MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JSR_FDED | 2025-05-14 04:54:38+00:00
I think that’s too simple.

You might find this paper from the Hoover Institution interesting, it w goes into some depth analyzing the implications of DeepSeek on US innovation: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/Zeg...

Similarly, withholding funding for research, meddling in how universities are supposed to conduct their affairs, the reduced appeal of studying in the US for foreign students, putting wrestling promoter Linda McMahon in charge of dept of Education… these are all going to impact America’s research and innovation abilities.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-14 04:54:56+00:00
You seem to think that I am making a negative judgment here. His lifestyle is fine with me and I assume he is a great person. He clearly has made many smart decisions around things like building lasting wealth through real estate and keeping good relationships with his family. He also clearly values his flexibility and his lifestyle, looking for 100% remote jobs almost exclusively. He talks quite a bit about the tax code and his three houses and how he wants to renovate them and use them to make money. However, if you look at the time spent on these things, it pretty strongly suggests that he prefers these things to programming/engineering.

I don't judge him as a person for this. In fact, he's probably better as a friend than many of us who did sacrifice a lot of this stuff for a career. Unfortunately, many careers in knowledge work are "up or out," and if you don't choose "up," "out" will be chosen for you.
by rectang | 2025-05-14 04:55:06+00:00
This doesn’t ring true to me. My understanding (and experience) is that coffee beans have abundant flavor components which get burnt away by the roasting process. Brewing issues like grind and proportion of beans/water are a separate class of problems. Is it not possible in your mind that someone just doesn’t like the sharp flavors which are left uncharred in light roasts?
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-14 04:55:25+00:00
I see this sentiment a lot these days. People who were around a person all day, everyday, for several years can say "this was the worst person I've ever known and they were completely incompetent"/"this person was an absolute saint and I was blessed to spend time alongside them", and some person who never met them will be like "your experiences are wrong and I know them better."

It's always weird and I have no clue why people get that mindset.
by keepamovin | 2025-05-14 04:55:35+00:00
Yes and in general I think it's a good thing. It's a shame and a moral obscenity (and moral injury for the people staffing those systems) when they can see crimes or abuses but are unable to do anything due to "national security" (when such withholding seems to undermine it!).

Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-14 04:57:18+00:00
2 Dudes. Girl. One dude becomes rich and throws parties, but is incomplete without Girl. Other dude (the main character, technically) works to make ends meet, but marries Girl. Rich dude connects with married dude to get close to Girl. That's the main motif at least.

A book about what happiness means and how and if you can ever shape and re-shape yourself to pursue it. Only the quote in the afterword really stood out to me, and I later learn that that's not even in the book; it's in the 50's movie adaptation:

>“There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”

The rest was more slice of life details about the roaring 20's. That quickly escalates when the Rich dude lends his car to someone else and he runs over someone. Rich dude takes the bullet in revenge when the husband of the run over person takes revenge.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-14 04:57:24+00:00
I just love how Win32 has its own set of system calls as a subsystem separate from the main NT kernel. Imagine making syscalls to control X11 or wayland window/gui.

These days I think MS wants you to use WinRT/UWP stuff: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/11/28/standa...
by mock-possum | 2025-05-14 04:57:35+00:00
Really?? I always appreciated candidates that would ask that at the end - being willing to step aside from the pretense of professionalism to ask a real question and listen to my answer is a signal to me that this is someone who is willing to be real with me, not pretentious or perfunctory.

I do get what you’re saying, but I disagree, there is a good answer; and as is often the case, it’s an honest one.
by theamk | 2025-05-14 04:58:28+00:00
The 2nd line of assignment, "The project is to build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client".

I agree that "inspiration" can be subjective, but in this particular case the solution was so much off that it'd be hard to argue otherwise. There is nothing terminal-like in it, and the tool is not usable as an email client either. Instead of doing login screens and user management, author should have made a page to view individual email or added folder (just 3, inbox/sent/trash, would already be a great improvement)

And if you want to ignore the requirements and work off position description... the position is titled "Email Backend Engineer", and the candidate's solution offloads actual email operations (storage, transfer) to third-party services. I suspect that even if candidate provided the same UX, but would have backed it with SMTP, IMAP, TCP/IP (not via http library), DNS MX lookup, resilient storage etc... then they might have passed.

But author failed to do either serious front-end work (required by question) or serious back-end work (required by job posting), so result was entirely predictable.
by Rusky | 2025-05-14 04:58:29+00:00
The stuff Fil-C adds is on the same footing as `unsafe` code in Rust- its implementation isn't checked, but its surface area is designed so that (if the implementation is correct) the rest of the program can't break it.

Whether the amount and quality of this kind of code is comparable between the two approaches depends on the specific programs you're writing. Static checking, which can also be applied in more fine-grained ways to parts of the runtime (or its moral equivalent) is an interesting approach, depending on your goals.
by BrouteMinou | 2025-05-14 04:58:42+00:00
I don't know why we are still having this topic going on. Zig is not safe, period.

Zig gives you the control you need if that is what you want, safety isn't something Zig is chasing.

Safer than C, yeah, but not safe.

Rust = safe Zig = control

Pick your weapon for the foe in front of you.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-14 04:59:02+00:00
Maybe in America. Outside the US, that's really not the problem. It's people buying up loads of houses and apartments in town centers and pushing everyone else out. Then landlords realize they can jack up rent because they can make more money in one weekend with some foreign tourists through Airbnb than they would from a local living there.

You can build new houses. But if locals are pushed miles away from town, the town dies. A new town is formed. And if that new town gets the slightest bit of popularity on social media, Airbnb swoops in to suck the blood out of it.

It's absolutely killing communities with incomes below the US average.
by holoubekm | 2025-05-14 04:59:41+00:00
As an engineering interviewer I feel the urge to comment. I like neither leet code, nor home assignments. They are both time consuming and provide you with a little information.

But having said this I would have likely rejected the author too. Kagi Search is a startup, these folks are typically looking for fast moving, pragmatic optimists who can strike the breadth - depth balance.

We used to have a colleague. They would collect the inputs, close themselves for a few days, come up with a solution only to learn that reqs changed in the meantime. It was not pleasant experience for anyone.
by asmor | 2025-05-14 05:00:02+00:00
That would maybe be a valid point if the take home set any context beyond "it's an R&D project" and "minimal".

What do you want to achieve here, is this a throwaway prototype or would a user ever see this? Am I going to get picked on for imperfect UX or do you just want to see something. It becomes an exercise in guessing the reviewers sensibilities.
by treyd | 2025-05-14 05:00:58+00:00
TypeScript is arguably one of the weaker statically typed languages, with how it allows `any` to quietly violate the type checked assumptions. It makes it harder to do a lot of the basic typing mistakes in JS, but it doesn't prevent them by any means, especially if you have to interface with (typeless) JS code.

So for these reasons alone I would be against using TS as a lingua franca for LLM codegen (as is GP I assume). As another commenter mentioned, LLMs have a tendency to throw their hands^Hlogits up when presented with complex TS type errors and just resort to using `any` to get it to compile (and probably hiding bugs).

And that doesn't even touch the issues with the JS/TS ecosystem and runtimes more broadly.
by buyx | 2025-05-14 05:03:24+00:00
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.

In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.

English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:

At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)

No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
by fenomas | 2025-05-14 05:03:49+00:00
I agree about Kagi, but about your process wanted to ask: do you really feel like having them write the code as a take-home task adds any signal to the process?

At my current gig we do a 1-hour pair programming kind of thing, where we video-chat and watch the candidate work on a small, straightforward task. And as the interviewer I watch how they use the tools, where they go for docs, do they read the requirements, how do they test, etc. By the end I always feel like I have a strong picture of their ability, and the whole thing is capped at 90 minutes for both sides (adding time for their questions).

If the candidate's code was written offline beforehand, I'd have no idea whether it was theirs, whether it came from a friend or chatGPT, whether it took ten minutes or ten hours, etc. Sure I could try to suss out those things during discussion, but isn't it better to observe directly?
by tkgally | 2025-05-14 05:04:14+00:00
I started roasting my own coffee a few months ago. I use a light pan with a screen cover I found online and roast the beans by shaking the pan over a high flame for seven or eight minutes. I judge the degree of the roast from the sound, the smoke, and the smell. It took a few batches before I got the hang of it, but now it works great.

Home coffee roasting is, as one might expect, a deep rabbit hole that one can spend a lot of money on. But if you're only roasting for yourself, a simple setup like mine should be fine.

I live in Japan, and there are coffee wholesalers that carry raw beans from all over the world. I'm currently trying beans from Nicaragua, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. When I use those up I'll try four other origins.
by csomar | 2025-05-14 05:04:37+00:00
It is really location specific. For some locations, the hotel experience is better/cheaper and hotels (serviced apartments) can have kitchens/privacy.

The problem is not much of the hotel/apartment but rather the platform. AirBnb manipulates search results, prices and UX to squeeze harder. It now wants to up sell "experiences" that it puts in your face every-time you open the app. It is just exhausting as the rest of everything on the internet that is taking the same path.
by int19h | 2025-05-14 05:04:52+00:00
Been using Devin for a few months now, for Typescript and Python.

I've never seen it check-in uncompilable code, but watching the Devin console I can see it building and using the code to ensure commits are not complete garbage. When it has checked-in compilable and almost right but slightly wrong code, automatically running lint and tests (it doesn't always run them before checking in) from ci triggers it to push a fix on its own.

Feedback loops are nice, but they can be expensive, and time consuming (oh look at me complain that it takes Devin a whopping 15 minutes to complete a task) so I can definitely see the value in type constraints.
by aorth | 2025-05-14 05:05:45+00:00
I tried with one PDF and was surprised to see it connect to some cloud service:

2025-05-14 07:58:49,373 - urllib3.connectionpool - DEBUG - Starting new HTTPS connection (1): openaipublic.blob.core.windows.net:443 2025-05-14 07:58:50,446 - urllib3.connectionpool - DEBUG - https://openaipublic.blob.core.windows.net:443 "GET /encodings/o200k_base.tiktoken HTTP/1.1" 200 361 3922

The project's README doesn't mention that anywhere...
by makeavish | 2025-05-14 05:07:14+00:00
I too had similar experience. I booked a 4.9 rated property with 30 reviews. But experience was really poor and I rated 1 stars post checkout. The propery owner reachout to me asking for explanation but I wasn’t in any mood to discuss.

Hours later they filed fake complaint to Airbnb that I rated poorly as I wanted late checkout and asked money to remove review. Airbnb removed my review post that. I had a flight to catch so I couldn’t checkout late anyway. I shared even flight details with Airbnb but they didn’t reinstate review and added a strike to my account. I expect host did this previously as well to improve their rating.
by theamk | 2025-05-14 05:08:08+00:00
OP's proposal was only describing irrelevant stuff (the backend technologies) and was completely silent on on stuff that mattered (demonstrating how actual RFC822 email works, mutt-inspired UI). It was therefore accepted without comments, as there were no "substance" to comment on.

That is often a problem with proposals/design docs in general. In the real job, if proposal is actually required, it would be sent it back with "please add details on UX and how you are going to store email headers". In this case, the proposal was explicitly _not_ required though, so interviewers did not want to ask for more details on the optional document. They checked what was written there, found no problems, and approved it.
by anthk | 2025-05-14 05:08:28+00:00
>hasn't much beyond blacksmithing and so was able keep those basic skills.

That's an Anglo-Saxon black legend. How do you think boats and trebuchets were made? Navigation in the ocean without trig? Astrolabes? Yeah, sure. Year 600 wasn't the same as 1200.

Read about Alphonse X. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile
by parpfish | 2025-05-14 05:09:19+00:00
Tangent:

I’ve often thought that it would be great to let people design their own political districts to reduce gerrymandering

At the polling place you’d get a map with your census tract and then be asked “which two or three adjacent tracts are most similar to your community”. Eventually you’d end up with some sort of gram matrix for tract-to-tract affinity, and then you could apply some algorithmic segmentation.

Two problems:

- this is far too complex for most voters to understand, much less trust, what’s happening

- the fact it’s “algorithmic” would give a sheen of pseudo objectivity, but the selection of the actual algorithm would still allow political infouence over boundaries
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-14 05:10:51+00:00
> Also, I have no idea how out of touch you have to be to claim that a simple sign that costs a few bucks is less convenient than something that requires power, another peripheral that requires power, and network access.

If you go ask random people whether they'd rather update a sign several times a day, or plug it in and be done for a year, what do you think they'd answer?
by ookblah | 2025-05-14 05:11:06+00:00
its about consistency to me. if you have a lot of time to kill on potential issues then sure. stopped using abnb when i traveled once and the AC was broken/leaking b/c the host thought i wouldn't mind it, then asked if i would be fine waiting 1-2 days while a repair guy came to fix it. thankfully the host was apologetic and worked with me and airbnb to get the refund, but i still had to book a hotel elsewhere.

with some chain hotel at least i know what to relatively expect in terms of service and amenities and have someone to complain to to make it right.
by kr2 | 2025-05-14 05:12:42+00:00
Chiming in from Los Angeles, USA to say wow, must be nice living in a modern society that prioritizes public transit and peoples' ease of movement. I know, I know, it comes with trade offs of living in an authoritarian state, but the absolute abysmal state of infrastructure in this country is maddening. Ever been on a train in Denmark or Japan or Switzerland?
by thisisit | 2025-05-14 05:13:51+00:00
>most taxpayers wouldn’t choose

How do you know that? Tax paying is a larger subset of people who voted in this election because migrants also pay taxes. The popular vote count was 49.8%. So, however you want to dice it "most taxpayers" aren't choosing here.

> forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic

Forcibly take? That is a right-wing point you seem to be repeating without seeing the irony.

The whole point of electing a government is that it can allocate taxpayers money maybe to causes you don't agree with.

If government reallocating resources is "forcibly take" then "most taxpayers" - the 50.8% people who didn't vote for this government can also claim their taxes are being "forcibly taken" by this government as well? Or is it that right wing voices matter more than others?

As I said lack of empathy and callousness is a hallmark of this government and its supporters.
by cryptoz | 2025-05-14 05:13:54+00:00
The actual money can’t be the issue. It’s $136 for failure to stop at a stop sign in WA. If they enforced that for 30 seconds per day the cities would be wealthy beyond belief.

Or maybe not-but we’d have much safer traffic! Thus enabling revenue from fewer deaths.

But I digress- the problem with “revenue” for cities is they actively avoid getting it. If they actually wanted or desired more funds for the city, simply enforcing laws is all that is needed. It’s just not desired to have revenue I suppose, if it means enforcing laws and collecting dues owed.

Yes yes I’m probably being “unrealistic” but honestly? Maybe not.
by throwanem | 2025-05-14 05:15:00+00:00
"I'm embarrassed about my taste in science fiction" isn't really something I know how to address.

I don't recommend the Rifters trilogy either - in this more or less emulating its own author, these days - nor have I bothered rereading it in by now well over a decade. It was interesting, I'm glad I read it, but what was there to be found I have long since taken away, and even when Watts comes up on the topic of his later work, his earlier doesn't really even occur to me. It's something I read most of 20 years ago that held my interest for a while with some of its ideas about artificial and archaic life and some of its character drama, but - no real critique, this, I read a lot of things - otherwise just didn't make all that much of an impression.

Typically the fashion in which that manifests is that I simply do not start any conversations on the topic, because it never occurs to me to do so. I'm not here to psychoanalyze the commenter who chose otherwise this evening. But if that were me, it would be interesting to me to reflect on why I had chosen to start the conversation I did, in a context where its subject was not at all relevant beyond a trivial coincidence of authorship.
by psychoslave | 2025-05-14 05:15:58+00:00
This explanation doesn't expose anything meaningful to my mind, as it doesn't define ownership and borrowing, both words being apparently rooted in an analogy with financial asset management.

I'm not acquainted with Rust, so I don't really know, but I wonder if the wording plays a role in the difficulty of concept acquisition here. Analogies are often double edged tools.

Maybe sticking to a more straight memory related vocabulary as an alternative presentation perspective might help?
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-14 05:16:10+00:00
Gerrymandering is much more favorable in a FPTP system of elections than other types of elections. Winner takes all really incentives doing whatever it takes to keep winning.

Instead of your quite complex idea of segmentation, entities should simply move to a slightly more complex election system than FPTP, but which has reduced incentive for gerrymandering. For example, systems that give parties some seats based on the percentage of votes they get in the whole country/province etc.
by jksflkjl3jk3 | 2025-05-14 05:16:52+00:00
I think we're just the silent majority.

I've been a digital nomad for the last 9 years. Airbnb is a huge reason why my experience has been so great. How else can I show up in a city in a new country , spend 5 minutes the day before I arrive, and end up with a nice furnished apartment in a great location for a week's stay?
by alganet | 2025-05-14 05:17:09+00:00
I didn't knew about it.

Honestly, it doesn't take a genius or religion to figure out that human connection and good counseling are good things.

However, I despise the analytical part of it. It sounds like made up stuff.

Anyway, "pouring the soul" into material stuff is probably much older than organized religion. Writing, painting, etc. To think people do it because they miss counseling is, in my opinion, in the realm of "wild unbiased guess". We do it since the very first cave paintings, for many different reasons way broader than a single explanation can hold.
by lmm | 2025-05-14 05:17:29+00:00
> But why conflate “technical skill assessment” and “ambiguity handling” into one big stressful test?

Because the combination is what matters for the hiring decision, and a single test is a lot easier for everyone than two tests.

> You’ll get better insight into their abilities with less effort for the interviewee AND the interviewer

Disagree. It would always end up being approximately twice as much effort for both.
by citadel_melon | 2025-05-14 05:17:52+00:00
Bell Labs was at its peak from 1960s-1970s. Since the 80s, corporate governance has completely changed due to Jack Welch’s short-term shareholder maximization ideology taking over the corporate world.

I don’t think there are current private organizations doing research similar to what Bell Labs did as the current corporate-governance systems wouldn’t allow for it.

Currently, industry research is more for profit-maximization at the expense of greater human prosperity/economic growth: such as you mention Monsanto making patented seeds, increasing profits by disallowing farmers to regrow crops more cheaply which otherwise could’ve been passed onto consumers/wider society.
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-05-14 05:20:57+00:00
Pro consumer, delaying public listings leaves the door open for housing discrimination for one. Selling agents can use the delayed listing process to only show the home to pre-screened buyers of their choosing for a variety of reasons, some legitimate; many not. That can very quickly turn into a Fair Housing violation and swept under the rug because buyers just aren’t aware it’s happening.