MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roguecoder | 2025-04-07 21:38:51+00:00
Follow up questions will vary, but the bulk of most interviews is the same for every candidate, and candidates are then judged based on a rubric that is the same for every candidate (though often tailored to the specific role).

The consistency lets interviewers compare across candidates, and avoids the cognitive pitfall of defining a rubric after-the-fact that lets us hire the candidate who appealed to our lizard brains.

Even at startups, questions are also usually tested on several existing employees before it is used on the first external candidate, for calibration. Companies put a lot of time and money trying to hire for actual competence.
by tshaddox | 2025-04-07 21:38:57+00:00
> Frankly, for most magic tricks the method isn't very interesting, although there are some notable exceptions where the method is fascinating, sometimes to the extent it can be far more interesting than the effect it creates.

> However, in general, most magic theorists and inventors agree that the method, for example, "palm a second coin in the other hand", isn't usually especially interesting.

Fair enough. It sounds like I simply fundamentally disagree, because I think nearly any explanation of method is very interesting. For close-up maginc, the only exceptions for me would be if the explanation is "the video you were watching contains visual effects" or "the entire in-person audience was in on it."

Palming is awesome. Misdirection is awesome. I fully expect these sorts of things to be used in most magic tricks, but I still want to know precisely how. The fact that I'm aware of most close-up magic techniques but am still often fooled by magic tricks should make it pretty clear that the methods are interesting!
by jbd41 | 2025-04-07 21:39:13+00:00
The "I can dig it" happens if you do DIG on any object other than I think the dirt. Just DIG alone is what tests digging in a room (except it only works in the starting room to find anything).

Do you have any good pictures of the tape? There's a Youtube video of someone playing it on hardware so you can see the tape inside of the machine, but no clear pictures of the real tape.

(Also, hello, I wrote the post! There's a part 2 where I finish the game, and I'll be doing the other Interact adventure game, Mysterious Mansion, in about a week.)
by foxyv | 2025-04-07 21:39:40+00:00
Please note, that if someone is asking for payment in exchange for employment or help with recruitment, it is very often a scam. Be very careful of such schemes.

https://consumer.gov/scams-identity-theft/job-scams-explaine...

> Never pay to get a job. Honest employers won’t ask you to pay to get a job. And they won’t send you a check and tell you to send some of the money back. That’s a scam. The check will end up being fake.
by josephg | 2025-04-07 21:40:24+00:00
> Make those threads access external resources simultaneously, or memory mapped to external writers, and there is no support from Rust type system.

I don’t think that’s true.

External thread-unsafe resources like that are similar in a way to external C libraries: they’re sort of unsafe by default. It’s possible to misuse them to violate rust’s safe memory guarantees. But it’s usually also possible to create safe struct / API wrappers around them which prevent misuse from safe code. If you model an external, thread-unsafe resource as a struct that isn’t Send / Sync then you’re forced to use the appropriate threading primitives to interact with the resource from multiple threads. When you use it like that, the type system can be a great help. I think the same trick can often be done for memory mapped resources - but it might come down to the specifics.

If you disagree, I’d love to see an example.
by 827a | 2025-04-07 21:40:54+00:00
Given that a computer should be able to simulate at least some applicable aspects and processes of reality billions of times faster than the speed at which our own universe runs at: Yes, I think it is entirely reasonable to have these agents follow at least some kind of from-scratch evolutionary history. It might also be valuable: As it could further research in understanding what the word "applicable" there even means; what parts of our evolutionary history are important toward inductively reasoning your way toward a diamond in Minecraft? What parts aren't? How can that generalize?

If you code a reward function for each step necessary to get a diamond, you are teaching the AI how to do it. There is no other way to look at it. Its extremely unethical to claim, as Nature does, that it did this without "being taught", and it is in my eyes academic malpractice to claim, as their paper does, that it did this "without human data or curricula"; though mitigated by the reality that they admit this in the paper. If this is the case; I am still digesting the paper, as it is quite technical.

This isn't an LLM, I'm aware of this, but I am at the point where if I could bet on the following statement being true, I'd go in at five figures: Every major AI benchmark, advancement, or similar accomplishment in the past two years can almost entirely be explained by polluted training data. These systems are not nearly as autonomously intelligent as anyone making money on them says they are.
by tshaddox | 2025-04-07 21:41:12+00:00
> But, if your problem is simple enough that you can represent it with a handful of states with two or three transitions each, then you have a very trivial problem, so trivial that the state-machine diagram likely added nothing at all to your understanding of it.

And yet, it's extremely common to see apps with clearly broken states and state transitions for what should be relatively "trivial" state machines. Think play/pause buttons, buttons with loading states, form fields with error states, etc.
by robocat | 2025-04-07 21:41:18+00:00
> For prospective job candidates, my advice is still that "the truth will set you free"

Is that really good advice?

If you have the wisdom of knowing when to embellish and when to blur, then you're more likely to get a job and more likely to fit in.

I'm a spectrum, and generally I'm over-truthful and I notice my habit regularly affects me negatively.
by johnea | 2025-04-07 21:42:02+00:00
Isn't that the point?

The levy causes less people to buy the service, this reduces the service's revenue. This causes the service to be more likely to accommodate some kind of regulatory ragine.

Isn't that the point of the levy?

I'm not that simpathetic to people crying about not being able to use this type of service anyway. I've never used one, and won't in the future. I've even mostly stopped using goggle's youtube as teh intrusive ads have increased.

People's addiction to these dis-servies is really the root of the problem.

They'll almost certainly be happier without them...
by kccqzy | 2025-04-07 21:42:07+00:00
I'm glad I learned React during the time when React.createClass was the only way. It was simple and intuitive. At that time the docs included a very lengthy discussion of what should be put inside the class and what should be passed via props. It was very helpful when it comes to teaching newcomers to architect their app. It also carried over the years of intuition by the typical dev working with OOP. Much better than the current trend of using hooks for everything.
by schacon | 2025-04-07 21:42:24+00:00
Ah yes. It was pretty cool that when Peepcode was acquired, Pluralsight asked me what I wanted to do with my royalties there and was fine with me waiving them and just open-sourcing the content.

It also is a testament to the backwards compatibility of Git that even after 17 years, most of the contents of that book are still relevant.
by debugnik | 2025-04-07 21:42:37+00:00
What variability? Lua can be easily sandboxed to not take any inputs: Running it would express the same manifest. And most Lua configurations would still read declaratively unless they needed extra the complexity.

I just think it's a shame that the manifest file for Lua projects would be in a language other than Lua itself. I'm more sympathetic to other trade-offs, though, such as being able to edit the file mechanically.
by jayd16 | 2025-04-07 21:43:27+00:00
Yes, as I said, its perfectly possible to make a good game with a small team. But to prop up a few games like you have is just survivor bias. There are thousands of failed games at that scale. When I say it takes a good game and massive marketing budgets to launch an IP, I mean to do so with mediocre or better odds of success. The rare gems you've mentioned are just that. Rare.
by floxy | 2025-04-07 21:43:36+00:00
1. Idaho National Laboratory

2. Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant

3. Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant

4. Argonne National Laboratory

5. Brookhaven National Laboratory

6. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

7. National Energy Technology Laboratory

8. National Renewable Energy Laboratory

9. Oak Ridge National Laboratory

10. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

11. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

12. Los Alamos National Laboratory

13. Sandia National Laboratories

14. Savannah River Site

15. Pantex Plant

16. Kansas City National Security Campus
by kypro | 2025-04-07 21:43:51+00:00
Almost certainly not. If you wanted to do this a better move would have been to target China with 100% tariffs then load up on Chinese stocks before lifting them.

You wouldn't need to start a trade war with the entire world, including allies, to do what you're suggesting. Just targeting a few companies or a single economy would work just as well without destroying your own country's economy and your political legacy.
by gorjusborg | 2025-04-07 21:43:58+00:00
Well firstly, the term 'social media' is so broad and fluid that I don't blame people for having differing ideas about it.

That said, my definition of social media is based on what is has become in recent history: 'internet-based surveillance-driven attention market'. It is a platform that divvies up users by demographics (determined by multiple forms of surveillance) and sells access to their eyes/brains. Because payment is tied to those eyes, there is an implied incentive to maximize 'engagement' (the number of times those eyes look at something).

That is not at all how I'd describe Hackernews, a link aggregation site (like Reddit), or a web forum (where people can talk to each other), despite social media platforms having all of those sort of abilities.
by Clubber | 2025-04-07 21:44:29+00:00
>The next stage of our interview process, had this candidate moved forward, is to implement a take-home project that we have specifically designed for prospective candidates to complete. Had we moved this candidate forward, I have no doubt that they would have been able to use AI to pass the take home project with flying colors.

I have no doubt as well, but I couldn't help but noticing, "Don't bother with take home tests," wasn't on the list of remedies.
by heelix | 2025-04-07 21:44:30+00:00
I've had some fun ones, when interviewing folks - back in the days when people where hiring.

* had someone make a giant cheat sheet with interview questions and taped it to the wall behind their computer. Part way through, the tape gave out and covered him.

* had someone attempt to lip sync the answers. The guy talking and the guy on screen were not the same guy. There was a bit of pretend 'oh just lag' for a while.

* Person we interviewed was not the same one who showed up for work. Great answers, great experience on the interview. Asked about some things we had talked about for quite a while - and he could not recall anything. Came to realize not the same person.

* the glorious mechanical keyboard furiously googling for an answer.

* the sample project they were asked to create as starting point for the interview, they had never run before. They sat and read through what was likely AI generated docs to run the app. Took them a while to realize they needed something other than Java 8 installed to run the sample.
by veidelis | 2025-04-07 21:44:43+00:00
"This is the famous UI = f(state) mental model of React". Famously incorrect generalization. Why? For example, the useRef hook enables components to hold their own state. React components are not guaranteed to be pure functions. Of course, it can depend on how one writes their code, but it's not a guaranteed that UI = f(state) in React in general.
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-07 21:44:49+00:00
The primary audience here isn't average people, or even engineers at the company. The primary audience is investors - the idea is to trick idiots into dumping their money into this overvalued company rather than the infinite other ones that also claim to solve groundbreaking problems with AI.

In the past, it was hiring (or at least the appearance of hiring). But that's an expensive signal and not sustainable for long in a post-ZIRP period. On the other hand, bullshitting about AI (and before that, blockchain) is much cheaper in comparison, and seems to do just as good without actually needing to hire anyone or even pretend to.

Whether AI is actually used, or helps the bottom-line, is irrelevant (it's not possible to conclusively say whether a piece of code was authored by AI or not, so the subsequent narrative will be tweaked as necessary to fit the market conditions at the time).
by mikysco | 2025-04-07 21:45:32+00:00
Based on the video, it looks like Vimeo's co-founder lives in the Mission district of SF. In my experience living hear for nearly a decade, the traffic norms around here are terrifying. I lived in the area years ago and the number of times cars would blow through stop signs in broad daylight around pedestrians stunned me.

I'd love to see more flow-control measures like speedbumps, etc. Walking around the area should be enjoyable - lots of trees & shops. The potential for erratic drivers causes me to avoid the place.

Other parts of the city are much safer (at least outside the main high-speed corridors). The Mission is full of stop signs and what you'd expect to be slow-speed traffic - reality is far different.
by bumby | 2025-04-07 21:45:33+00:00
Based on your answers, I'm guessing you haven't been involved in this process. (Not saying it as a bad thing, but just as a rationale for clarifying with further discussion).

An FMEA (and other safety-critical/quality products) go through an approval process. So if "ditch into the ocean" is not on the FMEA, it means they should have other mitigations/controls that bought the risk down to an acceptable level. They can't/shouldn't just push forward with a risk that exceeds their acceptable tolerance. If implemented correctly, the FMEA is complete insomuch as it ensured each hazard was brought to an acceptable risk level. And certainly, a safety officer isn't going to say the system doesn't need further controls because they put "ditch into the ocean" in the manuals. If that's the rationale, it begs the question "Why wasn't the risk mitigated in the FMEA and hazard analysis?" Usually it's because they're trying to move fast due to cost/schedule pressure, not because they managed the risk. There are edge cases, but even something like a double bird strike can be considered an acceptable risk because the probability is so low. Not impossible, but low enough. That’s what “ditch in the ocean” operations are for.

I agree that software system can improve safety but we shouldn't assume so without the relevant rigor that includes formal risk mitigation. Software tends to elicit interfacing faults; the implication being as the number of interfaces increases the potential number of fault modes can increase geometrically. This means it is much harder to test/mitigate software faults, especially when implementing a black-box AI model. My hunch is that many of those trying to implement AI in safety-critical applications are not rigorously mitigating risk like more mature domains. Because, you know, move fast and break things.
by acureau | 2025-04-07 21:45:34+00:00
The jargon makes this project really difficult to understand at a glance. I've gathered that this is an environment for the programmatic inspection of existing systems. It is developed by a company that works heavily with legacy code, and they found that writing code to inspect a system was a faster way to answer questions about it than reading the source. That seems like a really cool approach.

I still do not understand what "moldable development" means. To me this implies a different paradigm for building applications, which does not seem to be what's offered. I don't understand what a "micro tool" is, is it a unit of code? Am I missing something here?
by mwkaufma | 2025-04-07 21:46:19+00:00
The scaffolding is built from convex volumes, and I know which cuboid faces are "walls" and which are "windows" so I link the windows into a graph where the shared-faces are waypoints and do A*, using straight-line distance as the cost function.

Big obstacles are just built from the scaffold itself, and small obstacles are avoidable by just doing "whisker-traces" to veer around them (the navigation path is a movement hint used to calculate accelerations, not followed strictly).
by ozim | 2025-04-07 21:46:23+00:00
I think big corporations will take ownership - well not directly but via paying to foundations and it already is the case.

Second thing is there are bunch of things corporations need to use but don't want to develop on their own like SSH.

There is already too much internal tooling inside of big corporations that is rotting there and a lot of times it would be much better if they give it out to a foundation - like Apache foundation where projects go to die or limp through.
by boltzmann-brain | 2025-04-07 21:46:26+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | US and EU Timezones

~~

20+ yoe as dev/IC. 10+ yoe in managerial and executive roles. Multiple great exits and acquisitions. I have recently built a software NGO with over half a million supporters and over a thousand active volunteers and major political and media networking. I have built tech for Tezos, Oracle, Shell, Digitas, Saatchi & Saatchi, Time Warner, Sparkasse, Bank of America.

If there's a problem related to tech, I can solve it, and build a team or company around it. Available for work as dev/IC, EM, Director, or CTO, with experience in each. Full-solution MVP development from scratch. Performance optimization and modernization of older systems. DSL and programming language design, compilers. Let me know if you're looking for experience that isn't below! HN posts are short. CV upon request.

If you think I might be able to help you, shoot me an email: damian.jobsites+hn@gmail.com

~~

Example engagement types:

- Long term dev / IC or managerial roles

- Security audits for cryptography and secure code

- Review your code and dev processes, 10-page report

- Short-term dev and research work

- One-shot meetings

(see reply for skill list)
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-04-07 21:46:31+00:00
Nah, next step would be to pull the UX noose tighter and tighter, limiting things like number of clicks to reject non-essential cookies, restricting data loss (like if you already filled in some form data, etc.), maybe even limiting how much of the screen they're allowed to take until the user clicks on "read more" or whatever, etc.

I don't think this is necessarily going to happen, but that would be the reasonable next step from where we are now: boiling the advertiser frog slowly and with changes that users would consider uncontroversially positive.
by roguecoder | 2025-04-07 21:46:41+00:00
I suspect we are seeing the first wave of programmers who got a promotion to "senior" on the basis of being an early AI adopter at a place that valued lines of code written or tickets closed or other similarly-game-able metrics.

Alternatively, there are people who haven't been promoted but think their AI-fu is so good they obviously should have been, without realizing that "senior" is actually a different role, with additional responsibilities.

I've found asking about their pedagogy when coaching junior engineers is a great sorting strategy right now. It isn't something a lot of people have written about so ChatGPT's answers are full of useless platitudes, and mid-level engineers often don't even know that it is part of the job.
by boltzmann-brain | 2025-04-07 21:47:06+00:00
Main tech skills:

- Backend Programming: Zig, Rust, Haskell, Python, JS, TypeScript, Node, Vue, React, Elm, Scala, C, C++, SQL, Perl, PHP, Clojure, OCaml, Erlang, Elixir, Theorem provers (TLA+, Isabelle HOL, Agda), ...

- Devops & co: NixOS, Terraform, AWS, Docker, Ansible, Linux admin, Distributed Systems, ... Quote from code review: "This is the most beautiful Bash code I've ever seen written"

- Fintech: Dev experience with banks and financial institutions. Launched Tezos and other major blockchains. Dozens of smart contract audits.

- Bizdev: Gamification, consumer modelling, data-driven retention and engagement

- AI: LLMs, predictive text, machine vision (trajectory tracking), DSP, Big Data, ...

- Infosec: Cryptography, Red team testing, RE, audits, threat modeling, ...

- Other tech: Godot game engine, audio engineering (mastering), Verilog, VHDL

Management and business: Minor in Psychology, led and managed teams between 2 and 30 people, product design and gamification, hiring, executive and political outreach, media appearances, and a lot of other experience that won't fit in this post.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-07 21:47:23+00:00
I still remember decades and decades ago hearing about vending machines in Japan. Someone mentioned going to Japan and how you could get cold cans of coffee out of vending machines there. This was sometime in the 1990s, before even Starbucks was a huge thing. Everyone I knew thought the idea of cold coffee was ridiculous, a quirk of the Japanese that would never catch on.

I feel the Japanese have been pretty good at exporting culture, but it has a lot of misses among the few hits. I wonder if this is something that would catch on outside of Japan.
by mfkhalil | 2025-04-07 21:47:26+00:00
Hey, we’re working on MatterRank which is pretty similar to this but currently works on web search. (e.g. I want to prioritize results that talk about X and have Y bias and I want to deprioritize those that are trying to sell me something). Feel free to try it out at https://matterrank.ai

Would also be interested in hearing more about what you’re envisioning for your use case. Are you thinking a browser extension that acts on sites you’re already on, or some sort of shopping aggregator that lets you do this, or something else entirely?
by cr4zy | 2025-04-07 21:48:05+00:00
I discuss how the automation wave is already starting with white-collar job openings at a 12 year low in the U.S. I also talk about how we cannot simply count on taxing AI to support automated workers, as countries that don't tax will outcompete those who do. We therefore need international cooperation, based in MAIM, from the original Superintelligence Strategy paper.

I also discuss how bioweapons cannot be avoided via restricting open weight models as originally suggested in Dan's paper. Rather we need to heavily invest in bioweapon defense, and in particular use AI for wastewater monitoring and accelerating metagenomics (detangling mixed DNA).