They learn if they have to, like we always did. In-person exams (proctored) are good for testing that.

It also used to be that reddit comments were the epitome of quality in their time, much closer to current HN if not better. I attributed that to the voting mechanism; clearly I was mistaken.

Other commenters laughing at you for the price... It's not about the price it's about the barrier. Even if I love a service, I won't get very many people to try it if they need to enter a credit card.

If entering a credit card is too much you probably aren't a potential customer. Part of keeping a service low cost is keeping services efficient. Having a large pool of people using it for free who will never become customers will force the cost higher for those who do pay.

Good riddance to the "free" model. It's never actually free. You either pay with your data, or have to consume ads, or you're forcing other customers to pay for your free usage.

It's also a barrier for education.

Almost all technological choices I made as a teen were driven by "what hosting can I get for free, as my parents sure as hell won't put down their payment information for that". Back then that usually meant PHP and a max. 50MB MySQL.

If you've ever offered an online service, charging "the dollar" reduces a ton of spam/abuse you have to deal with.

I have been the service provider who had to paywall just to stop the spammers and you're right. But it's also true that kids will be collateral damage (or anyone without a credit card).

In my case, and it was the 90s, I took the time to setup a way to pay by calling a premium (1-900) for $1.49 number so the barrier to entry even for kids was still reasonable.

Maybe in modern day the equivalent is adding Google pay and Apple pay then you cover some kids at least (gift cards and such).

Quite the hassle for the provider, and it will turn away any person who cares about privacy. There's no way to win anymore.

If a parent can buy their kid a computer, they can pay 1 euro a month for a CDN in the rare case they need it. This is a bad argument.

I had trouble explaining to my parents what a BBS was. I wouldn't want to explain what a CDN is.

I think the point is that many HNer’s had parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t do “computer things”

Pay 1 Euro a month... or 1000s if their kid fucks up.

I get that credit cards are a barrier of entry but I’m more willing to give providers a break now that AI agents make it much easier to abuse free tiers. It’s also harder for smaller companies to offer free tiers. If we want a more diverse set of service providers we as customers need to be willing to accept some trade-offs.

I seem to remember that's one of the first things they tried, but the general models tended to win out. Turns out there's more to learn from all code/discussions than from just JS.

From my own empirical research, the generalized models acting as specialists outperform both the tiny models acting as specialists and the generalist models acting as generalists. It seems that if peak performance is what you're after, then having a broad model act as several specialized models is the most impactful.

Indeed, Python's version format is semver but it's just aesthetics, they remove stuff in most (every?) minor version. Just yesterday I wasted hours trying to figure out a bug before realizing my colleague hadn't read the patch notes.

its*

Well done

Took them this long to realize MCPs are just worse APIs.

I'm not scared that my skills will be obsolete, I'm scared employers will think they are. The labor market was already irrational enough as it was.

Well, I've worked as a developer in many companies and have never met a DBA. I've met tons of devops, who are just rebranded sysadmins as far as anyone can tell.