MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I made a conversational AI for interview prep
by yomwolde | 2025-04-05 22:42:51+00:00
SpeakFast helps you prep by actually talking—not just reading tips or recording yourself. The AI interviews you, challenges you in real time, and gives coaching based on how you're doing. It can even build a custom roadmap around your weak spots.

There are 200K+ real roles from top tech companies to practice with. You can also paste a job description and get a tailored mock interview instantly.

It’s composable, flexible, and built to feel real
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-05 22:43:59+00:00
> The welfare state is predicated on a pyramid-shaped population.

America isn't a welfare state, I think this much is clear :) It's welfare for the rich only.

> Also: people deride infinite growth, but growth is what is responsible for lifting large portions of the population out of poverty. If global markets were repriced tomorrow to expect no future growth, economies would collapse.

We don't have infinite resources so infinite growth is just impossible. And a fairer distribution of wealth can also lift populations out of poverty. The problem is the people that have a lot of wealth also have a lot of power they can wield to keep it that way.
by II2II | 2025-04-05 22:44:21+00:00
You pretty much need to use markup (or control codes) for rich text. Take bold, italic, underline, strikeout: those four can, and are, used in nearly any combination. You would need one bit for each of them. You would need two bits to specify four levels of headings. If you don't allow for that, you are back to using markup. You would also need one bit to specify proportional/fixed width font, because that is a thing too. That remaining bit would have to be used for superscript, since superscripts are commonly used for footnotes and simple mathematical expressions.

Okay, you can now create passable rich text documents for a limited (though common) range of purposes with that 8/24-bit breakdown that was suggested. But you may have noticed the author mentioned subscripts, which wasn't in my list. Well, it turns out that subscript and superscript have a terribly limited range of applications if you are specifying them per character: x^2^2 would be visually identical to x^22, and x^a_b would look different from x_b^a (with both presentations being nonsensical). The use of subscripts and superscripts in any technical applications would be severely limited. You need a much richer markup language to be truly expressive. So there really isn't much of a point in offering subscripts. Superscripts, sure, because they have a few non-technical uses.

Yet the reality is that people want a much richer set of formatting options. At a minimum, they want to select fonts and font sizes. Some of the formatting options have semantics. I know I crammed four levels of headings in those eight bits, but that only makes sense in headings. It doesn't make sense to specify it per character. Then there are other common document elements, like tables. You can create decent tables using monospaced fonts, but that is limiting and would produce undesirable results in some cases (try displaying April 5^th sensibly, using a monospace font so that it won't affect the width of the columns). On top of that, you are ditching the concept of styles because that implies some sort of markup.
by troyvit | 2025-04-05 22:44:49+00:00
Regarding ads as free speech:

> Bullshit. No one is entitled to yell at you "GET 20% OFF THIS UNDERWEAR YOU GLANCED AT YESTERDAY" with a dopamine megaphone in your bedroom. And to track 90% of your life to know when and how to say it. That's not free speech, that's harassment.

The same argument could be applied to the homeless people I see on most corners these days with cardboard signs designed to pull my heart strings. It's a different brain chemical, but it's actually real and it affects my re-uptake inhibitors a lot more. Should we ban them? Or just their signs?

Here are a few of the many defenses against advertising that are all free:

- Ad blockers for browsers

- Kill your television

- Listen to and support public media (unless those sponsorship messages count as ads which is a valid argument)

If literally everybody applied just those three things, advertising would die a natural death without having to ban anything.

<rant>

I'm a bit of a free speech zealot, and so I'll pull the slippery slope fallacy and just ask: after ads, what do we ban next? Sponsorship messages like public radio uses? Product placement in movies? Would we be allowed to have _any_ real products in movies or would everybody drink Slurm instead of Coke and drive around in Edisons instead of Teslas? Are movie previews allowed? What about product reviews where the product is given to the reviewer for free? What about Simone's presence on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert years ago? That was entertainment, but it also clearly advertised her YouTube channel. Is that allowed?

</rant>

We humans are one of the few animals that have within us multiple ways to kill ourselves. While that's mostly thanks to our awesome thumbs, our speech is another powerful tool. We're also one of the few animals that can, with much work, transcend our weaknesses and be more than the goop that makes us up. Finding out whether we do is the whole reason I'm sticking around.
by yongjik | 2025-04-05 22:45:08+00:00
> the "they suck, but they're the best we've got" people

I'm in this camp and I don't think it's "broken" - at least not in the sense that we have a broadly applicable "fix" that improves the situation.

I.e., everybody hates coding interviews but it's still close to the best we have got, and it beats credentialism or talking about random stuff (how are you going to compare across candidates).
by cogman10 | 2025-04-05 22:45:34+00:00
That has less to do with it being hard to craft bribery laws and more to do with the fact that the current bribery laws are entirely ineffectual. It's absolutely something that could be fixed, but certainly not something almost any politician would want to fix.

I will grant that companies would lobby hard against an anti-advertising bill (which means it'll likely never pass). That doesn't mean you couldn't make one that's pretty effective.

But, again, the nature of advertising makes it quite easy to outlaw. Unlike bribery, where a congress person can shove gold bars into their suit jackets in secret, advertising has to be seen by a lot of people to be effective. Making it something that has to be done in secret will immediately make it harder to do. The best you'll likely see is preferential placement of goods in stores or maybe some branding in a TV show.
by hintklb | 2025-04-05 22:45:50+00:00
Surprised to hear this because I had a very weird experience on my last stay. (and it will always be last as I will never stay at an Airbnb again).

Airbnb sided with the Host for some fabricated damages because the host was mad we told them the place was unclean. They put the burden of proof on us to prove we didn't destroy one of the sinks. Absolutely ridiculous.

We had to fight it for 3+ hours on the phone and message and start a chargeback and only then did support drop the fabricated charge.

And to top all of this, Airbnb deleted our bad review from that place (but left the review of the host).

So, never, absolutely never again. Too bad because I was spending 2k+$ on Airbnb before that incident and only got great reviews from other hosts.
by daveguy | 2025-04-05 22:46:20+00:00
o3 progress on ARC was not a zero shot. It was based on fine tuning to the particular data set. A major point of ARC is that humans do not need fine tuning more than being explained what the problem is. And a few humans working on it together after minimal explanation can achieve 100%.

o3 doing well on ARC after domain training is not a great argument. There is something significant missing from LLMs being intelligent.

I'm not sure if you watched the entire video, but there were insightful observations. I don't think anyone believes LLMs aren't a significant breakthrough in HCI and language modelling. But it is many layers with many winters away from AGI.

Also, understanding human and machine intelligence isn't about sides. And CoT is not symbolic reasoning.
Try Llama 4 Scout and Maverick as Nvidia Nim Microservices
by devaniranjan | 2025-04-05 22:47:35+00:00
The new Llama 4 Maverick and Scout models from u/AIatMeta bring native multi-modality and deliver leading accuracy for both language and image reasoning tasks.

These models are now live as NVIDIA NIM microservices for you to try right now—either as a hosted API or run them directly in your browser at build.nvidia.com.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-04-05 22:47:46+00:00
The argument was never about what anyone individual should or should not do, it was about the idea that the limitations of the hotel format are more driven by urban planning and local politics - striving to keep buildings as small as possible, concentrating all non-house buildings in small slips of land, etc. - than anything inherent to the hotel format. Hotels and Airbnb’s are great, but both be better if both were legal on 100% of the land in the city, along with apartment buildings and every other form of housing, and without the arbitrary restrictions on size.
by butterisgood | 2025-04-05 22:48:11+00:00
No. I don’t think this is true.

The PC was always meant to augment human intelligence. Consider what we lost with “calculators” vs slide rules. And what slide rules took from mental math.

We have a new “partner” in design and creativity. It’s sad when something we did becomes automated and the economic impacts - but this is just another tool to learn and use.

Maybe we can finally stop with tired Hollywood remakes of things? Maybe we can shake ourselves out of writer’s block quicker?

We are a still a part of this story. It’s not a kill switch but it makes us do things differently?

At least I hope so.
by dormando | 2025-04-05 22:48:39+00:00
Does anyone run these "at home" with small clusters? I've been googling unsuccessfully and this thread doesn't refer to anything.

So a non-quantized scout won't fit in a machine with 128GB of RAM (like framework or mac studio M4). Maverick is maybe a 512GB M3 Max mac studio. Is it possible (and if so what're the tradeoffs for) running like one instance of Scout on three 128GB frameworks?
by hintklb | 2025-04-05 22:48:42+00:00
I never even understood why people even think Airbnb is a tech company.

They basically operate a pretty simple website. Most of their busines is about arbitrating issues when they come. This has nothing to do with tech.

I would bet that United Airlines or American Airlines website handles way more queries than Airbnb.

But for some reason they managed to market themselves as a "design driven" "Tech company".
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-05 22:48:54+00:00
How would you like the government deciding some cause they didn’t agree with is advertising?

If you live in a conservative state, what are the chances that they say advocacy for Planned Parenthood is advertising and say that advocacy for pro-life is freedom of religion?

And how would that work over the Internet? Are you going to block foreign websites?

I can give you a real world example. Florida requires age verification for porn sites. Sites not based in the US including the ones owned by MindGeek just ignored it.
by kragen | 2025-04-05 22:49:33+00:00
I suggest reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_(economics). Some authors use the term "product" in opposition to "service", while others consider services to be a type of product. Not being clear about that distinction is one of the fatal flaws in imiric's proposal.

A show isn't made of matter. If you pay for it, you can't take possession of it or resell it later. If you, the buyer, aren't available at the time that it is provided, you get nothing of value out of the deal. These are attributes of services like surgery or internet connectivity, not products like antibiotics and computers. ("Health care" and "tech" are too vague to be useful.)

Getting things for free is not, as you imply, a usual attribute of services.
Show HN: Sound of Sorting, Reimagined for iPadOS and macOS
by nhubbard | 2025-04-05 22:50:39+00:00
Hello HN!

Put simply, this project is a complete rebuild of the famous Sound of Sorting visualizer, written in Swift with SwiftUI for iPadOS and macOS.

I originally envisioned it as a straight port of the original app, but I quickly realized that it would not be possible to do it that way.

It has most of the features of the original visualizer, plus some more educational features, like descriptions of the algorithms, space and time complexity, and implementations of each algorithm in 10 different programming languages.

I also put a lot of work into the sound synthesis, a custom syntax highlighter for displaying the code in the app, and the entire sorting platform itself.

I've been working on this project for many, many years now. It was my very first Swift project when I bought my MacBook Pro in late 2021, and it helped me learn so much detail about how Apple platform development works. I've since written a few other apps, like a darkroom timer for when I was developing my own film and prints.

I welcome any and all issues and pull requests, and any constructive criticism of the project. I'm sure there's some old code hidden away somewhere that I can't see it, or I wrote some of the code in a very inefficient way, and some Swift wizard will come along and point out how I can make it faster.

Thanks!
by jt2190 | 2025-04-05 22:51:16+00:00
> “We don’t have time to [write automated] test[s],” stated the principal engineer… This was in response to my candid observation that test coverage was low, existing tests didn’t always run locally for mysterious reasons, integration tests were non-existent, and pull requests could merge without passing the few tests that did exist.

Given the state of the existing automated tests, perhaps the Principal Engineer is correct… Why would the new automated tests be any better?
by autoexec | 2025-04-05 22:51:48+00:00
There are manipulation techniques we really can't protect ourselves against. It's like the optical illusions where even when you're fully aware what the trick is, you know the horizontal lines on the café wall are actually straight, you still see it incorrectly. Awareness of our weaknesses isn't enough to correct them.

Even when we can use that awareness to notice the times that we're being manipulated and try to remind ourselves to reject the idea that was forced into our brain surveillance capitalism means that advertisers can use the data they have to hit us when they know we're most susceptible and our defenses will be less effective. They can engineer our experiences and environments to make us more susceptible and our defenses are less effective. They're spending massive amounts of time and money year after year on refining their techniques to be more and more effective in general, and more effective against you individually. I wouldn't put much faith in our ability to immunize ourselves against advertising.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-04-05 22:52:57+00:00
Swift: now just as easy to understand as the less-travelled paths of C++ … The complexity of this language doesn’t seem to have any bounds. Sure, it’s the new shiny, but the cognitive load to understand what is going on is ever-increasing.

Personally I prefer Objective C instead, that’s a simple language. I can (and have) gone back to ObjC code from a decade previous and understood it straight away. I’m not sure I could say the same for Swift, it changes significantly from version to version, is not backwards compatible, and introduces new conceptual ways to do things instead of improving older ones.

I really wish Lattner hadn’t made the language, he’s done marvelous things with LLVM and Clang, but Swift has lost its way, IMHO. Unfortunately it’s now got enough momentum behind it at Apple that it’ll win out anyway, and Apple will be the poorer for it.

Thank $deity I’m leaving and I don’t have to pretend to like it any more.
by somishere | 2025-04-05 22:56:59+00:00
It's their movement that I find fascinating. It's like they just snap between positions [1]. They're incredibly fast.

Not to mention exceptionally beautiful (often irridescent [2]) and entirely curious.

I have thousands of happy snaps like those from around our old gaf of different pals that caught my eye or walked a web over one of us. So cool.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/kVK8z2p.mp4 [2] https://i.imgur.com/Ig3Nob5.jpeg
by voidmain | 2025-04-05 22:57:18+00:00
A start might be to enforce, or perhaps strengthen, laws against false advertising. I think most advertising is dishonest outright or at least by implication or omission. If everyone in the chain of custody of commercial speech was held liable if the speech was misleading, the world would look rather different. Compare the tone of a company's ads to the tone of its SEC filings.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-05 22:57:30+00:00
> You can buy a tub of 200mg caffeine pills for $3

The vast majority of caffeine that is available to add to products is extracted from coffee arabica. Either from the creation of decaf coffee or from other plant matter. IE caffeine is a useful byproduct of coffee arabica production.

There are most definitely other sources of caffeine, but if coffee arabica is no longer grown/harvested in the quantity it is currently, you would expect the cost of caffeine to increase significantly. I doubt we’d have shortages or anything like that, but I suppose it’s possible.
by silisili | 2025-04-05 22:58:36+00:00
For comparison, last year I was eating a packaged slice of ham and bit something hard, a rock or bone or something. Didn't hurt me or anything, but still odd. It was small and white, but could have been anything. I threw it out.

Later that day I wrote the company just to let them know, thinking if others had similar issues they could investigate.

They wrote me back saying it's impossible their packs would have bones in them, and it's possible my own tooth broke/chipped and that's what I was biting, and attached a coupon for something like 35 cents off one pack.

I found the reply to be really bizarre - I'd probably rather they not responded at all.
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-05 22:58:41+00:00
You argument sounds a bit like "crime exists despite laws against them also existing, therefore we should not have such laws".

What you seem to be missing is that, in the end, it's all about risks vs. potential gains.

As it stands, advertising is relatively cheap and the only risk is to lose all the money spent on it.

Once it's made illegal, that formula changes massively since now there's a much bigger risk in the form of whatever the law determines - fines, perhaps losing a professional license or the right to work on a certain field, or to found and/or direct a company, perhaps even jail time!

You're right, it will probably still exist in some ways in some contexts. I bet it wouldn't be nearly as pervasive as it is today though, and that's a win. And if it's not enough, up the stakes.
by Retr0id | 2025-04-05 22:59:42+00:00
By the way, the reason the address->IC mapping is non-trivial is for performance reasons.

If you were, for example, iterating over a column of a 2D array with a stride equal to some power of two, you'd end up hitting the same IC repeatedly. This limits your bandwidth to that of a single IC, rather than balancing it over all of them. (I'm simplifying a little, but that's the gist)

So they try to "swizzle" things, using a formula like the one in the article.
by vik0 | 2025-04-05 23:00:48+00:00
The overwhelming majority of "knowledge produced"* is nothing more than noise. Do not for a second think you're missing out on anything valuable or substantial. Do not be (or, remain) just a consumer, thinking he's accomplishing something by slurping up the newest, coolest, dandiest "thing"

* - especially things like: "newsletters, podcasts, Youtube videos, (tech) news, articles, and (of course) books"
by imchillyb | 2025-04-05 23:01:05+00:00
I believe it's a shame that the drippings do not create the basis of a mantle-stalagmite. That would be a neat feature to study.

'Our continent keeps on dripping, dripping, dripping, into the mantle...'

Doo-doo dah doo-doo.

---

Is there currently any type of ground penetrating radar or other device which could physically confirm the model's output?
by Lammy | 2025-04-05 23:03:25+00:00
Am I missing something? I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock and this site still looks totally fine — great even. I love the colors. There are like seven example banners on the entire page, three icons for navigation, and mostly text.

Or are you talking about some of the example sites the article links to like http://thombs.com/Dann_1996-06/noframes.htm in which case yeah I get it lol
by dimitri_deploys | 2025-04-05 23:03:50+00:00
This was a fascinating article and I admire the musician in question for committing to the re-Discovery (pardon the pun) of the process behind the original track. Still, I have to agree with the earlier commenter that the many hallmarks of ChatGPT's prose style (so to speak) distracted me somewhat from the story the author intended to tell. The seemingly random italicisation of phrases that couldn't possibly have required actual emphasis created a relentless subvocal choppiness. As much as I'm glad the author shared their insights, I wish the medium hadn't so overwhelmed the message. Not that I think using ChatGPT is fundamentally wrong. I suppose it's a little like cosmetic surgery: the best approach, if you're going under the knife, is to have just enough done that nobody can tell you've had anything done at all.
by gcp123 | 2025-04-05 23:04:44+00:00
This struck a nerve.

I've been on both sides of this war: the test evangelist fighting for coverage and the pragmatist shipping to beat a deadline. After 20+ years in software, the truth is painfully obvious: testing is the greatest productivity hack that everyone keeps "postponing until next sprint."

The author gets the psychology exactly right. We overestimate the initial cost and drastically undervalue the compound returns. What they call "Time Technical Debt" is the perfect description for that sinking feeling when you're working on a mature codebase with spotty test coverage.

The most insightful point is how testing fundamentally changes your design for the better. When you have to make something testable, you're forced to:

- Think about clear interfaces

- Handle edge cases explicitly

- Create clean separation of concerns

- Build proper startup/shutdown sequences

These aren't "testing best practices," they're just good engineering. Testing is simply the pressure that forces you to do it right.

My experience: if your system is hard to test, it's probably hard to reason about, hard to maintain, and hard to extend. The difficulty in testing is a symptom, not the disease.

At my last company, we built a graph of when outages occurred versus test coverage by service. The correlation was so obvious it became our most effective tool for convincing management to allocate time for testing.
by Georgelemental | 2025-04-05 23:05:05+00:00
Mandatory political indoctrination courses is the biggest thing. But also, having to fund left-wing events with mandatory activities fee. And it was much easier to get funding as a student group if you have the correct political opinions. Finally, if you say the wrong things, you might get reported to a political commissar (this was really rare at my uni though, there were signs everywhere saying how to make a report but in practice people didn’t do it).
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-05 23:05:20+00:00
One man's propaganda is another man's truth-to-power.

There are dangerous consequences to handing the government the authority to ban public communication (even about mouthwash brands) without very careful scrutiny.

Imagine if you couldn't advertise energy alternatives because oil and gas came first and, with advertising banned, we can't even talk about the relative merits of installing solar vs. buying coal-made grid electricity. The status quo will maintain until the planet cooks.