MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deanCommie | 2025-07-07 03:08:16+00:00
no i don't think we're saying different things.

what you're describing is survivor's bias.

1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.

2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.

2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.

People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.

We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
by handfuloflight | 2025-07-07 03:09:09+00:00
You're making two false assumptions:

That natural language can only be ambiguous: but legal contracts, technical specs, and scientific papers are all written in precise natural language.

And that AI interaction is one-shot where ambiguous input produces ambiguous output, but LLM programming is iterative. You clarify and deliver on requirements through conversation, testing, debugging, until you reach the precise accepted solution.

Traditional programming can also start with ambiguous natural language requirements from stakeholders. The difference is you iterate toward precision through conversation with AI rather than by writing syntax yourself.
by quuxplusone | 2025-07-07 03:10:44+00:00
Here's another recent one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44312099 "Lawyers are mad about SALT" quietly turned into "Lawyers are mad about salt."

This is simply a UI issue. It would be totally fine if, when you went to submit a link to HN, the UI before posting said "I'm going to use this title; is that OK? [default is yes]". The only problem is that HN's UI doesn't do that confirmation step; instead it forces everyone to double-check their own post after posting. And then when someone innocently fails to do that double-check, we get these meta subthreads and the only recourse is to ask a mod to retitle the post. It's a silly aspect in a system that otherwise tends to "trust the user."
by drewcoo | 2025-07-07 03:11:10+00:00
>> but can reliably take a task off their hands

Tasks can reliably take off farmers' hands.

Every year our state fair has dioramas to demonstrate the risks of mangling, amputation, and death.

I don't really want to see hallucinating LLMs making this even more dangerous despite how good it may make VCs feel. It's possible for it to not be a closed system but have someone's gain mean someone else's loss. (Arguments over closed vs open system are a sophistic tactic to ruin other people's lives for money.)
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-07-07 03:11:11+00:00
I've seen somewhat similar things in embedded development, e.g. ADCs with a triggered conversion mode that start a new conversion on receipt of a new trigger, abandoning a previous conversion if one was in progress. They fire an interrupt when the conversion completes. Not in any way buggy or unexpected, ICs generally either can block or can immediately respond but can't queue multiple requests.

Of course on the embedded side you're likely using C, quite likely an RTOS and thus threads, but if you're just using a superloop then you've got a single-threaded system (though with the complication of interrupt handlers) a bit like the interview asks about. I'd probably use a state machine for this with a superloop design, just about everything "async" in embedded boils down to writing a state machine & polling it. Actually writing a fully general-purpose async queue for embedded systems is rather more work, because you'll have to consider how it can be used from within the interrupt context. You really shouldn't block in an interrupt context, so all the queue operations need to be non-blocking. That turns it into something far too complex for an interview question.
by esseph | 2025-07-07 03:11:29+00:00
Hey, were you using KDE/Plasma, by chance?

I just switched over to it last night and my audio in Helldivers 2 in particular is awful and I'm having framerate dives.

If I got back to Gnome3, it's much more stable in fps and my audio problems go away.

This is with VRR on/off in both.
by alexjplant | 2025-07-07 03:11:40+00:00
> They're wondered why they weren't fired, when their prank had no negative side effects and the only issue was a department head being a dick about it?

There are plenty of companies where your boss being upset with you can lead to you being fired irrespective of whether it's logically justified. The author doesn't seem servile so much as green (which they admit and talk about quite a bit).

> No need to warp your idea of what's right around what someone got mad at you about.

Part of being an adult is the ability to mentally square how the world ought to be with how it actually is. It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that a decision you made wasn't optimal in retrospect even if it was the theoretically-correct one. This isn't "warping" anything as much as it is getting on with your life.
by Tokumei-no-hito | 2025-07-07 03:12:25+00:00
you seem unaware that over 60% (150M) of the US uses tiktok and around 70% of that (100M) are 18-30. it's unclear on the < 18 numbers but likely a significant number.

i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society.

it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-07 03:13:07+00:00
The best 'defense' of English spelling I'm aware of is https://www.zompist.com/spell.html, which at the end admits:

> I doubt that this page will convince anyone that English spelling is a good system. There's too many oddities. [...] What I hope to have shown, however, is that beneath all the pitfalls, there's a rather clever and fairly regular mechanism at work, and one which still gets the vast majority of words pretty much correct. It's not to modern tastes, but by no means as broken as people think.

Which is to say, English spelling is definitely messed up. But it's not some insane thing that lacks any hint of sanity that some people try to portray it as.
by robertritz | 2025-07-07 03:13:27+00:00
I like the idea, but it's really just three summaries each day, which I can get from Google News. Would be nice to have links to the tweets at the very least.

Also the top three stories are most likely what your audience already knows. What people are craving, at least what I'm craving, is something that isn't on my feed everywhere else.
by TheJoeMan | 2025-07-07 03:14:13+00:00
I found the linked article about his interview even more fascinating!

I heard once about a mechanical engineer who brought printed photos of his previous projects to the interview instead of a typed resume, to good results. Once you’ve had to interview someone, you realize many times the interviewer is as nervous as the interviewee, so breaking the ice is valuable.

https://engineersneedart.com/blog/interview/interview.html
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-07 03:14:46+00:00
After having introduced an Easter egg and being called out for it, the author states:

I became a cautionary tale though and would occasionally warn off the new hires who might have had an inkling to do something similar. And true to my word, I would tread very carefully from that day on with an eye to what Apple HQ would think about any of my actions — and potential consequences (intended or not).

It is very likely that management weighed the author's value to the organization against the cost, real or perceived, to rectify this particular situation. An additional potential value which was ultimately realized is the author became an extension of organizational policy "at ground level."

IMHO, this is an optimal resolution and should be applauded. Management reaped a 20-year reward and the author kept his job.
by samrus | 2025-07-07 03:15:02+00:00
I dont mean to insult you but your last paragraph makes me not take you seriously at all. I could feel it in the rest of the post but the idea of an alien simulation just reaks of ayuhasca fueled quack science

> A lot of core concepts are the same or very similar.

One point about core models is that LLMs mess up long contexts because they are trained on a static system rather (next token prediction) than a dynamic system (a reactive world, like a market or a road), so they dont know that their decisions affect the the world they are observing. This means they fundamentally cant model and extrapolate how actions affect current state. They can memorize and interpolate that as a static system, which is what they do for these videos and game systems, but that is incredibly data inefficient. Thats a core problem in them simulating games rather than understanding what a text says and means. The text wont change as they interpret it. These models will need to be re hypithesized to understand that their actions change their environment and that is not a trivial change thats a few years ago, thats a change at the level of the transformers where it might happen next year or 50 years from now. theres no way to tell
by i_love_retros | 2025-07-07 03:15:46+00:00
> I am a huge AI supporter, and use it extensively for coding, writing and most of my decision making processes

If you use it for writing, what is the point of writing in the first place? If you're writing to anyone you even slightly care about they should wipe their arse with it and send it back to you. And if it's writing at work or for work then you're just proving you are an employee they don't need.
by charleslmunger | 2025-07-07 03:16:03+00:00
It's too hard because the variations you could add to it (multi threading) that add enough depth to make it hard make it too hard, in my opinion. If you look at the implementation I linked in my previous comment, it's fully lock-free, which is pretty unreasonable to expect from anyone who isn't already familiar with lock free concurrency. On the other hand the version with a lock is basically identical to the single thread version. Asking for the two-lock queue is also a bad interview question because it's not something you'd reasonably expect someone to derive in an interview.

The other examples given for fleshing it out are all pretty similar; if a candidate can do one, chances are they can do the others too. If you want to get a decent signal if candidate skill, you have to ask a question easy enough that any candidate you'd accept can answer it, then incrementally add difficulty until you've given the candidate a chance to show off the limit of their abilities (at least as applied to your question).

Otherwise you ask a too-easy question which everyone nails, then make it way too hard and everyone fails. Or you ask a too-easy question and follow it up with additional enhancements that don't actually add much difficulty, and again all the candidates look similar. That's just my experience; the author seems pleased with the question so maybe they're getting good signal out of it.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-07 03:16:45+00:00
I’m reluctant to blame therapy-speak and diagnoses of legitimate mental health disorders for the lack of personality in a lot of folks.

Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:

* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others

* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting

* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance

* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree

Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).
by dsubburam | 2025-07-07 03:18:17+00:00
This parallels the debate about free will and determinism. If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]

i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.

If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.

[1] https://philarchive.org/archive/HOBFWA
by rtpg | 2025-07-07 03:18:18+00:00
> if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them

These interactions are not in that sense, they are in the "I say some stupid unvarnished opinion first and immediately realize there was a better way of saying it" variety. It is not downstream of me being stressed out about money or work or whatever. These are things that happen when I am in a perfectly normal mood, not thinking about how to pay rent or whatever.

I have plenty of social failings that are very much unrelated to capitalism. I have also had bad social interactions downstream of money/capitalism/etc too! But that's its own thing

Maybe you subscribe to some grand unifying theory here but I don't. Social structures and norms existed before market capital, and they exist in spaces fairly separate from the economic sphere ("those don't exist!" you might say, but I believe they do exist, at least in a time-and-space limited fashion).

Subsuming all of my issues to capitalism is unsatisfying. Thinking about the texture of it all (and potentially identifying some things that really are linked to that, and become as solvable as gravity[0]) is more valuable to me. I think it's also valuable to others.

[0]: or political action or whatever
by rezmason | 2025-07-07 03:19:49+00:00
The author of this post is a regular commenter on HN, JKCalhoun. Nice post, JKCalhoun! I love the three dozen dongles hanging on the wall of Dithering Heights.

The versions of these color pickers that were included in builds of Copland contain the strings "Hey what?" (for the HSL picker) and "Scheherazade" (for the crayon picker). Might those have been some of yours?

https://rezmason.net/chattin_with_jkcalhoun/copland_colorpic...
by thelittleone | 2025-07-07 03:19:55+00:00
I've had same experience. Taskmaster-ai was pretty good, but sometimes the agent ignored it as the project grew larger (can probably prevent that now using claude code hooks).

Trying this project today looks nice. I see you have sub-tasks. Any thoughts on a 'dependency' relation? I.e., don't do X if it is dependent on task A which is not complete.

FYI, there is a 404 in the AGENTS.md GEMINI.md etc pointing to a non existing README.md.
by Walf | 2025-07-07 03:20:31+00:00
I'm sure there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition, but you do realise time blindness is a real issue, right?

https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html

I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-07-07 03:20:31+00:00
Depends on the workload, but yes, codegen is a huge part of the total compilation time.

That said, that doesn't mean LLVM is always where the fixes need to be. For instance, one reason rustc spends a lot of time in LLVM is that rustc feeds more code to LLVM than it should, and relies on the LLVM optimizer to improve it. Over time, we're getting better about how much code we throw at LLVM, and that's providing performance improvements.
by Klonoar | 2025-07-07 03:21:02+00:00
> The reason men don't approach women in public anymore isn't some crazy conspiracy or anything

Respectfully: no, this is just an excuse.

I don't know where y'all lost the plot but when I was growing up it was widely considered that how you talked to other people was a skill. Skills require practice.

There's a billion people out there. Not everyone you meet is going to be against you talking them up. Do the work, lol
by guluarte | 2025-07-07 03:22:41+00:00
It is because you already have the technical knowledge, and with LLMs, it is easier to apply it to other tech stacks because all are fundamentally the same. And the things you don't know (for e.g., Go coroutines), the LLMs can explain them to you based on what you know, so you can learn them faster and apply your Python knowledge in Go.
by sardine5 | 2025-07-07 03:22:46+00:00
A bit different, as it's mainly for voice - but I made an app 'Murmur : Bluetooth Group Calls' - that lets you hold group voice calls and message via a mesh of Bluetooth LE connections. It's available on Android and iOS. https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/murmur-bluetooth-group-calls/i...

Doesn't really get any downloads, so not sure there's much demand for this - but I use it with some shokz bone conducting headphones for talking to my wife when we're cycling (also for wrangling our two small girls)
by Retric | 2025-07-07 03:22:47+00:00
I’m sure ECT is being misused occasionally, but what I’m referring to is the underlying condition such treatments are addressing as well as the research associated with finding what treatments are useful in which situations.

Seasonal affective disorder and bereavement-related depression may have similar symptoms on the surface, but there’s different treatments due to differences in underlying causes.

Some conditions may be a continuum with the same underlying cause taken to different extremes, but that continuum need not be continuous down to normal human behavior.
by chongli | 2025-07-07 03:23:00+00:00
the notion of a continuous function arose from a desire to explicitly classify functions whose graph "looks smooth and unbroken"

This notion falls down when you get to topology where you have continuous functions on topological spaces (which need not have any concept of distance nor even "smoothness"), since a topology can be defined on a finite (or infinite) set (of objects which may not even be numbers).

But that doesn't mean that vector addition is an arbitrary operation labeled + - vector addition is a meaningful concept for spatial vectors, one that you can formally extend to other operations if they follow certain rules while retaining many properties of the two-dimensional case

Vector addition need not even look like addition. For example, the positive real numbers can be defined as a vector space over the real numbers, with:

* (+) vector addition: u + v = uv (adding two vectors by multiplying two positive real numbers)

* (.) scalar multiplication: av = v^a

* (0) zero vector: 1 (the identity for multiplication)

Now we can verify some of the vector space axioms:

* let a be a scalar and u, v be vectors, then: a(u + v) = a(uv) = (uv)^a = (u^a)(v^a) = au + av, thus distributivity of scalar multiplication over vector addition holds

* let a, b be scalars and v be a vector, then: (a + b)v = v^(a + b) = (v^a)(v^b) = av + bv, thus distributivity of scalar multiplication over scalar addition holds

The rest can also be similarly verified but you get the picture.

Another weird vector space is the set of spanning subgraphs of a finite, simple, undirected graph over the finite field F[2] (which yields only 0 and 1 as scalars). In this one the idea of vector addition between subgraphs G + H is about determining whether two vertices are adjacent in one or the other of G or H, or adjacent in neither or both. This isn't really like addition at all, so none of the intuitions you might develop for vector addition in a Euclidean two-dimensional space would apply at all.
by nemanja_codes | 2025-07-07 03:24:52+00:00
Location: Serbia, GMT +2 Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: React, Next.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Astro, TailwindCSS, Jest, Cypress, Prisma, PostrgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, C#/.NET Resume/CV: Available on request GitHub: https://github.com/nemanjam Website: https://nemanjamitic.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic Email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com

I am a full stack developer with a Master's degree in Computer Science and 4.5 years of professional experience with JavaScript. My top skills are React/Next.js and I am also good with Node.js backends. I have decent experience with C# and .NET but currently it is not my main focus. I have a decent understanding of DevOps technologies (Linux, containers, IaC, automation) for a developer. I also have an interest in Python and FastAPI.

Here are some of my projects:

1. Comprehensive project: full stack Next.js, Prisma, unit, integration, e2e tests, CI/CD.

https://github.com/nemanjam/nextjs-prisma-boilerplate

2. Latest project: HN job ads aggregator, Next.js, SQLite (GitHub and demo links are in the first post).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373936

I have experience working remotely for startups within globally distributed multicultural teams.

I am looking for a full-time remote position. If we work well and stable I can relocate. I have detailed resume available upon request. You can check out my other projects at https://github.com/nemanjam . You can tell me about your company and project via email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic .
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-07 03:25:28+00:00
- reliability: there's only one TV that needs repairing ever. Having two of everything means something is going to break faster & more things will need to be repaired.

- space: one very large is smaller than two large tvs. (TV's were quite big.)

- weight: given all the wood and accessories, a big multi TV is far lighter than both combined

- placement: the room doesn't have to be setup to have two different viewing spots. Folks can look in the same direction.

- placement: "Separate audio could be played with or without earpieces," so sound can work fine even for multiple viewers

- choice: of this caught on & was optimized, there would have been lots of choices about which polarized tv you wanted to buy.

- quality: also strongly related to adoption.

Being completely negative is oh so often being completely stupid.

I absolutely can see a desire and want for a multi- iew screen like this, then, and now.