MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-04-06 16:01:11+00:00
When interviewing, one of the ways I try to discover how good a particular tech job is: How far up the management totem pole does the "tech illiteracy" start?

I've worked at companies where everyone, all the way up to the SVP (who reports to the CEO) is still very sharp technically. Meaning, the SVP and everyone below them could legitimately pass the Senior Software Engineer interview, or at the very least speak intelligently about the sw architecture, the reasoning behind the technical and design decisions made, performance trade-offs, security, and so on. If you've never worked for a place like that, it's almost hard to believe what it's like.

I've also worked at a (fortunately only one) company, where as a leaf-node employee, my first level manager was effectively tech illiterate. Those kinds of places need their individual engineers to all 1. have good tech skills, and 2. have those rare communication/translation skills that translate tech concepts/problems into business-speek.

At most companies, the point at which a technically literate employee reports to a tech-illiterate employee is somewhere up the management hierarchy--usually around "Director" level. Wherever that point on the org chart is, that person's direct reports are the ones who need to have those tech-to-non-tech translation skills.
by dasil003 | 2025-04-06 16:01:34+00:00
As a hiring manager with over two decades experience I tend not to think this way unless I know who the other hiring manager is, have reason to believe that they are strong at hiring, and that the role they are hiring for is similar enough to mine for it to mean something.

That's not to say I don't think about where I might have blind spots for a candidate—as you say, all processes are biased—but I've seen too many bozos in this industry (especially as the money started to become its own draw) to take a random offer as signal for anything. More context is necessary or it's just garbage in garbage out.
by mirashii | 2025-04-06 16:01:45+00:00
Even better, this library, with its use of unsafe and fork underneath, introduces a whole new class of undefined behavior to a program by providing a safe interface over an unsafe API without actually enforcing the invariants necessary for safety.

In order for the fork() it calls to be safe, it needs to guarantee a bunch of properties of the program that it simply cannot. If this gets used in a multithreaded program that calls malloc, you've got UB. There's a long list of caveats with fork mentioned in some other comments here.

In my view, this is not serious code and should be regarded as a joke. There's no actual value in this type of isolation.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-06 16:01:59+00:00
Doesn't really feel like a good faith engagement with the larger point, much less the specific point. I'm inclined to debate, but what's the point? The reality and impacts of what's happening are documented and easily available to those privileged enough to not feel any personal experience from what's happening in and to the world if you're ever more curious than you are right now.
by cmurf | 2025-04-06 16:02:29+00:00
And then there's this idiot talking about screws in iPhones. Is this even how iPhones are built? Piles of hidden screws?

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lm5p4tdc6a2c

So many screws that we should have human American workers installing screws in iPhones? And this is how we make American workers wealthier?

They think we're stupid or they want us to be stupid. This isn't an economic policy. It's a way to reward fealty and punish disloyalty, to a specific person.
by thewebguyd | 2025-04-06 16:02:32+00:00
> If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.

It's the someone to blame part that's important in big corporate bureaucracy. It's being able to tell your boss "We've done everything we can, it's in Oracle's hands now" limits your own liability vs. "We need to fix this ourselves, and haven't solved the problem yet."
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-04-06 16:02:38+00:00
We can see historically that advertising evolved from the charmingly blunt "Foo Bros. makers of hats" to "makers of the FINEST hats" (untrue, but at least we still know what business they're in...) to "wear Foo or no one will talk to you again". Along the way, regulations had to be enacted here and there, snake oil didn't actually raise the dead, so lying about that was banned, but letting us feel that we're inadequate because we can see how happy and cool the people wearing Foo are on TV (or TT) is just their free speech. And of course there are the side effects TFA touches on like building trillion dollar empires for Goog and Meta, and using the same levers to manipulate voting and buying.

Personally, I can imagine a world without ads because I block them everywhere I can, and somehow I still manage to buy things, even if they might not be making me feel as cool as I should if I'd only play along.
by sepositus | 2025-04-06 16:02:47+00:00
This was an enlightening article (as I wasn't too familiar with the history of TB), but I'm struggling to grasp the overall point. If USAID is all that's standing between us and TB taking over the world, that's a _seriously_ lousy place to be in. Why are we not spending time talking about resolving that issue instead? You could argue that restoring USAID gives us more time to resolve the issue, but then I would ask what has been happening during the time the funding was active?

Maybe I misunderstood the author's assertion.
by btrettel | 2025-04-06 16:03:33+00:00
It does address the base rate, though not in a fully satisfactory way. You're correct to point out the number of Teslas on the road vs. other vehicles, as is this person who mentions driving hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601681

The replies to my comment seem to me to be addressing the question of what the appropriate reference class is, not the base rate fallacy.
by shalmanese | 2025-04-06 16:03:51+00:00
> reading it, I felt like a child: it only says common sense stuff, but I had been doing everything wrong my whole life

Negotiation is a grammar. The rules of the grammar, when laid out on the page, sound incredibly basic. But like any grammar, anyone used to "hearing" the grammar, it becomes immediately apparently who has command of the grammar and who is making grammatical mistakes.

But the point of the grammar is not to learn the grammar, the point of the grammar is to make beautiful sentences. How far you choose to go down the path is up to your own avocation but learning the grammar allows you to understand and communicate the beautiful sentences of negotiation.
by dijit | 2025-04-06 16:04:44+00:00
that’s what I’m doing already, the issue is that unsafe code exists at all.

In order to call the win32 API one must create structs and pass pointers to them into the function call.

sending data is actually quite easy. But reading back data is quite difficult, in some cases you may have a list of something.

Regardless, Rust is not helping me anymore in those bits, and since all of the tools that find memory issues target primarily C++, and rust mangles certain things for C+ + toolchains - I find myself a little bit stuck, I’m not a genius and I’ll take all the help I can get.
by rayiner | 2025-04-06 16:05:08+00:00
> He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and break things". So let's fire 80% of the staff, see what falls down, and rehire where we made "mistakes". I really think he has an alarmingly high threshold for the number of lives we can lose if it accelerates the pace of progress.

Which seems like an antidote to the current culture of "don't build anything anywhere."
by dguest | 2025-04-06 16:05:12+00:00
Here's a simple explanation for what is going on in the US. I'd love to know if people think this is sufficient.

There are two types of taxes:

- Domestic taxes are levied by congress

- International tariffs are controlled by one person (the president)

So if the president wants to control people via taxes, they use tariffs. By this theory it has nothing at all to do with financial policies or political parties: it's just another tool we've given the president and we shouldn't be surprised if it gets used. By the same theory, if the president had full control over domestic taxes we'd see exactly the same thing.
by foobarian | 2025-04-06 16:05:24+00:00
> But let’s be honest: that’s not happening. Tariffs raise prices, but they don’t magically bring manufacturing back home. From my conservative perspective, companies should have the flexibility to offshore production—especially if they face pressure from unions or rising domestic costs.

I mean... in theory they would if the numbers work out i.e. if tariffs offset the additional labor/regulatory costs. The problem is they are hard to trust to stick around long enough for the capex to pay off.
by otterley | 2025-04-06 16:05:55+00:00
You must be using a different definition of “owe” than the rest of the world. By any layperson’s and lawyer’s definition, any money you deposit in a bank is definitely owed back to you. And it’s definitely placed in the liabilities column of their accounting books.

Any interest is certainly owed as well since it’s a consideration of a deposit agreement, but both are owed, not just the latter.
by gymbeaux | 2025-04-06 16:06:01+00:00
True, although I believe Maxwell is the oldest supported architecture for the current CUDA 12.x. Maxwell (eg GTX 980) came out around 2013, if memory serves. 10+ years of support is not bad at all considering ROCm supports only like 3 consumer AMD GPUs.

So your lousy laptop GTX 750Ti ehhh probably can’t practically be used for CUDA. But your lousy 1050Ti Max-Q? Sure.
Show HN: I have built my first AI notetaker. Any feedback?
by tommat32 | 2025-04-06 16:06:03+00:00
Hey there,

While searching for my next role as a PM in Blockchain + AI, I started building an AI-powered notetaker called MindNote: https://www.mindnote.online. The idea is simple: you input your thoughts, and AI helps you complete or modify them.

If you decide to test it, try using the prompt: Keep this text and…"(add budget, complete list, organize alphabetically, add their translation, etc.).

The first big release is all about modifying your notes with AI prompts. The next big step? Capturing thoughts directly from the mind using brain-to-text technology.

There is a 3 days free trial: https://www.mindnote.online Video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okq_LZLbDfI
by AbstractH24 | 2025-04-06 16:06:05+00:00
No, but I think we saw the start of a correction for that in 2022 and 2023. One which the emergence of AI sort of interrupted in a way that feels muddy.

A lot of startups still are trying to avoid raising down-rounds because of valuation used to raise money in 2021 that were unrealistic. For startups that seems like it is still one of the major issues that will come to a head. Particularly as it becomes clear AI is not yet mature enfough to empower the kind of growth without headcount people are projecting for.

The 11X story last month seemed like a leading indicator we were starting to see AI’s real vs touted ability come to a head, but not sure where that goes in light of tariffs.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-06 16:06:17+00:00
> So for edge cases sure, add a “this is an emergency drive to a hospital without LiDAR” mode but you don’t need to handle normal driving without them.

As a comparison for planes, there are not "this is an emergency, please land yourself" buttons for smaller aircraft:

* https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/aviation/five-ways-garmin-...

* https://www.garmin.com/en-US/legal/aluse/
by eweise | 2025-04-06 16:06:38+00:00
Not to argue the point, but in the article, he can't get the snare sound right so he needed to revert to a sample. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of recreating sounds. It would be impossible for instance, to recreate the amen break with a sequencer because nothing would be on a quantized beat and every single drum hit is different.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-06 16:07:18+00:00
They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour.

It may be beneficial to the company to save overall "company time" at expense of wasting time for many individual employees, but I don't think this analysis accounts for the costs of people leaving or being fired. Both of those are very costly, but they're step changes and hard to attribute to any specific cause.
by aiaisabsicjbd | 2025-04-06 16:07:25+00:00
Tariffs make sense to protect industry critical to the independence of a country. Imagine how different the Ukraine war would look if the EU wasn’t dependent on Russian (or US) energy.

Yes, profits and growth may not be optimal. But it’s like complaining your 401k isn’t doing as well as it could since you’re paying for healthy food and a gym membership.

That being said the manner trump is implementing these tariffs is ridiculous. They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. These seem optimized for chaos and are likely aimed at political goals (see TikTok and China already) or simply crashing the market (wouldn’t be the first time Bessent has profited off a financial crash).
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-04-06 16:07:33+00:00
Dice are considered "biased" if not all sides have equal probability, even if that's literally true.

When you look up the definition of bias you see "prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair."

So the way we use the word has an implication of fairness to most people, and unfortunately reality isn't fair. Truth isn't fair. And that's what I'm trying to point out here in reference to LLM output.
by n3storm | 2025-04-06 16:08:29+00:00
"Smaller older roads" XD

We don't live every family in a house miles away from work, schools and friends. Many of us live in cities, within flats, with lines of metro or bus close by. Our children go walking to schools. Roads are fine and maintained so regular vehicles can be used instead of 4x4, bikes are respected. Roads have sidewalks to walk.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-04-06 16:09:05+00:00
> “In 1999, theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum proposed a wild restructuring of the cosmos”

> “The brane-bulk model is a speculative idea for sure, but a fun one.”

I feel like it’s communicated pretty clearly that it isn’t some breakthrough finding that everybody agrees on. You could google the mentioned researchers/theories and find out more information if you still weren’t sure.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-06 16:09:23+00:00
You introduced an n^2 config algorithm but now you're worried about the much smaller performance impact from going to the end of the file instead of sometimes stopping halfway?

And for the record I'm not convinced your way is simpler. The code gets sprinkled with config loading calls instead of just checking a variable, and the vast majority of the parser is the same between versions.
by deinonychus | 2025-04-06 16:09:29+00:00
>My roommate comes in and talks, and while they're doing that I automatically start cleaning my room.

The moment a guest enters my apartment, my body immediately begins cleaning my kitchen and putting away dishes and cleaning up messes or tidying my living room.

I never thought of this in the body doubling context, but as a self-soothing thing for social pressure. Or maybe genuine guilt for the state of my apartment. It gives me something to do instead of just standing around maintaining eye contact (and the second effect of making the place nicer to exist in, for me and my guest).

Kind of reminds me of another social self-soothing thing, where if I'm not entirely comfortable with a guest (a newer friends or romantic partner) I subconsciously place something in between us, like standing on opposite sides of the kitchen island.

>Having someone in the room helps me relax that self-demand. I don't "should" I just "do".

I feel this in my bones. I've been living alone for a few years and I'm actually going to move in with a roommate soon to see if it can keep me "online" more often without draining me. I totally think it's a good idea to try hang or work in the living room with your laptop.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-04-06 16:09:35+00:00
I can see that cutting out the LIDAR could qualify as "cheap." And maybe he's being risky on betting on lowering the cost by simplifying the technology.

But why make the jump to "fraud/charlatan"? Every system needs to be finite. We can invest in every bell and whistle. Furthermore, he's upfront about the decision. Fraud requires deception.
by fire_lake | 2025-04-06 16:09:37+00:00
This is too simple. Prices float somewhere between cost to produce and value to consumers.

You can’t raise prices beyond value or no one will buy it.

You can’t lower prices below costs (for too long) or you go out of business.

Competition pushes prices down towards costs.

Therefore businesses are always looking for markets with barriers so they can rise prices to value.

Tariffs typically raise costs for all producers, but this only inevitably leads to price increases when competition has driven prices down to near costs.

Unfortunately many staple grocery products fall into this category.
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-06 16:09:39+00:00
> Gravity, the thinking goes, can escape our brane and extend into the bulk. That explains why it’s so weak. All the other forces must play in only three spatial dimensions, while gravity can extend itself out to four, spreading itself much too thin in the process.

Wouldn't this cause gravitational force to fall off with distance using something other than an inverse-square law? I think this explanation would be a better fit for the weak force than gravity for this reason. Thoughts?

More broadly: inverse-square behavior (Gravity, EM etc) strikes me as an intrinsic property of 3D geometry; more so of a tell of dimensionality than the magnitude of the force. (I believe the article is inferring higher dimensionality from relative magnitude, vice distance falloff)
by watwut | 2025-04-06 16:09:46+00:00
Shakespeare wrote plays that were meant to be played by actors and that is how they are used till today. Todays equivalent is a movie script. So indeed, it would be better off studying books to learn how to create top selling books.

Articles criticizing hero worship are kind of better when author can demonstrate they know a lot about history and the field they write about. I read some of those articles. But this one seems to make mane claims, compares apples with oranges and then throws around names of people that basically no one worships.

I never seen anyone claim that Euler is the most important mathematician or spend a lot of effort learning about him as person. We do learn some of his theories, because they are actually still relevant to us.
by Teleoflexuous | 2025-04-06 16:11:19+00:00
Thanks for checking it out. It could definitely use larger library of sounds in general.

Ideally, I'd like to allow sharing and storing of presets, but it was simply out of scope for the PoC - the functionality is there in the desktop version btw, but it on the other hand asks users to download an unknown .exe and then share mp3 and json files with each other, putting us firmly in the mid-90s'.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-06 16:11:59+00:00
Well, you can close all file descriptors (except the pipe used for sending the return value back to the parent), re-mmap all files with MAP_PRIVATE, and then use SECCOMP_SET_MODE_STRICT to isolate the child process. But at that point, what are you even doing? Probably nothing useful.

If there were a Quick Fix for safety, we'd probably have discovered it by now.
by CRConrad | 2025-04-06 16:12:28+00:00
> Linux feels a bit different since the complete system is not controlled by a single vendor. You have multiple distributions with their own kernel versions, libc versions, library dependencies, etc.

No, AFAICS that can't be it. The problem is that all those libraries (libc and others?) change all the time, and aren't backwards-compatible with earlier versions of themselves. If they were backwards-compatible, you could just make sure to have the newest one any of your applications needs, and everything would work.
by travisjungroth | 2025-04-06 16:12:30+00:00
> You have a main and a backup pilot, but either one must be 100% capable of doing it on their own. The backup is silently double checking, but their assignments are more about ensuring that the copilot doesn't just check out because they're human.

This is not how flying works in a multi-crew environment. It’s a common misconception about the dynamic.

Both pilots have active roles. Pilots also generally take turns who is manipulating the flight controls (“flying the airplane”) each flight.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-06 16:13:22+00:00
I see that you have also said "You can literally watch how (Tesla) FSD perform all readily live on YouTube"

I for one find this line of argument - that videos on YouTube are a stronger signal than regulatory approval - to be absolutely wrongheaded, delusional and laughable. YouTube proves nothing, and as a platform, was never intended to. Unlike regulatory approval.
by virtualritz | 2025-04-06 16:13:25+00:00
I think the point of parent was that the issue, the too narrow leading, is not a change that needs debating. On a mailing list, issue tracker or whatever.

Or if you think it actually was, this was not a project that I'd want to get involved in.

As someone who reads mostly ePubs, many of which suffer from issues this project aims to fix, I mean that in a very caring way.
by graemep | 2025-04-06 16:13:26+00:00
I agree, and I encouraged my kids to read the classics, but I did not give them a list of stuff they must read. I suggested things I thought they would enjoy.

> Around 30yo, I got Gulliver's Travels as a gift. Wow. I loved it. Provided context for so many common clichés.

Another writer whose works are just a bunch of clichés. I was disappointed to find Shakespeare was the same. (that is supposed to be a joke, BTW).

I do not think it such a disaster to read those at 30. better to read them a bit later and enjoy them, than to read them earlier and not. What you enjoy does change over time.

I think the most important thing is to get kids to read, then to read anything reasonably good.
by deinonychus | 2025-04-06 16:13:39+00:00
> It's now gotten to a point where I'm actively seeking desks with my screen exposed to the room, so people would be able to see me procrastinate, guilt tripping me to limit this sort of behavior.

I have this same brain. Working in public at a coffee shop is a great baseline, but it's even better if I can feel the social pressure to not fuck off even if it's made up by my own neurotic head. It's a crazy double-edged sword to wield. Really useful, but I think it heightens burnout and I can't stand to stay in the same place for long due to the palpable buildup of pressure to Go Home.
by TFYS | 2025-04-06 16:13:57+00:00
> generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation (because those are the ones that can afford the market clearing price on said advertising).

This is true, but only for the set of messages that produce value that can be captured by the advertiser. This set is a small subset of messages that produce value. For example, a message about the benefits of excercise/socializing/climate action would produce a lot of value, but not in a form that any single advertiser can capture. So a lot of high value messages don't get produced in the current system, and might have a better chance in a more "natural" attention economy.

Advertising also increases the value of a product, so the value of things whose value can be captured by advertisers will be inflated when compared to their value in an environment without advertising.