MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lanzaa | 2025-05-14 04:05:22+00:00
I think other have already corrected you, but radiative cooling is probably the least common on the ground and the only viable option in space.

I can help explain why. On earth, we are surrounded by stuff. Radiative cooling relies on thermal radiation leaving an object. Crucially, it also requires the object to absorb less thermal radiation than it emits. On earth we are surrounded by stuff, including air, that emits thermal radiation. There is a window of wavelengths, called the atmospheric window[0], that will allow parts of the thermal radiation out into space, rather than returned back. Imagine shining a flashlight on tinted glass, the light will get through depending on the color. If the light gets through, it has escaped. If not, the light is returned and heats up your surroundings again.

Also on earth the other methods (conduction, convection, and phase changes) are more effective. The earth can be used as a very big heat sink. On a spaceship or satellite, you don't have the extra mass to store the energy, so radiative is the only option.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_window
by bboreham | 2025-05-14 04:05:31+00:00
I took a look at the code, to see how I would react as a reviewer.

In the first file I opened, I got as far as here: https://github.com/Sleepful/mymail/blob/main/app/router/page...

// Create a context variable that inherits from a parent, and sets the value "test". // Create a context key for the theme. ctx, err := getEmails(pb, e)

First line is very weird, unrelated to the task. Maybe copy-paste from a sample in a blog post? Anyway not paying attention to leave it in.

Wording in the second line is not consistent with third.

I’d stop my review there. Lack of attention to detail. Author does not demonstrate an ability to think clearly.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-14 04:05:39+00:00
Banking is pretty disfunctional in Sweden. Lots of bank employees seem not to want to work, i.e. they were refusing to open a bank account for me on an EU passport until I asked for written confirmation (which they have to give by law), when suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore (colleague went to the same bank some months later, same employee, was told the same thing, so it's not that they don't know the rules). That said, they do have authentification down. Essentially you use your mobile bank id (an app that you connected via your id card) and when they need to authenticate you they push an notification to your phone that you confirm (using a PIN). Only annoying thing is that mobile bank id only works on android and ios.
by Teever | 2025-05-14 04:07:26+00:00
The solution to this problem ultimately needs to be a regulatory one.

People should be paid for the time they spend in interviews.

You make that the law and this ambiguous hoop jumping bullshit goes away real fast. Companies will optimize for cost instead of dumping cost onto the prospective employees.

This is good for the economy because it forces companies to innovate and optimize the interview process and it saves hundreds hours of totally economically unproductive time on the part of candidates.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-14 04:07:32+00:00
> if there are 20 excellent responses for a single open position, many capable individuals will be rejected.

I would never ask 20 people to do a take-home assignment. There are so many better ways to test team fit before asking someone to commit serious, unpaid, time to a project. Historically speaking a 30 minute chat with someone provides a surprisingly good amount of information to anyone experienced in hiring.

But if you want to commit 20 people to take-home assignments, then block off 20 hours next week for 1-on-1s to chat with them about those assignments. If that sounds like too much, then don't find a better way to filter down the number of people doing homework until it feels manageable.
by xyst | 2025-05-14 04:07:51+00:00
I think this is a classic case of over delivering.

The requirements to spin up and obtain live services (postmark, torso), is a bit much, especially for a take home assignment.

Personally, If your app can’t be spun up and tested with a simple "docker compose up —build", then you are doing something wrong.

My rule of thumb for take home assignments: if I spend more than a few hours on it. Then I am probably over delivering and need to rethink approach and remove shit I don’t need. There’s no way in hell I’m spending a full working day, let alone a _week_ of free labor for these assignments.

Note: also not a fan of "take home assignments" either. Of the few companies that ask for these, I consequently ask to be compensated for my time. Only 1 company agreed to compensation, but others declined and I moved on.
by quadhome | 2025-05-14 04:07:53+00:00
All but one of these come from the restriction[1][2] lint group.

I try to remember to look at new restriction lints with every Rust release. For example, here's what new with 1.86.0[3]; the `return_and_then` lint looks pretty nice.

n.b. no one should enable all restrictions lints— some are mutually exclusive, some are appropriate for specialised circumstances like `#[no_std]`. But I find them helpful to keep a project away from the wild parts of Rust.

P.S. `unhandled_errors` doesn't exist[4].

[1]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/stable/?groups=restr... [2]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/clippy/lints.html#restricti... [3]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/stable/?groups=restr... [4]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/stable/index.html#/u...
by jwillp | 2025-05-14 04:07:57+00:00
If only they passed the inverse law requiring gas and coal plants to buy renewable power to reduce their pollution impact. This raises the question, why should a power generator be required to purchase external power? Isn't that the job of the grid operator, not the generation companies? It sounds like the state grid operator is trying to put their own burden onto renewable generators, rather than manage their portfolio directly. Who actually is responsible for balancing the grid? The state? ERCOT? Individual generators? Nobody? How does this compare to other grids?
by ezrast | 2025-05-14 04:08:10+00:00
Without wanting to be unkind, this author misunderstands the purpose of the exercise, which is to demonstrate to another human being that you can write code that meets the company's standards (as in, would pass PR review), not to ship a fully-functional product solo. The initial email makes it explicit that they don't care if the product even works ("Can use a fake backend") and that the specifications are deliberately open-ended. A little intuition and empathy can tell you that they probably are not going to spend many hours reviewing a complex submission, so the project should optimize for demonstrability of code quality, not completeness.

"I would like to know what kind of response I could expect..." - This is also established from the beginning: you can expect either a "Looks good, let's do some interviews" or a "Sorry, not interested," based on the code you submit. They can't narrow down the choices prior to your submission, because they're grading your submission, not your proposal document with an extensive list of details that they already told you they're mostly ambivalent to.

"So it is funny that my project is so weak, yet it made them update the guidelines to something stricter." - Main character syndrome. As someone who has been on the other side of these kinds of reviews, the far more likely explanation is that they kept getting submissions where the build instructions didn't work (which is not disqualifying by itself; the authors may not be on the same OS as the reviewers) and they got tired of spending time dealing with it.

Ultimately, the failure here was not a technical one but a social one. The author tried very hard to do the thing that it seemed like they were asking for, not the thing they actually wanted. The hiring manager's unwillingness to engage with the proposal doc was itself a form of communication that they were not interested in this level of detail, it was just an implicit one.

It's common for engineer types to want all that kind of communication to be explicit, and I have a lot of sympathy for those folks, but the reality is that teamwork is a skill, and the ability to suss out what a stakeholder actually wants, but isn't saying due to incomplete information and/or office politics, is a reasonable thing to select for. The ambiguity of the prompt is a feature, not a bug: it's kept the author away from a company whose communication style they're not compatible with.

(that said, this project does sound excessively complex for a take-home)
by Arainach | 2025-05-14 04:08:39+00:00
Losing geopolitical influence, respect, and significance. Losing economic impact. Dramatically losing scientists, researchers, innovation, and the things to build future technologies. Losing the lead in electric vehicles and renewable energy. Losing the ability to build ships, semiconductors, large steel foundries, and more essentials.

So. Much. Winning. I'm sick of winning.
by silisili | 2025-05-14 04:09:02+00:00
Just to be clear, this wasn't my advice, it was written into the task description -

This project tests your ability not only to code, but to deal with ambiguity and open-endedness

I'm not sure how I feel about that to be honest. On one hand I get what they're shooting for in general by saying that. On the other, they're going to have some preconceived notion of what they want, and it's a bit of luck if you come close to that.
by theamk | 2025-05-14 04:09:10+00:00
Should have added "looks good on screen and on paper", "stores text compactly" and "multiple pages supported" :) And yes, that's a pretty easy set of hurdles. I wish we'd standardized on DjVu instead.

Re "PDF's are immutable." - that's not a psychological fallacy, that's a primary advantage of PDFs. If I wanted mutable format, I'd take an odt (or rtf or a doc). "Output only" format allows one to use the very latest version of editor app, while having the result working even in ancient readers, something very desirable in many contexts.
by noident | 2025-05-14 04:09:46+00:00
It's a tough lesson, but a good one to learn early: never waste time with interview take home assignments. This is especially true for broad and ambiguous assignments that you will need to sink lots of time into.

What if there are 300 other applicants? What's to disincentivize giving all of them the assignment even when there's only one open position? There is no guarantee that anybody will even clone your repository.

In a live coding interview, the company is committing valuable engineering resources to evaluate you. You have some assurances that they actually want to hire someone and not just get free labor or waste your time.
by sudoforge | 2025-05-14 04:10:35+00:00
hey there! i maintain git-bug, and recently trimmed down the README, which was, in my opinion, a bit too dense prior to this recent change (https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/commit/96c7a111a3cb075b5c...).

i rewrote the README with the goal of providing a clear overview of git-bug's features, and why you might want to use it, and ensuring that for those who are more technically inclined, things like the data model, internal architecture, and more were easy to find under the documentation folder (whether you're browsing through the files directly, or landing on //doc:README.md, which links to the files and folders under //doc.

if you think that there is information missing from the README, or hard to find in the repository (either by browsing through it, or clicking the rather prominent links from the main README), i'd welcome any suggestions in the form of a PR.
by dclowd9901 | 2025-05-14 04:11:18+00:00
Yes on this: It reminds me of when candidates ask me how they did at the end of the interview. It shows an extreme lack of decorum and empathy. What if you did terribly and I wouldn't hire you in a million years? Do you really want me to tell you that?

There's no good answer and asking a question like that shows real narcissism imo.
by bandrami | 2025-05-14 04:11:21+00:00
Yes, though that comes with its own headaches since the data those sandboxed applications are supposed to touch are the only actually valuable data on my computer. (How many versions of OpenSSL are currently running on my Silverblue system? I literally couldn't tell you.) My spreadsheet is only vouched for by some random dude on Flathub and it can steal all my financial information. But at least it can't add a printer, or delete a system file that I can freely download from the Internet at any time.
by keepamovin | 2025-05-14 04:12:15+00:00
It’s funny that classified imaging platforms would definitely have tracked this reentry, but they’re gonna hold off on providing their data and maybe not going to provide it at all because it needs to be parallel constructed through non-classified capabilities.

so it’s sort of like that submarine implosion incident where US Navy knew what happened immediately. They may have even notified people at that time.

but I’m sure that US space force already exactly knows the trajectory of this object and probably the Russian corresponding agency does as well. but like the public has to wait for “open science” to reverse engineer where it might’ve been.

It’s a funny Highlighting of the gap between public state-of-the-art and deployed capabilities that are not public.
by boulos | 2025-05-14 04:13:29+00:00
Great writeup!

I can't tell from your GLSL if these would have forced FMAs for a lot of the intermediate product sums. That would probably be a non-trivial effect, particularly for your large anisotropy cases.

The Heckbert paper also describes the basic theory, but you would want to supplement with some of the offline rendering work that followed it. OpenImageIO (OIIO) is pretty widely used, and has gone through several iterations of bug fixing like https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenImageIO/pul...

But for your purposes, you probably just need to find all the magic epsilons and sign checks to make it match.
by jrowen | 2025-05-14 04:14:02+00:00
I think the core value prop of Airbnb is (or should be) to provide a different experience than a hotel. It may have been "cheaper than a hotel" at one point and idk what the numbers are on how people are using it but in my experience it excels for larger groups or for people just looking for a more house-like experience than a hotel. Being able to stay in a nice house with a bunch of friends in any city is an amazing thing they made a lot more accessible.

Doesn't really make a lot of sense to me to just shop on price and then compare the experience to booking a hotel room, it's totally different.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-14 04:14:09+00:00
What about:

> And don't hesitate to tell us if you have any questions!

I personally have no problem dealing with "ambiguity and open-endedness" (and, in fact, enjoy it!), but my solution to this problem at every job that has had this issue is: talk to people and understand the problem.

Attempting to "mind-read" is the worst solution to ambiguity, and, in practice, nearly always leads to disaster.
by quantadev | 2025-05-14 04:14:29+00:00
I tell everyone up front (recruiters and companies) I absolutely don't do homework assignments as part of a job interview. If they're unable to judge my skill level from an interview, that speaks volumes about them, not me.

Furthermore, if they are even the kind of company that thinks they're so special they can or should even ask for that, then it proves they're the kind of people I want to avoid like the plague to begin with. So when I'm asked to do a homework assignment it's actually a huge time saver for me, because it tells me right up front to avoid them.

All developers should refuse this. But there are always enough that are so desperate they'll do pretty much anything.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-14 04:15:10+00:00
That makes me very sad, it is one of my favorite books. I know an internet stranger is unlikely to convince you, but here’s my endorsement:

It’s the story of an outsider who gives up everything in order to join the “in crowd”, and at the end finds that it was all meaningless. I think this is impactful because it forces the reader (or at least, forced me) to deeply consider what _I_ wanted out of life, instead of what others want, or what seems conventional.
by wqaatwt | 2025-05-14 04:15:20+00:00
Probably not so much western parts. Also regardless of China’s national policy individual Chinese companies regularly get sanctioned and are effectively forced to chose between doing business in the West and Russia. Which obviously isn’t a very hard choice for most…

AFAIK most stuff is smuggled through countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus (with no negative consequences for those countries; the opposite really..)
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-14 04:15:23+00:00
If your renter for a single room can completely cover your mortgage payments, there's a good chance that at least one of your properties has appreciated quite a lot since you bought it. That's wealth. If you go for a second mortgage or sell one of those houses, there's a good chance you will be covered on a relatively frugal lifestyle for quite a while.
by xypage | 2025-05-14 04:15:56+00:00
Went to check it out, it has a demo so it's worth giving it a shot, but then I went to look at what else this developer has published just to find it's the guy behind the original jelly car games?? Which they have a sequel to on their steam page and the music instantly sent me back. This became a huge nostalgia trip on accident, thanks for sharing!
by dzhiurgis | 2025-05-14 04:16:08+00:00
Can I ask you and everyone else - why do AI is so good at UI/CRUD apps and terrible at business logic?

I've been caught with this few times now. Spend ages trying to coerce AI to solve logic problem and end up just manually solving it myself. Whereas UIs are so good and usually near perfect from first prompt. I suspect it's the weak prompt. I need to learn and solve this before my brain completely atrophies (there must be Anthropic joke here somewhere hehe).
by stevenwoo | 2025-05-14 04:18:23+00:00
I read it a long time ago and like you have very little recollection of it. However in high school we also read Homer and several plays by Shakespeare and remember a lot of details - I think my English teachers did a great job of explaining the context and chairing our discussions about those other works. I was thinking it’s hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in high school but then the other works are separated from us by culture and centuries (though to be fair translations we read for Homer are each a work in themselves)
by cowhax | 2025-05-14 04:19:04+00:00
I feel Kagi's entire point of the take home assignment is to see how people handled assignments if left to their own devices with little instructions to go off.

When good companies are trying to hire engineers, they don't hire based on skill alone. They also try to hire based on how a person performs given certain constraints like time and ambiguity.

Sharing a proposal and asking for more time was probably the polar opposite what they were looking for

I think a lot of product managers prefer to see simple, fast solutions to a take home assignment. Understandable and turned in on time.
by huffer | 2025-05-14 04:19:10+00:00
Nice work! How do you verify correctness of the generated exercises and explanations? To me this looks the biggest risk in becoming a user: what if my _teacher_ teaches me subtle nonsense that I cannot easily detect since I'm learning and unfamiliar with the material (even if it's only in the 1-2% of cases)? Human teachers make mistakes too, but an LLM cannot _understand_ that it made one... So.. how do you solve for this issue of trust?
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-14 04:21:08+00:00
The parent's gripe is presumably about many bad SMS-based 2FA implementations banning non-post-paid numbers from use.

E.g. Blizzard (assuming they still do this)

If they want to be aggressive about fraudulent activity, fine, but don't restrict perfectly valid phone numbers from being used in their required 2FA scheme.
by llmthrow103 | 2025-05-14 04:21:11+00:00
As a hirer, the kind of takehome assignment I like to give is one that:

* Can be completed in 30 minutes by a skilled programmer

* Has clear evaluation criteria, both objective and subjective

* Has multiple approaches that require making different tradeoffs

And of course, only give it to some candidates where the result will be make-or-break.

As someone who took one of these broad take-home assignments my last time looking for a job, I failed a the assignment for a job I was overqualified for because I was told I wasn't able to divine what parts of the extremely broad assignment I would be graded on.

I doubt I will be in a position where I get a job that isn't a referral for the rest of my career, but it really turned me off of these kinds of assignments, both taking and giving them.
by npn | 2025-05-14 04:21:14+00:00
Is it just me or he missed the point completely?

Look at all the third party services he uses! Nobody sane would pick that solution. That would be a completely maintainment nightmare.

He did not write an email client, he wrote a wrapper to some email client, which handles all the heavy lifting.

At the very least, write something that interact with a real (or fake) SMTP server. Other things are just cherry on top.
by namuol | 2025-05-14 04:21:38+00:00
I’ve found emulators to be a pretty poor first project for rust specifically for the reasons you alluded to: That you need to know to write it without heap allocation (or other hoop jumping so long as you avoid juggling lifetimes) when so much literature and example emulator code doesn’t do this is a recipe for a bad experience. Ask me how I know.

If you’re going to write an emulator in this style, why even use an imperative language when something like Haskell is designed for this sort of thing?
by gia_ferrari | 2025-05-14 04:21:39+00:00
I just rigged up something similar: a DBUS listener for PulseAudio mic activity that publishes MQTT events to Home Assistant via discovery. No device config needed. I use hallway RGB lights to signal status ("purple = I'm in a meeting"). Quick and easy setup, I already had the RGB lights for mood lighting. Runs as a user systemd unit.
by powersnail | 2025-05-14 04:22:10+00:00
> No; you would need to touch people hair after a shampoo shower and after a non shampoo shower to see the difference.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. My girl friend has long hair, and doesn't wash with shampoo every day (which is somewhat common for long-haired people I believe), and the texture after shower is very different.

In college, especially exam week, we had more anecdata. It was possible to see people who 1) had not washed their hair, 2) had washed their hair in a sink with water only, 3) dry-washed with those sprays, and 4) washed with shampoo. It was very easy to tell which they did.

In general, soapy cleaner (or similar substances) is going to help immensely when cleaning oily stuff. And hair can be really oily. Water-only is just not the same.

One scenario I don't have is comparing other soapy products to shampoo. But shampoo aren't more expensive than other soaps anyway, so I never bothered to look.
by keepamovin | 2025-05-14 04:23:09+00:00
Crazy right? On the whole I think it’s great and wonderful that the web platform has grown into the gorgeous monster that it is. I mean what better than a unified technology to serve us all the worlds information from any device in a basically sandboxed environment. I’m even all for the beautiful way The platform has developed rapidly added capabilities on how the language JavaScript HTMLNCSS has evolved. I think all that is wonderful. And I really enjoyed the ride.

But all of that growth and integration comes with these vulnerabilities, and so the cyber and DLP control aspect of web browsers is a very important one.

If this resonates with you, i invite you to check out my company’s project BrowserBox on GitHub