nthacker

Launching The State of AI in College Admissions - a survey of 166 American Universities on their stated policies for how much AI is allowed in college admissions, what should be disclosed and what enforcements exist.

Applying to college in 2025 cant get more stressful. Of the 166 top colleges:

55 have explicit guidelines of AI use.

40 require disclosure of AI use.

106 enforce policies by using tools and systems to detect AI use.

Built for Students, Parents, Counselors and Educators dealing with college admissions this Fall. Use our report to quickly search through policies or generate a disclosure in seconds using our free tool.

I am building GradPilot (www.gradpilot.com) to help students with their graduate school application essays. We believe that AI can help many students review their own college applications, especially students who don't have access to counselors.

One of my findings with fine tuning models is that it relies on the inherent strengths of LLMs to learn from the latent space and having great datasets is super valuable to getting the outputs you desire. Aligned Labs was able to get the best creative writers, educators and people who read college applications for us to build a dataset that we fine tuned with GPT4o , GPT4o-mini, llama3-70B and llama3-8B. I highly recommend them!

No. The secret is the gamble

At first glance this sounds like genius but its not

YC or any successful VC doesn't fund ideas. There is something else the founders have figured out which is key to success and funding. This could be a distribution trick, a key insight, a user growth metric.

Its not hard to imagine YC or a VC coming across the same idea pitched by different founders. Why they picked the team they picked cannot be obvious from trawling the startup directory, that insight is hidden, its literally a secret that should be guarded

This is obviously worse because future transactions depend on people with coins in the past

bitcoin doesnt suffer this because proof of work provides an independent method for verification. the energy utilization argument that comes up should be evaluated in the context of the comparison of this independent humanless verification vs proof-of-stake or other shared or trusted mechanisms

"How do we know that the Bible is true?

Well we know that the Bible is true...because the Bible tells us so"

The circular logic of PoS:

1. The list of valid transactions determines who has coin.

2. People with coin decide which transactions are valid.

3. GOTO 1

https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Proof-Of-Stake-Wear...

Came here to say that this is one gripping book

Do some people have specific ideas or visions of what this could turn out to be? I've tried to play this out in my head but wasn't able to arrive at any new paradigms but then again I've only scratched the surface of plan 9 grid

what are some unique things people on the grid do?

At first I didn't believe what I was reading, since my experience has not been anything close to whats been described.

Then I found : http://www.notablebrahmins.com

NB Score, WTF: http://www.notablebrahmins.com/nb-score/

This is the difference between Product & Technology, in their literal terms

"Come for the tool, Stay for the network"

Your site is rad.

Here's my idea:

P2P grid compute + storage that is actually cheap and can drive down the cost of computation significantly.

Can be achieved with unikernels, homomorphic encryption, ipfs. There's a lot of compute and storage available all over the world, idle, waiting to be used. A system like this can utilize it

Ok, thanks for that feedback. It's currently disabled while I figure out next steps

Thanks for all the feedback HN, I do agree the service is a risky tool so right now I've stubbed it out, effectively disabling its use while I figure out how to address the comments here

Thanks for linking this

Great suggestion, thanks!

It's definitely not point-and-click. My thesis (and experience) is that it has gotten harder

Building & Deploying on clouds has gotten easier, and many dev environments have idle, underutilized resources that are paid for.

Love this tool too, thanks for linking it in

Updated the FAQs. Thanks for pointing this out

gotcha, thanks makes sense now.

> Q: Do you store my card?

> A: We do not store your credit card information. Payments are processed directly by Stripe, and we don't store your card details.

Thats exactly what we mean

I do think deleting cloud resources is a valid use case in many Eng teams and directly co-relates to a lower cloud bill. Engineers are frequently building POC's, test machines or just deploying quickly to have idle/underutilized resources lying around

I don't follow...?

Thanks for linking this

From the FAQs

Q: Do you store the keys? A: No, each Nuke is an ephemeral sandboxed process and we don't store any keys.

Agree. This is an early version of that pitch :)