MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by disambiguation | 2025-04-08 00:02:30+00:00
AI is a problem, so is lying, but this is a non issue already solved by the ancient tradition of in person interviews.

I assume the folks at kapwing are monitoring the responses, so if you're really open to ideas then i offer the following for your consideration:

The best interview I've had to date has been a live debugging challenge. Given an hour, a printed sheet of requirements, and a mini git repo of mostly working code, try to identify and solve as many bugs as possible, with minimum requirements and bonus goals for the ambitious.

This challenge checks all the boxes of a reliable and fair assessment. It cant be faked by bullshittery or memorized leetcode problems. Its in person so cheating and AI is out of the equation, but more importantly it allows for conversation, asking questions, sharing ideas, and demonstrating, rather than explaining, their problem solving process. Finally its a test that actually resembles what we do on a daily basis, rather than the typical abstract puzzles and trivia that look more like a bizarre IQ test.

Stumbling upon this format was such a revelation to me and I'm stunned it hasn't been more widely adopted. You'll meet many more "Sams" as your company grows - many will fool you, some already have. But a well designed test doesn't lie. Its up to you and your company to have the discipline to turn down cheap and easy interviewing tactics to do things the right way.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-08 00:03:59+00:00
The Roman empire at this time made massive use of auxiliaries - ie not Romans. These are soldiers from conquered lands. Mercenaries were also used a lot. Mercs are soldiers for hire rather than hired soldiers!

Auxiliaries might be closer to slaves than soldiers and mercenaries might have fewer rights than auxiliaries. The devil is in the details. Auxiliaries might be granted Roman Citizenship at commencement or after a period of service.

In general the policy was to deploy aux. from the other end of the empire to augment your top troops in a particular war theatre. Mercs were used to top up if available - think of them as Uber or Lyft when you've run out of decent taxis 8)

Ideally you'd expend your aux and mercs carefully, to keep your real killers (heavy infantry) going. However its just not that simple, depending on what you (Roman General) had at your disposal in terms of troops. It also depended on you not being daft and throwing your cavalry up hill at pointy sticks or whatever. "Skirmishers" can also be devastating:

The Germans (have a look at my username - yes I'm English) german - might mean spearman (I was told this by a bloke from Bayern). They were skirmishers - no armour and a big pointy stick and a buckler shield. They brought low several Roman legions.

Anyway. The term Legionary is a tricky one. And so is German and quite a few other terms here.
by enbugger | 2025-04-08 00:04:16+00:00
I was always inspiring the level editor in Cube 2: Sauerbraten (http://sauerbraten.org). This seems like an alternative to BSP approach which was more popular at the time. But I think this game's octree-based solution has more potential than just the render and raycast logic implemented in the engine. You could potentially make the entire level fully destructible and keep it optimized at the same time. The level building was also fun when I was teenager. No game allowed to edit levels with other players connected to the server and that was working in 2004!
by presentation | 2025-04-08 00:04:24+00:00
Seriously, I think the subtext is that people in the West equate Japanese = sexist (and therefore are an inferior people) and that the choice of focusing on ojisans, is a sexist decision made to degrade women.

When in reality it probably is just a light-hearted decision since old men are goofy, a lot of visible local businesses in rural Japan tend to be run by men, and the concept provoked a laugh.
by falcor84 | 2025-04-08 00:04:44+00:00
I love that and would maybe even add a model price parameter on each such function call. Perhaps e.g. an number in the range 1-10, with 1 being the cheapest available, and 10 being the best available (whatever the price), and then we'd have environment settings choose the actual models to use for each value. And perhaps have an overload fail-safe to switch all of the queries to cheaper models as a form of throttling.
by shitpostbot | 2025-04-08 00:06:19+00:00
Signal is end-to-end encrypted. One end is the Signal app on your phone. The other end is the Signal app on their phone. The Signal app is developed by people, using computers. Both of those things can be compromised, neither of them are under the perview of the U.S. security agencies.

I would put the market value of a backdoor into all Senior White House communications as certainly >$10B, and probably >$100B, limited only by how long the buyer believed it would be a reliable source of intel. (it may be better to offer it as a subscription service.)

At that point everything should be assumed to be compromised until demonstrated to a reasonable degree of confidence that it's probably safe. A random install from an app store is not that.
by Levitating | 2025-04-08 00:06:39+00:00
> See, I know that shipping end-user software - like the Tailwind compiler - if that software is written in an interpreted language - is fucking hard.

This I don't get. This is interpreted code, most web backends integrate node, why not just ship a node module? Why in gods name ship bun.

The whole web development scene has had some of the worst software engineering I've ever seen. With the exception of the Ruby scene, we have Tilt and Nokogiri for these types of things.
by shade | 2025-04-08 00:06:53+00:00
Yep, I'm in the exact same situation as you.

The tools for in-person are getting better, but aren't frictionless to set up and sometimes require you to spend time futzing with getting your iPad or iPhone to actually see an external microphone. I don't know if Android is better about this or not, unfortunately. I would _hope_ that interviewers would extend people a bit of grace about this, but who knows.

As an aside - I saw your post on Apple Live Captions, and completely agree with you. I've been slowly adding to a collection of reviews of various captioning tools, and was _very_ critical of some of the choices Apple made there.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-04-08 00:08:19+00:00
What you're experiencing is commonly referred to as "luck". It's the same reason people consistently think newer versions of ChatGPT are nerfed in some way. In reality, people just got lucky originally and have unrealistic expectations based on this originally positive outcome.

There's no bug or glitch happening. It's just statistically unlikely to perform the action you wanted and you landed a good dice roll on your first turn.
by hunter2_ | 2025-04-08 00:09:00+00:00
Good point. If I have 2 oscillators, and no control over their phase as they mix, then an option to choose 25% vs 75% for one of them would at least offer some variation instead of none.

As for compression, this [0] is a good intro. Most commonly it is applied to a signal deliberately to achieve a desired outcome, but I'm referring to a (generally) undesired speaker nonlinearity [1] near its maximum power handling capacity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

[1] https://marshallforum.com/threads/what-exactly-does-speaker-...
by presentation | 2025-04-08 00:09:17+00:00
Ojisan age bracket can be pretty wide, but 81 sounds to me more like an ojiichan. That said, if they're running a business and are still somewhat lively they can possibly still pass as ojisan in context.

Oniisan is much younger usually; usually I don't hear ojiisan so much as ojiichan (as well as ojisan rather than ojichan), my wife is Japanese and it rubs her weird to hear the opposite honorific in these cases.
by catlover76 | 2025-04-08 00:09:36+00:00
Unfortunate. I was a subscriber, though not an avid reader.

But never a paid subscriber. In retrospect, I could and maybe should have been. I was a paid subscriber at one point for both The Economist and The New Yorker. But for those, I got physical copies. Paying for something purely digital is the only aspect of my not paying for Quartz that I remember.
by zahlman | 2025-04-08 00:09:53+00:00
On the flip side: when you do intend to make a larger project like that, consciously focusing on the internal utility piece first is often a good move. For example, Pip doesn't offer a real API; anyone who wants their project to install "extra" dependencies dynamically is expected to (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12332975) run it as a subprocess with its own command line. I suspect that maintaining Pip nowadays would be much easier if it had been designed from that perspective first, which is why I'm taking that approach with Paper.
by cjbillington | 2025-04-08 00:10:31+00:00
Huh, that's not my recollection.

Mercurial on windows was "download tortoisehg, use it", whereas git didn't have a good GUI and was full of footguns about line endings and case-insensitivity of branch names and the like.

Nowadays I use sublime merge on Windows and Linux alike and it's fine. Which solves the GUI issue, though the line ending issue is the same as it's always been (it's fine if you remember to just set it to "don't change line endings" globally but you have to remember to do that), and I'm not sure about case insensitivity of branch names.

Pretty sure Mercurial handles arbitrary filenames as UTF-8 encoded bytestrings, whether there was a problem with this in the past I can't recall, but would be very surprised if there was now.

Edit: does seem there at least used to be issues around this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7256708/mercurial-proble...

though google does show at least some results for similar issues with git
by emmelaich | 2025-04-08 00:10:49+00:00
In early 2000s I was researching VCSs for work and also helping a little developing arch, bazaar then (less so) bzr. I trialed Bitkeeper for work. We went with Subversion eventually. I think I tried Monotone but it was glacially slow. I looked at Mercurial. It didn't click.

When I first used Git I thought YES! This is it. This is the one. The model was so compelling, the speed phenomenal.

I never again used anything else unless forced -- typically Subversion, mostly for inertia reasons.
by masswerk | 2025-04-08 00:12:48+00:00
As for the current one, a few years ago (2016), I wrote a new game for the PDP-1, a Computer Space simulator for the machine that inspired this first coin-op arcade video game. (Hence, Ironic Computer Space Simulator or short ICSS.) It proves that the venerable PDP-1 is capable of running a video game at 60 fps!

https://www.masswerk.at/icss/

As this was a RetroChallenge project, there's also project blog: https://www.masswerk.at/rc2016/10/
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-08 00:13:19+00:00
> Americans who lightly support Israel are baby boomers that won't be with us much longer

While 55+ is strongly pro-Israel, 35 to 54-year olds are moderately pro-Israel [1]. So sure, in 30 to 60 years we might see a demography-driven shift. (Gen Z isn't pro-Palestine as much as more evenly divided.)

One of the strategic mistake the American pro-Palestinian movement made from the beginning was deploying majoritarian tactics. Those don't work if you don't actually have a majority. (This protest is an example of it.) Instead, the movement should be deploying minority tactics in the way e.g. the gun lobby does.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/611375/americans-views-israel-p...
by AftHurrahWinch | 2025-04-08 00:13:35+00:00
Original title: Niemann withdraws from Freestyle Chess in Paris hours after being informed about new security equipment

Apologies for mangling it, it was much too long

My summary:

"Niemann had recently shared a post on social media informing his followers that he would soon be coming to Paris.

Norwegian outlet TV 2 has reported that Neimann pulled out at the last minute as soon as he learnt about the new security measures. The event’s management confirmed to TV 2 that Niemann pulled out shortly before his scheduled arrival at the tournament hotel. His exit comes in the wake of an announcement by the organisers and billionaire Jan Henric Buettner, who revealed the installation of advanced security equipment aimed at detecting cheating.

[Magnus] Carlsen had previously accused [Neimann] of cheating. Niemann later admitted to cheating in online games but denied all allegations that Carlsen made and went on to file a $100 million defamation lawsuit."
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-08 00:14:00+00:00
Oh I have. For example I remember this project:

>> Quantitatively, the QT-Opt approach succeeded in 96% of the grasp attempts across 700 trial grasps on previously unseen objects. Compared to our previous supervised-learning based grasping approach, which had a 78% success rate, our method reduced the error rate by more than a factor of five.

https://research.google/blog/scalable-deep-reinforcement-lea...

That was in 2018.

So what do you think, is vision-based robotic manipulation and grasping a solved problem, seven years later? Is QT-Opt now an established industry standard in training robots with RL?

Or was that just another project that was announced with great fanfare and hailed as a breakthrough that would surely lead to great increase of capabilities... only to pop, fizzle and disappear in obscurity without any real-world result, a few years later? Like most of DeepMind's RL projects do?
SensorLM: Real-Time Sensor Fusion Using LLM Reasoning
by PHOTON1233 | 2025-04-08 00:14:32+00:00
Imagine a delivery robot navigating a sidewalk:

Its wheel encoder shows it's slowing down unexpectedly Its thermal sensor detects a warm object ahead Its motion prediction model predicts the wheels should still be moving normally.

What if the robot’s system structures this into real-time schemas like:

{

"sensor_type": "rotary_encoder", "metrics": {"wheel_speed_m_s": 0.1}, "recent_values": [0.8, 0.7, 0.1], "metadata": { "units": "m/s", "mount_position": "rear_left_wheel" }

}

A similar schema from the thermal sensor, showing a 37°C object 0.6 m ahead Another from the prediction model, showing expected speed of 0.8 m/s

The LLM than receives these and reasons:

“Observed wheel speed dropped sharply from 0.8 to 0.1 m/s. Thermal sensor shows a warm object directly ahead. Predicted speed was 0.8 m/s — but reality diverged. Likely obstruction from human or animal. Initiate 5-second pause and begin visual recording.”

I'm thinking of building a lightweight library to make this plug-and-play:

You feed it raw, filtered, or predicted sensor data, and it outputs structured, LLM-readable snapshots — ready for reasoning and decision-making.

Not launched yet — just validating.
by remexre | 2025-04-08 00:15:04+00:00
Nix(OS) is aware of namespaces, and can use them (in fact, the aforementioned gaming support relies on them), but versioning packages still works better than versioning the system in most cases.

Consider three packages, A, B, and C. B has two versions, A and C have one.

- A-1.0.0 depends on B-2.0.0 and C-1.0.0. - C-1.0.0 depends on B-1.0.0.

If A gets a path to a file in B-2.0.0 and wants to share it with C (for example, C might provide binaries it can run on files, or C might be a daemon), it needs C to be in a mount namespace with B-2.0.0. However, without Nix-store-like directory structure, mounting B-2.0.0's files will overwrite B-1.0.0's, so C may fail to start or misbehave.
by defrost | 2025-04-08 00:15:19+00:00
Of etymological interest:

The word Usonian appears to have been coined by James Duff Law, a Scottish writer born in 1865. In a miscellaneous collection, Here and There in Two Hemispheres (1903), Law quoted a letter of his own (dated June 18, 1903) that begins "We of the United States, in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title 'Americans' when referring to matters pertaining exclusively to ourselves." He went on to acknowledge that some author had proposed "Usona" (United States of North America), but that he preferred the form "Usonia" (United States of North Independent America).

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usonia
by mrandish | 2025-04-08 00:16:53+00:00
> Palming is awesome. Misdirection is awesome.

Since studying magic has been a lifelong passion since I was a kid, I clearly couldn't agree more. However, experience has shown that despite claiming otherwise, most people aren't actually interested in the answer to "How did you do that?" beyond the first 30 seconds. So... you're unusual - and that's great!

> but I still want to know precisely how.

Well, you're extremely fortunate to be interested in learning how magic is really done at the best time in history for doing so. I was incredibly lucky to be accepted into the Magic Castle as a teenager and mentored by Dai Vernon (widely thought to be the greatest close-up magician of the 20th century) who was in his late 80s at the time. I also had access the Castle's library of magic books, the largest in the world at the time. 99% of other kids on Earth interested in magic at the time only had a handful of local public library books and mail-order tricks.

Today there's an incredible amount of insanely high-quality magic instruction available in streaming videos, books and online forums. There are even master magicians who teach those willing to learn via Zoom. While most people think magicians want to hoard their secrets, the reality couldn't be more different. Magicians love teaching how to actually do magic to anyone who really wants to learn. However, most magicians aren't interested in wasting time satisfying the extremely fleeting curiosity of those who only want to know "how it works" in the surface sense of that first 30 seconds of only revealing the proximate 'secret method'.

Yet many magicians will happily devote hours to teaching anyone who really wants to actually learn how to do magic themselves and is willing put in the time and effort to develop the skills, even if those people have no intention of ever performing magic for others - and even if the student isn't particularly good at it. It just requires the interest to go really deep on understanding the underlying principles and developing the skills, even if for no other purpose than just having the knowledge and skills. Personally, I haven't performed magic for non-magicians in over a decade but I still spend hours learning and mastering new high-level skills because it's fun, super intellectually interesting and extremely satisfying. If you're really interested, I encourage you to dive in. There's quite literally never been a better time to learn magic.
by legitster | 2025-04-08 00:17:09+00:00
TL;DR:

- They are allowed to use the AEA to arrest and deport foreign criminals

- The Supreme Court unanimously believes all detainees are entitled to judicial review and a court date as part of the detainment process

- Any existing cases of rights violations needs to be prosecuted in the district court where the detainment occurs, not in the DC court.

- Most of the dissent is that ruling was rushed and changing the location of the suits was unnecessary.

Sotomayor:

> That means, of course, that the Government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025.

> Nor can the Government "immediately resume" removing individuals without notice upon vacatur of the TRO, as it promised the D. C. Circuit it would do. See 2025 WL 914682, *13 (Millett, J., concurring) (referencing oral argument before that court).

> To the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.
by jen729w | 2025-04-08 00:17:09+00:00
Better than that is the Japanese 'Boss', which even comes in a very-Japanese steel tin. Great coffee that you can now get at most Australian servos, convenience stores, etc.

https://suntorybosscoffee.com

It's made in the Japanese iced style, which is easy to mimic at home and really does make a nice iced coffee.

1. Get your standard filter/drip machine. Nothing fancy.

2. Double the amount of coffee you normally use. You want it coming out strong.

3. Fill the receiving jug with ice.

4. Drip directly on to ice.
by ZeroTalent | 2025-04-08 00:18:18+00:00
I'm using LLMs to analyze 13F corporate filings, options flow, market news, etc. This was very labor intensive before. Essentially impossible for small companies. A 13F report can have 150 pages or so.

Just eliminating redious things. It's nothing difficult for a human, but we would have to hire a ton of humans and couldn't compete against the big guys then.

I'm not offering an LLM wrapper SaaS for my clients. We are just using this internally.
by blurker | 2025-04-08 00:19:04+00:00
I disagree. With classes, everything was stateful (because, y'know, classes). People were doing all sorts of crazy thing with the lifecycle methods and it was always a pain to have to remember the "this scope" and bind your event handlers. I saw so many bugs written by people who lost track of what "this" was.

Both paradigms have foot guns but having used both I much prefer the hook version.
by zahlman | 2025-04-08 00:19:05+00:00
The other replies (two at time of writing) suggested the tutorial built in to the Python documentation, specifically for Python, and I'd recommend it as well.

If you specifically want to practice using language features, you could start by taking a LeetCode etc. problem you find easy, and deliberately trying to write the code in different ways.

Oh, but take out the boilerplate that they want you to use for their automated testing. Test it yourself at the REPL, and make sure you have a good idea for what sorts of inputs to test with (and that you know what output to expect).

And, if you're feeling adventurous, read through the documentation for the `unittest` standard library and figure out how to test it yourself. Then look up Pytest and try to use that instead.

But you might be better served by trying to think of your own exercises, honestly.
Show HN: SensorLM: Real-Time Sensor Fusion Using LLM Reasoning
by PHOTON1233 | 2025-04-08 00:19:10+00:00
Imagine a delivery robot navigating a sidewalk: Its wheel encoder shows it's slowing down unexpectedly Its thermal sensor detects a warm object ahead Its motion prediction model predicts the wheels should still be moving normally.

What if the robot’s system structures this into real-time schemas like:

{

"sensor_type": "rotary_encoder", "metrics": {"wheel_speed_m_s": 0.1}, "recent_values": [0.8, 0.7, 0.1], "metadata": { "units": "m/s", "mount_position": "rear_left_wheel" }

}

A similar schema from the thermal sensor, showing a 37°C object 0.6 m ahead Another from the prediction model, showing expected speed of 0.8 m/s

The LLM than receives these and reasons:

“Observed wheel speed dropped sharply from 0.8 to 0.1 m/s. Thermal sensor shows a warm object directly ahead. Predicted speed was 0.8 m/s — but reality diverged. Likely obstruction from human or animal. Initiate 5-second pause and begin visual recording.”

I'm thinking of building a lightweight library to make this plug-and-play:

You feed it raw, filtered, or predicted sensor data, and it outputs structured, LLM-readable snapshots — ready for reasoning and decision-making.

Not launched yet — just validating.
by azakai | 2025-04-08 00:19:23+00:00
The JVM is designed around Java. That's really the main difference, and it brings some downsides for the goals of wasm, which include running native code - think C++ or Rust. The JVM is great at Java, which relies on runtime inlining etc., but not at C++, which assumes ahead-of-time inlining and other optimizations.