MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piva00 | 2025-04-05 15:40:13+00:00
> My current team scrapped the algorithmic questions entirely. We now do pair programming on a small feature in our actual codebase, with full access to Google/docs/AI. The only restriction is we watch how they work. This approach has dramatically improved our hit rate on good hires.

I've been on this gig for about 20 years, this process is by far the best one to participate in an interview both as an interviewee as an interviewer.

As an interviewer I have a lot more joy to tackle an actual task, or a problem very similar to how my team works, with someone applying for the position, it's easier for me to feel like a human instead of an assessment machine. I don't have to learn the N different potential case studies to run the interview, I don't need to feel like I'm ticking boxes when giving my feedback, it's all natural.

As a candidate it relaxes me a fucking lot, I don't have to brush off old books, go through a grind of studying and still feeling like I haven't studied enough because there's an endless amount of knowledge to learn if I need to cover all bases. I also feel a lot more like a human, I can talk through my train of thought, work as I normally would checking documentation, searching, etc.

This bizarre ritual feels almost like hazing by this point, at some point Big Tech decided this was "the way for hiring", then herd mentality took over to the point where tiny startups just cargo-culted processes without even questioning (I heard from a non-technical founder once "if Google does it then it's the best way to do it"). A few generations later of folks hired through this Byzantine process turned it into a hazing ritual, if they had to go through this pain then they might as well inflict the pain to make candidates prove themselves worthy.

It's a giant cycle of bullshit, and no matter how much I tried it's been always impossible to change the minds of HR that this is not the best way to assess candidates, the herd mentality is even stronger around there since there's always the dumb scapegoat: "we do benchmark peers in the industry and they all do this way, so we will do this way".

Sorry for the rant but it's one aspect of this job that really grinds my gears, I fucking hate running interviews with candidates because of it, I never feel I could properly measure someone's real abilities, and I really hate having to go through it myself...
by solardev | 2025-04-05 15:40:17+00:00
You really shouldn't. Help him set up a Squarespace/Wix/Wordpress or similar that you don't have to maintain.

Anything you code, manually or vibe-ly, is going to become a pile of unmaintainable garbage in a year or two and either you're going to have to help him fix it then or he's going to have to pay hundreds for someone else to do it for him (if he can find anyone).

Please believe me when I say I've wasted way too many years of my youth trying to hack together things like that for clients. That way lies madness. Don't let yourself go down that path. It's not a good use of time and money for you or your client.
by boricj | 2025-04-05 15:41:28+00:00
That reminds me I once emulated a NumWorks N0100 [1] and a HP Prime G1 [2] with QEMU, to the point where the emulators managed to run the official firmware.

- [1] https://github.com/boricj/qemu/tree/numworks_calculators

- [2] https://github.com/boricj/qemu/tree/s3c2416-boricj
by jchw | 2025-04-05 15:41:42+00:00
Well, to be fair, postmarketOS isn't Android. For Android I've had tons of custom ROMs with no obvious hardware issues, mostly CyanogenMod variants, over the years. postmarketOS, though, tries to run stock Linux. It's a different ballgame.

The alternate approach is actually to utilize the fact that Android is relatively better supported and wrap Android components into a standard Linux userland, using a compatibility layer like libhybris with patched vendor kernels. It's pretty ugly but if you want Linux on phone now it's your best shot at a flagship experience.
by rayiner | 2025-04-05 15:42:19+00:00
J.p. morgan predicts a 1.5% consumer price level increase this year from the tariffs. The 43% example in the article will be at the extreme high end.

Recessions affect different people differently. The stock market boomed during the Obama recovery from 2008, and during Biden, but most people didn’t feel it so much. A financial recession would be borne mostly by the laptop class.
by blacksqr | 2025-04-05 15:42:47+00:00
Also easier to research the applicable laws in the comfort of your home before you leave instead of trying to triangulate the situation while in detention.

According to the article the Workaway website explicitly says the traveler is responsible for securing the proper visas, which the woman here clearly did not do.

IANAL but I know enough about US law to know that giving accommodation is explicitly barred from being counted as compensation. Workers have to be paid minimum wage regardless of any room or board provided. I would be surprised if the law was much different in the UK.
by mcphage | 2025-04-05 15:43:45+00:00
But that was his entire campaign: we’re going to shoot ourselves in the face, and it will be the best thing ever for everyone. So maybe someone bought into the “it will be the best thing ever”, fine, but if they bought into that but not the “we’re going to shoot ourselves in the face”, then what did they believe? The effect will happen but the cause won’t?
by djoldman | 2025-04-05 15:44:24+00:00
Learning and working on this stuff almost always felt "all or nothing," (either it worked or it didn't), which was very frustrating.

This looks interesting:

> Like Ghuloum [2006], this course is different. Our development is by extending the complete, working compiler one small step at a time. At each step we end up with the working compiler, for a subset of the source language. Specifically, the methodology ([Ghuloum, 2006, §2.6]):

> 1. choose a small subset of the source language that is easy to directly compile to assembly;

> 2. Write the extensive test cases;
by ViktorRay | 2025-04-05 15:44:32+00:00
As for your last paragraph…in those days the US was the only country in the world that could manufacture stuff. Africa and Asia and Eastern Europe had been wrecked and would remain devastated by imperialism, war, failed attempts to try to make a planned economy work, etc.

Over the past few decades, the rest of the world has managed to develop and compete.

In regards to making global trade expensive again….the policies that the United States is pursuing won’t make global trade more expensive. It will just make trade with the United States more expensive. The other countries will continue to trade with each other cheaply and will continue to gain prosperity and continue to advance.

It is possible we may see a world in which the United States has stagnated to not compete with the rest of the world. And a world where maybe the dollar has been replaced with the euro or some other currency as the reserve currency. If that is the case…well things won’t be too good for Americans to say the least.
by solardev | 2025-04-05 15:44:36+00:00
Did this topic get resurrected and then re-timestamped somehow? The timestamps say many of the comments were posted 16 hours ago, but I definitely posted these way longer ago (like 3 days ago, I think). There's also a lot more voting activity now and possibly some green-name astroturfing.

I know HN has a "second-chance pool" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), but I didn't know it would artificially change the timestamps too...
by rcolyer | 2025-04-05 15:44:41+00:00
Well when I'm doing data science at work, I typically work with conda environments, which then just work with runvenv because it finds them all. For my other "python -m venv" multi-use environments, I just stick them in ~/.venv, OR I drop a symlink in ~/.venv to them, so they're searchable, which makes ~/.venv into exactly an explicit registry by symlinks.

If it's a one-off environment for one program, I'll usually just make a venv and put it right next to the script. But the problem is I don't want the clutter of an environment in places that are in my executable path. So if I have something like a repo directory that has a python program and an environment, or ~/python with a python program and an environment next to it, then I just drop a symlink in ~/bin/ to the executable script, and now runvenv will follow that symlink, find the venv next to the script, and run it. So it kind of separates it. I can make my environments however I want or wherever I want with conda or venv, and the scripts using them are still directly executable. Either by adjacency to the script, or a symlink in ~/.venv to them (if I didn't make them directly in there). It doesn't functionally matter if they're accessed via a symlink, because the runpip tool takes care of handling that properly.
by mizzao | 2025-04-05 15:44:50+00:00
Gotta love these two sentences in that article:

(when describing the model) Let ε<0 represent the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices...

(when implementing the model) The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.

4 is less than 0, right? Right?!?

This reads like a student who has made a mistake on an Econ 101 homework — where we would have given them an X and told them to try again. Except this failing student has now just set US trade policy.
by throwanem | 2025-04-05 15:44:59+00:00
Or, I don't know. Spend less time with TERF/SWERF, anti-pornography third-wave feminist lines of thought and argument, at least to the point where you regain the ability to recognize anything else when you see it.

This is the one thing Nietzsche said that's worth hearing, the shitty little edgelord he always was: it looks back, and you need to watch that. I think you haven't been. Your problem, not mine, thank goodness. I'd say "good luck," but given there is quite evidently nothing too low for you to think of me, your fortunes are entirely your own miserable business and frankly I both hope and expect you will fail.
by II2II | 2025-04-05 15:45:00+00:00
Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated. As they say, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. To choose something less extreme: an unreliable employee may still show up for work 80% of the time.

When their methodology prior to a particular point of time was shown to be weak, and the programs from that time are still available (the archives go back 30 years), I think that asking for spot checking of those old episodes is legitimate. The key thing here are the archives. If the archives weren't available it would be much easier to shrug and say, "live and learn."
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-05 15:45:25+00:00
Recent talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETZfkkv6V7Y

LeCun, "Mathematical Obstacles on the Way to Human-Level AI"

Slide (Why autoregressive models suck)

https://xcancel.com/ravi_mohan/status/1906612309880930641
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-04-05 15:45:25+00:00
> You want the Jews to have self determination if and only if they can conjure into existence a magical fairy land free of compromise

I think it's much more serious than arguing that they had the right to take over land already inhabited by another group of people, because of events from 2000 years ago. It just doesn't seem to occur to you that the Palestinians also have rights, and shouldn't have been forced to give up their land.

> or can will into existence powers like militarily defeating the Nazis despite lacking even a basic police force.

You're supposing that Jews would have left Europe en masse for Palestine. They wouldn't have. Most Jews before WWII did not accept Zionism. For example, in Poland, the dominant Jewish political movement was the Jewish Labour Bund, which was hostile to Zionism and which strove for Jewish civil rights inside the Polish Republic. In the real world, the only way the Jews of Europe could have been saved would have been by preventing the rise of fascism.

To get back to your original point, you still haven't acknowledged that Zionism was fundamentally different from other movements for self-determination. It was a movement for self-determination on land that the group in question did not inhabit, and which an entirely different group of people already inhabited. When Zionism succeeded, it created a massive refugee population (the previous inhabitants of the land the Zionists wanted for their own "self-determination") and sparked a conflict that has been going on for nearly a century now.
by throwaway802 | 2025-04-05 15:46:28+00:00
It seems to me, this is less a technical challenge, but more of a cost challenge. Bandwidth and storage is not free. Freemium works for private business communities (Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.), yet public communication is monetized by attention (FB, IG, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit etc.).

Has someone done work on finding viable alternatives to the attention-based business models? As long as it's free, users will switch, but costs need to be managed somehow.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-04-05 15:46:40+00:00
Neat! I played a few days :) the only issue I had was that I found it quite easy to tap a previously selected letter, and that’d mess me up especially if it wasn’t the last letter so far in that word. I think it’d probably be better to add a backspace button in addition to the clear one, and not deselect letters by tapping them.
by dawdawji | 2025-04-05 15:46:45+00:00
No doubt about it. Even in the U.S. we have a serious slavery problem. If you are incarcerated you do not have the same rights and most certainly can and will be made to labor if you want any hope of getting out.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

If we have indentured slaves in the U.S. then just imagine what they are doing at CECOT. Our judicial system is punitive. They would rather you working for 25 cents an hour cleaning vomit off hospital gowns then they would have you learning to read and write. Cash rules everything around them.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-05 15:47:31+00:00
No-one’s seeing the impact yet (except for those who pay day-to-day attention to the markets, but that’s not a huge number of people), because nothing has actually happened yet. The tariffs go into effect on the 9th, and China’s retaliatory tariffs go into effect towards the end of the month; the EU’s retaliation will probably start hitting in May. Over the next month, it is likely that Americans will see prices go up dramatically, and significant job loss is likely. Considering how upset Americans got over expensive eggs, you’ve got to assume every congressperson is about to drown under a sea of angry calls and letters from constituents.

That might actually produce a veto-proof majority for undoing this, quite quickly.
by orbital-decay | 2025-04-05 15:47:33+00:00
Claude can speak medieval and ancient languages but mixes up different time periods pretty often, unless you hard prompt the desired grammar. For Old English in particular, it tends to give something vaguely Shakespearean instead. It often uses period-incorrect alphabet or modern characters as well (for Slavic languages in particular).

I've also tried Old Norse, Ancient Greek, and Old East Slavic, and the result is pretty much the same. For OES in particular, it often outputs period-incorrect grammar, writes in Old Church Slavonic (different language), or even modern Russian or Serbian. Looks like the dataset was a bit chaotic, with religious books mixed with old manuscripts and even modern books for children. Mentioning a specific work from the desired period makes it write better, and wrangling it by specifying the rules makes it get this almost right.
by ornornor | 2025-04-05 15:47:52+00:00
> expensive

Not so much. As a tourist yes, no question.

If you’re a resident, there is a card that costs 160/year (180 the first year) and give you half price on all trains. Also works with any local public transit system (municipal buses, etc) across the country.

Train is quite affordable like that. For example St Gallen to Zurich is 90 minutes by train and costs 16.- with 1/2 fare card. You can even get a super saver (valid on this train only) for 21.20 or 11.20 1/2 fare. That’s for this Monday.

Swiss salaries are some of the highest in the world. The overwhelming majority of trains run on time, don’t strike, and are clean.

It’s cheaper than driving (gas and maintenance) + parking by a long margin.

You can go ski by train there. Haven’t owned a car in 5 years living there.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-05 15:48:56+00:00
>Bullying people in inferior bargaining positions has somehow worked thus far.

Has it? To who?

Canada hasn't, and won't, negotiate a single thing. We increased border patrols for a made up problem and thus far it has entirely served to catch guns and drugs and illegals coming from the United States.

The United States has lost tens to hundreds of billions of sales to Canada. They are never, ever coming back.

Trump sabotaged a critical trading relationship in a way that Americans just cannot comprehend, through his laughably stupid "bullying".

Similarly, supposedly Vietnam has come "hat in hand". Vietnam has literally nothing to offer. It has negligible tariffs or blocks on US trade, it just happens to be a poor country. The bullying is utter stupidity.

Mexico thus far has taken being pissed in the face because they're 100% of Trump's purported problem -- from drugs, to migrants to cartels to funnelling Chinese goods, and the likelihood is that Mexico ends up being the biggest beneficiary.
by mlsu | 2025-04-05 15:49:00+00:00
That note about comedy and melancholy being tied together is really salient.

The best sad stories are also the most funny. The arc of a sad story is the same as the arc of a funny one: there’s the tension, often like some introspective tension, that is built up and built up, and then finally released. And the relationship between audience and character in a sad story is the same as in a funny one — some deep connection between audience and character must exist in order for the release (crying or laughing) to pay off.

Took me quite a while to notice this.
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-05 15:49:17+00:00
Another text using this approach:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047760/essentials-of-compila... - Jeremy Siek's Essentials of Compilation (there's also a Python version)

Admittedly I didn't finish working through it (life got in the way), but I worked through a good chunk of it with a colleague from a non-CS background. He wanted to understand compilers and it seemed to be much more effective than other texts he'd tried to work through. I'll have to look at this one at some point, probably this summer when things are usually calmer for me.
by dmitrygr | 2025-04-05 15:49:47+00:00
That was the other side of my rant that I alluded to and didn’t go into. The compressed instructions set is idiotic for big cores that need to go fast. It wastes 3/4 of the encoding space on nonsense that is of no use there. When you’re designing a big out of order core, slapping on a slightly bigger L1 is not a problem. Variable size instructions is one.

Compare : Apple M4 perf vs $your_favourite_rv_”fast”_core perf per MHz

It makes sense for micro controllers, but not for big cores.

This whole approach of trying to be everything for everyone is one of the reasons that RISC – V ends up being mediocre for everyone and perfect for no one.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-05 15:50:02+00:00
> Its semantics can understood in 5 minutes.

Your definition of "semantics" must be different from mine, or you perhaps haven't seen https://javascriptwtf.com/ (linked in a sibling comment)

Your comment actually made me wonder whether those cited artifacts were implementation bugs or actually in the specification and ... lol, this shit reminds me of people who put comments above functions that just restate the function's name: https://tc39.es/ecma262/2024/#sec-addition-operator-plus

> Writing an interpreter or compiler for it would be easily within reach of an undergraduate student

Surely you don't really believe that? Or is the rest of the sentence "... eventually, over the course of their undergraduate career"

The 15th edition of the standard is 816 pages and now includes specifying the Memory Model. What I suspect you mean is "could write a parser for the 1st edition spec from 1997"
by k310 | 2025-04-05 15:50:29+00:00
I am an infovore and read every page in /newest, because my interests are many, and I don't want other people deciding what is important.

I open a few, and save meaty material as pdf (on the phone, I send it to the desktop)

This is similar to a post yesterday[0], brief comments.

> Browse No More

> The magic we once had with browsing the web is dwindling. March 13, 2025

> I'm no longer browsing the web; I'm consuming AI answers instead.

In this case, limiting my news feed to what others think is important (or hot, like emacs vs. vi) or not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43590233
Show HN: Kindle Comic Converter to Read Manga on eInk Kindle/Kobo/ReMarkable
by seam_carver | 2025-04-05 15:50:52+00:00
Kindle Comic Converter optimizes comics and manga for eink readers like Kindle, Kobo, ReMarkable, and more. Its main feature is various optional image processing steps to look good on eink screens, which have different requirements than normal LCD screens. It also does file size optimization by downscaling to your devices native resolution, which helps performance on underpowered ereaders. Supported input formats include folders/CBZ/CBR/PDF of JPG/PNG files and more. Supported output formats include MOBI/AZW3, EPUB, KEPUB, and CBZ. ------

Hey everyone! I'm the current maintainer of KCC since 2023, thanks for using it! I’ve been reading manga on Kindle ever since I got the big 9.7” Kindle DX from 2010 using mangle, and upgraded to the even bigger 10.2” Kindle Scribe 2022 using KCC.

The biggest contributions I've made to KCC are:

added modern macOS support and removed homebrew requirement

ported code to run on native Apple silicon M1 chip and later for a 2x speed boost (qt5->qt6)

free open source windows codesign with SignPath

fixed Kindle Scribe support

and tons of other various features and bug fixes and developer friendly changes

created a legacy Windows 7 build with 300+ downloads…

The biggest community PRs were:

huge 2x speed boosts due to various CPU/IO optimizations

Kobo/Remarkable support.

Enjoy using KCC and let me know if you have any questions!
by andrewfromx | 2025-04-05 15:51:34+00:00
the quiet contrarian hook. Posts that challenge a sacred cow of the tech world—like “REST APIs Are Overrated” or “Maybe We Don’t Need More Frameworks”

specificity in the abstract. Posts that zoom into a niche detail—say, “The 17ms Delay That Broke My Compiler”

emotional valence with a twist of restraint. Posts that subtly provoke curiosity, mild frustration, or even a quiet sense of awe

the second-order question effect. Posts that don’t just ask “What’s the best X?” but instead ask “Why do we keep picking X when Y exists?”
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-04-05 15:51:55+00:00
This is an awesome project and an interesting use case for WASI.

Get rid of this though:

> This means that you can write your entire application in a single language, Rust, and deploy it as a single binary. No more microservices, no more containers, no more Kubernetes, no more Docker, no more VMs, no more DevOps, no more infrastructure, no more ops, no more servers.

Don’t let your marketing team write your README.