MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-06-23 06:40:05+00:00
As far as system design is concerned, I feel like I have an answer as to why they're like this.

Typically, FAANG (and wannabe-FAANG) companies have overindexed on algorithm questions; which has been meant to draw people from a research/mathematics-heavy background which was well aligned with their initial needs by which they committed a sort of "original sin."

Since then they've forgotten to balance these requirements against the business applications they build, which require CRUD-heavy work and usually requires knowledge of how systems (databases, queues, performance tuning, load testing, etc.) work. Because said companies continue to overindex on algorithm skills, this means that aforementioned knowledge is deprioritized.

When systems fail to deliver the expected performance, these software engineers seeking new solutions with wild tradeoffs that may not have been required if they were able to come up with the right system model for the software. As an example, at two FAANGs that I've closely studied (and one of which I worked at), people always seem to be selecting serverless functions for scalability, and then adding queues and another set of serverless function to work the queues and slowly write to a database, only to work around the fact that it may have been easier to just have a background thread in a server-based model that processes results and commits them. (This is just one example; I'm sure there are cases where a queue may have been necessary to facilitate an async process. This doesn't discount the fact that serverless is usually the wrong model for most stuff out there.)

It also has a secondary effect on the software engineering market, where said engineers are now able to market their overly complicated solutions, selling it as THE way to build software and dismissing everything else as a toy. This also helps said FAANGs to market their cloud services; with sales people excitedly speaking about some supposed "innovation".

I remember a video from a FAANG organized event where they talked about how their database supports PITR upto the second. At the time, I was young, impressionable and lacked said knowledge, and came away mesmerized about how they could do this and thinking about how I could never write code to do that. Many years later, having read some introductory material about distributed systems and MySQL internals, I happened to remember "why wouldn't any database worth it's salt support PITR; after all, it's just replicating the WAL entries to another host!"

However, said practices have already taken hold, and it has lead to a generation of engineers who would continue to seek cloud services and design overly complicated solutions.
by TMWNN | 2025-06-23 06:40:05+00:00
I presume that X terminals did not appear at the same time as X Window because Project Athena <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Athena>, which created X, had its users use "real" workstations from the start, the IBM RT PC being the first. I don't know if MIT ever deployed any X terminals but, as I understand it, one of the tenets of Athena is that every workstation is a full-fledged remote login-capable node of the Athena cluster.
by mrtksn | 2025-06-23 06:40:17+00:00
It's already a reality in many places around the world. Most of people don't own a car, just participate in the ride sharing economy. In many places they still have a safety driver like Tesla but there are plenty of places with %100 autonomous driving.

Also authorities are getting giddy when a human tries to drive on railways, so it's effectively illegal to drive in certain places where the ride sharing is the default mode of transportation. It's also very privacy focused, even though there are cameras everywhere you can just buy an anonymous travel pass that you top-up every once in a while. It also allows you to hop between rides for free or at discount.

In the larger cities they often use hyperloop, so you never get stuck in the traffic.
by quotemstr | 2025-06-23 06:40:23+00:00
This paper is an attempt to Euler the reader.

See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/

> There is an apocryphal story about the visit of the great atheist philosopher Diderot to the Russian court. Diderot was quite the clever debater, and soon this scandalous new atheism thing was the talk of St. Petersburg. This offended reigning monarch Catherine the Great, who was a good Christian woman ... so she asked legendary mathematician Leonhard Euler to publicly debunk and humiliate Diderot. Euler said, in a tone of absolute conviction: “Monsieur, (a+b^n)/n = x, therefore, God exists! What is your response to that?” and Diderot, “for whom algebra was like Chinese”, had no response. Thus was he publicly humiliated, all the Russian Christians got an excuse to believe what they had wanted to believe anyway, and Diderot left in a huff.

---

The brain is a physical object and governed by the same laws that govern any other machine. Therefore, AGI, whatever that is, is possible in principle. To argue otherwise is to just assert unfalsifiable Cartesian dualism, i.e. souls.

The argument in no way proves, "mathematically" or otherwise, any property of AGI. The author's comments on the thread are, charitably, dense and obscure --- but I'm not feeling charitable, so I'm going to say they're evasive and Euler-y.

I don't think it's worth anyone's time to understand or deconstruct the argument in detail without some explanation of why the brain can do something a machine can't that isn't just "because souls".
by moomin | 2025-06-23 06:41:22+00:00
I’m beginning to feel like the tests are part of the problem. Our intelligence tests are all tests of specialisation. We’ve established LLMs are part of the problem. Plenty of people who would fail a bar exam yet still know how many Rs there are in strawberry, could learn a new game just by reading the rules, know how to put up a set of shelves.
by vidarh | 2025-06-23 06:41:23+00:00
The lack of mention of the Church-Turing thesis in both papers suggest he hasn't even considered that angle.

But it is the fundamental objection he would need to overcome.

There is no reasonable way to write papers claiming to provide proofs in this space without mentioning Church even once, and to me it's a red flag that suggests a lack of understanding of the field.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-23 06:43:42+00:00
While cobalt and nickel alloys must be made with relatively expensive metallic chromium, stainless steel is made with much cheaper ferrochrome.

Low-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for any stainless steel, is around $1500 per ton.

High-carbon ferrochrome, which is suitable for martensitic stainless steel, which is used for knife blades and for some tools, is less than $1000 per ton.

This is why stainless steel is much cheaper than any alternatives, e.g. much cheaper even than pure copper.

The inventor of stellite, Haynes, thought that stellite will become popular for cutlery.

It is likely that this would have happened, if the much cheaper stainless steel had not been invented soon.

The window of opportunity for using stellite in such applications has closed after a decade since its invention, by the appearance of stainless steel, relegating stellite and its derivatives to applications with requirements so high that they could not be satisfied by stainless steel, e.g. special tools and surgical implants (CoCrMo alloys, which are variants of the alloy originally named stellite, have been used for decades in making surgical implants, before the discovery that titanium is even better for this purpose).
by vidarh | 2025-06-23 06:43:52+00:00
Why can't it be algorithmic?

Why do you think it mustn't be algoritmic?

Why do you think humans are capable of doing anything that isn't algoritmic?

This statement, and your lack of mention of the Church-Turing thesis in your papers suggests you're using a non-standard definition of "algoritmic", and your argument rests on it.
by godot | 2025-06-23 06:44:02+00:00
> Right now, preparing for these interviews is really gatekept – either you need friends in big tech willing to help you practice, or you have to pay hundreds of dollars for one-on-one sessions.

So I'm probably not your target audience (I haven't had to interview for a software eng job for at least 7-8 years), but from my past experiences in these interviews from that time, system design is typically the most sensible part of the interview process and it really does just test if you have experience solving those problems, or if you're less senior, if you can think at least through the problems logically. There are even pretty good system design interview books written out there. What do you think is gatekept about this?

Leetcode took off as a trend because it wasn't easy for company interviewers to come up with good coding questions, partly because the daily work of most software engineers in most companies simply don't involve much tricky programming. System design is the opposite, most software engineers have to work on system design in their daily work and most companies can simply ask system questions very related to their companies' problems.

Looking at it from this lens, I'm not sure what a leetcode for system design adds in value, that a system design interview book doesn't already give.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-23 06:44:52+00:00
> the desire and demand for complex build systems is silly

No it isn't. "Simple" build systems like Make don't solve many of the problems that "complex" build systems like Bazel do.

At my current company I tried to convince my boss at the start of our project to use Bazel (it's very difficult to change build systems once your project is big), because I knew from experience it would solve many problems we would eventually run into.

He wouldn't let me and wanted to keep things "simple". Guess what happened? Now we have to run dozens of hours of CI just to fix a typo in a comment. CI regularly breaks because people forget dependencies. Etc.
by ch_123 | 2025-06-23 06:45:44+00:00
X originally was created on/ran on a graphics terminal - the DEC VAXstation 100. The VS100 was quite different to the later X thin client terminals: it required an adapter card to be installed in a host system, and the software which ran on the VS100 could directly access a chunk of shared memory on the host.

Ports to workstations with inbuilt graphics hardware came later.

References:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation#VAXstation_100
by motorest | 2025-06-23 06:46:28+00:00
> Companies that use l33tcode are filtering out pools of talent, in exchange for monocultures of echo chambers.

Please explain why do you believe that not moving forward with a candidate who fails basic coding challenges leads to "monocultures of echo chambers".

> The fact that this ^^^ is run by AI shows just how irrelevant technical interviews like this are these days. Why take a closed book test for a job that you never have to work a day in your life with the book closed?

You're trying to fabricate scenarios that never applied. There are no "book closed" exams, and no company hires developers on hard skills alone.

> If you are an experienced dev, u can rank other devs pretty quickly with a general conversation about any technology.

No. No, you don't. You think you can, but you're just deluding yourself. You have no idea if your personal biases got your best candidate rejected, or if your pick just is a top of the barrel candidate who enchanted you with buzzword lingo? This is a fact, and I've seen this play out in real life. I've seen team leads succumb to this sort of delusion and ehen they realize they hired smooth-talking scrubs that need constant help from junior devs to unblock themselves, you start to hear excuses such as "he was given an opportunity but squandered it". This is something that negatively impacts everyone involved.
by tripletao | 2025-06-23 06:46:34+00:00
A small team of skilled physicists relying only on public knowledge can design a nuclear weapon (and did, back in 1964; their work product was classified, the demonstrated futility notwithstanding). The only reason that random grad students don't have the bomb is that enrichment of uranium requires state-level resources. So why focus on the easier part of building a nuclear weapon that they haven't undertaken, while choosing language ("lowering latency", not "building") that minimizes the much harder part that they have? This view is prevalent, but it seems exactly backwards to me.

As to intent, the concept of "deterrence, but never going over the edge" doesn't really exist--if you're never going over the edge, then where does the deterrence come from? At best it's a bluff, like threatening someone with an unloaded gun. But would you really want to bet your life that Iran has put maybe a quarter of their GDP (including sanctions impact; the program itself is much less) into a bluff? We can't read minds, and their costly actions seem like much more reliable signals than our guesses at their intent.

Switzerland is an odd comparison, since they got their capabilities in what they openly described as the initial stages of a nuclear weapons program. Since abandoning that, Switzerland has been divesting its enriched uranium. If Switzerland were instead building up its stockpile while funding proxies to (conventionally) strike its neighbors, then I'd expect some combination of sanctions and military action there too.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-06-23 06:46:35+00:00
>her books are easy to read for lack of a better description (though this latter features in much contemporary writing).

Maybe linguistic evolution is playing a role? Contemporary writing is easiest to read because it's written in contemporary English?

I also think The Elements of Style had a real and positive influence, in terms of e.g. sentences getting shorter: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xYn3CKir4bTMzY5eb/why-have-s...
by BillyTheMage | 2025-06-23 06:47:07+00:00
> creating a relational database in Excel with tables being Excel files in a folder, because the stakeholder refused to let go of the Excel no matter how many times I told them I could do it in a better, easier way

I feel this pain. All of our jobs are quoted with a copy of the most complex Excel sheet I've ever created. Our "task management" is an excel sheet full of notes; imagine a series of walls full of post-it notes, you know, like Jira but way worse.

Not as bad as some things I've seen though. Seems to be common for Japanese folk to use Excel for CAD drawings and that just blows my mind. How is that not the worst possible CAD experience?
by pjmlp | 2025-06-23 06:49:22+00:00
Just as side note that it has gotten much better since we have constexpr if and concepts, no one should be doing SFINAE and template tag dispatching by C++20 onwards.

But this naturally is even better, disregarding the lack of taste on the newly added syntax.

To paraphrase a famous committee member, "This is C++", so what else to expect in syntax proposals.
by 112233 | 2025-06-23 06:49:30+00:00
now that a lot of std:: is constexpr, who knows how much of it will get pulled into compile time by std::meta stuff (I do not. I am asking). I know of no way of using different std libraries, one for compile time and one for target. Meaning, using this c++ variant without std library shipped with the compiler just got even impossiblier.
by globular-toast | 2025-06-23 06:49:57+00:00
This isn't about constant monitoring of people, it's about cars. I'm all for constant monitoring of cars within towns. They bully and intimidate and generally ruin places for everyone else. There needs to be strong incentives for people to not drive cars right into cities, with appropriate alternatives, of course.

I want to see much better parking on the outside of town with easy and safe travel to inside like light rail and bikes. All of this is possible if we take back what's been given to cars.

The biggest problem with drivers is they don't take responsibility for what they're doing. It creates a status quo where they feel empowered to do what they like and the rest of society bends to that. We have opportunity to force them to take responsibility which will reset that balance. It doesn't take much. When you realise you'll be driving at 20mph max and yielding priority to normal people everywhere driving suddenly won't seem so attractive. None of this is new restrictions on driving, it's just what they should have been doing anyway.

How do you feel about constant monitoring of trains or aeroplanes? If a train driver crosses a red signal it's straight to prison. When your actions can have such an impact on individuals and societies then your individual right to privacy is invalid.
by vidarh | 2025-06-23 06:50:38+00:00
Agreed. To slightly nuance your last three paragraphs, if the brain exceeded the physical, and if this meant we could do something a computer cannot be made to do, then to prove AGI impossible "all" the proponents of such claims would need to do would be to prove that human brains can do a calculation that is not Turing computable.

Anything else short of disproving the Church-Turing thesis will come up short.

They could start by proving that computable functions outside the Turing computable is possible, because if they are not, their claims would fall apart.

But neither this paper, nor his previous paper, even mentions the Church-Turing thesis.
by jeffrallen | 2025-06-23 06:51:17+00:00
Yup, sorry, I believe in big government.

I think paying taxes allows the government to be able to afford to do the things it is responsible for (health, security, prosperity, equality).

If an infrastructure project is only possible with government support (in this case subsidies), then let the government make it happen and let the population benefit from it. For example the Apollo program.

If a solar farm is not possible to do in the free market without subsidies, then DON'T DO IT until the market is right. (Anyway, what was the author's plan if he got deep into the project and instead of having a disappointment from connection fees, the new president cuts the subsides he needed? Subsidies are political and temporary, you cannot build a sustainable business on them.)

Pay your taxes, and contribute to building society. It's as simple as that.
by PaulShin | 2025-06-23 06:52:39+00:00
Thanks for the links—Brooks and Zawinski are exactly the guard-rails we keep taped to the monitor.

No Silver Bullet: We’re not chasing a “one tool to rule them all.” The essential complexity—humans aligning on what to do can’t be deleted; we’re only trying to strip away the accidental part (manual copy-pasting).

Zawinski’s Law: Instead of cramming every feature into one bloated app, we’re limiting scope to a single object model:

A message, a task, and a doc are the same object, just rendered in different views.

Chat ≠ Task Manager ≠ Wiki, but they sit on the same data layer, so hand-offs happen automatically rather than by re-typing.

Anything beyond that (CRM, billing, email) stays as integrations no temptation to rebuild an Outlook clone.

So the direction is “context cohesion without feature creep.” If we can kill the copy-paste tax and still keep each tool honest to its purpose, we think that’s the sweet spot.

Curious where you’ve seen this approach succeed or crash and burn in real teams.
by SilasX | 2025-06-23 06:52:45+00:00
I didn't have to, that's just a prominent, citeable example that immediately came to mind. People get ghosted all the time for being too difficult, it just doesn't make the news. It can always make sense to end negotiations when you expect the other person to have unreasonable expectations and/or if you have a backlog of difficult alternatives you can pick.

If you're going to reply, please drop the absolutes -- you're asserting a confidence you can't possibly have here. "No incentive"? Of course there is, you just don't think it's big enough to worry about. So say that instead of asserting a model that can't be true.

"No downside"? Come on, reality rarely works like that.
by mittensc | 2025-06-23 06:52:53+00:00
> In reality, I only need a few thousand lines of effective code out of it. If I were to do it all on my own, it would likely take two to three times longer—perhaps with better or worse quality.

Have you tried doing it on your own as comparison?

Any lessons why that might be true?

Are you missing some design/brainstorming stage that you are doing now by iterating through junk code and which might not be necessary?

You might be right now, but you gain experience that you otherwise lose by delegating to the LLM. With experience the reverse might be true.
by lrvick | 2025-06-23 06:53:03+00:00
What worked for me is 5 years ago I canceled my cellular subscription, and about 4 years ago gave up regularly carrying devices when I leave home at all. When I travel I carry a tiny laptop which requires some intention to pull it out when I need to, but it cannot notify me.

This has dramatically improved my attention span and I deliver far more personal and professional projects now in my late 30s than I could at any point in my 20s.

I am completely serious. You do not need to let apps and people be able to reach you at any time to lead a socially rich life in the modern world. Schedule time to do internet things, then walk away from your desk and live in the real world.

I run a b2b tech company in Silicon Valley. If I can do it anyone can.
by ccppurcell | 2025-06-23 06:53:06+00:00
I am sympathetic to the kind of claims made by your paper. I like impossibility results and I could believe that for some definition of AGI there is at least a plausible argument that entropy is a problem. Scalable quantum computing is a good point of comparison.

But your paper is throwing up crank red flags left and right. If you have a strong argument for such a bold claim, you should put it front and centre: give your definition of AGI, give your proof, let it stand on its own. Some discussion of the definition is useful. Discussion of your personal life and Kant is really not.

Skimming through your paper, your argument seems to boil down to "there must be some questions AGI gets wrong". Well since the definition includes that AGI is algorithmic, this is already clear thanks to the halting problem.