MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bccdee | 2026-01-03 02:43:30+00:00
Oh my god, this sounds awful. After the first few paragraphs, I was ready to be impressed, but then they started dropping all these insane details:

---

> Only 13% preferred the AI oral format. 57% wanted traditional written exams. 83% found it more stressful.

> Here is an email from a student: "Just got done with my oral exam. [...] I honestly didn't feel comfortable with it at all. The voice you picked was so condescending that it actually dropped my confidence. [...] I don't know why but the agent was shouting at me."

> Student: "Can you repeat the question?" Agent: paraphrases the question in a subtly different way.

> Students would pause to think, and the agent would jump in with follow-up probes or worse: interpret the silence as confusion and move on.

---

Based on these highlights, you'd think the experiment was a wash. The author disagrees!

> But here's the thing: 70% agreed it tested their actual understanding: the highest-rated item.

Man, you could shoot me with a gun, then make me write an essay, & I'd be forced to agree that you had tested my "actual understanding." That doesn't mean my performance wouldn't suffer. Also, 70% is not very high. That's barely two thirds.

Even the grading was done by LLMs (rather than having a TA grade a transcript, and the results were lower. The author defends this by saying, "Students will be evaluated outside the university, and the world is not known for grade inflation," but the world isn't "known for grade inflation" because it doesn't grade you at all. That's not even an excuse, it's just nonsense. It'll toughen you up, or whatever. Was this post written by an LLM too?

> Take-home exams are dead. Reverting to pen-and-paper exams in the classroom feels like a regression.

"Regression"? I mostly wrote pen & paper exams, and I only graduated a few years ago. If students want more flexibility, team up with other courses to supervise multiple exam sessions. Leaked questions aren't going to be any more of a problem than it was for take-home exams, especially since they can't take the booklets with them when they go.

It sounds like these students had a terrible time, and for what? Written exams work fine. These guys just wanted to play with LLMs.
by econ | 2026-01-03 02:43:44+00:00
It would be more efficient and civilized to just have a background check with a visum application. That way you won't have them in the us at all. That was the whole point of a visum? Therefore other motives must be behind the desire for full access. Full access doesn't mean people first have to travel or even a desire to travel. It means full access outside the normal law enforcement formula. Useful for many purposes, public shaming, asset recruitment, radicalization etc
by therobots927 | 2026-01-03 02:44:09+00:00
I Googled “can X and Y medications be combined” today actually and to my surprise was provided with an AI overview. It took the cautious route and recommended they not be combined, but I’m surprised that AI overviews for this type of thing would be allowed. In the event that someone were incorrectly advised to combine X and Y and died as a result, would it be possible for a lawyer to subpoena the search history of the individual and hold Google liable for giving incorrect medical advice?

Edit: Expanding the thought process here, if the DOJ wanted to could they force Google to release records of instances when such health-related queries were made, and instances where that was the last thing the person had googled since?
by magicalhippo | 2026-01-03 02:44:11+00:00
> We don't have any flags left for that that.

There's the reserved bit (aka the evil bit[1]). Are you saying gear out there drops packets with reserved bit set to 1? Wouldn't surprise me, just curious.

Seems like IPv4+ would have been a good time to use that bit. Any IPv4+ packets could have more flags in the + portion of the header, if needed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit
by eru | 2026-01-03 02:44:22+00:00
I just looked it up, and the limits in Singapore would probably let you get away with one or two beers before a drive (assuming an adult male).

Though I suspect the BYD folks would want to avoid any hint of impropriety, so they probably will only let you drink there _after_ your test drive.

But I've only ever ate and drank at their showroom, I never went to the car side of the business.
by drzaiusx11 | 2026-01-03 02:46:00+00:00
I love the associated rituals and the physicality of vinyl records. The large format album art, liner notes & inserts are great as well. As for sound quality I'm no audiophile so I won't pretend to make any claims of vinyl being better or worse than any other music medium, but I will say I don't get the same intentionality of listening with the streaming services I've tried: Google music, Amazon music, Spotify, etc which all seem to mess with your library by injecting ridiculous things like AI DJ interludes or "enhancing" your playlists by injecting songs into your carefully curated playlists at random. That and I have some really old shit that I haven't been able to find on other mediums.

Both Google music (before it turned into YT Music) and Amazon Music briefly allowed uploading your own music to stream which significantly helped with my use-case, but they both removed that feature during their inevitable enshitification. I toyed with self hosting and doing my own rips of CDs and vinyl, but I find throwing on a record more relaxing than futzing with lossy encoder parameters or patching streaming servers.
by anth0nycodes | 2026-01-03 02:47:40+00:00
Every time I start a new open-source project, I end up creating a license manually on GitHub's UI, then manually updating the year and my name. I got tired of doing this repeatedly, so I built a small CLI to automate it.

License Generator is a Node.js CLI that creates a LICENSE file for your project in seconds. It pulls official license templates (MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL, etc.) from GitHub’s Licenses API, automatically fills in your name from git config, and writes the formatted LICENSE file to your current directory.

It has an interactive mode that walks you through choosing a license:

npx @anth0nycodes/license-generator

There’s also a quick mode. You set a default license once, then generate it instantly for new projects:

generate-license --set-license mit
generate-license -q

I built this because I noticed I was wasting the same few minutes at the start of every project doing identical setup work. This removes that friction, especially when scaffolding or prototyping multiple repos.

Implementation-wise, it’s a thin wrapper around GitHub’s Licenses API with a simple terminal UI (clack/prompts + inquirer). The codebase is roughly ~200 lines of TypeScript.

Features:

Interactive selection from 13 common OSS licenses

Auto-detects author name from git config

Quick mode for one-command generation

Overwrite protection for existing LICENSE files

Clean terminal output

GitHub: https://github.com/anth0nycodes/license-generator

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@anth0nycodes/license-generato...
by perching_aix | 2026-01-03 02:47:50+00:00
> I think there is a chronic issue of students thinking they deserve good grades, or deserve a diploma simply for showing up, in social media and I probably read that into your comment where I shouldn't have.

Yeah, that's fine, I can definitely appreciate that angle too.

As you can probably surmise, I've had quite some struggles during my college years specifically, hence my angle of concern. It used to be the other way around, I was doing very well prior to college, and would always find people's complaints to be just excuses. But then stuff happened, and I was never really the same. The rest followed.

My personal sob story aside, what I've come to find is that while yes, a lot of the things slackers say are cheap excuses or appeals to fringe edge-cases, some are surprisingly valid. For example, if this aforementioned 99% attrition rate is real, that is very very suspect. Worse still though, I'd find things that people weren't talking about, but were even more problematic. I'll have to unfortunately keep that to myself though for privacy reasons [0].

Regarding grading, I find grade inflation very concerning, and I don't really see a way out. What affects me at this point though is certifications, and the same issue is kind of present there as well. I have a few colleagues who are AWS Certified xyz Engineers for example, but would stare at the AWS Management Console like a deer in the headlights, and would ask exceedingly stupid questions. The "tuition fee extraction" pipeline wouldn't be too unfamiliar for the certification industry either - although that one doesn't bother me much, since I don't have to pay for these out of my own pocket, thankfully.

> If you learn the material, you pass and get a diploma. This is no more a gamble than your paycheck

I'd like to push back on this just a little bit. I'm sure it depends on where one lives, but here you either get your diploma or tough luck. There are no partial credentials. So while you can drop out (or just temporarily suspend your studies) at the end of semester, there's still stuff on the line. Not so much with a paycheck. I guess maybe a promotion is a closer analog, depending on how a given company does it (vibes vs something structured). This is further compounded by the social narrative, that if you don't get a degree then xyz, which is also not present for one's next monthly paycheck.

[0] What I guess I can mention, is that I generally found the usual cycle of study season -> exam season to be very counter-productive. In general, all these "building up hype and then releasing it all at once" type situations were extremely taxing, and not for the right reasons. I think it's pretty agreeable at least that these do not result in good knowledge retention, do not inspire healthy student engagement, nor are actually necessary. Maybe this is not even a thing in better places, I don't know.
by electriclove | 2026-01-03 02:48:25+00:00
The CDC recommendation to get it at 11 or 12 does not make sense to me. I know they aren’t having sex - and I know that some kids do. We will discuss, together, the pros/cons as they get older to see if it makes sense. As they get older, they’ll make these decisions themselves. Until then, I’m weighing the pros/cons and in our case, it doesn’t seem they are at risk in the near future.
by axiolite | 2026-01-03 02:48:35+00:00
In 1996? OpenBSD and Apache had been around for a year. PGP had been around for several years. HTTPS was used where needed. SecurID tokens were common for organizations that cared about security.

Admittedly SSH wasn't around, but kerberos+rlogin and SSL+telnet was available. Organizations who cared about security would have SecurID tokens issued to their employees and required for login.

Dial-in over phone lines, and requiring a password, was much less discoverable or exploitable than services exposed to the internet, today.
by nvader | 2026-01-03 02:48:51+00:00
One thing I find myself wanting is an emacs-lite alternative to less/more. Something that would let me page though a file, but use my emacs bindings to search, filter, browse etc. I've already built up my muscle memory, so it would be great if I could reuse it for this purpose.

Thought I'd tag along to this submission and see if anyone has a recommendation?
by cocodill | 2026-01-03 02:49:08+00:00
As someone who has been following the congress for twenty years (and if I couldn't be there, I watched streams and recordings), I have to say once again that it used to be better. The selection of topics was broader and more interesting. About fifteen years ago, politics entered the picture, and over the years it has become more and more prevalent. Strange people began to appear, and about ten years ago, this event ceased to be a cozy meeting place for hackers and geeks. I am very sad about that.
by socalgal2 | 2026-01-03 02:49:09+00:00
Do you have a device that supports HDR such as any MacBook in the last 10+ years, any iPhone since iPhone 4, or most high end Androids?

If so, try this: https://gregbenzphotography.com/hdr-gain-map-gallery/

Clicking the "Limit to SDR" and "Allow Full HDR (as supported)" should show a significant difference if you device supports HDR. If you don't see a difference then your device doesn't support HDR (or your browser)

For these images, there's a specific extension to JPEG where they store the original JPEG like you've always seen, and then a separate embedded gain map to add brightness if the device supports it. That's for stills (JPEGs) though, not video but the "on the wire difference" is that gain map

I'm not an expert but for videos, ATM, afaict, they switched them to 10bits (SDR is 8bits), and added metadata to map that 10 bits to values > "white" where white = 100nits. This metadata (PQ or HLG) can map those 10 bits up to 10000 nits.
by monero-xmr | 2026-01-03 02:49:12+00:00
Anecdotally I’ve seen among my non-tech friends more questions about VPNs. Several of my friends own Steam Decks which is pretty wild to me given they are just normie gamers.

It’s literally the ads and bloatware. Windows is horrible unless you are technical enough to strategically disable the bloatware, and keep on disabling it as the updates continually reenable it. And if you are technical enough to disable it then Linux isn’t a problem.

Microsoft really is enterprise, cloud, and GitHub / AI tools. Windows for personal users is harvesting as much cash as possible from boomers and gamers, but the gamers are leaving en masse now. Software professionals only use macOS or Linux unless they are a MS shop that has to use Windows stack.

It is an incredible shift for those of us who have been around forever. But it’s a true look at how impossible things shift, bit by bit, until all of a sudden it all washes away. Never believe the tech cos on top today can’t be beat. It can and will happen someday
by asveikau | 2026-01-03 02:49:14+00:00
They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite end up doing less.

That was my impression of one of the major problems when I worked there 2008-2011. But I don't think it's just one problem.
by willempienaar | 2026-01-03 02:49:14+00:00
Cleric | Staff SWE, AI | Staff SWE, Product | Head of Marketing | SF Onsite | $160K-$240K + Equity

Engineers can't keep up with their production environments: dozens of services, dashboards everywhere, alerts firing. The information to diagnose most issues exists, but finding it takes longer than fixing the problem. AI generated code is making this worse.

Cleric is an AI SRE that autonomously investigates production issues and surfaces findings to engineers. It connects to your existing tools, reasons through the evidence, and tells you what's wrong. We believe engineers should ultimately be accountable in production, and our goal is to help them go much faster.

The hard part is making agents reliable when there's no single right answer. We've built evals, memory systems, and feedback loops that improve with every incident. Gartner just named us a Cool Vendor, we are well funded with years of runway, and most importantly the engineers that use our product find it very sticky.

We're hiring the following roles:

- Staff SWE, AI: Build the reasoning engine. Design evals, debug agent behavior (not just code), expand what it can handle. You've built agents and operated distributed systems at scale.

- Staff SWE, Product: Define what AI SRE should be. Spend time with engineers during incidents, find gaps, decide what to build. You've owned products and know production pain.

- Head of Marketing: Engineers love the product but we need to reach more of them. Software engineers are allergic to AI hype, and you'll need to cut through it. Technical background required.

Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cleric
Or email me: willem-hn@cleric.ai

Willem, Co-founder & CTO
by gerdesj | 2026-01-03 02:49:58+00:00
"I get the biological desire to put food on the table for one's family and therein lies the problem"

They don't make money (put bread on the table) by selling Windows any more. That is soooo 2000s.

Income is from data mining and from subscriptions to cloudy offerings that are mostly MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Oh, and hyping their perceived value to the point that the term "meme stock" is no longer just a joke.
by solid_fuel | 2026-01-03 02:52:18+00:00
You're hand waving away the core problem - if I'm running someone else's script, it's not up to me if they used external packages or not, and in python using someone else's script that relies on external packages is a pain in the ass because it either leaves setting up a venv and dealing with python's shortcomings up to me, or I have to juggle system packages.

I'm sure uv can handle this _if_ a given script is packaged "correctly", but most random python scripts aren't - that's the issue we're talking about in this thread.

The whole point of a scripting language IMO is that scripts should _just run_ without me doing a bunch of other crap to get the system into some blessed state. If I need to learn a bunch of python specific things, like "just add _pycache_ to all of your .gitignore files in every directory you might run this script", then it isn't a useful scripting language to me.
by bmandale | 2026-01-03 02:52:45+00:00
This is begging the question. Games on linux lack kernel anticheat because linux isn't very popular. Once linux is popular enough, then they will figure out a way to do anti cheat on it in a way that they consider acceptable. Valve already considers VAC good enough, because they want to support linux. Anti cheat on windows works the way it does because that's what's available on windows, on linux they'll figure out some other way.
by refulgentis | 2026-01-03 02:53:02+00:00
Why are LLMs a theoretical dead-end? I understand the "manifold-fitting the semantic space of the internet", but I don't understand "why they are necessarily dead ends, theoretically."

If I had to steelman a counterargument, I'd handwave about RL and environments creating something greater-than the semantic space of the internet, and then highlight the part you mention where we haven't reached a practical dead-end. Maybe link out to the Anthropic interp work on them planning-in-advance via poking at activations when working on a rhyming poem.
by snake_doc | 2026-01-03 02:54:01+00:00
> That’s not change unique to America though. Why would I be thinking of changes that have affected almost every country, when talking about whether Americans recognize how America has changed?

Hahahaha, this is like saying, the world wars didn’t impact Europe, because it also impacted the whole world! Europeans, the war didn’t happen!! Anyways… this entire thread is more evidence that European stereotypes are valid for the most part
by noman-land | 2026-01-03 02:54:51+00:00
I think it would be interesting to have a version where the chosen numbers were the same every time. We all know the odds won't change but there are countless people who play the lottery this way. They have "their" numbers and they never deviate for fear that if they do, that's when "their" numbers would pop up and they'd miss out on the win.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-01-03 02:56:02+00:00
It’s just not the same thing. There is significant overlap, but it’s not enough to be a reasonable suggestion. You can’t suggest a service as a replacement for a local offline tool. It’s like saying “Why do you need VLC when you can just run peertube?”. Also since then, age is the real replacement for pgp in terms of sending encrypted files. Wormhole is a different use case.
by ethbr1 | 2026-01-03 02:56:07+00:00
> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently

This is literally the shitshow that's post-Ribbon Microsoft UX in a nutshell.

In the 90s, they designed a logical ontology, then mapped every item somewhere into that.

Post-Ribbon, they pulled whatever happened to be most-commonly used in, and then everything else got stuffed in a jumbled junk drawer (because who uses that?).

What seems to have been lost in the move from one to the other is anyone at Microsoft giving a goddamn 2 seconds of thought, minimum, to EVERY item in the OS.

And because that thought was never given, you get wildly broken edge cases and odd settings, simply because it wasn't anyone's job to make sure everything had a place.

Ribbonification (aka polish the 80% and fuck the 20%) isn't bad for users: it's bad because it lets Microsoft be lazy about organizing.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-03 02:56:19+00:00
>completely lose all notions of language comprehension

I see this pretty often. These aren't even what should be called typical users in theory. They are people doing a technical job and were hired with technical requirements, an application will spit out a well written error message in the domain they should be professionals in and their brain turns off. And ya, it ends up in a call to me where I state the same thing and they figure the problem out.

I really don't get it.
by fooblaster | 2026-01-03 02:56:25+00:00
Show me a single FPGA that can outperform a B200 at matrix multiplication (or even come close) at any usable precision.

B200 can do 10 peta ops at fp8, theoretically.

I do agree memory bandwidth is also a problem for most FPGA setups, but xilinx ships HBM with some skus and they are not competitive at inference as far as I know.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-01-03 02:56:30+00:00
Location: Southern California / Pacific Time

Remote: Ok

Willing to relocate: Yes, w/ stipend

Technologies:

Expert:
Python, PostgreSQL, Linux
Django

Near:
HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Flask, FastAPI
HTTP, Sockets
Rust, Java
Containers
Hardware

Familiar:
Electronics
C, C++
Windows, macOS
Just took a Machine Learning (ML) class.

Interests / Experience:
Software Development
Distributed Computing
Data Engineering
Graphics / data pipelines
Vfx, Aerospace
Project Management
Training / Mentoring
DevOps, SysAd, QA
and more.

Résumé/CV:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hxygjtb1vrwuwnznzn2vd/mgm_resume25pw.pdf?rlkey=kv6e5gljiz3p8jym9ztgirc1a&st=6p05kj9g&dl=1
Password: "resume_2025" (no quotes)

Email: See resume.

Seasoned full-stack developer here—focused on solving problems:

▸ Recently finished a multi-year modernization of the backend platform for congress.gov, specifically their substantial ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) data pipeline.

▸ Worked at a number of Internet-facing companies during high-growth periods. Can do it all.

▸ Have extensive experience designing, developing, and maintaining distributed graphics production pipelines for visual effects companies, under harsh deadlines.

▸ Have trained and mentored developers, tech-folk, and end-users as well.

▸ Love building reliable, well-documented, and maintainable systems.

Let’s crush your issues! Cheers,
by cbcoutinho | 2026-01-03 02:56:52+00:00
I've been running openSUSE tumbleweed myself for years, and recommend Linux to like-minded power users. OP is preaching to the choir.

How do you all deal with (extended) family? This Christmas I spent time with my parents and the topic of Windows 11 came up again with all of its associated dark patterns.

What do you all do to help them out of this madness? Is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc the best option for seniors? My dad's entire career was in Silicon Valley 1.0 where Excel/Outlook was his bread and butter and feels married to Windows, but ever since leaving the workforce those skills are more of a hindrance than an asset.

Now that he's retired, he still uses Excel to plan vacations for example, but Windows is riddled with this BS and I am powerless to help him navigate this anti-consumer behavior. It's incredible that Microsoft is shooting their most loyal customers I'm the foot with this BS.

Do you all help your parents remotely? What kind of issues do you run into being your parents IT support?