skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same kids as always but so many are displaced today. Most of them shouldn’t be in a university as they aren’t particularly smart, curious, or interested in becoming a serious person at that moment.

Most kids can’t read serious fiction or ruminate about classical philosophy because they just don’t have the tools to get there. They’re disengaged because they don’t want to be there but the alternatives are worse, or appear to be. They’re escaping reality because they’re constantly being humiliated.

I don’t have a solution in today’s knowledge economy where being smart, which most people aren’t, is a prerequisite to “success”. I can criticize though as that’s easy. The university system is not for most people. The idea that we should ensure that those that belong should get pathways in and not overlooked means we try to send everyone. And it feels like social death to many if you don’t go.

Maybe the kids are smart enough to realize college is mainly a bullshit hurdle to get over so they can get a bullshit job and that little of what they learn matters in that bullshit job. That a diploma is a checkbox and not an affirmation of intellectuality in most cases.
A special group of single-celled organisms laid the foundation for complex cells
> Obsidian isn't open source by most reports.

On FreeBSD I can build a full copy from source (in fact I have to, there is no binary package). The only issue seems to be licensing, not source availability. Personally I don't care about licensing (I completely ignore it all anyway) and it doesn't stop you from inspecting the source code.

I think Obsidian is a really great package, I just happened to have moved over from OneNote which is horrible Microsoft mediocrity and doesn't even have a Linux app. And the web version is really useless, it needs to refresh every day and it can only search within the same tab, not a whole notebook. Such a mess. Obsidian is so quick and efficient <3 And there is full self-hosted syncing available, which I also use.
> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides.

I don't feel like asking for the slides is unreasonable/unimaginable. Probably varies by university and department, but for my degree (pre-COVID) all lecturers made their slides available on a VLE, generally in advance of the lecture.
Worth pointing out the history of this policy.

The Final Scientific Integrity Policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was developed in response to the 2021 Presidential Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-Based Policymaking. The policy officially went into effect on December 30, 2024

I guess it's going back to what existed since the founding of the NIH in 1887 to the last 4 months.

https://www.faseb.org/journals-and-news/washington-update/ni...
The pg-mcp server doesn’t need an API key. Those variables are only needed to run the example claude-client. You can write your own agent to talk to whatever LLM you like.
this post is ironic given that we're talking about an article where a professor is complaining about people's poor reading comprehension. the post you're replying to did not explicitly make any argument, they only quoted someone, and no the quoting of someone with no additional commentary is not an argument - lol
Some of these observations aren't particularly surprising, but this line really took me out of it:

> Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.

The implication that for one course (of which they have multiple in a year, over four years), students can be expected to spend up to $100 for textbooks (and the author thinks this is low-priced!) is astonishing and shows a profound disconnect with the actual financial situation of students. Of course, many will just use libgen or get second-hand copies, but these things are thwarted by incremental releases with just enough changes to make them infeasible for use in the course.
We can say that Mars is more similar to Earth than Jupiter even though Sagittarius A* exists.
Why so complicated? A torch should suffice for a basic fire.
Which European countries _remove_ fluoride from water generally? UK adds it in naturally low fluoride areas.

Some countries no longer add it (but their water still has naturally occurring fluoride that they don't remove).
What's the latest and the best so far? Are they using GPGPU? Is quantum computing there yet, or would it help? Heuristics and sampling?
I've seen this retort elsewhere. It's not true. It's why corporations are persons with first amendment and other freedoms.
> All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them.

Is that considered cheap in the US? Do people not do like 5 courses per semester?
this professor sounds like an arse:

> > I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides.

uhm, why not? smh. even if they contained answers - redact them and share. there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone would like them.

anyway, more relevant to the article: get rid of guaranteed student loans and all of these problems will solve themselves imo. it's no shock people treat college like a joke when there's little at stake for them personally. add insult to injury with people trying to absolve them of bad decisions in the form of getting rid of the little accountability - loans - that they had.

two steps to success: 1. stop forcing college on everyone. 2. make colleges guarantee the loans. the quality of the students will change, resolving the issue the article author has.
I wish people were as careful when thinking about adopting S3 as they seemingly are careful when others move away from S3.

Somewhere along the line, people starting defaulting to "at least 3 nodes for backend" and "cloud services for all infrastructure" even if the product they're building haven't even found product market fit.

Sure, if you know for a fact that your traffic will go and down more than 50% during a normal day, go for something that scales up and down quickly. But for most other use cases, the extra cost of cloud doesn't really make much financial sense, unless you're a fat VC-funded startup cat.
- "Earth's L2 Lagrange point, which is a valuable and limited area of space"

That's a strong exaggeration; it's millions of km across in three dimensions. Gaia's orbit alone is

- "263 000 x 707 000 x 370 000 km, 180 day-long orbit around L2"

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/G...
And I don't think we will get there with digital computers either.
Yes of course, but again, I don't think anyone disagrees with you on this.
I think it’s only a matter of time until TVs refusing to work without internet or randomly interrupting your watching experience to ask you to connect to the internet.
Heck, they can even learn from Microsoft now and demand a Vizio account, iPhone apps, etc.

Additionally they could start producing them without HDMI or other ports to prevent Apple TV or other similar devices from connecting.

What I’m trying to say is that corporate greed is limitless and the only thing that can prevent abuse will be strict regulations at the end of day.
Checkout infernet protocol
Let's not move the goalposts. He promised unsupervised FSD for 2019 and he promised level 5 autonomy for 2020, they're still at level 2 autonomy.

Per https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

[2017] The sensor hardware and compute power required for at least level 4 to level 5 autonomy has been in every Tesla produced since October of last year.

[2017] I think that [you will be able to fall asleep in a Tesla] is about two years

[2018] Probably technically be able to [self deliver Teslas to customers doors] in about a year then its up to the regulators

[2019] We expect to be feature complete in self driving this year, and we expect to be confident enough from our standpoint to say that we think people do not need to touch the wheel and can look out the window sometime probably around the second quarter of next year.

[2020] Robotaxis release/deployment... Functionality still looking good for this year. Regulatory approval is the big unknown

[2020] I am extremely confident that level five or essentially complete autonomy will happen, and I think, will happen very quickly, I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level five autonomy. I think—I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year, There are no fundamental challenges remaining.

[2020] I'm extremely confident that Tesla will have level five next year, extremely confident, 100%

[2021] FSD will be capable of Level 5 autonomy by the end of 2021
> How would you have prevented this defect instead, in a way that you find simple?

I currently prevent this sort of thing using a populated database. This database has actual real data (user info overwritten with random data).

Using a pre-populated database catches many more errors than this article's approach does.

Using a pre-populated database that has actual data generated by the users over a year or so catches even more errors.

This approach is fragile and misses the actual error, fixing only the symptom. The actual error is "there's a hole in my tests big enough to fly a passenger jet through".

The correct approach is to take a dump of the production database, scrub PII from it, and then perform your migration.
East Coast US here, I can bring my own cable modem with any cable ISP I have had in the past 10 years.

I imagine fiber is a different story.
I am against adding anything to a whole population to treat a few, folate included. Here is why. Folate is a known stimulant of some cancers.

https://aacrjournals.org/cebp/article/17/9/2220/169762/Folic...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13668-018-0237-y

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1463-1318....

(And you know that the first line cancer treatments, like methotrexate, are anti-folates.)

So while we are lowering birth defects, are we increasing cancers at the same time? Has this ever been studied?

We are not a homogeneous population.

The same is true for fluoride. Some people have a fluoride allergy:

https://www.aaaai.org/allergist-resources/ask-the-expert/ans...

And while fluoride is known to prevent cavities, it also makes tooth enamel brittle:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00709-8

https://www.medindia.net/news/healthwatch/fluoride-strengthe...

So I prefer to medicate myself, according to my own needs and my own genetics, thank you.
Sounds like hocus pocus to me (like gold plated connectors), maybe you get like half a meter of extended distance or something with those? If I had to I'd go the repeater way (or as others mentioned: fiber, but sounds expensive and not maintenance free)
> you don't even need Python to be installed!

Note that this is exactly the case in TFA - uv takes care of installing Python ad-hoc.
Same here. There was a fair amount illicit copying of textbooks too. But this teacher doesn't even want to share his lecture slides.
It’s why electrolyte drinks are a thing for sports.
Except this isn't computational biology, it's fluid dynamics with an agent inside running a neural network.

You'd think they'd try something like smooth particle hydrodynamics so that it can be done more efficiently on a GPU cluster but I think they are just doing classic CFD
https://mario.oldcities.org/ take a look
It's also much easier to pay attention if you don't have to frantically take notes. To focus on what an equation means, instead of focusing on transcribing it correctly, and then maybe trying to understand it later, if there's any time left, before the lecture moves on.
Where did I say it had to be put in water? I literally said kids should consume vitamins with fluoride. You’re the one making up things about a topic you don’t understand.

You really want to strengthen teeth as they’re developing. It’s critical. Your “fact is” is wrong although you want to do that too. Continue to fortify after they grow in.

May I ask what motivates you to post things here where you clearly have 0 knowledge about a subject and you just write things that sound logically right in your head but are wrong?
I wonder if the savings includes the cost of labor to maintain the physical servers, cabling, performance and security security monitoring, etc. Not saying it doesn't, I just wonder.
Black Tea has an astounding amount of fluoride. You dentist is stupid for only asking where you live and not what you eat and drink.
I think you just discovered software engineering, which at its best makes intelligent tradeoffs to optimise use of resources to meet needs.
Brushing is much less important for your teeth than your genetics and/or nutrition.
> When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?

If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.
Aren't they supposed to at least pretend there's Nazis in Greenland so they have to "de-Nazify" it with a "special military operation"?

Amateurs.
I very much appreciate the concrete numbers in this post!
Hey I have done the same for Swift scripts! (Well I have rewritten what Homebrew’s creator did some time ago, but does not maintain anymore, to be precise.)

https://github.com/xcode-actions/swift-sh
> h3 'Counter:';

This code can also be written h3('Counter:');. Raku’s functional style means we can drop the parens (). So we have a function h3 with a Str argument.

Is this what's considered "functional" (as in functional programming) nowadays? Perl 5 (Raku's predecessor) had that for like twenty years now.
I see, the server is sensible to version mismatchs. Thank you!
There's so much to unpack here. I'll start from the bottom.

> better universities like Ivy Leagues where the author works

The author gives their background in the second paragraph of the article (did you read it?): "I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name"

> Well, most lectures just aren't very helpful. They move slower than if we just read the docs.

a) It appears that no one is reading the docs, as the author discussed at length (did you read it?)

b) A lecture is always faster than reading. A lecture is cliff notes. A lecture is the person who knows more than you teaching you the most important bits of the docs.

> it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it

You stated that the lecture was too slow so you just read the docs. Here you state that there's not enough time and benefit to reading. Which is it?

> It scares me as well how little interest my peers have in actually learning

Do you see that you're demonstrating that same disinterest? Reading isn't worth your time. Lectures are too slow and the professors are dumb anyway. Etc.

> Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position

This implies that there is some educational medium by which you are so deeply focused and involved in, that the author is unaware of, pointed directly at CV building and internship/job getting, that you simply don't have time for the lectures or books that the author's class covers. Is that correct? What is it? How much time are you spending on an average day CV building?

> can I really afford to waste my time like this?

Sweet summer child. You are a college student. You have all the time in the world.

Your post here, if anything, corroborates the author's perspective.
https://archive.md/HTFE4
Typically, the issue is slides allows the speaker to present stuff much faster than a person can realistically write (unlike writing on a board), so you end up with lossy notes. The coping mechanism for students is therefore by writing notes on the slides. Slides also help you preview the lecture, though few people probably actually do this.
the author doesn't work at an ivy league, they work at an average school (your error here is beautifully ironic...)
She is teaching courses that involve reading books. In her words: “I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre”. Five or more books plus a textbook might cost $100. (And yes of course all of these are on Gutenberg and Libgen, but the point is that the kids don’t read them either way.)
> Bottom line is that you need to validate your input from outside the process if you're running in a privileged context[1]

What this "if" qualifier? You need to validate all input from outside the process. Whether the process is privileged or not is, frankly, not really relevant.

(I submitted a blog post a few days ago explaining "Parse, Don't Validate" in plain C, but it didn't get any traction).
I dont think it is the same, or at least that is not my experience of using SO. Typically using involved usually requires me synthesising answers, getting a better understand of my issue in order to search/evaluate the answers I need. With an LLM I can be much more vague, and the amount of mental effort I have to spend to get to some "working" code is much less and does not require me understand as many things. Even if I did not understand fully what a piece of code from SO did, it was usually at worst a piece of code that I still needed to integrade inside a function etc. I doubt you could get into having any interesting enough working up simply by copy pasting code from SO. Now I can copy paste entire functions and code files from an LLM.
The GI of sugar (sucrose) and HFCS is largely the same. Indeed, the HFCS-55 used in colas actually has less glucose and more fructose, and fructose actually doesn't lead to a blood sugar spike (or, more correctly, a much lower impact), leading to HFCS-55 having a lower glycemic index. HFCS and sugar are both just combinations of glucose and fructose molecules.

HFCS is not worse than sugar unless you're consuming such an outrageous amount that the fructose leads to a fatty liver (which does happen). But if you're consuming that much HFCS, it's only a small amount more of sucrose to yield the same outcome, as of course both have loads of fructose.

The one viable argument to vilify HFCS is simply that it's so convenient and inexpensive (courtesy of massively subsidized corn production) that it led to many more products having added sugars. But people who carefully pour over ingredients looking for HFCS, but treat sugar as wholesome, are usually operating on ignorance.
More than a few times i would re-read the textbook end to end in the week leading up to final exam. Particularly for subjects that I knew were foundational for future courses. 20 years later I still find myself breaking out my old textbooks several times a year to refresh a topic.
I’m referring to mostly engineering, economics, and finance textbooks. As much as I enjoyed philosophy and ethics, I don’t find myself needing to break those books open.
> At least for me, it's not that reading bores me - there just isn't enough time and benefit to it, especially for novels and literature. Literary books aren't going in my CV, nor providing any insight into how to write better code. When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?

This reads as though the goal of reading is to bolster your career opportunities as a developer?
If it's not connected to your career then it shouldn't be viewed that way, it should be viewed as a kind of leisure and the challenges/rewards involved should be compared to the alternatives there (i.e. is the investment in time of being able to understand more complex novels returning a level of personal fulfilment that makes it potentially a more rewarding focus than some more immediately gratifying leisure activity)

It may still be of very low value but viewing the prospect specifically as being damaging to your career opportunities seems like an incorrect perspective to be starting from.
I was taught the Standard ML of New Jersey (which as a non-American I did not realise is a joke, it's referring to the company now known to you as Exxon, the Standard Oil of New Jersey) at university.

I strongly believe that - although my home institution no longer teaches an ML as first language - this is the best way to teach CS to undergraduates. An ML has all the fundamental ideas you will need to also teach about this discipline, and (so long as you choose e.g. SML/NJ or similar, not Rust or something) it won't be a language the average teenager you recruited might already know, so the week 1 exercise showing they've understood what they're doing is actually work for all of your students, averting a scenario where some of them drift away only to realise at exam time that they haven't learned a thing.
I still have many of my textbooks from College. They are great reference books, and yes, I read them all.

But that was pre-internet.

I must say, that was a very structured, well laid out way to learn. I mean that as opposed to Googling for each subtopic, reading dozens of webpages on that single subtopic, hoping to find accurate info.
I doubt China has 7m persons writing code in the same way that I doubt there are 1.6m people pumping code in the US. That being said, they are pretty close to being in a "closed universe" of their own. Some companies are trying to open up (deepseek, tencent, alibaba, etc...) but it is a relatively a new thing.

If you go low in the stack (Operating Systems, compilers, developer tools, etc...) it's all American but in mainland China they make everything custom and different (more aligned with their culture and how they do business).

If you want to get in touch with them, find projects in GitHub where the Chinese hangs out (ie: they like P2P/sharing/decentralized stuff) and send an email. My experience is that they are eager to try your stuff or get in touch but there can be a significant language barrier.
Maybe they feel it is expected of them and aren’t really interested in the subject matter? I met an engineering student once who told me they hated it but their parents wouldn’t support them for their true passion (the arts). For some I think (given my experience at uni is 2 decades ago) they use it as an excuse to enjoy being young rather than do serious study.
It's a Western problem. In China students work very hard because they had to beat a tough competion to even be able to attend the University. And they know that finishing the University with good grades will mean a difference between a good life and a hard one. In South Korea it's the same.

So, IMO, standards should be kept very high. There is no need that all people finish the University. There are plenty of jobs that can be done without attending an University. But the problem is that even for those jobs there's a degree of competence required and some willing to work. And there are people who fail at low qualification jobs. Solution? Bring some competition. Hire only well prepared people.