Hacker News Reader

j_frenchon GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands

.... Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents.

Wow. This image of Anthropic employees ripping books apart to use them to train models is a powerful one, seems like an inflection point in the history of information.

j_frenchon AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

I think the answer to "how will AI agent guidelines be enforced" is that they won't be because they can't be, at least not directly.

This doesn't mean that this approach doesn't have value though. I think it very much does.

One way to indirectly enforce use of the AI agent guidelines is via an oral examination where the instructor and student look over their work together and talk about it. Students who have genuinely tried to learn and used AI as a learning tool via the agent guidelines should do a lot better in an oral exam than students who have used AI as a solution generator.

I adopted the oral exam (without agent guidelines) for a course i teach in the academic year just gone, it worked pretty well. Next term I intend to include the agent guidelines to give them clearer guardrails. Still ultimately optional, but if students choose to ignore them it's gonna be pretty obvious during our conversation.

j_frenchon AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford

I wish you good luck! And add that I'd be interested to hear how you get on. I intend to adopt a similar approach with my classes in September. The . history folder is a great idea.

How do you intend to assess your students?

j_frenchon Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)

I had forgotten Northern Exposure existed for 30 years until remembering it recently, and discovering that i had very fond memories of watching it on Irish tv as a teenager. There was something different about it, definitely going to watch it again

j_frenchon Texico: Learn the principles of programming without even touching a computer

they had me at the theme tune. very charming, my kids are gonna lap this up

j_frenchon Salmon exposed to cocaine and its main byproduct roam more widely

it's listed here, though out of stock (and in Ireland) https://www.celticwhiskeyshop.com/Vin-Mariani-50cl

Seems an Irish company started remaking it https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/irish-drinks-firm-...

j_frenchon Salmon exposed to cocaine and its main byproduct roam more widely

never knew this was a thing. seems it's still available to buy! sounds like a more respectable version of Buckfast, the tonic wine made in an abbey in Devon that had/has a cult popularity with the youth of parts of Ireland and Scotland

j_frenchon A new way to measure poverty shows the US falling behind Europe

Sterck's article from The Conversation referenced in this article: https://theconversation.com/measuring-poverty-on-a-spectrum-...

j_frenchon Bus travel from Lima to Rio de Janeiro

I did most of this route by bus in the late 2000s, mostly semi-cama style where available. Was entirely manageable mostly, apart from feeling weird as the altitude kicked up heading to Cusco, and the horrendous surface of the la paz to uyuni road. For an interminable stretch in the middle of the night in felt like we were driving over an endless washboard.

The 2008 US presidential election was on, we hadn't heard the result, the park ranger in an unbelievably remote hut at uyuni informed us that "el Moreno" had won

j_frenchon English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings

I had planned to move towards projects counting towards the majority of my CS class grades until chatgpt was released, now I've stuck with a 50/50 split. This year I said they were free to use AI all they liked (as if I can do anything about it anyway) , then ran interviews with the students about their project work, asking them to explain how it works etc. Took a lot of time with a class of 60 students, but worked pretty well, plus they got some experience developing the important skull of communicating technical ideas.

Would like to give them some guidance on how to get AI to help prepare them for their interviews next year, will definitely take a look at your AGENTS.md approach.

What's your student feedback on it been like?

j_frenchon Comparing the Latitude of Europe and America

Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours. As kids when we looked out to sea on the west coast we thought next stop was New York, but it's more like Newfoundland. If (when?) the gulf stream gets significantly disrupted it's gonna be a major shock

j_frenchon Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

I did not know they offered this. Thanks for the heads up

j_frenchon Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

I use bandcamp intermittently and have often wished that they offered a "subscription" feature like this, whereby they take a certain amount of money from me a month to put into my "bandcamp wallet" or whatever, that I can then use to buy music. I mean to spend a certain amount on music in bandcamp per month but life gets in the way and it falls off the radar. A model like this would definitely keep me more engaged

j_frenchon Jellyfin as a Spotify alternative

FIP and NTS are my goto's. The discovery features for shows on NTS and the "in focus" specials are great, so many good opportunities there for serendipitous listening. Will def check out radio paradise

j_frenchon TV Garden

I have so many questions. Why is the bread depressed? Why is it in space? Why is the soundtrack so cool?

j_frenchon Don't Bother with Vibe Coding

I recently saw it used in the documentation a university department produces when they want to propose running a new program. I was agog.

j_frenchon Yes, in the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio

From what I remember I had a decent amount of success copying games using a twin tape deck for my amstrad 464. I ended up passing on the amstrad to a colleague over a decade ago, who since moved to the US and is almost certainly on here. If you see this Jim, I found the manual!

j_frenchon Show HN: I'm a teacher and built an AI presentation tool

As an educator, it seems to me that a lot of people here are missing the point that teaching and generating teaching materials are not the same thing. Teaching is actively engaging with the real live (possibly small) humans in the classroom, which includes asking them questions to make them think, promoting discussions, identifying misconceptions etc etc etc. Teaching materials are a resource that support teaching. They're not doing the teaching. The teacher is. OP has put together a nice tool to help them to generate new materials to support their teaching. Good on them!

j_frenchon Show HN: I made a web app to bring children's drawings to life

Ah yes, so it is

j_frenchon Show HN: I made a web app to bring children's drawings to life

Looks interesting, but it would be nice to be able to try it out (once even) without subscribing. The one token that seems to be available when you create an account disappears when you try to create an animation

j_frenchon Show HN: File0 – An easier way to manage files in serverless apps

I thought this was an exclusively Hiberno twist, maybe not?

j_frenchon I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

I found some of my first BASIC programs recently, written in 89/90 on an amstrad464. They're on cassette tape. I have a tape deck with line out, but I don't even know how to start trying to get data off an "audio" cassette tape these days?

The programs weren't fancy: one was for picking lotto numbers for my mam (the national lottery had recently launched in Ireland so it was a novelty.) Also I was 10.

j_frenchon The Good Soldier Švejk (2018)

My older brother gave me Animal Farm to read as a child, I enjoyed it as a (somewhat depressing) story about animals taking over a farm.

j_frenchon Faircamp is a free Bandcamp alternative

The big draw for me is the curation, articles, scene reports, bandcamp weekly, all nicely and simply integrated with a way to listen to what you're reading about on the platform. Recommendations from humans as opposed to the Spotify algorithms. There's a lot of music on the internet, Bandcamp's offering for me is helping me to find some of it that I can connect with.

j_frenchon Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job

I didn't pick up disdain or displeasure from your original message, and I didn't feel bad for you. I felt good for you! I thought "here's someone like me, who's making a decent living in a nice job, but who has a good sense of perspective and isn't getting caught up in the inane irrelevant trivialities of the tech workplace that are ultimately utterly meaningless." You can make a living doing something you enjoy without having to buy into every single aspect of a corporate workplace and without tangling up your identity with your job. Some of us work to live, and are happy doing that. It's not a failure to be not totally consumed with your career.

j_frenchon I'm OK, the bull is dead (2004)

To be fair to Raj (the guy who had just accidentally killed a bull), from his perspective "the bull is dead" is a very important part of the story.

It's maybe a question of perspective. His ability to consider his parents' perspective might have been somewhat limited by the fact that he was 17, it was late at night and he'd just been in a car crash which resulted in the death of a bull.

I think he did a great job and it's a great story. Glad to hear he's ok, he's lucky! RIP the bull though :(

j_frenchon An arrowhead made of meteoritic iron from the late Bronze Age

That shameless plug got you a new subscriber here anyway :)

j_frenchon Miyazaki’s Magical Food: An ode to anime’s best cooking scenes

I've been doing this with my kids. It's been so enjoyable, we're all getting a lot of joy out of it. My youngest became obsessed with Totoro when she was 4 and I think I enjoy it more every time we watch it. Waiting a while before I show them spirited away, Ponyo spooked her first time round, but a year later and she loved it. There's a lot to process in some of them for small kiddos, so like most everyone else says, those two are probably the best ones to start with.

j_frenchon Surah Al-Fatiha and the Lord's Prayer Comparison [pdf]

Ah yes, thanks. Us papists go straight to "amen" and a mic drop after "evil". That doxology (in a slightly different form) is familiar too, but it's used somewhere else. The version we learned also refers to "trespasses" and "those who trespass against us" instead of "debtors" and "creditors". The latter sounds a bit ... commercial? Definitely think it sounds better having enemies who've "trespassed against us".

j_frenchon Surah Al-Fatiha and the Lord's Prayer Comparison [pdf]

Would you mind explaining? It does read a little differently to the version we rattled off growing up in holy catholic Ireland. I didn't know there was a remix out there