MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andrehacker | 2025-05-14 03:07:40+00:00
>> Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.

Except that they didn't: they bought a company that had been building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition (Where 2 Technologies), then they also bought Keyhole which became Google Earth.

Incidentally they also bought, not built, Youtube .. and Android.

So, yes, they had a good nose for "experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that.""

They arguably did do a good job investing their resources but it was mostly in buying, not building.

.. and they are good at marketing :)
by galangalalgol | 2025-05-14 03:07:54+00:00
I think most of us enamoured with rust are c++ refugees glad the pain is lessened. The tooling including the compiler errors really are great though. I like the simplicity of c, but I would still pick rust for any new project just for the crates and knowing I'll never have to debug a segfault. I like pytorch and matlab fine for prototyping. Not much use for in-between languages like go or c# but I like the ergonomics of them just fine. I don't think it is at all weird for people coming from c++ or even c to like rust and prefer it over those other languages. We have already paid the cost of admission, and it comes with real benefits.
by junebash | 2025-05-14 03:09:04+00:00
I was in the same boat for many years (as in, my whole 35 year life), and today I still hate “coffee-flavored” stuff. But one day I was really tired and had to get stuff done, and asked for a recommendation for a coffee drink for someone who doesn’t like coffee. The suggestion was a vanilla latte. Fast forward a year and a half, and now I drink coffee almost every day.

If you haven’t given that or a caramel macchiato a try, I’d highly recommend it. You might be surprised. I was.
by unclad5968 | 2025-05-14 03:09:07+00:00
That thread is hilarious... The dude bootstraps his own search/browser company, an incredibly difficult space, becomes profitable, and sends his customers t-shirts they didn't want. A bunch of HN users who have probably never even applied at a startup are criticizing him for how he runs his profitable business that he funded himself. If he wants to shovel every dollar of profit into a furnace, who cares? It's their money.
by eru | 2025-05-14 03:09:22+00:00
Than what do you save? Only the system-on-a-chip (CPU, GPU, RAM).

And the hardware to get an SoC with phone-like performance in a laptop or desktop form factor is relatively cheap, just because you have so much more space and power and cooling to work with.

(Your laptop-shell definitely needs its own power supply, whether that be a battery or a cable, because the screen alone will take more power than your phone's battery can provide for any sustained period of use.)
by danpalmer | 2025-05-14 03:09:44+00:00
To me, take-homes that have UI or API integrations are a bit of a red flag, because UI code (for most roles) is relatively boring, and API integrations are a lot of faff with not much signal. Cool you can make an HTTP request, cool you've got a basic CRUD editing setup. It's a lot of code that takes a lot of time and tells me almost nothing about how you code, hell, AI tools will happily generate these things in no time and at a pretty good quality.

What I want to see is an engineer implement an awkward bit of business logic. Does it become a million nested if statements and a "here be dragons" comment at the top, or do they identify the right patterns and build something that I can reason about when reading the code? This is far more valuable in the job, more signal in the interview, and much harder for AI to get right. It also takes less time.
by AnonHP | 2025-05-14 03:09:58+00:00
From this post, it seems like the hiring manager is either not the real hiring manager (maybe just an HR agent with this lofty title) or was himself hired without any screening or on the job evaluation for reading and responding to emails (which is a big part, IMO, of any manager) or has multiple roles to play and has no time to devote to hiring.

I feel sorry for the author to have spent more time on actually doing the assignment after that reply.
by tbihl | 2025-05-14 03:10:17+00:00
Hate to say it, but everyone does this. My dad replaced his iPhone back in December when an update killed it. No acknowledgment of the problem from Apple.

Hell, my car has a stupid system that shakes motor mounts apart and burns through ignition coils and spark plugs. Honda won't admit fault because, among other things, it was a fuel-saving boondoggle and they won't back down from lying to customers if it means stepping into the path of an oncoming EPA train.
by bcoates | 2025-05-14 03:11:12+00:00
I don't get airbnbs because they're cheaper, I get them because I want to rent something other than a hotel room. If best western had in-laws or 1br quadplexes I'd be happy to stay there, but most hotels I've stayed at are bad rooms in bad locations that almost always include at least one negative surprise every trip, and as you move up to more expensive ones they somehow get fancier but worse.
by eru | 2025-05-14 03:11:33+00:00
> If people waste fancy silicon on phones, yes very much.

The silicon only has to be fancy, because phones are so constraint in terms of space, power and cooling.

Getting phone-like performance in a desktop or laptop form factor and power and cooling budget is a lot simpler and cheaper.

> They don't have to buy a new device but can still get a mouse/keyboard/display combo and so some "productivity tasks".

The point was that they do have to buy a new device. The only thing they don't have to buy is new silicon. But that's trivial compared to everything else.
by monster_truck | 2025-05-14 03:11:37+00:00
Have had some insanely bad experiences with AirBNB and swore them off forever.

People listing mcmansions they cant sell in a state of disrepair, lies about amenities and internet. Had to relocate several people repeatedly in the middle of the pandemic lockdown and it took months for the refunds to process.

Had another host try to pressure me into a cash deal and then claim damages to extract fees when I turned it down. After supplying their text messages and proof that the place was fine I had to wait 18 months for a refund and was locked out of renting a safer place.

I can't imagine trusting them for anything else. I now exclusively use craigslist and other sites that allow you to directly deal with property owners and have been really impressed.
by dwattttt | 2025-05-14 03:13:32+00:00
If that's a specific use case you need to handle, it's O(1) again if you have a pointer to both the node to be removed and the previous node.

Whether it's more efficient to carry a second pointer around when manipulating the list, or store a second pointer in every list node (aka double linked list) is up to your problem space.

Or whether an O(n) removal is acceptable.
by cebert | 2025-05-14 03:14:18+00:00
I understand the frustration here. I assume Kagi has a lot of candidates and is trying to identify the best ones for handling ambiguity. While I can appreciate the interviewee’s desire for more information or a rubric, it might potentially hurt the effectiveness of the take-home assignment.

During my college days, I had an on-campus interview with Microsoft that served as an assessment for whether I would be eligible for more in-person interviews in Seattle. The interview question was open-ended: “I would like you to design an alarm clock.” It seemed like an unusual open-ended question that prompted me to consider several critical factors, such as the intended audience, physicality, visibility, and audibility. By considering these factors and not immediately presenting a solution, the interview team informed me that I had passed the test. If they had provided me with more specific instructions or guidelines before the interview, they might have missed a signal that was important to them.

Unfortunately, I did not advance to the subsequent rounds at Microsoft. I interviewed during the fall semester. While I made it thru the full process, I was informed that I lacked confidence, but wasn’t a no. I was encouraged to reapply in the spring. The initial experience had left me drained and disheartened, so I decided not to pursue a second attempt. I now deeply regret this decision and wish I had given it another chance. If anyone is in a similar situation during their college years, I strongly advise them to avoid making my mistake. Working at a FAANG company could have changed my entire life and career trajectory.
by edfletcher_t137 | 2025-05-14 03:15:15+00:00
Building a concrete, working, minimum-viable solution from ambiguous requirements: that's the point of the exercise. That's what hiring managers want in candidates because those candidates end up being good at building a concrete, working solutions from ambiguous requirements. Which is every software project ever. Although the AI Age has unquestionably changed the efficacy of this kind of candidate screening, that is orthogonal to this discussion. For many years it has been one of the most-effective ways to screen for the ability to build concrete, working solutions from ambiguous requirements. Which is every software project ever. So it's no surprise it persists.
by NoPicklez | 2025-05-14 03:15:17+00:00
As someone who also lives in Australia, OS travel is absolutely stressful, we don't do it as often like other countries and Europe, US are a long way away which makes it all the more stressful.

Absolutely, lots of systems need to interface and things need to go well to avoid friction, but often is the case that I have over prepared and I didn't need to worry.

I find comfort in that millions of people travel every day and problems will happen and there is usually always a way to solve it. As long as you have the basics, you've got to have faith it will work itself out.
by function_seven | 2025-05-14 03:15:57+00:00
And requires me to remember to get up and hang it before a scheduled meeting. Or not hang it when someone calls me and a meeting erupts. And I need to remember to take it down after each call. (If I don’t, then it’s just up all the time and might be taken as seriously as a Prop 65 Warning.)

Automations are really nice for certain things!
by unclad5968 | 2025-05-14 03:19:05+00:00
You don't have to do it every day. Youll acquire taste over a similar period of you did it less frequently. Almost all taste is acquired, and all you need is repeated exposure. If you rode the same roller coaster once a week for a year, the last experience would be significantly different than the first experience, even though you'd be doing the same thing. Basically the same for tasting (or any other sensory experience for that matter).
by spinarrets | 2025-05-14 03:20:13+00:00
The mechanism is calling the cops, and letting the cops know it's an Airbnb. Then contacting Airbnb letting them know you've filed a police report.

Airbnb doesn't give a shit about you (and frankly, neither do the cops), but the cops and Airbnb don't want to tussle with one another.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-05-14 03:20:31+00:00
Eliezer Yudkowsky's take:

>Presumably the real purpose of this company is to refute people who said "We'll just walk over to the superintelligence and pull the plug out", without MIRI needing to argue with them

https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1831899029690839549#m
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-14 03:20:50+00:00
You’re really naive. Bloomberg is one of the better news outlets, and I would put no weight on Supermicro’s denials, as they have a pattern of lying about financials and have a sweepingly broad supply chain vulnerable to sabotage and counterfeiting.

The Federal government and some banks hire companies to do supply chain integrity inspection and management. They find bad parts all of the time, especially in the channel.

There’s a pretty obvious reason why they wouldn’t want to talk about a detected case of foreign espionage embedded in servers after publishing.
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-14 03:21:21+00:00
The fortunate thing about our vector DB, like I mentioned in the post, is that we store the HNSW on disk. So, it is much less intense on your memory. Similar thing to what turbo puffer has done.

With regard to the graph db, we mostly use our laptops to test it and haven't run into an issue with performance yet on any size dataset.

If you wanna chat DM me on X :)
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-14 03:22:03+00:00
Why are those rules there? Why don't they break? Why are they small, elegant, and beautiful? Why are many connected to each other in harmony?

This doesn't fit what random, survival-oriented processes produce. It doesn't fit what random, chaotic systems produce. It looks more like an intelligent being designed and maintained the universe. That should amaze you.

They also hardwired us with a specific morality. Children are born looking for God, wanting to be loved, and with a sense of justice (fairness). That the creation has these morals implies the creator either has them or knows of them. If people have done evil, they should be quite afraid of what that implies.

Divine revelation came later with miracles as proof. God's Word told us we have to seek God, love others, do good, and do justice. That fits with our natural design. That specific God fits the profile of one who would design that elegant universe with only human life in it. That should reinforce the need to repent and follow Christ, or burn alive. In His Word, he also said He created us very personally before He began driving those laws you're talking about.
by garganzol | 2025-05-14 03:22:05+00:00
Problem solvers based on graphs are hard to get your head around at first, but then you get extremely elegant and powerful solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.

The only gotchas are: 1) time to get your head around 2) algorithmic complexity of the resulting solution.

Graph theory is probably the most fulfilling math application in the computer science. In a way, graph-based algorithms do magic similar to AI but in a fully determined manner. If you think about it more broadly, a graph resembles a subset of a neural network but only with {0, 1} weights.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-14 03:22:14+00:00
@gerdesj your tone was unnecessarily rude and mean. Part of your message makes a valid point but it is hampered by unnecessary insults. I hope the rest of your day improves from here.

I don’t specifically like Rust itself. And one doesn’t need a programming language to discover themselves.

My experience learning Rust has been that it imposes enough constraints to teach me important lessons about correctness. Lots of people can learn more about correctness!

I’ll concede- “everyone” was too strong; I erred on the side of overly provocative.
by spinarrets | 2025-05-14 03:22:27+00:00
> I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't just stick to their core.

Greed. Founders and employees who cannot understand the value of a sustainable business that does one thing well and keeps people employed. We shouldn't seek to grow indefinitely, we should seek to reach comfortable levels of success and then focus our efforts on rewarding the people who are clients and employees maximally.
by Const-me | 2025-05-14 03:22:27+00:00
Interestingly, CPU-bound high-performance systems are also incompatible with Rust’s model. Ownership for them is unambiguous, but Rust has another issue, doesn’t support multiple writeable references of the same memory accessed by multiple CPU cores in parallel.

A trivial example is multiplication of large square matrices. An implementation needs to leverage all available CPU cores, and a traditional way to do that you’ll find in many BLAS libraries – compute different tiles of the output matrix on different CPU cores. A tile is not a continuous slice of memory, it’s a rectangular segment of a dense 2D array. Storing different tiles of the same matrix in parallel is trivial in C++, very hard in Rust.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-14 03:23:37+00:00
Electricity is the cheapest input by far! People and large networked GPU clusters are far more expensive.

Typical models are now trained on clusters of roughly 20K GPUs. Even if you get a volume discount you still need cabling, switches, etc…

The minimum entry price to play in the game at this level is about 200-500 million dollars.

Meta spent something like $10B on their AI compute, for comparison.
by bartread | 2025-05-14 03:24:49+00:00
It does have a feature to do the opposite. You can, in theory, extract tabular data from PDFs with Excel (note: only on the Windows version; this function isn’t available in macOS Excel).

In practice I’ve found it to be extremely unreliable, and I suspect this may be because the optional metadata that semantically defines a table as a table is missing from the errant PDF. It’ll still look like a table when rendered, but there’s nothing that defines it as such. It’s just a bunch of graphical and text elements that, when rendered, happen to look like a table.
by josephg | 2025-05-14 03:24:56+00:00
Yes, testing is Zig's answer. But that quote is right. Testing doesn't achieve the same kind of systematic prevention of memory bugs that rust does. (Or GC based languages like Go, Java, JS, etc.).

You can write tests to find bugs in any language. C + Valgrind will do most of the same thing for C that the debug allocator will do for zig. But that doesn't stop the avalanche of memory safety bugs in production C code.

I used to write a lot of javascript. At the time I swore by testing. "You need testing anyway - why not use it to find other kinds of bugs too?". Eventually I started writing more and more typescript, and now I can't go back. One day I ported a library I wrote for JSON based operational transform from javascript to typescript. That library has an insane 3:1 test:code ratio or something, and deterministic constraint testing. Despite all of that testing, the typescript type checker still found a previously unknown bug in my codebase.

As the saying goes, tests can only prove the presence of bugs. They cannot prove your code does not have bugs. For that, you need other approaches - like rust's borrow checker or a runtime GC.
by Aziell | 2025-05-14 03:25:00+00:00
I went through something very similar — spent several days on a take-home assignment, took it seriously, carefully followed all the instructions and delivered everything.

Then I waited for two weeks, and all I got was a clearly templated response.

The worst part isn’t even the rejection — it’s the vague replies, or no reply at all.It just makes you feel like your time doesn’t matter.

Thank you for writing this. We really do need more people to speak up about these things.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-14 03:25:06+00:00
I did a recent round of interviews and this experience closely mirrors mine (at multiple places). Delivered an exceptional solution to the problem only to be rejected without a discussion about the delivered project. I have been on the hiring end of take-homes multiple times and firmly believe that if you ask someone to do a take-home assignment you must follow up with a chat about the code. Apparently that's not the case at most places.

If you're asked to do a take home, I highly recommend confirming that there will be a follow up regardless of the assessment, and if they do not agree to this, do not do the "home work". The honest truth is that most of the teams hiring are of pretty low quality and therefore implementing a good solution is a negative because the team hiring is not at your level (which is a frustrating reason for being rejected).

I'm an early adopter of Kagi and am now planning on cancelling my account over of this. Completely unacceptable. If you don't have time to chat with a candidate about their work, don't ask them to do the work in the first place.
by twelve40 | 2025-05-14 03:25:31+00:00
maybe they should admit they are not special anymore and expand into other large markets like hotels? I don't even care anymore, I just use Google Maps or Booking, whether it's a "property" on Booking or a hotel, each one has it's pros and cons, I choose whatever feels right at the moment from what seems to be an exhaustive list of both. Properties can be more fun and better for larger groups, hotels are cleaned and don't have annoying "house rules" like washing the dishes etc, or chasing the owner if the lock doesn't work. I don't know how many travelers still stick exclusively to properties anymore.
by bastawhiz | 2025-05-14 03:25:48+00:00
You're not doing it in a browser window. You're integrating against device APIs like NFC, you've got custom UI (which you probably want to be native), you've got stuff like camera access to read QR codes and OCR a credit card. Want to pay by topping up a wallet at 7-Eleven? Now you need a map to show where the nearest one is.
by iamthemonster | 2025-05-14 03:26:05+00:00
It's quite interesting how coffee is treated in different cultures.

In Australia, coffee would normally be consumed as a dark roast, but with texturised (that is aerated and steamed to create a microfoam).

Dark roast coffee is less acidic, and when made into an espresso + texturised milk drink it becomes very sweet and smooth tasting.

Light roasts used in espresso-based milky drinks are not so pleasant, and are more prone to astringency, especially if you use the same grind size, temperature and shot volume as a dark roast (which home espresso makers probably would, but cafes would know better).

Light roasts are best with pourover or French Press methods and served black, which are not really methods that are as common in the Australian tradition.

I'm quite surprised that someone who didn't like dark roasts would find light roasts less challenging, but hey I'm Australian not Swedish.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-14 03:26:23+00:00
> paradigm-shifting conventions

- Basic oxygen steelmaking - Float glass - Orbital satellite - High speed railway - Public key cryptography - Orbital space station - DNA/RNA/sequencing - Self-driving car - Cellular phone service - CD-ROM - Direct satellite television - Laptop - (Also some other stuff after 1985...)

Take many and don't be a dick about most.
by podunkPDX | 2025-05-14 03:26:48+00:00
A few years back I discovered that the Ethiopian run minimart up the street sells unroasted coffee beans, $6/lb.

I bought a pound and followed the proprietor’s advice, roasting small quantities in a cast iron pan on medium high and agitating/stirring until it looked right.

This was too labor intensive to be sustainable (40m for about 100g), but the end result was breathtaking. Immediately bought a roaster from Sweet Maria’s and haven’t looked back.

I’m in the Pacific Northwest and we are spoiled for choice with artisanal roasters and coffee shops alike, but mine still tastes better since I roasted it yesterday.
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-14 03:27:32+00:00
"Rust basically just calls 'free' for you the moment something goes out of scope."

C++ does that too with RAII. Go ahead and use whatever STL containers you like, emplace objects onto them, and everything will be safely single-owned with you never having to manually new or delete any of it.

The difference is that C++'s guarantees in this regard derive from a) a bunch of implementation magic that exists to hide the fact that those supposedly stack-allocated containers are in fact allocating heap objects behind your back, and b) you cooperating with the restrictions given in the API docs, agreeing not to hold pointers to the member objects or do weird things with casting. You can use scoped_ptr/unique_ptr but the whole time you'll be painfully aware of how it's been bolted onto the language later and whenever you want you can call get() on it for the "raw" underlying pointer and use it to shoot yourself in the foot.

Rust formalizes this protection and puts it into the compiler so that you're prevented from doing it "wrong".