapse instead of reform, like almost every other country in the world already has.
by jswelker | 2025-11-30 05:21:52+00:00
It's especially fun if your employer is in a field with an aging employee population--like higher ed ironically. The insurer gives the same premium rate to all employees, meaning everyone is in the same risk pool. The old and or unhealthy employees make insurance more expensive for everyone at the employer. I've had situations where the exact same insurance plan cost two hugely different amounts of money after switching employers just because of average employee age differences. Really quite perverse.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-30 05:23:07+00:00
Exactly. Unreasonable conditions imposed on everyone to "solve" an ideological or societal matter impose externalities on bystanders. It's religious fervor not backed by honest appreciation of human nature or reality. While I don't like end-uses that exploit or harm others, there is no meaningful magic spell that can police usage of code gifts apart from not giving away anything and micromanaging every single invocation for moral purity.
by nobody9999 | 2025-11-30 05:23:57+00:00
>The problem is that any hiring test that blacks and whites pass at different rates, is presumed racist. Never mind that the real issue might be that the blacks went to worse schools and received a worse education.

Your first sentence is the result of bigotry against those with "enhanced" melanin content, not the cause.

The cause is laid out in your second sentence.

Resolve the systemic bigotry (not just against those with enhanced melanin content, but against those with the least resources as, at least in the US, most schools are paid for by local property taxes, making the poorest areas the ones with the worst schools) and put us all on a level playing field and we'll be a much fairer society IMNSHO.
by SquareWheel | 2025-11-30 05:24:41+00:00
I was using Bazzite, but they started talking about potentially shutting it down due to a removal of 32-bit support. It seems a bit safer to choose one of the mainline Fedora spins. Maybe Kinoite or Silverblue if you're into atomicity, though there's still some rough edges to be aware of.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-30 05:24:41+00:00
Thinking aloud here. Start by requiring that orgs get your permission via email to license your code. Over time, formalize the patterns in your approve/deny responses into an LLM-powered API which does an instant approve/deny, with a prompt you handcrafted and backtested based on real-world data. This could even work for e.g. Linux package installation: As a pre-install hook, a prompt asks the user what organization they work for (if any) and how they intend to use your code. Make it so users can still appeal a "deny" by sending you an email, but attempting to respond to the questions a second time with different answers violates the license [within a certain timeframe at least]. If other open source devs are also interested in this scheme, you could let them piggyback off of your infrastructure... answering your qs toggles a "virtue bit" which unlocks a bunch of "ethical packages", hosted in a dedicated repository to better track downloads. Support yourself by suing companies which violate your license terms.

Since organizations evolve over time, you could have a re-authorization flow every time your users want a major version update of your software.

A flaw in this proposal is that the very worst actors (scammers, black hats, etc.) are likely to be beyond the reach of the legal system in practice. Perhaps you could mitigate this a little bit by replacing Github Issues with a private support forum for trusted licensees.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-11-30 05:25:02+00:00
Correlation-only is sloppy analysis.

The inheritors and descendants of those that directly created the problem are screaming at the colleges as the problem.

But that’s ass backwards: Create the long-term financial opportunity and the college problem will disappear overnight.

The correlation is because rational actors will follow the only leads available to make money, survive, and raise a family.

Edit: I edited the tone, slightly.
by nick238 | 2025-11-30 05:25:43+00:00
>99.999% of the power put into compute turns into heat, so you're going to need to reject 8 MW of power into space with pure radiation. The ISS EATCS radiators reject 0.07 MW of power in 85 sq. m, so you're talking about 9700 sq. m of radiators, or bigger than a football field/pitch.
by jswelker | 2025-11-30 05:27:50+00:00
The F1 issue is absolutely real. Foreign students have been the secret sauce in keeping prices lower for US students for a long time now. Trump 1 and now Trump 2 presidencies have created financial crises at most universities just by making vague anti immigration gestures without even materially changing student visas. Presidents and provosts routinely make desperate oversea sales pitches to try to gin up the pipeline. I know of one major state university whose entire financial existence depends on visas from a few companies in Hyderabad.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-11-30 05:28:20+00:00
I wonder what tools the Zig team has to deal with trolls like this.

Is the zig name or logo trademarked? What about the mascot he's using as his github picture?

They're violating the terms of the MIT license as mentioned in the article, so maybe Zigtools has legal standing.

As for lying about no AI, being an asshole isn't illegal, so no angle there.

Any other ideas I missed?
by blitz_skull | 2025-11-30 05:28:34+00:00
Assuming a grad income of $80k is an insane starting assumption. MAYBE you’re making that in software (good luck getting your foot in the door).

Any other industry? Biology? Social sciences? Academia? Manufacturing?

I struggle to think of anything other than finance that has a shot of STARTING at $80k. Hell I didn’t hit $80k in software industry until ~3 years in and I thought I was (I indeed WAS) very lucky.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-30 05:28:52+00:00
Feel free to read a biography of him.

> Musk was not going to be homeless if he failed.

Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.

I had a friend who started company after company starting in high school. Some were more successful than others, but he never lost his enthusiasm for the next company. The last time I saw him, he was living out of a trailer because he put everything he had into his next company. (Sadly, he passed a few years ago from an accident.) He left behind a large wake, and his memorial service was packed.

(He grew up in poverty.)
by xethos | 2025-11-30 05:29:16+00:00
I'd like to push back on "useless" degrees here, as well. The idea that degrees that leave graduates struggling to pay their bills (especially with student loans factored in) are worse than degrees that maximize income is bad for society. Not every job that is good for society pays well - if they did, educators would be better paid, and many executives would not be compensated as well as they are.

Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.
by ameliaquining | 2025-11-30 05:29:33+00:00
The threat model here is not malware, but code-execution vulnerabilities in legitimate apps. If you're developing an application, you might use this API to deny yourself privileges that you know you won't need, so that if an attacker finds a code-execution vulnerability in your app, they can't use it to take over the user's machine.

It is not a suitable technology for sandboxing a program that wasn't designed to be sandboxed in this way. For that, you need one of the other technologies listed in the article.
by hc12345 | 2025-11-30 05:30:30+00:00
As prices for college go up, the student is more of a customer than anything, and therefore the pressure to raise grades goes up. Who is going to go to a college where people tend to need an extra year to graduate, when each year is 60k? Or one where only the top 5% of a class gets a top grade?

You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.

The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.

This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.
by graemefawcett | 2025-11-30 05:30:40+00:00
The nice thing about the transformer architecture is that they can cross these domains, to an extent. I have a very spatial way of reasoning through problems and using an LLM, especially an agentic one like Claude Code with access to my local file system as a research assistanmt, is a great aid.

I just have to remember how I built something and where the code is. We can take a quick dive into the code base and I don't have to yet again attempt to serialize my mental model of my system into something someone else may understand.

It can be difficult to explain why using the path on the underlying mount volume's EBS volume to carry meta data through filebeat, logstash, redis and kinesis to that little log stream processor was in fact the cleanest solution and how SMS was invented. It's easier when you can get the LLM to do it ;)
by Izkata | 2025-11-30 05:31:15+00:00
I think it's fine for the "sinking in a lake" case too? The water pressure prevents the door from opening, and my understanding was you want the car to fill with water fast enough you can take a breath, let the pressure equalize, then open the door. You're likely not going to get out through a broken window while the water is pouring in through it (I guess if you're fast enough to still be above the water line), so by the time that stops it doesn't seem like there'd be much difference between opening the door and maneuvering through the much smaller window.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC68mflUEwc
by smolder | 2025-11-30 05:31:19+00:00
Yes, I would also prefer that servers were community run as in the hl2 days.

I would still argue that there are technical issues leading to some amount of cheating. In extraction shooters like Hunt Showdown, Escape From Tarkov and a few others, people can run pcie devices that rip player location and other information from the machines memory in order to inject it into an overlay with a 2nd computer, and they do go to these lengths to cheat, giving them a huge advantage. It wouldn't be possible to rip that info from memory for these "ESP cheats" if the server didn't needlessly transmit position information for players that aren't actually visible. IMO this is a technical failure. There are other steps that could be taken as well, which just aren't because they're hard.
by adiabatichottub | 2025-11-30 05:31:24+00:00
A couple years ago somebody parked a stolen car in front of our building, stuffed a rag in the fuel filler, and lit it. I must have pulled up just a couple minutes after they had left. Grabbed the fire extinguisher I kept under the seat and put it out. I had that extinguisher around for about 5 years. You never know when you'll need it.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-11-30 05:31:54+00:00
From the perspective of decreasing income inequality on a global scale, when multinationals fire workers in developed countries and replace them with lower-paid workers in developing countries, that is a very good thing, since people in developing countries need the jobs more. I would be skeptical of any license which privileges co-ops over multinationals for that reason. Co-ops are likely to reinforce existing global income inequality, due to labor protections for developed-world workers. A globally rich, privileged slacker gets to keep a job they're barely doing, because they had the good fortune of being born on the right dirt. It's modern feudalism.
by piyh | 2025-11-30 05:33:27+00:00
Wildly misreported headline

>The Index measures where AI systems overlap with the skills used in each occupation. A score reflects the share of wage value linked to skills where current AI systems show technical capability. For example, a score of 12% means AI overlaps with skills representing 12% of that occupation’s wage value, not 12% of jobs. This reflects skill overlap, not job displacement.

>The Index reports technical skill overlap with AI. It does not estimate job loss, workforce reductions, adoption timelines or net employment effects.
by SquareWheel | 2025-11-30 05:34:02+00:00
Why do you say that? If they drop 32-bit support, maybe I won't be able to play games for a time - at least until somebody rigs up a fix - but at least my operating system will still be supported.

If Bazzite goes poof overnight, though, that's a major problem. At least Fedora's official spins will continue to receive necessary updates.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-30 05:34:02+00:00
I agree the answer is “yes”. But I think people are also forgetting that the reason college was a useful thing to pay for, was it was effective in differentiating between someone who was highly capable and someone who wasn’t. In a world where anyone can get a degree by simply spending enough time and money, there’s no real differentiation happening. Even if someone gets a degree, their fundamental competency (I guess I’m talking about something like IQ) is going to be whatever it is. And so it’s going to be hard to find jobs and the perceived value goes down.
by ajashdkjhasjkd | 2025-11-30 05:34:24+00:00
> Most of the world has severed the two

Yes, and the US system is the envy of the world and is responsible for the overwhelming majority of wealth generated in the US over the past few decades.

I'm not sure how that's an argument against the US Higher Ed system.

Edit: The real issue you seem to be pointing to is the cost of attending universities in the US. There are 2 parts to this. 1 is the costs of running a university, and the other is the cost that is paid by the student.

Most of the rest of the world subsidizes student tuition so students dont pay much out of pocket. The US, OTOH, has been consistently reducing govt support for student tuition. Even worse, it's been pushing students into taking loans that unlike most other loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy. And even though students aren't required to start paying back those loans until they graduate, they do start collecting interest from day 1, which means a student has picked up a significant burden simply from the interest on the loans they received to pay for their freshman tuition, when they graduate.

These are all issues with the US system of financing education as opposed to the actual liberal arts education system.
by Vegenoid | 2025-11-30 05:34:33+00:00
> How much of a longevity guarantee do you need from a distro that is used for gaming, of all things?

Games are something I do to relax. I want as little friction to play the games as possible. For tech projects and work stuff having to mess with the OS and move away from deprecated stuff isn’t such a big deal, it’s part of the work. But for games I want them to just work as much as possible, I don’t want to have to find a new distro and install it and set everything up again on my gaming PC.

Despite Windows sucking in so many ways, it is the OS with the most assurance that a game will work without fuss. I am happy to see Linux closing this gap.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-30 05:35:13+00:00
People aren't versed, and think the problem in their life is that they don't make enough money.

The actual problem (overwhelmingly) is that they spend to much on housing.

If we can just build more housing to bring down prices, 80% of reactionary "just seize their assets in anyway" rhetoric will go away.

Of course, this also means the middle class needs to take a 20%+ hair cut on their net worth. Deeply unpalatable, and doesn't fit the "1% will pay for everything" zeitgeist.
by foxandmouse | 2025-11-30 05:35:50+00:00
I've been using Linux forever (back to the mailed Ubuntu CDs days).

I installed this begrudgingly after fighting edge cases with Waydroid on Arch. It's the first "batteries included" distro I've actually liked. I usually hate the "omakase" approach, but the setup here is pretty much how I would've done it myself.

Side note: GNOME + Waydroid is the best experience I've had with a desktop OS on a tablet. Finding tools like scrcpy included out of the box was a nice surprise, too.
by defrost | 2025-11-30 05:35:55+00:00
> Could computer vision give you those metrics though?

Yes.

> How would you do it?

Similar to how I once estimated rock size and soil grades on high speed conveyor belts in real time, borrowing ideas from a few decades of satellite / airborne image processing, signal processing in geophysics, industrial computer vision applications, etc.

You'd start with recognising cards, or locking in on a roulette wheel ..

To be honest, computer vision isn't strictly needed here - old school casino crews would "fast enter" cards by hand using a chording hand piece or similar, the eudeamonic pie crew used custom single board computers in the shoes for both entering wheel and ball speed and for transmitting recieving the guesstimate to the table person placing bets.
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-30 05:36:23+00:00
Yes but it is not standardized at all. Every college has its own way of doing things. Even every degree or school within a university can be different in how they handle grades. Some places put every student on a curve, so that a particular distribution of grades is always enforced. Some places operate on more of a pass/fail basis - often this is done for the first couple years to avoid measuring students when they’re adjusting to a new lifestyle (meaning partying a lot). Some places tend to give out easy grades. So you cannot compare students across different degrees and colleges.
by Dig1t | 2025-11-30 05:36:51+00:00
Mac and iOS have something that is almost exactly the same as this called sandboxing. When a daemon or app starts one of the first things it does (usually right inside of “main”) is enable the sandbox and declare which resources to whitelist, everything else is denied.

It is only useful for guarding your own process against someone using malicious inputs to get your process to do something you don’t intend. It is not a guard against programs written by malicious actors (malware), there exist other mechanisms to guard against malware.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-30 05:37:11+00:00
That's part of my point. As Nick says, libxml2 was not designed with security in mind and he has no control over how people use it. Yet in the "security only in the critical components" mindset, he's responsible for bearing the costs of security-critical development entirely on his own since daniel left. That sucks.

But this isn't a conversation limited to the big tech parasitism Nick is talking about. A quick check on my FOSS system implicates the text editor, the system monitor, the office suite, the windowing system, the photo editor, flatpak, the IDEs, the internationalization, a few daemons, etc as all depending on libxml2 and its nonexistent security.