Hacker News: bonoboTP

New comment by bonoboTP in "Message your other Claude Code sessions"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:21:22 +0000

Claude Code does allow this. You can talk to the subagents directly and watch what they are doing.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 21:06:53 +0000

Of course. And mechanistic interpretability research is a thing.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:30:05 +0000

At low student counts, like 20, (think specialist niche elective master's courses, not the huge bachelor's courses) it's perceived by profs as more efficient in fact than the ordeal of organizing a written exam.

With an oral exam, the prof blocks off 3 days or so, with ~8 students per day and it's done. It's not a huge additional effort compared to all the effort of giving the course over the full semester anyway.

An added, though minor benefit is that the professor might decide to offer a student assistant job to someone who performs well, because it's much easier to judge who is actually good in an oral exam vs in written. There's a reason that job interviews aren't just tests filled out on paper but involve personal interactions.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:09:47 +0000

It's very possible but somewhat slower. PyTorch and CUDA have flags for determinism. It won't work across all different GPU models though, but it will get you bitwise equal results on the same GPU.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:44:27 +0000

American colleges give way more support throughout the studies though. In Europe you're literally alone and nobody cares if you miss deadlines or you're failing out. No general consultations, no extra departments and admin bloat. You have to have your shit together.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:42:20 +0000

Grading written exams is delegated to teaching assistants / PhD students.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:40:10 +0000

Oral exams are still common in Germany and many European countries in case of smaller courses taken by 20-30 students in a semester, and sometimes even in larger courses, and the task of examining is then split among multiple professors and lecturers.

In Hungary it's a pipeline. You go in a room, you pick a piece of paper out of a hat, which gives you some task or topic to prepare for. Then you sit down at a desk (the room is filled with about 15 students working already), then you solve the problem or sketch out your notes to present the topic you picked for like 20 minutes, then you go to the professor and you have to, in low voice, explain your solution, the professor asks back and pokes at it to make sure you understand. The professor then gives a grade immediately and you go home.

In Germany, it's usually no random pick of a topic, you just go through the entire semester's material over 30-45 minutes and the professor stops to spend more or less time on each topic to explore your knowledge. You can explain things by making sketches on paper. A PhD student sits there quietly taking notes of what was asked and what the student answers approximately. You leave the room, the prof and the PhD student discuss the performance, decide the grade and you come back, and the professor explains the grade and what you did well and not well.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:27:30 +0000

None, but have interacted with American students at European universities and they were very lost without all the coddling and all kinds of support infrastructure and basically getting their life organized by administrators who personally attended to their matters and reminded them a million times about deadlines and so on. They were unprepared for actually having to manage their own studies, read up on rules, find out where to register for something, until when, etc. etc.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:06:08 +0000

Or like Europe. You don't pay tuition, but if you slack off, and don't progress properly, you only have a limited number of exam retries and limited number of funded semesters. If you fail, you're out, choose another profession. You're not a customer, you're someone who is trying to prove themselves and get certified by experts on their knowledge. The "customer" of the university is whoever will glance at the degree paper and tries to ascertain the skill/knowledge level of the outgoing student. They have to give a good signal there. The reason this doesn't work in the US, is because they want mediocre children of rich parents to be pushed through, because college is a networking and social class-based finishing school, not a place for acquiring knowledge.

(Also, there should be electives, but the rigorous backbone of a degree should be mandatory, so "students won't choose this course" doesn't come up.)

New comment by bonoboTP in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:48:10 +0000

European universities also have accommodations and extra time etc. And yes it's an arms race. Though at some point it will simply inflate away the value of the degree, but educators will stand there baffled, not understanding how it could happen.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Denmark Requires Oral Defenses for Students' Written Work to Counter AI Cheating"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:44:56 +0000

The US consists of many small parts too, and it may work in each of those small parts.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:43:17 +0000

Regular graded assignments is the "treated like children" version. The adult treatment is that you can come to class if you want, you can do the assignments if you want, but if not, that's fine too. There is one test at the end, and it's your responsibility to prepare for it as you want. You manage your own time, we offer consultation, lectures, assignments, tutorials etc. but you can reject all of this and learn the material from some other textbook, and as long as you've mastered the material, you'll get a good grade at the exam. This is how German universities work, for the most part.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:28:10 +0000

4 months is ancient. Fable and Sol are a different animal.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:27:16 +0000

Why would it need to be revolutionary? It can be some ordinary thing. Software is mostly ordinary.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:40:38 +0000

Bullshit. You can be cynical, it's fine but this is just nonsense. People have so much demand for coding that there is no need to make it waste tokens. People are eager to implement more features, do more testing, more platforms, more file formats, bla bla. There is absolutely no incentive to waste tokens. They can barely serve the demanded tokens anyway. There is in fact incentive to save tokens, so subsidized subscriptions don't consume as much.

New comment by bonoboTP in "Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:08:11 +0000

Persistence in problem solving can be good, on non-hacking tasks too. Like math, speeding up algorithms, finding bugs, debugging weird multithreading race conditions etc.

New comment by bonoboTP in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:43:09 +0000

If you want to sell something, you need a buyer. This is my point.

New comment by bonoboTP in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:32:17 +0000

Not at all.

New comment by bonoboTP in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

bonoboTP — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:03:03 +0000

Is "economics" some god of the pantheon or how can he force things?

No, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.

New comment by bonoboTP in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

bonoboTP — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:50:38 +0000

Get paid enough by who and for what reason? Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?