MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shahbaby | 2025-05-12 20:39:08+00:00
Always. Every interview exists to narrow down the applicant pool. Unless it's an automated interview, I would rather stay unemployed than take one of those.

The prep depends on the interview type. Most fall into 3 categories.

1. Algorithms - I remember a better time in life when I had the luxury to wait until I had an interview scheduled and only then would I have the motivation to grind. I'm now grinding everyday since it takes time to make meaningful improvements. Although a part of me enjoys these type of questions, it does make me question my career choice. I guess the one silver lining is that I'm getting much better at solving these questions than when I was employed.

2. System design - For this type of interview I've found that it's all about your ability to guess what type of system they'll want you to build and what parts they'll be interested in focusing on.

3. Behavioural - This actually requires the most company specific preparation. Refining your behavioural stories to match what the company is looking for and with who you're interviewing with (i.e Recruiter or C-suite level). Thinking of meaningful questions to ask. Practicing mock interviews. It all takes time.
by wltr | 2025-05-12 20:39:20+00:00
I’m finding all these awesome attempts at making hacker news better as destined to fail. Just as you’re making a reader for things not worth reading.

Actually, I enjoy this mediocre UX, it reminds me to not waste too much of my precious time in here. That helps me visit only once in a while. To me, there’s some wisdom in this.
by tuckerman | 2025-05-12 20:39:49+00:00
I agree that for a lot of purposes online conferences are a great experience (p99 conf has been really fun for example) but nobody has really cracked the hallway track. I've heard about smaller conferences like Monktoberfest but their smallness being a main appeal necessarily limits their scope. Meetups seem to lack a certain je ne sais quoi. I wonder if someone will either figure out the online hallway track experience or if there is room for a new sort of in-person event?
by ngangaga | 2025-05-12 20:40:03+00:00
> but a huge part of why Trump was able to rise to power was because there was by far not enough protest against him.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this claim. For one thing, it's not clear that trump voters respect protestors in the first place. For another thing, we're an extremely geographically distributed population, and most of our cities already swing strongly blue. This means protesting is generally a high-effort, low-return activity.

Whatever will provide friction I do not know, but I don't think protests are going to play a major role outside of maybe providing a narrative about how angry people are. But it's important to note that a significant number of people vote for Trump because he makes certain people angry.... If the right people "protest" in a ridiculous enough manner, you're going to likely strengthen the resolve of his base. Granted, I suspect this isn't much of an issue with science funding, but it's something to keep in mind.

My attitude is: if this country doesn't want science research, let it, follow the research overseas, and let your absence speak for itself.
by paulnovacovici | 2025-05-12 20:40:11+00:00
Completely agree. I’ve been experimenting with embeddings by building Recallify, primarily to help me quickly retrieve obscure things I’ve read online. Even at just 1024 dimensions, it’s impressive how effectively embeddings capture and surface ideas based purely on semantic similarity, rather than exact keyword recall (which I’m pretty terrible at remembering). It’s been a game changer for turning fuzzy mental concepts into actionable insights.

Beta testing an iOS app for it if anyone is interested: https://recallify.app/
by latchkey | 2025-05-12 20:40:29+00:00
Great feedback and thanks for the follow on twitter.

Agreed, their software stack needs work, but thankfully that's why they are sponsoring developer events like you attended. The progress is happening fast and this is something that wasn't happening at all 6-12 months ago. It is a real shift in focus.

If you have specific areas you'd like me to pass up the chain for them in order for you to build support for your engine, please let me know and I'm happy to try to help however I can. It took a while for us to get there, but they are now extremely responsive to us.
by yibg | 2025-05-12 20:41:45+00:00
End of the day it's an ROI analysis (using the term loosely here, more of a gut feel). What is the cost and benefits of making an app more secure vs pushing out an insecure version faster. Unfortunately in today's business and funding climate, the latter has better pay off (for most things anyways).

Until the balance of incentives changes, I don't see any meaningful change in behavior unfortunately.
by Implicated | 2025-05-12 20:42:03+00:00
Agreed. My stance on this changed over the course of some years after a close family member married an actual engineer (structural) and I got a lot of insight into that world.

It's astonishing to me the ease of which software developers can wreak _real_ measurable damage to billions of lives and have no real liability for it.

Software developers shouldn't call themselves engineers unless they're licensed, insured and able to be held liable for their work in the same way a building engineer is.
by nashashmi | 2025-05-12 20:42:33+00:00
Is there anything you could blow the whistle on right now? If yes, and you are not blowing the whistle, then then answer is no you could not do the right thing. It also means you did not come forward to do the right thing then either.

If you can’t think of anything that you could blow the whistle on, then chances are you were the one who did wrong and were found out about it.

If neither is the case, then you are either oblivious or you are a snitch who didn’t let anything slide.

Come up with a list of reasons why you did not come forward. Don’t belittle your crimes either.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-05-12 20:42:36+00:00
Not just the owners, but the other engineers.

I have never worked in the auto industry, but I was an embedded software engineer at an F500 company that loved to just throw hardware "over the wall" to the SW engineers.

I had come from a very small company and working like this made no sense to me. After a particularly annoying discovery I was talking to one of the EE's and he explained it to me. "You see, the guy who designed that controller knows nothing about software. He just has a list of specs to meet, and he gets a processor, wires a bunch of peripherals to it, and releases a circuit board. If you're lucky, the SW guy who sat in the design reviews made sure to get a good enough processor to make your job easier. If not, you're SOL because as long as the hardware meets all the requirements they gave him, no one is going to want to change anything."

In this case, the engineer was incentivized to save a whopping $0.50 on a machine that cost around $2,000 to build. And for lack of that $.50 part, software spent hundreds of hours adding code to find a way to implement the behavior that it would have provided. Not to mention all the Test hours needed to verify that it worked as expected.

Paradoxically, I also saw the opposite behavior on the same project: people adding extremely complex hardware to solve simple problems because the company paid very well for patents, so of course everyone had an incentive to produce patentable designs.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-12 20:42:38+00:00
Yep. I'm in the Midwest too. I paid $15 for my chop saw, and it's a lot nicer one than I would have bought new. My table saw cost $6, probably because the plug on the end of the power cord was gone. New plug for $3, and it's fine. Handheld tools like circular saws and drills typically go for $3-5.

I get a dud once in a while, but at those prices, I still end up way ahead overall.
by sdenton4 | 2025-05-12 20:42:47+00:00
(Indeed, Belle and Sebastian's "If You're Feeling Sinister - Live at the Barbican" is my favorite B&S album, and is quite a lot better than the original studio recording. So the Barbican has an odd warm place in my heart despite knowing nothing more about it until today.)

(That same Live at the Barbican album is weirdly hard to find because it was a damned Apple Music exclusive. Travesty...)
by dijit | 2025-05-12 20:42:58+00:00
Agreed, when it comes to writing for hackernews I have had the best results personally when being curious but incomplete.

If I try to actually educate someone or do my research fully, either someone will know more than me, and an expert will weigh in to invalidate some section of my posting- or people will pretend to be an expert- and you’ll spend a day trying to discuss why what they’re saying is incorrect. Both will cause the discussion for other people to die.

The best has been tangents that are tangentially related to the topic presented. There can be multiple of these subthreads and they always make for interesting reading.
by mperham | 2025-05-12 20:43:16+00:00
Dozens is just the number I've talked to who have told me their scale. I'm sure there's a lot more.

And ultimately the precise number is not as important as the fact that it *is normal* for midsized Ruby apps to operate at this level of scale. The more you start to use the background job pattern, the more you tend to create. "A Job for every ProductVariant record" can easily create 10-20m jobs.

You want tools that scale to the size of "success". That would be a good marketing tagline for Sidekiq.
by supernovae | 2025-05-12 20:43:19+00:00
I don't have the answer as it pertains to Uber, but the "marketplace" approach to things is pretty universal.

Ebay fees are upwards of 10-15%. Amazon fees can be as high as 45% Apple's app store fee can be 15 to 30%

Uber wants to get you coming and going by charging a Sub on the front end and splitting fees on the backend... it's like the worst of capitalism
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-12 20:43:49+00:00
> There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of this claim. For one thing, it's not clear that trump voters respect protestors in the first place.

They do respect one thing, just like their master does: strength. Show up in force, in overwhelming numbers, and all these "don't tread on me" people suddenly find out that, whoops, they aren't the top dogs any more. It used to be the case that you got beaten up or worse for showing up in KKK outfits, these days you got pseudo-edgy kids on social media with them.
by andrehacker | 2025-05-12 20:43:51+00:00
Internet in 1997. That is when the web was small enough that you did not need Google, you just used a 1200 page "internet yellow pages" book [1]

Around that time the book form became untennable so they started switching to CDROM versions [2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/luckmansworldwid0000unse_1997ed/... [2] https://archive.org/details/new-riders-www-yellow-pages-1997
by halfdaft | 2025-05-12 20:43:57+00:00
It is! - except it's to hide the fly tower from the outside. The fly tower wasn't part of the original design. The first resident theatre company to be - the Royal Shakespeare company insisted upon one so the architects but came up with the genius idea of hiding it with a conservatory. I discovered this when working in the theatre space. I went exploring the fly tower (as you do) and opened a door at the top. I assumed I'd see some dark service corridor, but instead emerged into the warm, humid, nighttime air of a huge conservatory - it was easily the most magical architectural experience I've ever had.
by immibis | 2025-05-12 20:45:00+00:00
The theory of Boltzmann brains is that you're way more likely to get just a brain (including false memories of a planet earth and a whole visibile universe around it), than to get a brain, a planet earth, and a whole visible universe around it. So the chance that any of that is real, given that a brain exists to perceive it, is infinitesimal. We are probably just floating human brains that popped into the vastness of space three microseconds ago, complete with false memories of the distant past.

To dispel a misconception: They're not some hypothetical type of brain that exists as pure quantum fluctuations (though those are even more likely). Boltzmann was talking about the probability of actual flesh-and-blood human brains arising spontaneously out of the vacuum.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-12 20:45:18+00:00
>Windows Defender hogs resources, laptop reviews showing Windows systems getting 10 hours of web browsing battery life are lying, Windows Defender actually ruins the performance of your computer

There are definitely times when I wish I could disable it outright. Often someone will want my help reviving an old computer or laptop and it'll have to sit for a day in a loop of windows update fighting windows defender for resources with neither of them making much headway before one or the other will finish enough to let the other run for a bit.
by mdhb | 2025-05-12 20:45:50+00:00
This is literally THE scam Elon, Thiel, Sacks and others are running as they gut the government.

Sell assets like government real estate to themselves at super cheap rates and then set up as many dependencies as they can where the government has to buy services from them because they have nowhere else to turn.

To give an example this missile dome bullshit they are talking about building which is a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons.. but there is talks at the moment of having this run by a private company who will sell it as a subscription service. So in this scenario the US military can’t actually fire the missiles without the explicit permission of a private company.

This AI thing is the same scam.
by spindump8930 | 2025-05-12 20:46:13+00:00
It's not clear how your perception of quantum computing would lead to 'faster horses' in the current view of NN architectures - keep mind that the common view of 'exploring many paths simultaneously' is at best an oversimplification (https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2026).

That said, perhaps advances in computing fundamentals would lead to something entirely new (and not at all horselike).
by frinxor | 2025-05-12 20:46:52+00:00
Cribl | https://cribl.io/careers | REMOTE We have a lot of positions open. Backend, Frontend, SRE. Mostly a node.js shop. Hiring from senior to principal roles.

We are desperately seeking a Senior Performance Engineer https://cribl.io/job-detail/5498039004/

Looking for folks with knowledge of node.js, observability, streaming data, logs, metrics
by icelancer | 2025-05-12 20:46:56+00:00
> Whichever the default free model is right now

Sigh. This is a point in favor of not allowing free access to ChatGPT at all given that people are getting mad at GPT-4o-mini which is complete garbage for anything remotely complex... and garbage for most other things, too.

Just give 5 free queries of 4o/o3 or whatever and call it good.
by shayanbahal | 2025-05-12 20:47:42+00:00
I did a quick test and seems like the full admin access that I used to get is slightly fixed/changed. I'm wondering if there was an issue and I have enough data to show there were full compromised of all users data, but it is changed now (might still be vulnerable but let's say it's not). should I still release something? they should have notified their users of such an issue right?
by immibis | 2025-05-12 20:47:59+00:00
It's actually a 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% reduction and yes that is the correct number of 9's.
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-05-12 20:47:59+00:00
Academic CS has no shortage of prestigious or even good publishing venues. Just within systems and networking, there is SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys, PODC, DISC, FAST, SIGCOMM, CIDR. If you extend to databases there's also VLDB, SIGMOD, etc. These are all Tier-1/Tier-1.5 venues.

Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.
by dogman144 | 2025-05-12 20:48:26+00:00
Layman’s understanding, but the only real prevention is time and if there’s an existing grizzly pop down there. Reason grizzs are expanding is the males have very large roaming territory, and each new adolescent male needs to find its own or face conflict. If you’re backpacking in an area with a pop, good odds there’s 1x grizz per 6 square miles.

Hunting and environmental damage could play a role, but I don’t think modern hunting/F&G policies could do much. They are very adaptable creatures and eat a variety of stuff, so I speculate you’d have to have real ecosystem collapse to cause them to bow out of an area.

End of the day for me - grizzlies ranged the entire country in 1776 times, and then by the 1970’s got boxed into Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming basically. If that bear disappeared/disappears, it’d be a tragedy. Meet a bear or see one skinned and they’re pretty darn close to human-looking. The Montana pop in glacier is about to join with the Wyoming pop in Yellowstone, they’re now in the bighorns in WY, and get spotted in eastern plains Montana now.

If you’re not hunting and dressing game, as most hikers are not, the main danger comes from surprising them, so just keep head on a swivel and carry bear spray. Carry a 10mm or .44 and up for if you get stalked by one. NOLS Lander has a good YouTube video on grizzly safety. After long enough accounting for this, I realized I wasn’t really “hiking” in non-bear areas much as marching around woods acting like I was, and I haven’t looked at the non-bear areas the same.
by harikb | 2025-05-12 20:48:54+00:00
You are underestimating the risk to people who protest and how bad it needs to get before people are pushed to it.

Distribution is somewhat like this...

Say there are 10,000 people affected by this

5,000 probably have skills to pivot to something else, don't give a shit about future billionaire's kid's problem. People wouldn't want to be scientists if they can't also have a decent career.

2,000 people have means to survive and can't afford to fight the thugs on street

2,000 people are desperate, but otherwise marginalized by current admininstration (immigrant, mexican, black, muslim,... whatever) but don't want to sacrifice their extended family too.

1,000 people are desperate, have the courage to fight (probably white).

If the future of curing the billionaire's kid relies on 1,000 people sacrificing their life... oh well....
by quantified | 2025-05-12 20:49:20+00:00
Static types are to prevent errors before they ship. If you were traumatized instead of assisted when learning things, get help, sure. Lots of bad social behaviors transmitted from many sources, it's a major cultural failing (in a high-trust world, anyway) to make people feel bad about not yet knowing something.

Lots of unnecessary dependencies increase your vulnerabilities, and costs of maintenance.

All those devs who did some stuff and moved on, built careers for themselves and headaches for others. Don't be that guy (or gal).
by dang | 2025-05-12 20:49:49+00:00
Related:

LSD chemist William Pickard to be released from prison - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23947157 - July 2020 (375 comments)

The "Acid King," Serving Life Without Parole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12211097 - Aug 2016 (25 comments)

Other (more loosely) related threads:

The LSD Museum (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36673288 - July 2023 (25 comments)

Owsley Stanley: The King of LSD (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32651502 - Aug 2022 (57 comments)

Nick Sand, Orange Sunshine LSD chemist, has died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14207957 - April 2017 (82 comments)

Grateful Dead Fan Timothy Tyler Has Been Granted Clemency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12395737 - Aug 2016 (211 comments)
by hbartab | 2025-05-12 20:50:41+00:00
$5 billion in added valuation in just 6 months on $35 million in annual revenue [^1]. That's a 400× multiple for a company that mostly wraps other companies' LLMs [^2].

Is that a bubble popping, or just my headphones?

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/7621cd5f-901e-4948-879d-011e0edb3... [2]: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/technical-faq/what-advanced-ai...
by Abilash-Suresh | 2025-05-12 20:50:45+00:00
The idea for this actually hit me during one of my many (many!) hours spent on sites like MonkeyType. I loved the flow of just typing, that almost meditative state you can get into. It's great for raw speed and reflex, but a thought kept bugging me: "What if all this mindless typing could actually help me learn something I need to know?" So I created Note Rush, upload your notes and get back the most insightful bits to type.
by spindump8930 | 2025-05-12 20:51:18+00:00
This paper is very cool, comes from respected authors, and is a very nice idea with good experiments (flop controlled for compute). It shouldn't be seen as a wall-breaking innovation though. From the paper:

> Existing transformer libraries and codebases are designed to be highly efficient for tokenizer-based transformer architectures. While we present theoretical flop matched experiments and also use certain efficient implementations (such as FlexAttention) to handle layers that deviate from the vanilla transformer architecture, our implementations may yet not be at parity with tokenizer-based models in terms of wall-clock time and may benefit from further optimizations.

And unfortunately wall-clock deficiencies mean that any quality improvement needs to overcome that additional scaling barrier before any big runs (meaning expensive) can risk using it.