MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-18 05:05:13+00:00
It's a bit off the main topic of this thread, but the problem isn't designed to be finished in time. From the page:

> Very few people will finish the full problem. You do not need to complete every step to pass our interview.

A problem that an average candidate completes doesn't have a lot of differentiating power on the high end, whereas a problem where an OK candidate finishes 2-3 steps and a great one finishes 4-5 carries a lot more information.
by Animats | 2025-07-18 05:05:14+00:00
Usually, people use AI for reading logs, looking for interesting events or patterns. That goes way back. Microsoft was using it to classify and group similar crash dumps back in the 1990s.

Rust lets you write a default debug print for each struct, and will generate one if asked. So you don't have to write out all the fields yourself. That's enough to do the annoying part of the job.
by vintermann | 2025-07-18 05:05:54+00:00
Why take the chance? Because genealogical data is valuable to you, of course. If it isn't, no amount of legal or technical security will make it worth it.

I do think that the health stuff from 23andMe is only marginally better than astrology, that the ethnicity estimates are inferior to what most people can get from good old fashioned genealogy, but that the matching may be useful, if you value knowing who you're related to a lot.
by tayo42 | 2025-07-18 05:06:44+00:00
>The percentage of computer science graduates ... For those who specialized in computer programming,

Isn't computer programing all of computer science. This seems like a weird distinction to make?

The job market just seems to suck, if it didnt i dont think things like this would come up. I dont think immigration is the reason for the job market sucking. theres no jobs to apply to, theres no jobs to take from americans in the first place
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-18 05:07:16+00:00
> Some of them can't even figure out how to spend SNAP, because there's no refrigator or pantry in the stairwell they sleep in! I had a friend who insisted on spending 100% SNAP on 100% fresh beef. He literally wouldn't eat anything else. Jeez.

Isn't this making the argument in favor of a UBI? The theory behind SNAP is they have to buy food instead of stupid things, but then they just buy stupid food.

Meanwhile someone who is actually having a hard time gets put in a bind because they'd otherwise be willing to eat day old bagels and whatever's on the menu at the soup kitchen in order to save up for what they really need, which is the deposit for an apartment. But you can't use SNAP for that and then the government is paying the same money for worse results.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-18 05:08:33+00:00
While I agree this will be a major boon for SpaceX because military gonna military, in realistic terms it's far from a game changer. ICBMs are tough to shoot down because of their high speed and small size. Starship, by contrast, is huge and will need to slow down much more when reentering the atmosphere. It would be a sitting duck.

For proxy and "we're not involved in this war, honest" type stuff, that might be acceptable so long as target is nowhere near peer. But in any war against a peer military power including Russia/China, they'd have about as much use as aircraft carriers - which is to say, basically none. This, btw, is the major problem with war logistics in general. It's not the speed, because throughput matters much more than latency anyhow, but vulnerability.
by bruce511 | 2025-07-18 05:08:41+00:00
I get the "client side" of this equation; some number of users want to keep their actions/data private enough that they are willing to pay for it.

What I don't think they necessarily appreciate is how expensive that would be, and consequently how few people would sign up.

I'm not even assuming that the compute cost would be higher than currently. Let's leave aside the expected multiples in compute cost - although they won't help.

Assume, for example, a privacy-first Google replacement. What does that cost? (Google revenue is a good place to start that Calc.) Even if it was say $100 a year (hint; it's not) how many users would sign up for that? Some sure, but a long long way away from a noticeable percentage.

Once we start adding zeros to that number (to cover the additional compute cost) it gets even lower.

While imperfect, things like Tor provide most of the benefit, and cost nothing. As an alternative it's an option.

I'm not saying that HE is useless. I'm saying it'll need to be paid for, and the numbers that will pay to play will be tiny.
by ordu | 2025-07-18 05:09:00+00:00
> I think it would be extremely surprising for Universal Grammar to be proven false.

All you need to make it unsurprising you need to find an alternative hypothesis, that can explain observed facts.

How about this one. Humans got the ability to abstract deeper than others. While some animals could deal with concepts closely associated with real phenomena, and therefore they can use words to name things or maybe even actions, they cannot go further and use abstractions over abstractions. As the result they cannot deal with a recursive grammar.

Or another hypothesis. Humans got an ability to reflect on themselves, so they came to concepts like "motive (of action)", it made it possible for them to talk about actions, inventing words-categories, that categorize actions by supposed motive of action. But it is not just that, people started to feel that simple words do not describe the reality good enough, because a) actions have more than one motive, b) they started to see actions everywhere (the stone is lying flat? it is the action of the stone, that strictly speaking cannot act.). All this led them to invent complex grammars to describe the world where they live. Animals from other hand can't get it, because their world is much simplier. They don't see the stone "lying": it is a stone, it cannot do anything.

These hypotheses don't seem explaining everything, but I have just invented them. I didn't really tried to explain everything. But thinking about it, I'm in favor of the second one: all people are schizophrenics if you compare them with animals. They believe in things that are not exist, they see inanimate objects as animate, they are talking with themselves (inner dialog). It just happens that the particular kind of schizophrenia most people are struggling with is a condition that allows them to not tear apart all the connections with the Reality. It is more like borderline schizophrenia.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-18 05:09:17+00:00
Soham got 5 jobs. More than 5 jobs... He kept them for a while too.

We didn't lie to comp sci grads, they have the skills to DO the job, but the interview is a whole other skill that they have to learn. There is a gauntlet to be run of goofy interview questions and qualifiers. I dont know any one in the last few years who hasn't gone back to leetcode and the like to brush up if they needed to look.

Then you get posts like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079183

https://emaggiori.com/employed-in-tech-for-years-but-almost-...

Staff doing nothing or not pulling their weight is far more common than people think. Managers are resistant to firing staff, not because of HR, or emotional reasons. Rather many of them don't want to deal with the judgement of their peers (why did you make the bad hire to start with), and the judgement of their team/group. Office politics at the director level and above in a large organization is BRUTAL.
by rixed | 2025-07-18 05:10:36+00:00
Either you or me are deeply wrong about how genotypes relate to phenotype.

While some DNA characteristics can be statistically linked with some costly health conditions, the connection to "being a good hire" seems totally imaginary to me, has always been and will always be.

For what it's worth, public posts and comments on internet are probably a much better indicator of whether someone is going to be an obedient employee, and this dystopia is technically doable right now, and certainly many are working on it already.
by userbinator | 2025-07-18 05:10:48+00:00
sum += (x > 0 && y > 0 && x < x_limit && y < y_limit) ? a[y][x] : 0;

That took less than a minute of thought; or you could use a common technique in image and video processing, which is to make sure that the edges are always present but filled with appropriate values by defining your grid to be slightly bigger than the active area.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-18 05:11:59+00:00
Current fashion in enterprise projects, getting SaaS products talking to each other.

You get a CMS piece, talking to a DAM piece, talking to a ecommerce piece, talking to a payment piece, talking to analytics piece.

Currently, the integrations are done via a bunch of serverless functions in providers like Vercel, Nelify, Cloudflare Workers, maybe AWS Lambda or Azure Functions.

As of now, some of those SaaS vendors are bringing integrations into house, where you describe, via prompts naturally, how the integration should look like.

Example,

https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-stream

So less need for as many devs as usual in such integrations.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-18 05:13:45+00:00
This is bad advice. Please don't make claims about security if you're making it up as you go.

Environment variables are substantially more secure than plain text files because they are not persistent. There are utilities for entering secrets into them without leaking them into your shell history.

That said, you generally should not use an environment variable either. You should use a secure temporary file created by your shell and pass the associated file descriptor. Most shells make such functionality available but the details differ (ie there is no fully portable approach AFAIK).

The other situation that sometimes comes up is that you are okay having the secret on disk in plain text but you don't want it inadvertently commited to a repository. In those cases it makes sense to either do as you suggested and have a dedicated file, or alternatively to set an environment variable from ~/.bashrc or similar.
by jbotz | 2025-07-18 05:14:05+00:00
Yes, but on all reasonably recent distros (including all current "LTS" releases) just `python` will also get you python 3.x. If there is still a python 2.x on your system you'll have to type `python2` to get it. So it is up to the user... to upgrade their system. You really don't want to work on a system that's so outdated that `python` is still python 2.x.
by ewoodrich | 2025-07-18 05:14:50+00:00
Apple’s AI summary mangled a BBC headline about Luigi Mangione

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/13/24320689/apple-intellige...

Apple urged to withdraw 'out of control' AI news alerts

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o

iOS 18.3 Temporarily Removes Notification Summaries for News

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1i2w65j/ios_183_temp...
by mcny | 2025-07-18 05:15:00+00:00
> If the state doesn't have the money, cancellation sounds less expensive than completion, in the short term. Of course, the costs for not doing the coastal repairs will continue to acrue, but if there's no money, there's no money?

I feel like this story has played out so many times before with the end result being the federal government ends up paying for it but only after it becomes much more expensive than if we had paid for it much earlier? I feel like this is a defect in how we run our government.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-07-18 05:15:00+00:00
I don’t understand why we care if foreign born individuals are coding out software. We all use foreign written code daily.

Any student will look at the job prospects of their major before selecting it. We aren’t lying to them. I won’t feel bad for a student fresh out of college that “only” received a job offer for 95k, when that’s above the US median household income. I’m skeptical the lower job placement rate is due to H1B, and it might be more related to larger labor market trends.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-18 05:15:04+00:00
I'd argue harmless, small and transparent dependencies are the easiest to avoid. The extreme of it "is_even", but any library that could fit in 200 lines should probably be owned code.

Where the article hits is critical libraries that you heavily rely on and that your code is slowly formatted around. I'm thinking specific data parsers, fancy query brokers, time management libraries etc.
by FMecha | 2025-07-18 05:15:05+00:00
There was a brief attempt in late 90s Japan by game publishers to curtail used game sales by campaigning against it on back covers of games in late 90s/early 2000s. They stopped after the court said no to it.

Additionally, the market is also seeing used games as collectibles like cars and are inflating their prices that make it out of reach to actual buyers in favor of collectors. (cf. WATA Games)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-18 05:15:17+00:00
> Do we have any guarantees of this? Couldn't we equally have way less Nurses, Doctors, ER Techs, Construction Workers building homes, Teachers.

No, because we actually need those things, so we would keep hiring people to do them, whereas useless makework jobs are the obvious thing to cut if there is less labor available.
by azinman2 | 2025-07-18 05:15:22+00:00
“eliminate the STEM OPT extension”

I won’t get into h1b which gets plenty of air time, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone wanting to eliminate OPT. This is beyond idiotic. Foreigners come and get educated in the US; if we didn’t have OPT they’d have to go back to their home country and contribute there. Instead with OPT we give them a chance to integrate into American companies, making the US more competitive as a whole. This is a massive strategic advantage. Places like MIT/CalTech/CMU are heavily made up of foreigners. We need the best and brightest minds from the world; only pulling from 350M vs 8B is a giant mistake.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-18 05:15:25+00:00
The mosasaurs also developed a caudal fin (vertical, like sharks and ichthyosaurs, not horizontal like whales and dolphins) and eventually they became quite shark-like, though not as fish-like as ichthyosaurs.

Between ichthyosaurs (who evolved in Triassic) and mosasaurs (who evolved in Cretaceous) there existed also a group of marine crocodiles (Metriorhynchidae; who evolved in Jurassic), which also had caudal fins and were quite shark-like.

So there have been at least 4 groups of amniotes that looked like sharks, cetaceans among mammals and at least 3 groups of diapsids.

However all these marine predators looked like sharks from the point of view of locomotion, but none of them had the kind of teeth specialized for cutting that are characteristic for sharks. Teeth resembling those of sharks are found only among some other fish, e.g. piranhas, whose bodies do not resemble sharks.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-07-18 05:15:43+00:00
Depends, maybe Its more a matter of description, but I would call the lowest quality engineer I've seen employed a "0.1x" engineer, before I would describe a good one as a 10x.

Just because it's a kind of visualisation of a distribution, the elite are not that far ahead of the competent, but there is a very long tail of shitters out there.
by eviks | 2025-07-18 05:16:15+00:00
> Type "pocket alternative" into your favorite search engine and you'll find a bunch of sites that recommend a few good alternatives.

Now our turn to call bs. There is no single result at the first few pages of your "favorite search engine" results that would give you a comprehensive comparison to Pocket, so you'll have to waste time with a few services to uncover how they fail at something basic Pocket has.

And all these "alternatives" lists you cite are very primitive that won't help you uncover such issues

> mostly because my pocket list is pretty much dump and forget

Ok, but you know that some people actually want to use the service to, you know, read later instead of forgetting?
by bcrosby95 | 2025-07-18 05:16:58+00:00
I don't think how far a candidate gets on this particular test determines if they're OK or if they're great. I posit that a great one could finish 2-3 steps and an OK one could finish 4-5.

Because like many people have stated, this is just a hand holding test. You're basically seeing if they can code. So you're testing how fast someone can take a list of 5 steps someone else gives you and translate it into code in under 30 minutes.

And I'll tell you, I've never, in my life, worked on code with a series of 5 requirements and submitted it for review after 30 minutes. That would be bonkers, because I'd probably spend at least an hour sussing out all the ambiguities and contradictions.
by refurb | 2025-07-18 05:17:14+00:00
You can read all about USCBP policies on the use facial recognition

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy...

It would appear the software returns a lot of “potential matches” with propensity scores and demographic and recording information and it’s up to the agent to make the final determination.

It’s more a tool to find potential matches rather than a program that pops up and says “this is who this person is”
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-18 05:17:42+00:00
> I'm not a fan of basic income due to its inflationary effect that all-but neutralizes its spending power.

What causes you to believe that a transfer payment would be inflationary? Some high-paid partner at a law firm has less money, some low-paid teacher has more money, net amount of money everybody has in total hasn't changed.
by mikepurvis | 2025-07-18 05:18:52+00:00
I would also guess that some of these cases are designs that were adapted from previous USB mini- or micro-b configurations. Like an intern got the assignment, switched the connector, and wiped hands on pants, not realizing that an electrical change was required as well.

And if you spin the new board and it works with the A->C cable sitting on your desk, then what could possibly be different about plugging it into a C<->C cable, right?
by ylow | 2025-07-18 05:19:33+00:00
This is using statistics to tell a preconceived story. Underlying this a notion that foreign workers are simply “imported” like they are dug out of the ground or something. How do these STEM OPT people find jobs? Guess what. They interview like everyone else does.

1: Every big tech interview I have been in the visa status is not even a question in the interview process. There is just a simple gate that “can you legally work in the US”? The hiring committee is not even thinking about visa (that’s a HR problem)

2: Are there confounders in that foreign workers are less likely to negotiate? Absolutely.

3: are there confounders in that people who come to US for study are likely already a self selected bunch who are striving to succeed? What are the typical grade distributions between foreign STEM students and US STEM students? Is grade a confounding variable? What happens if we control for GPA?

And finally does H1B abuse happen? Absolutely.

There is a lot of nuance that are not captured by surface level statistics. But nuance does not make outrage.
by vintermann | 2025-07-18 05:20:16+00:00
Best case scenario is that you can answer a ton of historical questions that you wouldn't have a chance to otherwise.

I'm currently in the process of figuring out where my most distant known paternal-line ancestor came from. Took a Y-DNA test, found a very distant all-male line cousin who was open to taking a Y DNA test (because he had already taken one at 23andMe, I knew the odds were good that he would be OK with it - the 23andMe test also had enough Y information that I knew it was likely we both descended from the same man).

His first results came in yesterday. In another couple of weeks, when his Y SNPs come in, we'll know which of my ~10 private mutations (ones no one else has been found to share) we have in common, which will in turn put better time estimates on our distance to other testers in our part of the Y-tree.
by barisozmen | 2025-07-18 05:20:28+00:00
An FHE Google today would be incredible expensive and incredibly slow. No one would pay for it.

The key question I think is how much computing speed will improve in the future. If we assume FHE will take 1000x more time, but hardware also becomes 1000x faster, then the FHE performance will be similar to today's plaintext speed.

Predicting the future is impossible, but as software improves and hardware becoming faster and cheaper every year, and as FHE provides a unique value of privacy, it's plausible that at some point it can become the default (if not 10 years, maybe in 50 years).

Today's hardware is many orders of magnitudes faster compared to 50 years ago.

There are of course other issues too. Like ciphertext size being much larger than plaintext, and requirement of encrypting whole models or indexes per client on the server side.

FHE is not practical for most things yet, but its venn diagram of feasible applications will only grow. And I believe there will be a time in the future that its venn diagram covers search engines and LLMs.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-18 05:20:36+00:00
> You're implying that all reality is cultural,

Let's look at two examples of cultural reality:

Fan death in South Korea. Where people believe that a fan running while you sleep can kill you.

The book "Pure, White and Deadly". Where we discredited the author and his findings and spent decades blaming fat, while packing on the pounds with high fructose corn syrup.

An LLM isn't going to find some intrinsic truth, that we are ignoring, in its data set. An LLM isn't going to find issues in the reproducibility / replication crisis. I have not seen one discredit a scientific paper with its own findings.

To be clear LLM's can be amazing tools, but garbage in garbage out still applies.
by jppope | 2025-07-18 05:21:55+00:00
I applaud the courage to call out this as a problem. With that said I believe that there is a lot more nuance on this issue than the article is willing to provide, or more importantly research needed to be done to be rigorous on this topic. There definitely is some truth here about the H1B1 program in the job market. There are some companies who are absolutely shameless abusers too. I think that all of us working in the industry know that a comp sci degree alone is not enough to provide the training for many of these roles.

As an aside, I think there's another equally important issue that should also be raised along with employment. A large number of our graduate+ degrees in STEM go to foreign nationals. The issue is not providing education to foreign nationals in and of itself, but that many of these degrees (public schools) are funded by tax payers, and we are depriving our country of an educated population while educating citizens in other countries who compete with our country globally. Private schools can and should do whatever is in their mission, but public schools should have some accountability to our citizens and tax payers. We all have a right to get value for the money that we put into things like our public university system, which is supposed to be training future leaders of our country.

Of course with that longwinded answer I have to say... Tech is like the weather, just wait for a minute its all going to change anyway, so don't stress all of this.
by rcbdev | 2025-07-18 05:22:04+00:00
Sadly, I've made the different observation that (in my country, where university is free and academic degrees are worth their weight in gold) most developers who never went to university think of themselves as the lone gunman while lacking basics after 7+ years of experience.

Bonus points if most of their experience is in nebulous freelancing. One of them admitted once that they didn't earn anything in his 2 years of "freelancing" on his CV.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Good engineers are exceedingly hard to find in my country, much more so than in California.