MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lmm | 2025-05-14 03:27:34+00:00
> I think people still want to use different form factors in the future. There's different uses for a phone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop.

> The only thing you save from running your desktop (or even laptop) form factor off your phone is the processor (CPU, GPU, RAM). You still have to pay for everything else.

Having used the same device as my tablet/laptop/desktop for a few years (previously a couple of generations of Surface Book, now the Envy, in both cases with a dock set up on my desk), I never want to go back. It just makes using it so much smoother, even compared to having tab sync and what have you between multiple devices. It's not a money thing, it's a convenience thing, which is why I think it'll win out in the end.

I think as hardware continues to get thinner and lighter, the advantage of a tablet-only device compared to a tablet/laptop will disappear, and as touchscreens get cheaper, there'll be little point in laptop-only devices. I definitely still want an easy way to take a keyboard with my device on the train/plane, and I don't know what exact hardware arrangement will win out for that, but I'm confident that the convergence will happen. I think phone convergence will also happen eventually, for the same reason, but how that will actually work in terms of the physical form factor is anyone's guess.
by ncallaway | 2025-05-14 03:28:39+00:00
> we never clearly define specs or requirements for anything.

I mean, what if part of the role that’s being hired for is to help people clearly define the specs and requirements? I consider that a big part of what it means to be a senior software engineer.

Maybe this exact format isn’t the best way to test for it, but I don’t think “we want to see if someone can deal with ambiguity” means all the work is ambiguous. It might just mean all work needs to go through a process to take it from “ambiguous requirements” to “clearly defined specs”
by alganet | 2025-05-14 03:29:57+00:00
"you are a lunatic BECAUSE you're opinion is invalid" (translates to: you are being unreasonable). Not ad hominen.

is different from

"you are a lunatic THEREFORE your opinion is invalid" (translates to: I think your conclusions came from your mental condition). Ad hominen.

It's quite easy to understand.

Fallacy lists are known to be vulnerable to sophists that take it apart literally instead of seeing the broader perspective of having them.

The introduction of a disruptive discussion (such as: is this a fallacy or not?) is a common technique for diversion.

You should have acknowledged that the other guy didn't meant to insult when he tried to explain. But you did the opposite, you doubled down on making it an insult. It's a sign of a bad conversation, in which one or more participants are not interested in the discussion.
by sbrother | 2025-05-14 03:30:08+00:00
Apologies since I have not taken the time to learn rust yet, but I've written a lot of modern C++. Is the ownership model kind of like std::unique_ptr and std::move, and `Rc<RefCell<Node>>` the same idea as `std::shared_ptr`? But less idiomatic? Or do I have the wrong idea?
by redczar | 2025-05-14 03:31:10+00:00
I’ve got 20 years of experience teaching mathematics at a community college. MyMathLab and it’s various clones are all terrible. My brief tinkering with this product has impressed me. Certainly it underdelivers at this point but they are on the right track as far as interface and usability. Don’t know if they can pull this off but being different than existing ed tech players in mathematics is a good thing since Pearson, etc. all suck.
by shusaku | 2025-05-14 03:31:14+00:00
Very insightful idea here. If you work in software, requirements engineering is a key task. Figuring out “would this deliver for you?” is a key question you hash out with clients.

But the absurdity of take home work like this is the company feels obliged to keep their requirements secret. Thus, by doing the task not knowing if it will be up to spec, you compromise on your most important skill!
by theamk | 2025-05-14 03:31:14+00:00
My first though on looking at the code, and then on demo video was: wow, it took that person a solid week to write a web app with two pages.. all while missing the most basic email features, like an ability to opening a message (and not just show full text of mail bodies on one page).

Later on I read the requirements... This person applied to a position named "Email Backend Engineer" but they actually used a third-party product (postmark + turso) for email backend! They also clearly don't think about email too much - the basic stuff, like plaintext email formatting, viewing, and folders (at least inbox + outbox) are simply missing; while there are optional features, like login screen, admin page and backend framework. And backend database does not even containing a email headers map!

That person might be a great engineer, but I don't think they would be a good fit for that specific position. I'd reject them as well.

(A separate question is that hiring manager's second response... We don't do take-home interviews, but I imagine I'd be stumped by a proposal like that, it seems so irregular in a take-home assignment. Still, I can see how the candidate took that response for an approval... perhaps a next candidate would get an extra sentence perhaps something like "actual problem grading would depend on the code quality, number of features implemented, and how close those are to requirements and job description")

Update: read original job description and not just the except from the blog. That person surely omitted some stuff in their blog! the original title was:

"The project is to build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client"

it gave examples:

"Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya."

wow! that's 100% no hire, serious inability to read the requirements.
by rayzana280 | 2025-05-14 03:31:43+00:00
Location: New York, NY Remote: Open to remote or hybrid roles Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: TypeScript, JavaScript, Next.js, React, Node.js, Prisma, tRPC, Zod, Firebase, OpenAI APIs, Ruby on Rails, SQL, Docker, Material UI, HTML/CSS Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/103SeNBQbMj-tYSloXMGSioG_... GitHub: github.com/rayzana280 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rayzana Email: rayzana280@gmail.com

Summary: Full-stack software engineer with professional and project experience using TypeScript, Next.js, and Prisma to build modern, scalable web applications. Most recently contributed to a contact management platform using tRPC and a clean, component driven UI. Comfortable working across the stack and improving UX with thoughtful frontend features. Strong interest in shipping real products, collaborating closely with teams, and growing in environments that value clean code, learning, and impact.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-14 03:31:45+00:00
> To preserve SPA-level speed of navigation while most of content is rendered on server, RSC enabled frameworks implement routes prefetching.

Clever solution, but it sounds like it will have one of two problems:

1. It doesn't allow fine enough grained control over what's prefetched

2. It does, but because of that it has become unmanagably overcomplicated

How do you avoid these?
by musicale | 2025-05-14 03:31:55+00:00
Not PP, but I'd remove year counts. They can do the math if they need to. The main question for the hiring manager should be: can you do the work?

I would probably rephrase your professional summary to focus on you (e.g. Full Stack Engineer specializing in..., Engineering Team Leader for ..., ), and perhaps active verb phrases describing your most significant activities and accomplishments.

I'd move education/degree to the bottom. Recent achievements, experience and skills are more important.

Experience section should provide evidence to support your claims when possible.

Also I haven't looked at your linkedin page but it should be comparable. Best of luck!!
by bastawhiz | 2025-05-14 03:32:31+00:00
Yikes, I love Kagi but if I'd applied for this position and they gave me this assignment, I'd have told them to take a hike. This isn't an afternoon project, it's a full weekend. Maybe two. And are you supposed to be writing tests and stuff for this?

Moreover, this exercise tells you so little about the candidate and their experience. Sure, you know they can code (or did they just use Cursor?) but you have no idea whether they are good and addressing prompts and not at making wise choices. Who cares if the program can send email? What matters is that the client doesn't choke after 10k messages are received or that unicode is handled well: that's the sort of actual challenges you'd be doing at a company like Kagi, not making enormous toy projects.

Edit: Despite that, it seems like a bold choice for the author to build a web app instead of a TUI like the instructions lay out. One could say "terminal inspired" could include web applications but I think that's a stretch.
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-14 03:32:40+00:00
Neo4j first of all is very slow for vectors, so if performance is something that matters for your user experience they definitely aren't a viable option. This is probably why Neo4j themselves have released guides on how to build that middleman software I mentioned with Qdrant for viable performance.

Furthermore, the vectors is capped at 4k dimensions which although may be enough most of the time, is a problem for some of the users we've spoken to. Also, they don't allow pre filtering which is a problem for a few people we've spoken to including Zep AI. They are on the right track, but there are a lot of holes that we are hoping to fill :)

Edit: AND, it is super memory intensive. People have had problems using extremely small datasets and have had memory overflows.
by josephg | 2025-05-14 03:32:51+00:00
> This can potentially lead to performance and/or control flow issues that get incredibly difficult to debug.

The borrow checker only runs at compile-time. It doesn't change the semantic meaning - or the resulting performance - of your code.

The borrow checker makes rust a much more difficult and frustrating language to learn. The compiler will refuse to compile your code entirely if you violate its rules. But there's nothing magical going on in the compiler that changes your program. A rust binary is almost identical to the equivalent C binary.
by enjo | 2025-05-14 03:32:54+00:00
As an occasional host we always wait until the guest writes a review. Our goal is to basically never have a guest write a review so we don't write them hoping they just forget. If we write one they get an email telling them that we did and really pushing them to review.

Our place is all five star reviews and there is very little benefit for further five star reviews. So it's kind of all risk for us at this point when someone does review.
by lmm | 2025-05-14 03:32:57+00:00
> Sure, the work is chaotic. But why would the interview process need to be chaotic?

Because the interview is meant to measure how well someone would perform on the work?

> You want to get the best signals of ability that you can, and one thing you can do to help that is to make sure that you’ve given an assignment that will be evaluated consistently on your end and understood uniformly by the participants

Well sure, all else being equal, but if the cost of consistency is an assignment that doesn't reflect the actual work environment then that may outweigh the benefit.
by bcoates | 2025-05-14 03:33:15+00:00
A nugget in this that seemed significant:

Quote

“I don’t know if I want to call it a social network, because of the stigma associated with it,” says Ari Balogh, Airbnb’s CTO. So they employ a fuzzier term. “We think of it as a connection platform,” he says. “You’re going to see us build a lot more stuff on top of it, although we’re not an advertising system, thank goodness.” (My own observation is that any for-profit company that can host advertising will, but whatever.)

End quote

Launching a communications tool in 2025 that isn't one of the two overly trod spaces (the advertising-hyperengagement loop of instagram, etc. or the people-you-already-know of whatsapp) is a genuine moonshot in a way that "what if airbnb but for manicures" isn't, and it's something that an incumbent like Airbnb could do that would be impractical for anyone else.
by bsimpson | 2025-05-14 03:33:16+00:00
There are too many shady middlemen in the vacation rentals space. I refuse to rent any place that has a separate lease, but they're no longer unheard of.

To some degree, I understand the businessification of rentals - it's uncomfortable for both parties if you're trying to get a grandma to meet you to exchange keys after a late flight. But also, that person-to-person charm is a big part of why people chose Airbnbs in the first place. If it's just an IKEA flip of an old apartment, why bother?

I've actually noticed that my taste in interior design has been impacted. The "pastel and sculpted veneer" aesthetic that took over Airbnb, "modern" coffee shops, and supposedly adult furniture brands like West Elm disgusts me now. I suspect it would have appealed to me if it hadn't been badly copied with shitty materials so many times. Now, I associate it with hollow experiences, poor craftsmanship, and attempts to get me to pay more for a "quality" I won't receive.
by Tiberium | 2025-05-14 03:33:52+00:00
I understand that their responses were very minimal and not helpful, but it clearly says in the requirements to make a "terminal-inspired" email client. However, in the video you shared [1] I see a somewhat generic email web app, with nothing particularly "terminal-inspired". Considering the fact that they wanted either a real TUI or a webapp, I'm pretty sure that the web app should've also been "terminal-inspired". Am I missing something? I'm not trying to necessarily criticize you, perhaps I just misunderstood the requirements.

Edit: I've actually checked the full requirements page, and they explicitly say this in "Inspiration":

> Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY1sVXMkP_o
by remram | 2025-05-14 03:34:38+00:00
The uncertainty of the assignment and the lack of responsiveness during this week-long unpaid endeavor are inexcusable. Your anecdote strikes me as a totally different process as Kagi's in every possible way.

The problem is not the lack of a "rubric", it is the sheer amount of effort expected from the candidate, especially related to the unprofessionalism of the response. This process is set up to waste a maximum amount of time from candidates without any sort of feedback, and no proof that a reward even existed.

How many dozens of people completed this assignment and got rejected? How many of those assignments were even reviewed by the manager? Did anyone actually get hired? "Giving details would make this less effective for the manager" doesn't begin to excuse this behavior.

Honestly this hiring manager casts a negative light on the entire organization. Do they treat everyone this poorly? Business partners, employees?
by stephen_g | 2025-05-14 03:34:49+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.

I mean, potentially they failed the real test by asking all the questions - Kagi specifically say they're looking for people who can deal with an open-ended project, and instead of just deciding to do something cool, they seem to spend a lot of time demonstrating that they can't deal with open-endedness by asking a lot of questions and coming up with a detailed spec and asking for approval before starting.

That's not to say what Kagi is doing is good, but it's probably for the best for the candidate that they didn't get the job because it sounds like they wouldn't flourish in that kind of environment (which is better to know before starting a job, instead of starting a job you're going to hate and then burning out or failing probation)
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-14 03:35:16+00:00
> We receive a lot of interest and applications for each position at Kagi which makes selection processes is extremely competitive.

This is the real take away. Don't put in outsized effort at companies that are highly subscribed. Everyone prides themselves on being "extremely competitive" and unless it's a FAANG (or well known quiet money fountain like Valve), it's probably not actually worth the effort.

If it's hot on HN, it's highly subscribed -- you just can't expect effort to be valued the same way when there are 10 applicants.

> We normally don’t provide feedback at this stage. We have had other submissions that were simpler and stronger, so we decided to continue forward with these candidates.

This would have been a great place to push and ask for a little more feedback (while being nice as possible since they have nearly no incentive to share more)... How could the other solutions have been simpler and "stronger" (whatever that means? more robust?) -- a few details on what you missed that they were looking for (tests? documentation? CI?) could at least add some value.

All that said -- finding a job is really hard right now. Wish you the best.
by xyst | 2025-05-14 03:35:16+00:00
Explains why ABB recruiters have been filling my inbox with invites to interview.

Note they have a fucking ridiculous interview process of at least _6 rounds_. Absolutely bonkers.

I was tempted to go for it but fortunately have many other companies in my pipeline with much saner interview processes.

Good luck to whoever gets those positions. Seems they pay quite well, but the question is whether ABB push to expand will pay off and become self sustaining.
by pizlonator | 2025-05-14 03:35:20+00:00
> It makes it a lot less performant and there is no avoiding or mitigating that downside.

You can’t possibly know that.

> C++ is often selected as a language instead of safer options for its unusual performance characteristics even among systems languages in practice.

Is that why sudo, bash, coreutils, and ssh are written in C?

Of course not.

C and C++ are often chosen because they make systems programming possible at all due to their direct access to syscall ABI.

> Fil-C is not a replacement for C++ generally, that oversells it.

I have made no such claim.

Fil-C means you cannot claim - as TFA claims - that it’s impossible to make C and C++ safe. You have to now hedge that claim with additional caveats about performance. And even then you’re on thin ice since the top perf problems in Fil-C are due to immaturity of its implementation (like the fact that linking is hella cheesy and the ABI is even cheesier).

> It might be a replacement for some C++ software without stringent performance requirements or a rigorously performance-engineered architecture. There is a lot of this software, often legacy.

It’s the opposite in my experience. For example, xzutils and simdutf have super lower overhead in Fil-C. In the case of SIMD code it’s because using SIMD amortizes Fil-C’s overheads.
by zed_dev | 2025-05-14 03:35:41+00:00
I got a little mad when I read this article. Apparently, all I needed was a $27 cable to upgrade my home network to 40GbE. Forget the Mellanox cards, transceivers, and expensive switches I’ve bought. According to PCWorld, I was doing it all wrong. All I really needed was a $27 cable!

Seriously, this is infuriating. The article is extremely misleading, clearly written to push an affiliate link. They imply that users can "upgrade" their home networks by buying a CAT8 cable, which is complete nonsense in this context.

Let’s be clear:

* There is no consumer 40GbE — and likely never will be.

* Consumer hardware is just starting to adopt 2.5GbE (NBASE-T).

* There is no transceiver, NIC, switch, or device that supports 40GbE over twisted-pair RJ45 CAT8.

* Even CAT5e can handle 10GbE just fine over short distances.

This so-called “no-brainer” upgrade will do absolutely nothing for the average user. At best, they’re buying an overpriced cable that changes nothing. This article is not just ignorant — it’s deceptive.

PCWorld should take it down.
by GianFabien | 2025-05-14 03:36:04+00:00
Not only for travel, but everyday chores I try to make sure I have fallback, i.e. lavishly printout everything and file the old fashioned way. When traveling I print everything and in duplicate which I put in each of our carry-on bags and sometimes a third into the laptop case.

There is a book "The Machine Stops" - and we see glimpses of the scenario, e.g. the couple of recent bank network failures which left point-of-sale systems inoperable as well as ATMs. Recently MyID.gov.au was down and locked out all who followed the security recommendation to remove all username logins on my.gov.au.

Our IT systems work most of the time, but they certainly don't meet the 5 nines criteria. It is not a technical issue, it is a management issue. Executive management should be personally liable for failures. The slap on the wrist corporate penalties don't address the core issues. And those penalties are ultimately paid for by the customers, the very people adversely affected in the first place.
by haswell | 2025-05-14 03:36:07+00:00
Saying something negative isn't inherently toxic. But saying something negative in a job interview is walking a line. Everyone everywhere has experienced negative factors in a prior job, so it's not exactly a revelation if someone has some war stories.

But what a person chooses to focus on does say something about how that person thinks.

If I ask someone what they dislike about their previous job, and they say something like "there were times when management would change directions at the last minute and cause the whole team to scramble", that's relatable and not necessarily a red flag.

If someone starts venting about low quality coworkers and shitty management, that's probably a red flag.

If someone volunteers negativity unprompted, that's probably a red flag.

My point here is that discerning between toxicity and honesty is usually possible, and what a person chooses to be negative about is a signal that helps tell the difference.

What I don't want on my team is a culture of negativity. A negative/pessimistic default is a wet blanket that shuts things down before they have a chance to get started. It creates tension where it need not exist. And it requires significant effort to counteract once it exists on the team. And to reiterate, I'm not looking for toxic positivity either. That's a separate problem.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-14 03:36:12+00:00
In addition to stuff people are saying about AirBnB reviews in other comments, as far as I can tell there is no way to leave a review or otherwise provide public feedback in cases where the host cancels the booking before you get there. This seems to grossly incentivize scamming.

I reserved an AirBnB months ahead of time to see the eclipse in Dallas last year, and the host canceled it the day before I was to arrive, with no communication (even when I tried to message them). I got a refund, but that's pretty cold comfort. Without any disincentive to do this, it's pretty easy for hosts to screw people over.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-14 03:36:51+00:00
So true! I have experimented with plugging an iPad Pro into an Apple 7K Studio Monitor with keyboard and an Apple Trackpad and Stage Manager: close to being generally useful, but I also get the idea that Apple is purposely holding back to prevent reducing Mac sales.

That is why I am rooting for Samsung DeX and what Google is offering: Samsung and Google can make money for their own reasons making a universal personal digital device.