MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IgorPartola | 2025-07-07 01:18:11+00:00
It’s funny because I have had ti implement “serialized fetch()” a few times recently, with delays and random jitter too.

I think this question is a bit confusing in its wording even though the concept is actually quite useful in practice. First, async queues have nothing to do with network coms. You can have a async queues for local tasks.

Also while it is obvious to most that you shouldn’t do this, you can also satisfy the requirements to this task by polling the queue and flag using setTimeout() or setInterval(): on invocation, check if there is anything in the queue and if so, if we aren’t waiting on a response fire off the next send().

Retry logic with this system is always a problem. Do you block the queue forever by retrying a request that will never complete (which lets the queue grow infinite in size), or do you give up after some number of retired? If you give up, does that invalidate all queued requests? Some? None? This becomes application-specific. For this kind of thing I have implemented it using multiple parallel queues. That is, you request a send() but using a specifically named queue so that if one queue’s serialized requests break, other queues aren’t affected.

If you do something like `sendOnce(payloadA, callbackA, 5000); sendOnce(payloadB, callbackB, 1);` should payloadB be sent in 1ms or 5000 + RTT + 1ms?

You could solve this in the JavaScript environment by using something like WebSockets or WebTransport much more trivially than by using send() which is I assume a thinly veiled fetch(). This probably fails OP’s interview but in reality leverages the lower level queueing/buffering.

A more fun and likely more illuminating question would be to do something like provide a version of send() that uses a callback for the response and ask to convert it to a promise. This is a really fun one that I had to deal with when using WebCodecs: a video decoder uses callbacks to give you frames but for example Safari has a bug where it will return frames that are encoded as delta frames out of presentation order. So the much better API is to feed a bunch of demuxed encoded chunks to a wrapper around VideoDecoder, and then wait for the resolution (or rejection) of a promise where the result is all the decoded frames at once. This problem really gets at the concept of callbacks vs promises which I think is the right level of abstraction for evaluating how someone thinks of single threaded concurrency. You also can get a really good feel for a person’s attitude here if they refuse to use callbacks or promises (or the async/await sugar around promises).
by bigfatkitten | 2025-07-07 01:18:26+00:00
A robust performance evaluation process does this just fine. If they do well they get a bonus, if they do poorly they get fired.

There is also no massive and obvious corruption risk in me paying either of those people to do a job as there is with a support engineer.

Maybe I should tip customs officers too, for processing my passport quickly and not looking too closely at my luggage?

Or perhaps if I take a speeding ticket to court, maybe I should tip the judge based on the outcome?
by yladiz | 2025-07-07 01:19:14+00:00
It's naive to think that software engineering will be automated any time soon, especially in a few years. Even if we accept that the coding part can be, the hard part of software engineering isn't the coding, it's the design, getting good requirements, and general "stakeholder management". LLMs are not able to adequately design code with potentially ambiguous requirements considered, and thinking about future ones too, so until it gets anywhere close to being able to do that we're not going to automate it.
by geodel | 2025-07-07 01:19:19+00:00
They just didn't hire a lot like other companies. No cloud or AI bandwagon with tons of hiring and then later finding no work recently hired folks. Also work conditions were more traditional and stiff compared to pure software play companies so lot of people weren't falling over each other to get job at Apple.

Also Apple is good at lot of outsourced work for long time compared to many other companies. So they don't tons of non-core software stuff in-house. In that matter they are more like typical Fortune 500 companies than SV company.
by ayaros | 2025-07-07 01:21:32+00:00
Be sure to check out LisaGUI's "Windows 93™" theme which (aside from being a reference to the colors of that other great Web OS) is a Blue/Pink CGA-inspired theme, and the "Through the Looking Glass" icon theme which is literally just icons from Windows 1.x/2.x. (Although I had to make the recycle bin icon myself using the Win95 recycle symbol)
by mgraczyk | 2025-07-07 01:21:56+00:00
I currently use LLMs to design code with ambiguous requirements. It works quite well and scales better than hiring a team. Not perfect but getting better all the time.

The key is to learn how to use them for your use case and to figure out what specific things they are good for. Staying up to date as they improve is probably the most valuable skill for software engineers right now
by shevis | 2025-07-07 01:22:41+00:00
> requires a model of how consciousness works.

Not necessarily an entire model, just a single defining characteristic that can serve as a falsifying example.

> any information they can communicate to me, exists entirely in (R^n)^c

Also no. This is just a result of the digital medium we are currently communicating over. Merely standing in the same room as them would communicate information outside (R^n)^c.
by ayaros | 2025-07-07 01:25:10+00:00
Thank you! Although just between you and me, it really depends on the speed of your computer and whatever JS engine you're using. If you open up the bounce demo and start increasing the number of objects on screen, you'll find the FPS dips quite a bit. Also, scrolling through a multi-page text document may also slow things down..... just don't tell anyone! ;)
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-07 01:25:50+00:00
As a start, separate "derivatives" (a huge category of products) into two simpler categories: listed options and futures. For many underlyings, like interest rates or commodities, it is very difficult to trade the underlying directly, so you use derivs to trade them indirectly.

Related: My biggest concern: There should be more gatekeeping around allowing retail traders access to derivs markets due to the implied leverage in the contracts. That said I don't know a good way to gatekeep. How about an exam?
by morsecodist | 2025-07-07 01:26:03+00:00
I somewhat agree that there is a problem but there is a glimmer of hope. As these medical terms are used more in everyday speech they lose their medical connotations and just become new words for personality traits. A lot of people who casually describe things as ADHD are using it more as an adjective than a diagnosis. We have had medical terms make it into this usage before: moron, hysterical, humourous (we're going all the way back to the four humours).
by WorkerBee28474 | 2025-07-07 01:26:29+00:00
> it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
by cowboyscott | 2025-07-07 01:27:15+00:00
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.
by fwlr | 2025-07-07 01:27:31+00:00
Some psychologists finetuned a Llama-family LLM on some psychology data - “a data set called Psych-101, which contained data from 160 previously published psychology experiments, covering more than 60,000 participants who made more than 10 million choices in total”, so I guess maybe 10 million tokens?

That part seems to make sense, but I cannot rightly comprehend the confusion that follows.

Some psychology researchers are claiming it has become a model of human cognition? (Because it can imitate the way a psychology study participant answers psychology study questions?)

Other psychology researchers are disputing this by testing its reaction time and digit span memory? (Are they administering an iq test? A cranial nerves exam?)
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-07 01:27:41+00:00
Most words in foreign languages that most people believe don’t have an English equivalent often do, but the English word is so obscure that almost no native English speaker knows it, and as you point out, English vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close to learning it all. English is the C++ of human languages.

What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do?

I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.
by quacksilver | 2025-07-07 01:28:38+00:00
Could AI still be a useful tool if the reviewer performs a manual review first and then queries the LLM with:

1) Here is a new academic paper. Point out any inconsistencies, gaps or flaws in the research, and any contradictions with previous research in the field.

2) Here is a new academic paper and a journal submission policy. Does the paper meet the journal submission policy?

3) Here is a new academic paper, the review policy of the journal and a review of the paper. Does the review appear to have been conducted correctly.

4) Here is a new academic paper and a review of it. Has the review missed anything?

With the above, the reviewer could review the paper themselves, and then get the AI agent to proof read or double check everything, treating it like an editor / reviewer / secretary / grad student that they had asked to read the material. As long as the AI output was treated as potentially flawed feedback or a prompt from a third party to look deeper into something then that seems fine...

I'm surprised we are still using in-band signalling after the captain crunch whistle / blue-boxes have been around for that long
by frankacter | 2025-07-07 01:29:20+00:00
OP was requesting details of the America party, at the time of writing that was the most detailed list confirmed by Elon Musk in that thread.

Herr is a Time article that provides a summary indicating Musk's confirmation.

https://time.com/7300282/elon-musk-new-political-party-ameri...

As the new party is in its infancy the details beyond that are limited, so it's the best roundup of what "for the 80%" in the middle would imply.

Looks like this was attempted prior as recent as 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/27/forward-repu...

One caveat is that the intent of this party is not (initially?) to run a presidential candidate, but rather back individual Senators and Representatives.

>Backing a candidate for president is not out of the question, but the focus for the next 12 months is on the House and the Senate
by kulahan | 2025-07-07 01:30:45+00:00
I misread this with my other comment response, sorry - yes, donate them a tool which anyone can use. That’s kinda the thing with these spaces - they provide the things that are much too expensive to supply for everyone individually. If you stop by with $1500, you can add an amazing tool to an already amazing collection, or you can get like 5 small things for the house. Definitely most efficient to provide it for the library!
by positron26 | 2025-07-07 01:30:52+00:00
Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?

90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.

The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.

Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.

It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-07 01:32:02+00:00
> Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.

The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.

The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-07 01:32:43+00:00
To note, what u-block is doing to workaround this is far from the trival "just block the ad" behavior, and I expect it to break again (perhaps within weeks ?)

Then the waltz will go on as usual, until the ads are straight baked into the video-feed with the server refusing to serve the rest of the content on a per-client base.
by simonw | 2025-07-07 01:33:07+00:00
I imagine that's because LLMs are of most interest to the Hacker News crowd: they can help write code, and you can build systems on top of them that can "understand" and respond in human language.

Generative image / video / audio models can produce output in image, video and audio. Those have far less applications than models that can output text, structured data and code.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-07 01:33:39+00:00
Alright, let’s get this straight.

You’ve got people foaming at the mouth anytime someone mentions AGI, like it’s some kind of cult prophecy. “Oh it’s poorly defined, it’s not around the corner, everyone talking about it is selling snake oil.” Give me a break. You don’t need a perfect definition to recognize that something big is happening. You just need eyes, ears, and a functioning brain stem.

Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension.

And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is.

And don’t give me that “it sounds profound but it’s really just crap” line. That’s 90 percent of academia. That’s every selfhelp book, every political speech, every guy with a podcast and a ring light. If sounding smarter than you while being wrong disqualifies a thing, then we better shut down half the planet.

Look, you’re not mad because it’s dumb. You’re mad because it’s not that dumb. It’s close. Close enough to feel threatening. Close enough to replace people who’ve been coasting on sounding smart instead of actually being smart. That’s what this is really about. Ego. Fear. Control.

So yeah, maybe it’s not AGI yet. But it’s smarter than the guy next to you at work. And he’s got a pension.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-07-07 01:33:57+00:00
> You're not a normie and defaults matter. Most of the world doesn't even know what an ad blocker is let alone know how to install one

These problems don't need LLMs to solve; they need something that also starts with 'L', but is a lot more boring—legislation. The online world is rampant with rubbish and misinformation not because LLMs aren't yet at our beck and call like a digital French maid, but because laws in most parts of the world haven't caught up and multi-national megacorps do whatever the heck they see fit. Especially so in 'capital-friendly' countries. One sees a lot less of this in the PRC, for instance.

I would love to see a GDPR-style set of legislation straight up addressing everything from privacy defaults on social media to aggressively blocking online ad networks.

> I get quite a lot of predictions right

Good for you, then.
by prisenco | 2025-07-07 01:34:06+00:00
There's a big discussion in there about the inherent requirement of labor, the definition of leadership, collective vs hierarchical decision-making, hegemonic inertia and market capture and more. This is probably not the best place to have it.

Not to say that Zuckerberg is dumb but there's plenty of ways he could have managed to get where he is now without having the acumen to get to other places he wants to be.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-07 01:34:58+00:00
I think what (may have) changed is that we now have "acceptable" labels. ADHD is fine, autism is fine, alcoholism, schizophrenia, not great, pedophilia, very very bad, even if you have never acted on a child.

I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.

Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.

To summarize:

Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.

Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.
by rustystump | 2025-07-07 01:35:25+00:00
I think we all have but that doesn't change that this is almost exclusively a js specific interview question with a very js'y solution to the point of hammering in a imagined "js land" api.

I am not against testing deeper language understanding for a job that requires it but the layers of contrivances to make it "not only js" rightfully rubs non-js devs the wrong way. This comes from someone who loves them some js.

The AI ick at the end makes what would have been mildly interesting, incoherent and uninteresting.
by benreesman | 2025-07-07 01:35:30+00:00
Just earlier this evening I had not one but two commenters issue replies to the effect that successful deception in the public sphere, business and politics, is a marker of high intelligence. And that's just a depressingly direct example of what really seems to be a profoundly entrenched worldview "coming out of the closet" in the last decade or so especially.

The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.

If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.
by djoldman | 2025-07-07 01:37:57+00:00
I like where this is going.

However, it's not sufficient. The actual tasks have to be written down, tests constructed, and the specialists tested.

A subset of this has been done with some rigor and AI/computers have surpassed this threshold for some tests. Some have then responded by saying that it isn't AGI, and that the tasks aren't sufficiently measuring of "intelligence" or some other word, and that more tests are warranted.