MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bborud | 2025-07-07 13:00:13+00:00
I've conducted a fair number of interviews. At least one of the problems I pose to candidates are to test if they will ask questions that clarifies what I am asking for. Because being able to articulate both what you want to accomplish and what the non-negotiable constraints are, is a key skill. The more senior you are, the higher this part of the interview gets weighted.

This is also how a candidate can get to know the interviewer and possibly the company he is interviewing at. What does the interviewer say when you start picking apart what they are actually asking about.

The way this problem is posed has two main issues. The first is that it is unclear what the interviewer actually wants. The second is that the problem to be solved isn't well defined. This is later confirmed when we read the blog posting and it is revealed that rather than designing a solution to a problem, the interviewer expects the candidate to hack their way to a solution. Not to recognize what you are trying to accomplish and reason about how to solve such problems, but just peck at the problem. Mess with the code.

To make matters worse, it would appear that the interviewer is approaching the problem in a dubious manner -- solving a server problem by depending on the clients to cooperate. That should make you suspicious.

It gets further confused by adding poorly motivated extensions to the problem while misusing nomenclature. It appears he is asking for how to solve a difficult problem in messaging systems, but he isn't. He is asking for convenient ways to implement something much simpler. Which even makes me question if he would have recognized someone smarter than him misunderstanding and solving a harder problem -- someone who is capable of solving the kind of problems his use of nomenclature hints at, but apparently wasn't after.

Now, think about your reaction to this problem formulation from my perspective. From the perspective of someone who wants to hire senior developers. When I hire people I need people who can solve problems. Lacking that, I need someone I can train to solve problems. I have no need for people who dig themselves out of holes brute force. This is why some portion of my interview questions will only work if the candidate asks questions. Some of these interview questions are really easy to solve from a technical/algorithmic point of view, but only if you can identify the underlying problem.

If I had presented the problem as stated to a candidate and they did what the interviewer seemed to want, I'd probably have added them to the reject pile for lack of ability to take a step back and point out that this is a bit silly.
by dkyc | 2025-07-07 13:00:42+00:00
I think what changed is that we at least can attempt to limit 'bad' things with technical measures. It was legitimately technically impossible 10 years ago to prevent Photoshop from designing propaganda posters. Of course today's 'LLM safety' features aren't watertight either, but with the combination of 'input is natural language' plus LLM-based safety measures, there are more options today to restrict what the software can do than in the past.

The example you gave about preventing money counterfeiting with technical measures also supports this, since this was an easier thing to detect technically, and so it was done.

Whether that's a good thing or bad thing everyone has to decide for themselves, but objectively I think this is the reason.
by __s | 2025-07-07 13:00:45+00:00
Dante is a poor example for language proficiency, as he was educated / traveled/ well read. The common person would have a much different lived experience

I have colleagues in India. It's a diverse mesh of regions that vary in about every way. Was explained people grow up with 3 languages, their regional language, a neighboring region's language, a more general language, & then educated folk are taught English. Then in school they were still taking classes for other romantic languages. At an Indian restaurant with one colleague I noticed they would mostly rely on hand gestures. One factor here is that there may often be a language barrier

I've also interacted a bit with Senegalese, which has Wolof as the primary language, then French taught in schools. Many only know Wolof (with French influence weaved in). & the well educated learn to speak English, & how to maintain more European French accent
by zug_zug | 2025-07-07 13:01:09+00:00
Exactly. If anything I think the vast majority of us engineers under-diagnose ourselves for where we fall on that spectrum (which is probably the safe career and social move in the millennial generation).

Almost every day of my whole career I've worked with people who were missing social cues and being disliked because they were misunderstood. I think an engineer is MUCH more likable if they genuinely say "Sorry if I'm loud, and I don't mean to interrupt, sometimes when I get excited I accidentally do this, I don't do it because I think my ideas are better than everyone else's."

Now obviously if somebody exaggerates a trait they don't have, says it in a self-important way, and isn't remorseful at all about the effect it has on people around them, and isn't trying to change it that's a shame.

But frankly imo the balance of that in software is I've met 1/2 in my whole career who came across as self-important about their conditions, versus against maybe 20% (dozens and dozens) weren't able/willing to communicate their oddities.
by monkaiju | 2025-07-07 13:01:47+00:00
None of the little technocratic nonsense matters though if you blow it when workers are actually trying to directly exert their power. The power of the workers doesn't come from the NLRB or any of these government institutions, it comes from their ability to withold their labor, and when they do that it becomes clear that both parties are funded by the same oligarchs because both of them will step in and stop it.
by ThePatientTiger | 2025-07-07 13:01:57+00:00
"being part of the root causes to 50% of all security vulnerabilities."

Truly an exaggeration. People really overestimate the danger of C.

"no one would nowadays embark on writing such a large system using C from scratch."

Come on, C is fast. C is not complicated. C has proven that it is reliable in recent 50 years. People don't like C because they can't do anything without their sweet language's garbage collector.
by ABS | 2025-07-07 13:03:09+00:00
you are making the mistake of confusing your experience, which is of course legit but anecdata, with "how it works" in general.

I'm an almost 50 years old Italian so not a spring chicken but I definitely learnt Italian growing up, not a dialect, and not "from school".

I guess it's the difference between growing up in a city vs a village.
by OtomotO | 2025-07-07 13:03:59+00:00
You're not alone in this, no.

My definition of AGI is the one I was brought up with, not an ever moving goal post (to the "easier" side).

And no, I also don't buy that we are just stochastic parrots.

But whatever. I've seen many hypes and if I don't die and the world doesn't go to shit, I'll see a few more in the next couple of decades
by gwd | 2025-07-07 13:04:21+00:00
Been using aider as my daily driver for a while, just gave opencode a spin last night.

As another comment by the authors said, they're still pretty early days, so there's a lot of missing documentation and functionality; that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge.

Two big differences:

1. opencode is much more "agentic": It will just take off and do loads of stuff without asking, whereas aider normally asks permission to do everything. It will make a change, the language server tells it the build is broken, it goes and searches for the file and line in the error message, reads it, and tries to fix it; rinse repeat, running (say) "go vet" and "go test" until it doesn't see anything else to do. You can interrupt it, of course, but it won't wait for you otherwise.

2. aider has much more specific control over the context window. You say exactly what files you want the LLM to be able to see and/or edit; and you can clear the context window when you're ready to move on to the next task. The current version of opencode has a way to "compact" the context window, where it summarizes for itself what's been done and then (it seems) drops everything else. But it's not clear exactly what's in and out, and you can't simply clear the chat history without exiting the program. (Or if you can, I couldn't find it documented anywhere.)

ETA: opencode will tell you how big the context window is, but not what's in the context (AFAICT).

3. As sort of a side effect of both of those, the "rtt" seems much shorter for opencode: lots of small actions with quick feedback for opencode, vs long contiguous responses for aider. But that could be more how I happened to use it than something specific.

I do feel like opencode's UI is more... "sparkling"? The screen is much more "managed", with windows, a status bar, more colors, etc. Aider is much more like the REPL loop of, say, python or sqlite3.
by suyjuris | 2025-07-07 13:05:03+00:00
Yes, that would by an interesting trial. But it is only about six books, and all claims regarding Claude have been dismissed already. So only the internal copies remain, and there the theory for them being infringing is somewhat convoluted: you have to argue that they are not just for purposes of training (which was ruled fair use), and award damages even though these other purposes never materialised (since by now, they have legal copies of those books). I can see it, but I would not count on there being a trial.
by bluGill | 2025-07-07 13:05:09+00:00
I fully agree with this. There is a reason long range sharp shooters use simple bolt action guns, while the vast majority of an army uses much more complex guns. A simple bolt action also happens to be the most precise gun we can make (a single shot musket would be simpler, but it wouldn't be more accurate and loading it would be a pain). You choose the best tool for the job. Properly cared for modern guns don't jam very often, and improperly cared for guns jam too often no matter how simple they are.
by genrilz | 2025-07-07 13:05:33+00:00
There isn't a formal definition of how the borrow checking algorithm works, but if anyone is interested, [0] is a fairly detailed if not mathematically rigorous description of how the current non-lexical lifetime algorithm works.

The upcoming Polonius borrow checking algorithm was prototyped using Datalog, which is a logical programming language. So the source code of the prototype [1] effectively is a formal definition. However, I don't think that the version which is in the compiler now exactly matches this early prototype.

EDIT: to be clear, there is a polonius implementation in the rust compiler, but you need to use '-Zpolonius=next' flag on a nightly rust compiler to access it.

[0]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2094-nll.html

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius/tree/master
Ask HN: Aggregating authentic user reviews across platforms?
by howardV | 2025-07-07 13:06:30+00:00
I'm exploring the technical feasibility of building a tool that aggregates genuine user reviews about websites from various sources (social media, forums, review platforms, etc.). The core challenge: How do you programmatically collect and verify authentic user sentiment about a website while respecting rate limits, ToS, and privacy concerns? Technical questions I'm grappling with:

Data sources: Which platforms actually allow review scraping legally? Authentication: How to handle platforms that require login for review access? Rate limiting: Best practices for respectful data collection across multiple APIs? Spam detection: How to filter out fake reviews and bot-generated content? Real-time updates: Efficient ways to keep review data current without overwhelming source platforms?

Broader questions:

Has anyone built something similar? What were the biggest technical hurdles? Are there existing APIs or datasets that make this more feasible? What legal/ethical considerations am I missing?

Currently researching this space and would love to hear from anyone who's tackled similar challenges in review aggregation, web scraping at scale, or sentiment analysis. Any insights on the technical architecture or cautionary tales would be incredibly valuable!
by myth_drannon | 2025-07-07 13:06:37+00:00
The devil is in the details. From the river to the sea is different. There are some moderate Palestinians and then there are Hamas and other extremists. So the goal of destroying Israel has different interpretations. Moderates just want Palestine instead of Israel and Jews out "back to Europe" ( or whatever the came from) and extremists just want to slaughter (aka October 7th but their buddies Hizballah and Iran failed to help them, the "Khaiber, Khaiber" crowd that wants what ISIS did to Yezidis )
by mananaysiempre | 2025-07-07 13:06:55+00:00
So, I’m not familliar with whatever Figma’s Auto Layout is, but the complaint still feels somewhat wrongheaded.

Design ≠ print design; if you’re designing for a reflowable medium, you’ll have to design to its constraints. A good prototyping tool should allow you to go outside the constraints for the moment, but for a web or mobile designer to dismiss those constraints as the engineer’s concern is about as appropriate as for a typographer to dismiss the constraints of type casting as the moldmaker’s: it won’t work.
by nxobject | 2025-07-07 13:07:26+00:00
I understand Chollet is transparent that the "branding" of the ARC-AGI-n suites is meant to be suggestive of its purpose, than substantial.

However, it does rub me the wrong way - as someone who's cynical of how branding can enable breathless AI hype by bad journalism. A hypothetical comparison would be labelling SHRDLU's (1968) performance on Block World planning tasks as "ARC-AGI-(-1)".[0]

A less loaded name like (bad strawman option) "ARC-VeryToughSymbolicReasoning" should capture how the ARC-AGI-n suite is genuinely and intrinsically very hard for current AIs, and what progress satisfactory performance on the benchmark suite would represent. Which Chollet has done, and has grounded him throughout! [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
by techjamie | 2025-07-07 13:07:26+00:00
Crunchyroll was originally an anime piracy site that went legit and started actually licensing content later. They started in mid-2006, got VC funding in 2008, then made their first licensing deal in 2009.

https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/04/online-anime-video-technol...

https://venturebeat.com/business/crunchyroll-for-pirated-ani...
by paulnpace | 2025-07-07 13:07:50+00:00
It can't conduct heat to human skin. The concept, in this case, wouldn't be to merely prevent a material from catching fire, but to keep the person from being burned or steam-boiled.

However, the general concept could also be applied to protecting things besides people, such as vehicles or buildings.

I don't actually know very much about the wavelengths used by DEW, so I'm not clear if water, alone, is a practical as shielding, but could be used as a heat sink, especially when factoring in latent heat of vaporization.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-07 13:08:01+00:00
This idea is called qualia [0] for those unfamiliar.

I don't have any opinion on the qualia debates honestly. I suppose I don't know what it feels like for an ant to find a tasty bit of sugar syrup, but I believe it's something that can be described with physics (and by extension, things like chemistry).

But we do know some things about some qualia. Like we know how red light works, we have a good idea about how photoreceptors work, etc. We know some people are red-green colorblind, so their experience of red and green are mushed together. We can also have people make qualia judgments and watch their brains with fMRI or other tools.

I think maybe an interesting question here is: obviously it's pleasurable to animals to have their reward centers activated. Is it pleasurable or desirable for AIs to be rewarded? Especially if we tell them (as some prompters do) that they feel pleasure if they do things well and pain if they don't? You can ask this sort of question for both the current generation of AIs and future generations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
by gadabout | 2025-07-07 13:08:06+00:00
> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.

Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-07 13:08:09+00:00
The first highlight from this video is getting to see a preview of the next ARC dataset. Otherwise it feels like most of what Chollet says here has already been repeated in his other podcast appearances and videos. It's a good video if you're not familiarized with his work, but if you've seen some of his recent interviews then you can probably skip the first 20 minutes.

The second highlight from this video is the section from 29 minutes onward, where he talks about designing systems that can build up rich libraries of abstractions which can be applied to new problems. I wish he had lingered more on exploring and explaining this approach, but maybe they're trying to keep a bit of secret sauce because it's what his company is actively working on.

One of the major points which seems to be emerging from recent AI discourse is that the ability to integrate continuous learning seems like it'll be a key element in building AGI. Context is fine for short tasks, but if lessons are never preserved you're severely capped with how far the system can go.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-07 13:08:18+00:00
ask deep technical questions and evaluate the response.

I've had better success, by a wide margin, doing this, than any code challenges ever gave.

I don't know why the industry is so averse to this, it really does work, and I know others who also swear by it.

You can find the bullshitters pretty quickly even in this ChatGPT driven world
by 998244353 | 2025-07-07 13:08:18+00:00
No, and this is where this formal notion of basis I mentioned unfortunately diverges from what is perhaps more useful in practice.

You can represent any function f: [-pi, pi] -> R as an infinite sum

f(x) = sum_(k = 0 to infinity) (a_k sin(kx) + b_k cos(kx))

for some coefficients a_k and b_k as long as f is sufficiently nice (I don't remember the exact condition, sorry).

This is very useful, but the functions sin(x), sin(2x), ... , cos(x), cos(2x), ... don't constitute a basis in the formal sense I mentioned above as you need an infinite sum to represent most functions. It is still often called a basis though.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-07-07 13:08:51+00:00
The cup isn't exactly 100C, it's being heated by the flame. But it's only a few hundred microns thick, and the back is in direct contact with the 100C water. One side is exposed to an air/methane flame at around 2000C/3500F, which (while very hot) is a poor thermal conductor, and the other side is in contact with the water. The temperature at the interface is somewhere in the middle.

Also, you do you, but it's probably not a great idea to boil food in plastic cups or "waxed" (often coated in a styrene compound, not real "wax") paper cups...
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-07-07 13:09:03+00:00
As much as I like the idea of people working on peer-to-peer networks, delay tolerant network, if I'm within Bluetooth range, it's quicker to chat with the person I'm talking to than to go through a messaging app.

That technology is interesting, but it is probably not a good usecase. There are potentially lots of interesting things you could do with smart watches and bike computers, such as uploading activities without direct connection to a phone or sharing routes with nearby participants, etc.

Use cases where you may not necessarily have a phone or adequate network coverage.
by daeken | 2025-07-07 13:09:21+00:00
(B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's super common in Argentina at least.
by dghughes | 2025-07-07 13:09:26+00:00
>neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language

I think any small groups of humans were just one virus away from extinction. Even we almost disappeared. A species that has a very low population for the entire species then all get sick that is bad even if all do not die. Your species loses genetic diversity and then another virus or even a large natural disaster strikes the group wiping it out. Maybe we just were lucky and survived not due to any skill better than other species.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-07 13:09:58+00:00
Stargate is a specific franchise that riffs off "ancient aliens" idea. "Ancient aliens" by itself is a meme complex (in both senses of the term), not a specific thing. Pseudo-specialists selling books and producing documentaries are just another group of people taking a spin on those ideas, except they're making money by screwing with people's sanity instead of providing entertainment.

See also: just about anything - from basic chemistry to UFOs to quantum physics. There's plenty of crackpots selling books on those topics too, but they don't own the conceptual space around these ideas. I can have a heated debate about merits of "GIMBAL" video or the "microtubules" in the brain, without assuming the other party is a crackpot or being offended by the ideas I consider plain wrong.

Also, I'd think this through a bit more:

> Pop culture is a narrow subset of culture, not interchangeable with mythology.

Yes, it's not interchangeable. Pop culture is more important.

Culture is a living thing, not a static artifact. Today, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are even more influential on the evolution of culture and society than classical literature. Saying this out loud only seems weird and iconoclastic (fancy word for "offensive"? :)) to most, because the works of Tolkien and Rowling are contemporary, and thus mundane. But consider that, back when the foundations of Enlightenment and Western cultures were being established, the classics were contemporary works as well! 200 years from now[0], Rowling will be to people what Shakespeare is to us today.

--

[0] - Not really, unless the exponential progress of technology stops ~today.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-07-07 13:10:43+00:00
I'd say we're not far off.

Looking at the human side, it takes a while to actually learn something. If you've recently read something it remains in your "context window". You need to dream about it, to think about, to revisit and repeat until you actually learn it and "update your internal model". We need a mechanism for continuous weight updating.

Goal-generation is pretty much covered by your body constantly drip-feeding your brain various hormones "ongoing input prompts".