MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2025-04-05 12:36:55+00:00
Centralised platforms have strong economic incentives to invade privacy.

Its not really about FOSS vs proprietary. FOSS is better because it can be verified, but, for example, Whatsapp is better than a FOSS platform that is not E2EE and not decentralised.

Ideally we would use decentralised, E2EE encrypted FOSS.

Governments also like centralised platforms because they enable surveillance.
by smileysteve | 2025-04-05 12:37:11+00:00
The "calculations" of trade deficits not including services (which America became a services economy) is a bold choice. Ie, the iPhone might be buying from China, but if you purchase an iTunes or iCloud subscription.

It's completely possible that America produces luxury goods (ie John Deere tractors, Ford sprinter vans, airplanes) that can only have so much demand to smaller nations.
by 1dom | 2025-04-05 12:37:16+00:00
Can you share a link to your web server please?

I'm finding it hard to make sense of your comment: I can't reconcile some of the stuff you're saying. My gut feeling is you're either ridiculously smart, so smart that defining and implementing a security rules engine for a web server is something genuinely trivial for you, and the world has a lot to learn from you. Or, you're really, really not aware of how much you don't know, so much so that you're going to end up doing something stupid/dangerous without realising.

Either way, an example of a supposedly fast web server written by you should clear it up pretty quickly.

Sorry, because this feels a little rude, and I don't mean it to be, but you're contradicting quite a lot of widely held common sense and best practise in a very blasé way, and I think that makes the burden of proof a little higher than normal.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-05 12:37:48+00:00
Does “in-person” mean flying in the candidate, and performing the interview on-site?

Does “100% of their loops” mean everything after the initial contact?

I suspect smaller companies could find this challenging.

I’m old enough to remember when independent recruiters acted almost like “talent agents,” with large payouts.

This encouraged them to curate a “personal brand,” and they would often do a lot of the vetting, themselves.

I believe that executive recruiters still operate that way, but engineering recruiters seem to have sharply declined, since those days.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-04-05 12:38:02+00:00
I couldn't agree more. LLMs are legitimate tools and, ideally, I want to see how effective a candidate is in using their available tools to solve complex problems.

The service on offer here is different. It's providing a means to use LLMs to fake your way through a technical interview.

Showing that you can use LLMs to quickly and correctly solve problems is a good skill to have. Offering up a solution from an LLM as your own work without acknowledging how you got there is just misrepresentation... or to put it another way is just lying. Maybe fake your degrees and experience while you're at it, right?

At least in the long run, many that need these tools to get in will be found out once they start having to solve real problems on the job. Just a shame about other, more qualified people being turned away. Of course if the LLM was sufficient enough on its own, perhaps a real software developer was never required to begin with.
by cudgy | 2025-04-05 12:38:05+00:00
Reminiscent of the dramatic release of a Syrian prisoner reported on CNN that was determined to be fake.

“CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime was not what it seemed.”

https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...
by raverbashing | 2025-04-05 12:38:09+00:00
The problem with people that think they're too smart is that they usually lack theory of mind

This crap is transparent. A person actually solving the problem won't type that fast or not think silently about it. And even better, the LLMs usually get stuck in a snag on some of the problems, or they write weird snippets

(though this might bring down the number of interviewers asking for leetcode)
by danielvaughn | 2025-04-05 12:38:10+00:00
My approach to technical interviews is just to talk shop with the candidate for an hour.

Throughout the conversation, we mostly stay light and touch on a lot of different topics. But every so often, I’ll drill in and start discussing some random topic at depth. If you drill in just 2-3 times throughout the interview, you get a pretty clear picture of the candidates average depth of knowledge.

Not only is this LLM proof, but you also get a sense of their opinions, their interests, their passion, etc.
by ErikAugust | 2025-04-05 12:38:53+00:00
The industry seems so divided on AI right now.

We have interviews where we aren't allowing the use of it (yet interviewees are using stealth AIs to cheat). At the same time, I am also hearing of organizations mandating the use of it, ie: "20% of the code committed needs to be generated". There's probably a set of orgs that exist that do not allow the use of AI in coding interviews, yet practically mandate the use of AI in day-to-day work!

We are at an inflection point I think, but my guess is AI is going to win out soon enough.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-05 12:39:02+00:00
It helps to look at where & why the author has settled: thanks to tech like Zoom (that really came into its own around Covid) one can be physically settled in a place and also participate in global markets and global conversations.

Good for fomo and good for anyone looking to design a life; why not live in a place that enriches your body! Wherever you live, you can now find work that connects and enriches your mind. Your designed life provides so much of what you seek from travel but also community: getting to say hello to the same people each day for years.
by visarga | 2025-04-05 12:39:07+00:00
This is true, a lot of progress can still happen based on simulation and synthetic data. But I am considering the long term game. In the long term we can't substitute simulation to reality. We can't even predict if a 3-body system will eventually eject an object, or if a piece of code will halt for all possible inputs. Physical systems implementing Turing machines are undecidable. Even fluid flows. The core problem is that recursive processes create an knowledge gap, and we can't cross that gap unless we walk the full recursion, there is no way to predict the outcome from outside. The real world is such an undecidable recursive process. AI can still make progress, but not at exponentially speed decoupled from the real world and not in isolation.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-05 12:39:13+00:00
Hmm, my wife likes to swim, I better start calling her my fish.

Whales need to take breaths on the surface, unlike fish, which can stay underwater basically indefinitely. Without that difference, whaling would be a lot more complicated, if not outright impossible, especially in the 19th century - you just can't catch a huge solitary animal in an ocean on purpose if it doesn't have to surface from time to time. Or only with sheer luck.

Even the ancient whalers were aware of the fact that whales need to breathe, and thus, at the very least, could say "well, these are some rather special fish, you know".
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-05 12:40:29+00:00
Some people here seem to believe this will make leetcode obsolete. I'm afraid it will just make cheatting a status quo - if everyone else aces the coding part of the interview because of some AI tool, then you are at a severe disadvantage if you try to play by the rules. From the perspective of the hiring manager it'll look like the coding questions are too easy, since everyone gets them right, except that one experienced person for some reason.
by KaiserPro | 2025-04-05 12:40:32+00:00
leetcode is a bastard. I fucking hate it with a passion.

Its almost useless as a way to learn how to be a better coder, as most of the "fastest" answers are unreadable.

But if you are using it as a basis for interviews, you are more likely to bump into someone who has trained on that particular question.

I'm not sure what the answer is, as other said, pair programming is kinda the answer. Maybe debugging something in your code base.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-04-05 12:40:38+00:00
> And now they can do fizz buzz with AI, Cursor, Copilot, etc.

No, they can't. These are the people who don't know the difference between a variable and a function call or what a module is. (90 percent of applicants.)

AI can't help them here. Even if they can copy-paste an AI response they still don't have the vocabulary to explain what they're copy-pasting even in most basic terms.
by jesseduffield | 2025-04-05 12:40:52+00:00
It appears that RedwoodJS as we know it is being wound down. I've never used Redwood JS but I've watched it from a distance as it was (to my knowledge) striving to be a proper fullstack JS framework akin to rails, which is a noble pursuit. Seems like they had some challenges getting traction and supporting React Server Components and now they're pivoting to a new project which revolves around cloudflare workers.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-05 12:41:43+00:00
If your main machine, your money-making linux computer, were infected with a very sophisticated rootkit and/or bootkit, how would you go about ridding your device of it?

Boot off Thumb or iPXE and flash the BIOS after confirming with the vendor in writing this is how they would do it for this particular bootkit. If this is not sufficient replace the BIOS chip. If that is not an option write off the server and accept the losses and lessons learned. Implement better security. File lawsuits against the vendor if the server came with the bootkit.
by api | 2025-04-05 12:42:09+00:00
That’s fascinating. I always figured that real estate hyperinflation just drove all the arts and cool counterculture stuff away.

The upper Midwest had a lot of culture too. Disco (Chicago was a big place for that), Motown (named after Detroit), techno (also Detroit), industrial (Cleveland / Akron), and house music (Chicago and Detroit) all either came from or had large contributions from what is now called the rust belt.

That whole region used to be solidly Democratic. It drifted a bit R in the 90s and 2000s until Trump flipped it with one word: tariffs. Another quote I remember from a guy in Michigan in 2016: "when Trump started talking about trade... I'd die for this man. I don't care what else he does."

Different people have different reasons for supporting a politician, but for these people it's... I'm not even sure it's hope at this point. For some of them it's revenge. They feel lied to and betrayed.

I guess that's part pretty different from the old Cali weed industry. Nobody promised them anything. For these people the Democrats told them NAFTA would bring jobs.
by siva7 | 2025-04-05 12:42:11+00:00
This only results in that technical interviews won't be done remote or as homework in the future. Even before covid i wouldn't have recommended this remote interview approach. The by far best results in interviewing were a technical talk-through over their past experiences or some short pair-developer task (mob programming or refinement) were they can use whatever tool they want if they lack experience to talk about - i wanna see how they tackle real problems by asking good questions. Hardly to fake even with advanced ai tools if the interviewer is a very experienced engineer.
by hresvelgr | 2025-04-05 12:42:51+00:00
> It would have been a far better language.

I like Tcl and I think it has some very admirable traits. That being said, I don't even want to picture the hellscape of an ecosystem that would have flourished if it became the language of the web. JS was the better timeline I will admit begrudgingly, and that includes the Scheme timeline as well.
by agubelu | 2025-04-05 12:42:56+00:00
Leetcode interviews only became popular because FAANG needed a somewhat objective way to weed out large quantities of applicants in an initial round. In this context, and as part of a broader interview process, it somewhat makes sense.

But then of course, since FAANG did it, everyone else jumped on the leetcode bandwagon and started asking ridiculous DSA-exam-type questions that had nothing to do with their actual work, even if they had the capacity to conduct proper interviews for their candidate volumes.
by ttyprintk | 2025-04-05 12:43:41+00:00
> Which is actually part of his strategy. You need fools that commit outrageous claims, threats and actions. Then he can play the good cop when it makes sense and just fire the fool. That is basically applied game theory on a meta- and psychological level.

Firings that support this: Flynn, McCabe, Esper, Bolton

Firings that support Trump’s Razor: Comey, Sessions, Tillerson, Nielsen, Krebs

“The dumbest explanation is often the correct one.” tells us that the increase in information from those moves is uselessly low for both him and us. Nevertheless, if Trump is able to influence the rules, the accumulation of side effects of high strategic value gives his advisers something to work with.
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-04-05 12:43:45+00:00
I'm seeing a lot of justification for this tool (on the tool's page and in the comments here) based on the "LeetCode is bad, companies shouldn't test for orthogonal skills".

While I agree with that sentence broadly, tools like this undermine the process even for non-orthogonal skills. For instance, we administer System Design interviews and Practical Coding interviews (usually, we give the candidate a code base and ask them to make a modification to it)—things that are not LeetCode and are pretty relevant to day-to-day work. We actually let candidates use AI, as long as they show how they're using it. Tools like still undermine our process even for those types of interviews.

I'm a realist and understand that tools like this are inevitable. But I don't think they're ethical, and I think the "Fuck Leetcode" argument justifies their existence. In general, trickery is wrong (whether it's companies doing it, or candidates).
by jfengel | 2025-04-05 12:44:49+00:00
And the story is in fact largely true. Daisey is a storyteller, not a journalist, and TAL is not a news program.

The lesson for journalists is that this isn't journalism, and the first clue is that it didn't come from a journalistic source. Listeners should have found that suspicious from the get-go... and so should Glass.

TAL screwed up. And the worst part is it fits a narrative in which NPR is a propaganda source, which is eagerly gobbled up by people who themselves are being uncritical.
by sim7c00 | 2025-04-05 12:45:47+00:00
a rules engine for a web server isnt difficult if it doesnt have to carry responsibility for the web app security itself. then its as the posted outlined really...

that being said, its common for new servers to have old vulns, not many coders will go over cve reports of apache and nginx and test their own code against old vulns in those.

i do find a lot of claims about performance or security are oftend unsupported as with this server. it just says it on the readme but provides no additional contex or proof or anything to back up those claims.

my thought is that original commenter gott riggered by that, perhaps rightfully, and points out thia fact more than anything. if you want to claim high performance or security, back it up with proof.

the simple fact its in rust doesnt make it more secure. and using async in rust doesnt imply good performance. it could in both cases. wheres the proof.?
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-05 12:46:36+00:00
"The situation is bad so all rights can just be completely eliminated" is not actually a tenable position. "We had to do a fascism because of Biden" is not real. It is a choice. One that you need to own.

If the rule is "people we claim are illegal immigrants can be sent to a Salvadoran gulag for the rest of their lives without process and even if we admit we made a mistake with somebody we cannot bring them back" then this means that literally anybody can be sent there. The government just picks me up off the street, claims that I'm an illegal immigrant even though I am a citizen, puts me a on a plane, and then no law or court can save me from spending the rest of my life in hell.

What a system.
by bogwog | 2025-04-05 12:47:05+00:00
> These "invisible AI" tools aren't destroying technical interviews - they're just exposing how broken they already were.

Whenever the topic about how broken tech interviews are has showed up on HN in the past, there were usually two crowds: the "they suck, but they're the best we've got" people, and the much less common "they suck, so we do something else" crowd. Almost everyone agreed they were broken.

What does it say about the tech industry that so many orgs continued to use a system that was known to be broken for so long? How much inefficiency and waste over the past couple of decades is attributable to bad hires? And conversely, how many efficiency improvements in the near future are going to get attributed to AI tech rather than the side effect of improved interviewing practices meant to combat AI candidates?
by rafram | 2025-04-05 12:47:07+00:00
I just don’t buy this argument as a reason people don’t want EVs. The primary benefit of an EV is that you ~never need to stop and “refuel” it unless you’re making a long road trip. You can install a charger at home, even a very slow one that doesn’t need a special circuit, and always have a full battery in the morning. When you do need to stop on a road trip, you can use fast charging, which is ~250 kW, so somewhere around a quarter of the gas pump’s “wattage.” You’ll probably want to use the bathroom/buy a drink anyway, so charging taking four-ish times as long as pumping isn’t really a big deal.
by abetusk | 2025-04-05 12:47:07+00:00
To further expand on this with some back-of-the-envelope calculation, I've heard EVs are on the order of 30-40 kWh. Say the power storage of the gas tank in an ICE car and the battery storage of an EV are commensurate. Conservatively, say refueling your ICE car takes about 1 min, so 30,000 Wh / ((1/60)h) ~ 1.8 MW.
by graemep | 2025-04-05 12:47:37+00:00
Not true on FB anymore, but a long way. What I see in my feed.

1. Racist meme - probably because I am visible ethnic minority so they hope it is rage bait. I continue to see a lot of wolf whistle racism on FB although I ignore it. A lot of it reads like it is written by someone who is not a native English speaker.

2. Sponsored post advertising a course for kids who want to be lawyers. Probably because I have a teenage daughter and I am an admin of two home education related groups. Not relevant to anything my kids wants to do though.

3. A post from a group I am in.

4. A stupid anti-home ed post - one of these ones where they take an image of a post somehwere else and mock it. More rage bait. It also talks about American stuff (you have school taxes, apparent?) and I am in the UK.

5. A map from a group I am not in that is copied from Our World in Data.

6. A sponsored post for a luxury bed.

7. A meme from a group I think is stupid, suggesting you encourage your daughters to dress modestly.

8. Pictures posted by a friend.

9. A post from a group I am in..

10. A post from someone I have never heard of.

That makes three determined by who I follow, to seven algorithmically chosen.
by otterley | 2025-04-05 12:48:17+00:00
Everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As important as getting things right is, nobody is perfect. Then, how you react when you make a mistake matters. You can cover up the truth, dissemble, point fingers, or—best of all—be humble and honest and apply the lessons learned in the future.

Kudos to Ira and his team for doing the right thing after realizing they did the wrong thing.
by matijash | 2025-04-05 12:49:05+00:00
Yeah, both RedwoodJS and BlitzJS appeared at about the same time as we started Wasp (https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp), with the same mission of being Rails/Laravel for JS.

We were excited to see that several instances of the same core idea appeared at the same time, and it gave us validation that we're on the right path. A bit sad about Redwood moving away from the original vision, but interested to see where this new direction takes it.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-05 12:49:27+00:00
> You can install a charger at home, even a very slow one that doesn’t need a special circuit

Lots of people rent, and might not have a parking space with charging available.

That said, battery and charging technology is evolving, so it might be a solved problem 10 years from now - especially as Toyota and Idemetsu Kosan are on track for mass producing Solid State EV batteries by 2028 [0]

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japans-idemitsu-buil...
by impure | 2025-04-05 12:49:38+00:00
The article starts off strong by making a strong argument that 'it's different this time' because of the US's trade deficit and how Americans buy too much junk and don't save enough.

But then it says 'That would lead U.S. GDP to rise, resulting in higher employment, higher wages, and less debt.' This is clearly false as tariffs distort the market. With free trade every country can specialize in what it is best at (their comparative advantage) maximizing GDP. So no, the GDP would fall because Americans are forced to divert resources from more lucrative industries.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-05 12:49:46+00:00
yeah, what the parent commenter said makes little sense. Google search certainly won't do this and not a lot of people use google as a cdn (and even if they did I doubt there is an adword/adsense integration like that). Maybe if you click like every result from a google search. Most annoying ads aren't served by the top ad providers anyways, there are a lot of ad networks and ad delivery services out there.

The #1 cause of that bot experience is vpns and proxies. I get that 3rd rate experience myself, but even then it is bad but not unusable bad.
by Jensson | 2025-04-05 12:49:47+00:00
A social media platform doesn't have the same networking effect when everyone speaks different languages. If you make a social media site in country A, and get everyone to use it there, happened a lot in Europe, but it doesn't spread to neighboring countries since all users spoke a different language.

This means that only really large countries can compete here since they start out with a big userbase and its much more likely for a smaller countries population to migrate to a large app than vice versa.

Where I live it took to after 2010 until American social media was more popular than local ones.
by Juliate | 2025-04-05 12:50:19+00:00
There are bigger markets than the USA in the world. Some that are even more prepared in the face of rising costs of petrol and gas, and that have seen this "Trump" hypothesis coming for several months, if not years.

USA is 17% of worldwide importations. Other growing markets (China, further integrating Europe, Africa, South America, India; even Russia, that's coming from far down) can take that cut, even if it's a temporary hard blowback. How long can the USA take a 50% cut of their importations? How long can the USA take a shift of the international exchange going to another currency than the dollar?

American exceptionalism used to be a thing. It still is, in very specific market segments, but that are now going to be heavily challenged, for sovereignty reasons rather than economic ones.

So I am not sure where is this going? Likely not in the appreciation of US stock market. Or maybe you have some factories, and factory workers, and raw materials hidden somewhere?
by KaiserPro | 2025-04-05 12:51:11+00:00
This is the kind of content I am here for.

I haven't touched music production stuff for about 18 years (Mackie D8b + protools represent), however its great to see someone break down a song bit by bit. It also helps that the song they are covering is a banger.

For a slightly tangentially related podcast you might like https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00106lb which is where a bunch of musicians each week create a playlist of 4 songs that each have a link.