MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cryptonector | 2026-01-02 20:56:02+00:00
Is there an evaluation of how good the questioning was? Did TFA review the transcripts for that? Did I miss it?

> The grading was stricter than my own default. That's not a bug. Students will be evaluated outside the university, and the world is not known for grade inflation.

Good!

> 83% of students found the oral exam framework more stressful than a written exam.

That's alright -- that's how life goes. This reminds me of a history teacher I had in middle school who told us how oral exams were done at the university he had studied in: in class, each student would come up to the front, pick three topics at random from a lottery-ball-picker type setup, and then they'd have a few minutes in which to explain how all three are related. I would think that would be stressful except to those who enjoy the topic (in this case: history) and mastered the material.

> Accessibility defaults. Offer practice runs, allow extra time, and provide alternatives when voice interaction creates unnecessary barriers.

Yes, obviously this won't work for deaf students. But why must it be an oral examination anyways? In the real world (see above example) you can't cheat at an oral examination because you're physically present, with no cheat sheets, just you, and you have to answer in real time. But these are "take-at-home" oral exams, so they had to add a requirement of audio/video recording to restore the value of the "physically present" part of old-school oral exams -- if you could do something like that for written exams, surely you would?

Clearly a take-home written exam would be prone to cheating even with a real-time AI examiner, but the real-time requirement might be good enough in many cases, and probably always for in-class exams.

Oh, that brings me to: TFA does not explicitly say it, but it strongly implies that these oral exams were take-at-home exams! This is a very important detail. Obviously the students couldn't do concurrent oral exams in class, not unless they were all wearing high quality headsets (and even then). The exams could have been in school facilities with one student present at a time, but that would have taken a lot of time and would not have required that the student provide webcam+audio recordings -- the school would have performed those recordings themselves.

My bottom-line take: you can have a per-student AI examiner, and this is more important than the exam being oral, as long as you can prevent cheating where the exam is not oral.

PS: A sample of FakeFoster would have been nice. I found videos online of Foster Provost speaking, but it's hard to tell from those how intimidating FakeFoster might have been.
Selling theoretical frameworks to enterprises €50K-€300K licensing)
by Boiindil | 2026-01-02 20:56:03+00:00
I build theoretical frameworks that companies license as foundational IP - think "upstream R&D supplier for Big4 consultancies."

Business model: One-time licensing (€50K-€300K), no ongoing support, clients present work as proprietary while I stay invisible.

Current portfolio:
- Financial governance systems (_Asset Framework, 18 operators)
- AML compliance architectures
- Multi-agent coordination frameworks
- Defense-tech governance systems

Evidence: 60+ published research works with DOI
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-0008-5263

Currently targeting: Big4 consultancies, banks, insurers, FinTech infrastructure firms.

Problem: Finding the right buyers. Most don't understand "upstream IP licensing" as a category.

Question for HN:
1. Anyone familiar with IP licensing channels beyond IAM Market / Acquire.com?
2. Know buyers for this type of work?
3. Suggestions for positioning "theoretical frameworks as competitive advantage"?

Not looking for donations - looking for business contacts, cooperation opportunities, or channel advice.

Situation context: Solo operation (no team, no VC), 4 weeks until housing displacement, several deals in pipeline but nothing closed yet.
by geuis | 2026-01-02 20:56:23+00:00
Location: San Francisco
Remote: Yesd
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript/JS, React, node.js, Redis, Postgres, pgvector, LLM agents, Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure), ci/cd pipelines, other tech
Résumé/CV: on request
Email: charles@geuis.com

Senior engineer with 15+ years of full stack and backend experience, as well as experience at startups and as a founder.
by aspenmartin | 2026-01-02 20:56:47+00:00
> This shit has gotten worse since 2023.

I would really appreciate it if people could be specific when they say stuff like this because it's so crazy out of line with all measurement efforts. There are an insane amount of serious problems with current LLM / agentic paradigms, but the idea that things have gotten worse since 2023? I mean come on.
by maxdo | 2026-01-02 20:56:55+00:00
you don't need CC to do exact same thing in a much more complete environment(cursor), with nice GUI, plugins ecosystem of entire VS code vs just a cli tool built against core UNIX priciples : CLI is good at doing one thing, GUI is for something more complex. CC is mixing two paradims...

I really can't not stand sub par copy paste expereince , bad text positioning etc. Why settle?
by patmorgan23 | 2026-01-02 20:57:28+00:00
Eyeball networks and cloud providers have been implementing IPv6. In the US all major phone carriers are v6 only with XLAT, the large residential ISP all have implemented v6 (Charter/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity, altice/optimum). The lagging networks are smaller residential ISP and enterprise networks.

In Asia they've implemented v6 everywhere pretty much because their v4 allocation is woefully insufficient. APNIC has like 4 billion people in it but less IP space than ARIN, with a population of less than 500 million.
by RangeLead | 2026-01-02 20:57:45+00:00
I noticed something odd while working on this.

Most founders obsess over features, UX, onboarding, churn. All valid.
But almost nobody talks about the cost of getting the raw inputs before any of that matters.

Before your CRM is useful, you need leads.
Before your outreach works, you need targets.
Before your “AI sales agent” does anything, you need data it can trust.

And that part is usually:
- hacked together
- outsourced badly
- or paid for at an absurd markup

What surprised me most is how low the bar actually is.

You don’t need perfect data.
You need good-enough, structured, and fast.

Most teams aren’t losing deals because their product is weak.

They’re losing weeks because someone is still:
- scraping by hand
- exporting CSVs from five tools
- cleaning garbage columns
-arguing about whether a list is “fresh enough”

There’s a quiet shift happening:
People are less impressed by smart tools
and more interested in owning boring assets they can reuse.

Clean datasets scale better than features.
They don’t need onboarding.
They don’t break when an API changes.
They don’t care about UI trends.

This isn’t glamorous work.
It doesn’t screenshot well.
It doesn’t demo nicely on Twitter.

But it compounds.

If you’re building anything that touches sales, marketing, recruiting, or partnerships, my honest takeaway is this:

Stop starting from zero every time.
Owning the input layer changes everything.

Curious if others here have felt the same pain, or if I’m just scarred from too many CSVs.

If you want to see what I’m working on or give feedback, here’s the site:
https://rangelead.com
by oytis | 2026-01-02 20:57:58+00:00
Not necessarily better, just less controlling. E.g. in Germany there exists an imperative to give children freedom despite dangers. Parents don't expect from themselves to be able to shield their chidren from all possible dangers either. Not sure if it's better, but it's a different parenting culture for sure.

It mostly extends to interactions in the physical world though - restricting children's use of digital devices is socially acceptable and expected
by cyberax | 2026-01-02 20:58:25+00:00
That's incorrect. Matter-over-Thread absolutely does NOT require IPv6 on your router. Even Matter-over-WiFi will happily work in IPv4-only networks, as long as your router does not filter the IPv6 announcements.

Some routers can work as _relays_ between the Thread network and WiFi, but this is entirely optional.
by avidiax | 2026-01-02 20:58:47+00:00
> Fact is you'd run into exactly the same problems as with IPv6.

If you treat IPv4 addresses as a routable prefix (same as today), then the internet core routers don't change at all.

Only the edge equipment would need to be IPv4+ aware. And even that awareness could be quite gradual, since you would have NAT to fall back on when receiving an IPv4 classic packet at the network.

IPv6 seems to be a standard that suffered from re-design by committee. Lots of good ideas were incorporated, but it resulted in a stack that had only complicated backwards compatibility. It has taken the scale of mobile carriers to finally make IPv6 more appealing in some cases than IPv4+NAT, but I think we are still a long way from any ISP being able to disable IPv4 support.
by Guid_NewGuid | 2026-01-02 20:59:01+00:00
More Zhongnanhai-ology from our cold warrior correspondent.

As usual I feel like he overestimates the US' ability to impose rules and underestimates the Chinese ability to both circumvent those rules while developing self sufficiency. In addition we've all seen the Chinese ability to retaliate across a range of industrial sectors from rare earths to drug precursors. While these embargos would have some impact on Chinese chip development initiatives like Huawei clusters and DeepSeek show that China will find a way to innovate whether or not they have access to the most powerful chips.

In light of the 15th 5 year plan these China hawks are increasingly irrelevant to the conversation unfolding outside the borders of the increasingly irrelevant and mistrusted US.
by Xx_crazy420_xX | 2026-01-02 20:59:34+00:00
My thoughts:

- The cost function of the CEO is a deeply nested function, as for example revenue is dependent on multiple factors like customer growth, operational costs etc. In practice this function is nested to the lowest possible point in a tree of dependents. No coincidence that best CEOs know how they companies work on lowest levels and understand the constrains and incentives there.

- Where is the boundary of AI CEO? Should we make the boundaries? Human is restricted to 18h awake time, single threaded processing, thats why we need to divide the workload. Is same thing really needed with AI? (assuming all layers of the stack are AI managed already)

- How to validate that decomposed elements of the cost function, (like the customer growth and operational costs revenue) provide valid equation? The cost function should take into account things like reconstruction loss minimization, to ensure that model is not delusional and new dependencies are valid (problem discovery).
by bccdee | 2026-01-02 20:59:44+00:00
> If you want to make pointers not have a nil state by default, this requires one of two possibilities: requiring the programmer to test every pointer on use, or assume pointers cannot be nil. The former is really annoying, and the latter requires [...] explicit initialization of every value everywhere.

I used to be an "initialize everything" partisan, but meaningful zero-values have grown on me. I still don't think everything should be zero-initialized, though (that is, valid when initialized to zero). I'd prefer it if there were a two-colour system where a type is only zero-initialized if it don't contain a pointer, either directly or transiently.

The trick would be that zero-initialized sum types have a default variant, and only that variant needs to be zero-initialized. So a type that requires explicit initialization can be made zero-initialized by wrapping it with Optional<T>, whose default value is the zero-initialized None value. So even though you end up with coloured data types, they're easily contained & they do not spread virally.

I think this offers the best of both worlds. It gives you explicit nullability while still permitting something like `make([]SomeStruct, n)` to return a big block of zeroes.

> Languages like Rust were designed from day zero around explicit individual-element based initialization

> Ownership is a constant concern and mental overhead when thinking in an individual-element mindset. Whilst ownership is obvious (and usually trivial) in the vast majority (99+%) of cases when you are in the grouped-element mindset.

I think there's a sort of convergence here, because one of the tips that's often recommended for dealing with lifetimes issues in Rust (e.g. cyclic data structures) is grouping elements together in a parent structure and using handles instead of references. Often this is done with integer handles in a simple Vec<T>, but libraries like slotmap¹ exist which make that pattern safer & more ergonomic, if desired.

Ownership and lifetimes are a source of essential complexity in programming. I don't see any contradiction between managing them with a grouped-element mindset and managing them with language features; in fact, I think the two go hand-in-hand quite nicely.

[1]: https://docs.rs/slotmap/latest/slotmap/index.html
by cryptonector | 2026-01-02 20:59:52+00:00
TFA's case involved examinations about the student's submitted project work. It's not the same thing. Even for a more traditional examination with no such context attached one might still want to rely on AI for grading. (Yeah, I know, that comes across as "the students are not allowed to use AI for cheating, but the profs are!".)

Also, IMO oral examinations are quite powerful for detecting who is prepared and who isn't. On the down side they also help the extroverts and the confident, and you have to be careful about preventing a bias towards those.
by EvaWorld9 | 2026-01-02 21:00:06+00:00
Thanks!

That exact feature, keeping the structure (bold/italic...) but stripping the junk was actually the hardest part to build. It requires parsing the full object tree recursively to make it compatible with any app, instead of just doing simple text replacements.

I saw so many people looking for that "middle ground" that I basically built the whole app around it. Glad it resonates!
by bigfatkitten | 2026-01-02 21:00:08+00:00
> BTW what's the trouble with multi-homing? Can't an interface have two separate IPv6 addresses configured on it, the same way as IPv4 addresses?

Because it breaks your network when that router goes away. Your switch ACLs, firewall rules, and DNS records all become invalid because they contain addresses that no longer exist, that your devices continue trying to reach anyway.
by istjohn | 2026-01-02 21:00:25+00:00
A supporting citation:

> In 1965, mothers spent a daily average of 54 minutes on child care activities, while moms in 2012 averaged almost twice that at 104 minutes per day. Fathers’ time with children nearly quadrupled – 1965 dads spent a daily average of just 16 minutes with their kids, while today’s fathers spend about 59 minutes a day caring for them.

https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...
by loufe | 2026-01-02 21:00:25+00:00
I set up tracking all my bank statements, pay slips, Costco (and other multi-category store) receipts, and other things in Fava (beancount's webui) over the last month. I spent way too much time developing a plugin to help categorizing transactions, making a full api and python scripts as well to let AI make edits for me (dry runs before clearing).

I stumbled upon Maybe (https://github.com/maybe-finance/maybe) and the community fork (https://github.com/we-promise/sure) a couple days ago and almost invested too much time to migrate to it. That project still doesn't have split transactions. A fresh intuitive UI is great but Beancount's format is so simple it's hard to beat.
by Drybones | 2026-01-02 21:00:37+00:00
Chromium based browsers have non-google sync. Vivaldi implements their own encrypted sync service and I believe Brave does as well.

But I am talking about browser feature support, not stuff that can supplemented with an extension like a password manager.

Firefox has poor support for modern web features including video processing and encoding which makes it very bad at web conferencing/video calls or in-page streaming.

Firefox's developer tools and console is also much worse and missing important features.

Other features Firefox is missing or has poor support for compared to Chromium are WebGPU, WebTransport, Periodic Background Sync, and parts of WebRTC. Plus various APIs for web serial, badging, and Web Share are missing partial or full support.

Firefox still doesn't have functional HDR for images and videos including AV1.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-02 21:00:44+00:00
> The EU is extremely protectionist. As is China. Much more so than the United States

Well tried but no, not even close. Presenting tariffs as a tit-for-tat is Trump government propaganda. It's baseless however and as connected to facts as looking at the trade balance for goods while ignoring services.

> It’s not. But these comments are boring. aS ‘MurICAN EuRope SHOuld PAY 4 defEncE.

It is. Nice stawman with the irrelevant parallel by the way.

America has an aggressive subsidies program targeting European industry (IRA) and high tariff on key part of the export chain notably steel. And I'm not even talking about the political meddling and threat of invasion by your government.

China is honestly a significantly more reliable trade partner at this point.

> How exactly?

The Hartz reforms.
by Zaskoda | 2026-01-02 21:02:06+00:00
We followed this practice at a Non-Profit I volunteered for some years ago. For us, it was motivated by a few reasons:

- we trained the community around us to look to our website first for the most recent news and information

- we did not want a social media platform to be able to cut us off from our community (on purpose or accident) by shuttering accounts or groups

- we did not want to require our users have accounts on any 3rd party platforms in order to access our postings

- but we still wanted to distribute our messaging across any platforms where large groups of our community members frequently engaged

Another aspect of our process that was specific to our situation and outside of POSSE - we only posted one topic/issue/announcement per blog post. We had a news letter that would summarize each of these. Many organizations like ours would post summaries of many things to a single blog post, basically the same as the newsletter. However, this was cumbersome. For example, if someone in the community had a question, it was much clearer to link to a single post on our site that answered the question AND ONLY answered that question. It made for much better community engagement, better search engine indexing, cleaner content management, and just a better experience for everyone involved.
by bpodgursky | 2026-01-02 21:02:19+00:00
For a variety of reasons, it's pretty common in many western countries for convicted first/second offenders even for pretty serious crimes to not serve much time. You see that in the UK for sex crimes for example, where offenses with "mitigating" cultural factors are punished extremely lightly.

Which again is that country's choice, but it's not one that countries accepting their tourists are obligated to accept.
by anonymars | 2026-01-02 21:02:24+00:00
I think there is value in treating other actors with some semblance of rationality and using that to gain insight into how one might deal with them, rather than considering them fully sui generis.

For example it would be a similar mistake to think that the recent swing in US politics is a uniquely American phenomenon to which one's own population is inherently immune.

If instead one thinks, maybe we're not so different after all, perhaps one may better understand how better to deal with it.

Especially if the alternatives are, "we just need to get rid of the bad people" or "I guess there's no hope for a better world"
by umanwizard | 2026-01-02 21:02:41+00:00
> We are talking about being issued only IPv6 addresses where you actually use it to connect to stuff.

You seem to be asserting that dual-stack machines use IPv4 by default, but that's not really true. If your machine has both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, browsers will in fact use IPv6 to connect to sites that support it, like Google. They prefer IPv6 by default and fall back to IPv4 if IPv6 is slower (Happy Eyeballs algorithm).

Of course, random software can mostly use whichever it wants, so I'm not claiming every process on such a machine will use IPv6, but most common stuff does.
by foxfired | 2026-01-02 21:02:48+00:00
I've restarted blogging last year, going from a handful of blog post to, publishing consistently. All content gets published on my blog first. I've seen an ~8x increase of traffic. I was affected by zero-clicks from Google's AI overview, but the bulk of my traffic now comes from RSS readers.

I published a write up just this morning: https://idiallo.com/blog/what-its-like-blogging-in-2025
by lovich | 2026-01-02 21:02:58+00:00
I’ve read Mr. Zitrons articles and recently exited a 10 year old position I held with Nvidia due to his analysis, but this part of the article was news to me

> The investment requirements are so large that equity financing alone won’t do. The balance sheets of many of the major players have been altered significantly. Looking at Meta’s annual statement before ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, it had over three times as much cash as debt on its balance sheet. Last quarter it had 15% more debt. Microsoft had 30% more cash than debt pre-ChatGPT. Now it has almost 20% more debt. Amazon, which has traditionally had a more leveraged balance sheet, now has over 50% more debt than cash

I was still under the impression that all the faangs had more cash than liabilities, I wasn’t aware that had flipped
by aberoham | 2026-01-02 21:03:17+00:00
Meredith's talk was extremely scripted, not very original and then she ducked out of taking any audience questions. Udbhav awkwardly stood there but seemed like he could have had much more to say. It was hard to watch.

Mona Wang's talk early on Day 2 wasn't recorded but was the polar opposite -- Original, off-the-cuff, engaging, and just fun to witness.

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/... https://m0na.net/papers/wirewatch.pdf
by Rexxar | 2026-01-02 21:03:37+00:00
Technically there isn't a recession but, if you split by sectors, you see that all sectors not related to the AI investment boom are in the red. The question is: is it a natural consequence of investment shift to better technologies or a real problem that is temporarily hidden by an AI bubble ?

(https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Sc...)