MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gs17 | 2025-05-13 04:47:19+00:00
If you look at how they're scored, it's worse than Meyers-Briggs. Wanting a specific personality type for the job makes a lot more sense than many of these. Most don't give any points, many have labels that increase in number but the points aren't logically related to them (unemployed for 3-4 months before this job? No points for you! 1-2 or 5-6? Have a lot of points!). Even ignoring the rest of the story, it's a very flawed test.
by Thorrez | 2025-05-13 04:47:22+00:00
>when turning left I was told to lean to the right (which is obviously different to a two wheeler where you lean in the direction of the turn), otherwise you'd pop-up on two wheels easily enough!

Can you explain the mechanics behind that? When turning left, wouldn't the bike be at risk of tipping to the right? Wouldn't leaning to the right make that worse?
by ern | 2025-05-13 04:48:05+00:00
Frameworks can help in many cases, especially for complex or high-scale apps. But in simple CRUD apps, particularly in consulting environments, they often add more complexity than value.

I've seen this play out repeatedly. A company needs a basic CRUD system. Consultancy A brings in designers who produce “wireframes” (usually full-featured eye candy) and UX-centric “journeys.” To justify its bloated fees, the consultancy builds something super-slick using frameworks to match the designs. But once the budget runs out, the customer struggles to maintain it. Eventually, the app becomes unmanageable.

So the consultancy sends in a designer again to produce new mockups and “journeys.” The cycle repeats, this time with another framework.
by famouswaffles | 2025-05-13 04:51:21+00:00
>Now that we're a decade into this hype cycle and investors are getting antsy, they're doubling down by anthropomorphizing the technology and selling us "chain of thought" and "reasoning", as if making everyone say these things will somehow magically produce intelligence.

The Transformer, nevermind GPT-3 did not exist a decade ago. I guess LLMs aren't the only things that hallucinate and spout confident nonsense.

>I also care about the results, but I judge it based on direct experience. IME the current SOTA models can't be relied on to accurately produce working code most of the time, yet I'm expected to trust they can produce accurate healthcare diagnosis and advice? Give me a break.

You don't see the fallacy of forcing your experience in one domain onto a completely unrelated one regardless of any evidence to the contrary (even if you don't trust open ai, this is hardly the only paper trialing SOTA LLMS for diagnosis)? What does code have to do with diagnosis ? And while the current SOTA is by no means perfect, if you can't get them to produce working code, that's a you problem. At the very least, many users would disagree.

Yeah benchmarks aren't perfect. Doesn't mean they aren't useful. Certainly a lot more useful than your approach.
by hinkley | 2025-05-13 04:53:59+00:00
With that much atmosphere that’s a lot of tidal forces too, if you just get some I to orbit.

But the question. Is do you spin it backward or slow it down to spin it the right way, creating a situation where one side of the planet always faces the sun for a while. Might be an opportunity to freeze and cart off the other side of the atmosphere…
by djtango | 2025-05-13 04:56:48+00:00
Yes and being able to buy and take whatever you want has led to rampant antibiotics abuse.

Unfortunately medicine at the high level always has to cater to the lowest common denominator.

Personally, while I agree AI can probably take up some of the mundane triage I have some reservations about AI in its current LLM form being a good judge as patients are unreliable narrators and doctors rely on many senses and heuristics to make their recommendations.

An AI fine tuned to be a doctor with perfect health data and patient history is an interesting prospect, especially given the loss of the "family doctor" but that kind of data collection is a way away and has other Pandora's box considerations
by a_bonobo | 2025-05-13 04:57:10+00:00
Yes, human coders are predictably 'bad' - it scales roughly with the complexity of the task and the years of their experience, along with some randomness ('brain farts'). LLMs are completely unpredictably 'bad' - sometimes a task that a high schooler can solve sends an LLM into a spin, sometimes an LLM solves a task that would require a PhD in the field. The unpredictability is what makes these tools so unfit for purpose.
by somat | 2025-05-13 04:57:24+00:00
"Venus is dry"

I thought the Venus theory was runaway greenhouse driven initially by water vapor. Going off memory, H2O is roughly 10 times as effective a greenhouse gas as CO2, with Venus being closer to the sun A larger percentage of water ended up in vapor form, leading to a feed back loop where the increased heat pushes more water to vapor leading to more heat, eventually liberating the co2 from the rock, making everything worse, ending up with the current situation where venus has way too much atmosphere.

Which is the long way to say, I think there is a lot of water on venus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
by paulmooreparks | 2025-05-13 04:57:38+00:00
> In 1975, physicist Stephen Hawking postulated that contrary to the theory of relativity, particles and radiation could escape from a black hole. At the edge of a black hole, two temporary particles can form, and before they merge, one particle is sucked into the black hole and the other particle escapes.

Hasn't this explanation been discredited for a while?

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/hawking-radiation-bl...

> Black holes are not decaying because there’s an infalling virtual particle carrying negative energy; that’s another fantasy devised by Hawking to “save” his insufficient analogy. Instead, black holes are decaying, and losing mass over time, because the energy emitted by this Hawking radiation is slowly reducing the curvature of space in that region. Once enough time passes, and that duration ranges from approximately 10^68 to 10^103 years for black holes of realistic masses, these black holes will have evaporated entirely.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/hawking-radiation-re...
by viraptor | 2025-05-13 04:59:38+00:00
This story has really annoying results, because while there were dumb decisions made about the hiring process, people are also blowing some things out of proportion.

There's lots of terrible personality tests in recruitment and they're sometimes abused for various purposes. This one is just mildly bad compared to for example corpos hiring people to analyse the signature/writing style of the candidate. But handing out the key to that test was just terrible.

Then there's another one where people reacted strongly to someone handing out highly scoring words for the resume... where the words would be included in any basic coaching like "leader", "ownership", "delivered", etc.

It's hard to even talk about this when people have kneejerk response to a few key phrases here.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-13 04:59:59+00:00
"Multiple times" doesn't have to mean "no modifications". Suppose the software is currently on version A. You think that changing it to a version B might make it more performant, so you implement and profile it. You find no difference, so you figure that your B implementation isn't good enough, and write a slight variation B', perhaps moving around some loops or function calls. If that makes no difference, you keep writing variations B'', B''', B'''', etc., until one of them finally comes out faster than version A. You finally declare that version B (when properly implemented) is better than version A, when you've really just tried a lot more samples.
by physicles | 2025-05-13 05:00:35+00:00
A few:

- Current time in a few different time zones (work is scattered around the world, and log files are always in UTC, so it's handy to have those there at a glance)

- Wifi network name. Our office has multiple wifi access points with the same SSID, so the script uses the AP's MAC address to figure out which one I'm actually connected to

- Current latency to google.com via VPN (I live in China so if internet isn't working, the VPN is always the first thing to troubleshoot)

Ones that I've thought about adding but haven't gotten around to it:

- Status of our cloud monitoring (i.e. a green square if things are OK, red square if not)
by josephg | 2025-05-13 05:00:46+00:00
SeL4 is a capability based operating system toolkit, entirely implemented in C. The core operating system is just a few thousand lines of code. Its even mathematically proven to be bug free - which is totally insane.

It even uses a capability to allocate (assign) memory. So you typically have a microservice (userland process) in charge of memory on the whole system. Other processes get heap memory allocated to them by asking that service for it. (Though typically you'll allocate large blocks, and divide it up using a normal allocator).
by UltraSane | 2025-05-13 05:01:53+00:00
The longest lived fission products are actually the LEAST radioactive. This inverse relationship exists because of the fundamental relationship between half-life and radioactivity. The longer a radioisotope's half-life, the lower its specific activity (radioactivity per unit mass)

You are like a firefighter who opposes using water (nuclear energy) to extinguish fires (reduce CO2 emissions) because people might drown.
by smdyc1 | 2025-05-13 05:01:54+00:00
I read in A Bridge Too Far, the Hawker Typhoons that attacked German positions at the start of the Operation (called in by the Forward Air Comtroller), flew under the opening barrage and one Typhoon disintegrated as it was hit by a shell. I've often wondered if there was any system in place to prevent that sort of thing.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 05:02:23+00:00
This is what I’m talking about: There was apparently a preponderance of evidence that messages were sent and money was transferred to have people killed. There was motive. There was evidence. A court reviewed it. It was introduced in a trial.

Yet there’s this desire to downplay it or wish it all away as a conspiracy against him. You have to suspend belief and assume that someone else sent the messages or that they were fabricated. It’s all really hard to believe unless you’re in the mindset that he’s a hero and you need to explain away the inconvenient parts of his history that detract from the person people wish he was.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-13 05:02:43+00:00
Most people don't work 52 weeks a year so yearly earnings are different than weekly earnings times 52. Beyond that it's important to consider what you're comparing here. You're looking at the wages of (and only of) all full time+ workers in America - meaning you're comparing the earnings of somebody fresh out of high school to somebody who's been working for years on average. And of course plenty of those people are also working overtime. In spite of all of this, the high school kid is still earning 20% more! And the OP that started this thread conversation made it clear his kid has already received this offer, so yes it's literally straight out of high school. His earnings in a few years will be even higher.

Games and trades are complete opposites. If you still think you enjoy game development (and aren't independent), then it's almost certain that you haven't been in the industry long. With games, you start with a passion and the games industry will just completely beat it out of you. The games industry will make you hate game development and even games. The trades are different in that somehow that passion is enabled to be born for those that didn't already have it, and fostered and grown in those that did. In software you end up in a scenario (I'm speaking outside of games here - where you don't even get good pay) where people mostly hate their job, but love the pay. And in welding you end up in one where people mostly love their job.
by azonenberg | 2025-05-13 05:04:30+00:00
This project dates back to circa 2013 when at the time, there was nothing available in that class without NDAs. Once I got set on the path of going custom I didn't want to back off from the challenge even if an easier path became available.

Also, I explicitly do not want to run embedded Linux. I much prefer bare metal on the control plane (I ended up writing a bare metal sshd because I couldn't find one that supported no-malloc, no-OS operation)

And one of the architectural plans of this project is a completely separate control/data plane where the processor can't see fabric packets and has a physically separate management interface.
by lynx97 | 2025-05-13 05:06:00+00:00
I grew up in the 80s as a 100% blind child. Technology was by far not as advanced as today. Computers were just coming up when I was around 12. I learnt to type on a oldschool typewriter, and I also learnt to write braille with a pretty heavy full-metal embossing device. OCR was still quite bad. When I switched to what you call high scooll, I used a laptop with integrated Braille display to follow classes. Used good old DOS as OS and Word 5.5 as my "notepad". Except for PC Lingua for Latin, I basically had no tools specialized for learning. A electronic notepad and my brain was all I had to follow school. And I still made it. I have a great job I love, my own appartment, a sweet girlfriend and I am basically completely independent. To a point where I had to forcefully send away my mother since her continued attempts to "help" me were basically detrimental to my own development. I can not emphasis how important it is how you deal with it as a parent. Since parents are indeed the biggest hinderence to development, we have a saying around here amongst disabled people: "additional disability due to parental overprotection" (Zusatzbehinderung Eltern). Please take a moment to understand what this means, without feeling personally attacked. Its important. Your child can leave home around 18, just like every other kid. I did. Don't slow that process down artificially. The more this is prolonged, the harder it gets for the individual to actually obtain independence.

I am telling you this because I read between the lines that you believe current technology is a reason for you to be hopeful. Sure, it should be. But never forget, your child can do much more then you as a sighted person will ever be able to understand. Don't let them drown in your own misery. Let them discover what they can do. You will be surprised what they come up with. And dont fall for Gear Acquision Syndrome. Sure, tools are nice, and they do get better, which is also nice. I LOVE vision models, to stay on topic somehow. However, I still leave my house with only a cane and my phone in my pocket. I do occasionally ask Siri "Where am I" to get an address if I happen to have forgotten where I am exactly, currently. But at the end of the day, my cane is what shows me the way. Most tech is hype, plain old hearing and your sense of touch gets you much farther then you might think.

Wish you all the best for your own journey, and the development of your child.
by californical | 2025-05-13 05:06:18+00:00
Obstructing traffic is very different than “driving more slowly than the person behind you wants”. Obstructing means blocking, not making them wait 30 seconds for a good chance to go around.

If you are moving a large item that is fragile, are you allowed to go 35mph in a 45mph zone to reduce the risk of damaging the fragile item? Or is that illegal too? Or what if one of your passengers gets car sick easily?

In fact, there are some winding mountain roads in California where the speed limit is 55, but if you go that fast, you’re suicidal because there are no guard rails and very sharp turns. Occasionally, someone mildly suicidal will come up behind you. Is it illegal to drive 15mph in that 55 zone?

Safety is prioritized above speed, suggesting otherwise is unhinged and antisocial.
by alexjplant | 2025-05-13 05:06:31+00:00
Serious question for somebody on HN with a journalism background: why didn't they just make the headline "Gov't to Restore Deleted Climate Data After Farmers Sue"? The sentence "So The Government Will Put It Back." seems like an answer to the question "Why Did The Farmers Sue The Government?" that the headline did not ask. As written it would make more sense as a single clause. At the very least couldn't they have omitted the "So" or replaced with "Now" in order to make the whole thing flow better? I'm sincerely puzzled. The headline reminds me of one of those SAT English questions that has the taker choose the best rewrite of an awkward sentence; surely I'm missing something.
by azonenberg | 2025-05-13 05:06:42+00:00
This is not going to be cheap. That was never the goal.

In low volume when you combine several custom multilayer boards, custom powder-coated sheet metal work, etc even if you allow for the practically-free recycled FPGA this is going to probably end up being a $5-10K project. The last custom one-off 1U I did from ProtoCase was like $800ish just for the enclosure, and that was before the recent tariff hikes.
by wormius | 2025-05-13 05:07:33+00:00
I got bit by linux audio issues after moving from Win10 to CachyOS (arch based distro). It seemed to be working fine, but I noticed when switching to speakers a terrible digital distortion that wasn't there previously. (I'm not a linux noob, have used since Debian Bo in '97, for example, plus many other distros off and on through the years)

I spent so much time messing with alsamixer, removing pipewire, installing pulse, uninstalling pulse, readding pipewire, resetting ports and connections.

I realized it had something to do with the audio buffer (due to the echo and the distortion was "shaped" like the feedback/if that makes sense). like a half second delay feedback.

Ultimately I read up on the buffering mechanism and found that switching to the Bore-LTO kernel fixed everything. I was so desperate I was literally swapping ends of my cables between the PC and speaker, in theory it shouldn't matter but before realizing the issue when I noticed the noise was based on a delay/feedback, I had no other alternative and was at my wits end.
by somat | 2025-05-13 05:07:53+00:00
My understanding is that it was water that started the whole thing. water vapor is about ten times as effective a greenhouse gas as co2. and the runaway heat started with too much water vapor(closer to to the sun I think), leading to more heat, leading to more water vapor. eventually it got hot enough to start liberating co2 out of the rocks. leading to the current situation today where venus has way too much atmosphere.

Which is to say, putting a ring around venus to block the sun may have merit, but adding more water sounds like pouring petrol on a fire.
App Store for Hosted Agents?
by jakejmedeiros | 2025-05-13 05:07:58+00:00
StackAI and the likes seem to enterprise for my personal use, want something that hosts public MCP tools, OpenAI function calling, really anything useful in of one of the million standards that are coming out and I can compose them together to quickly build an agent that I don't need to code or host myself? I want to make some multi-context agents for personal workflows but having trouble making them work well by myself.
by mjevans | 2025-05-13 05:08:34+00:00
Offhand, what I remember reading during the initial 737 MAX crashes:

Part of the appeal of the 737 series of airplanes was pilot certification across a wide fleet allowed for carrier flexibility and cost savings. Same airframe, same 'response', 'same certification'. So they tried to lie to everyone. Mount the engines on the same airframe a bit differently. Use software to make the behavior (in most circumstances) the same as the older models. etc.

The rational was that they 'couldn't' spend the time, money, or above pilot training needs to field a new competitive model. They'd just come off of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner . Which skimming the Wikipedia article, probably also dovetails in with the seemingly eternal struggle between the Machinists union and Boeing the company who used to be headquartered in Seattle. Penny pinching decisions there probably had negative effects on safety too.
by Munksgaard | 2025-05-13 05:09:16+00:00
As someone who has used both SML, Haskell, Rust and Elixir professionally: No, not really.

Access to the BEAM is nice, but unless you're targeting the BEAM in your compiler I don't see any benefit. Even if you're targeting the BEAM, you might decide to use another language, cf. Gleam: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/

Edit: Actually, one thing I will mention is the superior support in Elixir/Erlang for pattern matching bitstrings[0]. Not usually helpful in compilers, but an evolution of pattern matching that other languages should take up, in my opinion.

0: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#%3C%3C%3E...
by mathgorges | 2025-05-13 05:10:32+00:00
I assume SoftTalker is referring to SWEs not being Professional Engineers.

Professional Engineer (PE) != Engineer (in many jurisdictions)

> A professional engineer is competent by virtue of his/her fundamental education and training to apply the scientific method and outlook to the analysis and solution of engineering problems.

> He/she is able to assume _personal responsibility_ for the development and application of engineering science and knowledge, notably in research, design, construction, manufacturing, superintending, managing, and in the education of the engineer.

(emphasis mine)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer#Definition
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-13 05:10:39+00:00
We've somehow built extremely fragile systems. Technological, yes, but not only technological. Also social, economical, and structural. Somehow, our systems can no longer absorb even slight shocks.

Then, when the job market contracts by what would otherwise be 5 or 10 percent, all hell breaks loose, and there's an enormous chain reaction.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-13 05:17:52+00:00
Whats hilarious (in general, not directed at you personally) is that computers have been "taking people's jobs", at scale, for around 40 years now.

We didn't really care when it was factory workers, or payroll clerks, or switchboard operators. But now that it's going after programmers, now we care.

The good news is that there are a bunch of other jobs still left. And for a long time yet there are still lots of IT jobs that are safe.

To be fair, low-skill programming jobs have been replaced for years. Lots of them outsourced offshore. (Does it matter if your job goes to AI or a Bengali?). But today's systems are huge, and complex, and require a lot more than what AI can do (impressive as that is.)

Frankly, if you work at a place, and you look around the room, and all you see are cogs in the machine, and you dont want to be a cog, then you're already in the wrong place.
by imgabe | 2025-05-13 05:18:47+00:00
I'm not sure what you want. It's not like $68k is poverty wages. If they don't do the overtime, maybe they only make $50k, which is still above the median personal income ($68k is household income, meaning that is usually with more than one person working). Yeah, you can't live in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco on that, but there's lots of other places you can live just fine, and many many people who live on less. Welding is in demand in lots of places, especially lower cost of living places. It can't be that hard to move. Human beings migrated across Siberia wearing animal skins, surely one can figure out how to apply for a job online and rent a U-Haul.