MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 11:15:08+00:00
He mentioned that Oxide has an interview process that takes 20 hours realistically between coming up with work samples, answering 8 questions before hand and 9 hours of in person interviews.

I was curious about the pay.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Oxide-Computer-Salaries-E54...

For their “senior” engineers it’s in the range of offers for I’ve seen for new grads at most of the tech companies and around the range of generic enterprise CRUD developers.

No offense to “enterprise developers”. I spent 25 years as one. But why would I jump through hoops for a job that pays about the same as I could hypothetically get based on interviewing for a few hours and asking generic behavioral questions and maybe some techno trivia about whatever language the company uses.

I find it fascinating that companies want rockstar ninja developers but then offer meh compensation for the positions.
by nnashrat | 2025-08-10 11:16:09+00:00
It also could be like the Turing test.

There was no grand announcement of passing the Turing test or not. Instead the whole idea has faded in importance.

As the models get better, it wouldn't be shocking to me we get to a point that no one cares if the models are considered "AGI" or not.

We will be chasing some new vaguely defined concept.
by Bowes-Lyon | 2025-08-10 11:16:42+00:00
Linus has a point – it was garbage.

I’m happy that Linus takes his job seriously and catches such things even under tremendous stress. We are lucky to have him; he once again saved our collective asses from a lot of pain down the road.

The tweet was prejudiced and manipulative. The bottom part of the email was cut off, not revealing additional context. The focus was put on „Google engineer“, which is totally irrelevant. People here in the chat repeat that the developer is „Chair of the UNIX-Class Platform Specification“. So what? Why is this relevant at all? Apparently, even „Chairs of this and that“ still have a lot to learn.

Another point: I have seen many such „helper“ functions when dealing with LLM-generated code. Was this particular code LLM-generated? I don’t know for sure, but it certainly looks that way. So the headline could easily have been „Linus rejects LLM-generated garbage.“

Once again, we are lucky to have Linus, whatever his communication style may be.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-08-10 11:18:22+00:00
I am becoming increasingly frustrated with ChatGPT, when I should be a prototypical user. I analyze and help develop U.S. public policy. Cgpt is great for pulling in vast amounts of data, especially surface level, very quickly. I can then churn through what it has found, ask questions, etc. in seconds.

However, when you give something to Cgpt is when it seems to fail. The first is that it has a terrible time with cross-memory contamination. New Chat should mean a new session, instead at times it acts like a continuation of all previous sessions. Ergo if I give it a paper to summarize, it will pull in data from other previous sessions and insert that as if it belonged. It will also pull in data (words) from the internet and erroneously cite them.

Some of that can be rectified with the most explicit and logic drive questions, but that sort of defeats the purpose of treating it "like a research assistant," as it is often referred to.

Second, is that it cannot process and return large documents. For example: A sixty page plain text file of a conference speaker transcript. Asking it to summarize the conference does not work, and if you ask it why, it will tell you: can't hold large documents in memory, or it will go into a loop, or it will give nothing. Another error limitation it reports is that it can only return so much to the web interface, that i can understand.

Third, is in how files are handled. Am I the only one that tries to download a file and it gives me the "failed to get status for /mnt/data..." Even small files, or it gives a very partial correct/incorrect document, the same document you gave it initially, or a mess...

Those have been the biggest problem. I recognize that as a user I need to adapt in a few ways: Be very explicit and logic driven in my requests; chunk to the smallest reasonable number of parts of documents; and others. Understand that it's ability to recall can be limited, even if give explicit instruction, so each query should be a healthy repeat of the last results.

But we're paying for this..which has us testing multiple LLMs alongside Cgpt before we seriously dive into one.
by sliken | 2025-08-10 11:18:26+00:00
Well sort of. Apple makes a competitive mac mini and macbook air with a 128 bit memory interface, decent design, solid build, nice materials, etc starting at $1k. PC laptops can match nearly any aspect, but rarely match the quality of the build, keyboard, trackpad, display, aluminum chassis, etc.

However Apple will let you upgrade to the pro (double the bandwidth), max (4x the bandwidth), and ultra (8x the bandwidth). The m4 max is still efficient, gives decent battery life in a thin light laptop. Even the ultra is pretty quiet/cool even in a tiny mac studio MUCH smaller than any thread ripper pro build I've seen.

Does mystify me that x86 has a hard time matching even a mac mini pro on bandwidth, let alone the models with 2x or 4x the memory bandwidth.
by CodeVisio | 2025-08-10 11:18:43+00:00
I understand you and did the same in the past.

However, here we are talking about at the general level. Not a single instance as your experience.

Engineers are hired for engineering jobs not for manager jobs or mopping the floor.

On the other side, if a lately hired person wasn't find himself comfortable inside the team, I, _as manager_, can always complain the team and accuse them being guilty because they weren't able to say NO at interview level or because they said YES at the wrong candidate. Do you see the faulty thought of our time? I as manager earn a lot for managing people but in reality I download my responsibilities of not being able to interview a candidate and so find the right person _downloading_ that on the team that actually is not responsible for new hired person. Fantastic.

Than's the meal they want you digest in some cultures. In mine, as manager, I decide who is on board, and I clarify clearly the roles of every one. No space for interpretation.

I din't come out from a manager school, but I started from the ground and I put myself _every time_ in the shoes of who is managed by me.

My humble opinion
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-10 11:18:46+00:00
CUDA largely was Nvidias attempt at swaying Khronos and Microsoft's DirectX team. In the end, Khronos went with something based on a blend of AMD's and Nvidia's ideas, and that became Vulkan, and Microsoft just duplicated the effort in a Direct3D-flavored way.

So, just use Vulkan and stop fucking around with the Nvidia moat.
by raesene9 | 2025-08-10 11:19:24+00:00
Indeed, Mullvad is a VPN provider (https://mullvad.net/en) they provide several privacy focused services including a VPN and a browser.

Using Mullvad (or other VPN products) allows someone to make their traffic originate from specific countries, which can allow for testing to see what it'll look like from different countries, or to access content which is restricted to people in a specific country. It can also allow for bypassing age check restrictions that apply to specific geographies (e.g. the UK)

Integrating it with Tailscale makes it easier to use (if you're an existing tailscale user) as instead of having to install and manage a separate product, it integrates with your existing tailscale setup, allowing you to dynamically choose a mullvad exit node in a give country, and then your Internet traffic will appear from that country.

(that all sounds somewhat ad-like but I'm not in any way affiliated with Tailscale or Mullvad apart from being a user (Tailscale did give me a nice hoodie one time for writing a blog though ))
by masklinn | 2025-08-10 11:20:37+00:00
> there aren't any known good states prior to an unexpected crash

If there aren't any good states then the program straight up doesn't work in the first place, which gets diagnosed pretty quickly before it hits the field.

> your work needs to be correct more than it needs to be available.

"correctness over availability" tends to not be a thing, if you assume you can reach perfect and full correctness then either you never release or reality quickly proves you wrong in the field. So maximally resilient and safe systems generally plan for errors happening and how to recover from them instead of assuming they don't. There are very few fully proven non-trivial programs, and there were even less 40 years ago.

And Erlang / BEAM was designed in a telecom context, so availability is the prime directive. Which is also why distribution is built-in: if you have a single machine and it crashes you have nothing.
by gavinray | 2025-08-10 11:21:04+00:00
> "The actual implementation of Universalis uses Kotlin DataFrames"

Neat. My favorite talk at the 2025 Kotlin Conf was the demo of the new compiler plugin that allows ad-hoc type inference from DataFrame expressions.

Essentially, say that you have an input type like:

type User { name: String, age: Int }

And you do something like ".map(it => { doubledAge: it.age * 2 })"

The inferred type of that intermediate operation is now:

type User_synthetic { doubledAge: Int }

Which is wild, since you essentially have TypeScript-like inference in a JVM language.

Timestamp to talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5NaqGF9oT4&t=543s
by fnordsensei | 2025-08-10 11:21:36+00:00
> By being particularly bad at anything outside of the most popular languages and frameworks, LLMs force you to pick a very mainstream stack if you want to be efficient.

Do they? I’ve found Clojure-MCP[1] to be very useful. OTOH, I’m not attempting to replace myself, only augment myself.

1: https://github.com/bhauman/clojure-mcp
by mrtksn | 2025-08-10 11:22:11+00:00
My understanding was that with GPT-5 you don't actually get the high quality stuff unless the system decides that you need it. So, for simple questions you end up getting the subpar response. A bit like not getting hot water until you increase the flow enough to trigger the boiler to start the heating.

Lately I enjoy Grok the most for simple questions, even if it isn't necessarily about a recent event. Then I like OpenAI, Mistral, Deepseek equally and for some reason never felt good about Gemini. Tried switching to Gemini Pro the last two months but I found myslef going back to ChatGPT's free mode and Grok's free mode. Cancelled yesterday and now happily back to ChatGPT Plus.

I got %80 GPT-5 preference anyway.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 11:22:23+00:00
No my passion isn’t my job. I have a long list of things I do for fun. Sitting at a computer is not one of them. My job is transactional - an exchange of labor for money.

I can’t exchange “passion” for food clothes or shelter.

I’m 51 now and can afford to choose work life balance over money. But if I were younger and it’s advice I give all younger graduates in CS is to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG (or equivalent paying company)” and by pay I mean cash and RSUs in publicly traded companies not “equity” that will statistically be worthless.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-10 11:22:24+00:00
Yes it does. ROCm support for new chips, due to being available for paid support contracts, comes like 1-2 months after the chip comes out (ie, when they're 100% sure it works with the current, also new, driver).

I'd rather it works and ships late than doesn't work and ships early and then get gaslit about the bugs (lol Nvidia, why are you like this?)
by perching_aix | 2025-08-10 11:24:37+00:00
I don't really understand this reasoning.

HN allows for creating a user. HN requires every post and comment to be created by a user. HN displays the user for each post and comment. HN allows for browsing users' post and comment history. HN allows for flagging posts and comments, but only by users. HN allows for voting on posts and comments, but only by users. HN also has some baseline guardrails for fresh accounts. Very clearly, the concept of user accounts is central to the overall architecture of the site.

And you ask if it is in HN's interest to ensure people's user accounts remain in their control? Literally all mutative actions you can take on HN are bound to a user that I can tell, with that covering all content submission actions. They even turn on captchas from time to time for combating bots. [0] How could it not be in their interest to ensure people can properly secure their user accounts?

And if I further extend this thinking, why even perform proper password practices at all (hashing and salting)? Heck, why even check passwords, or even have user accounts at all?

So in my thinking, this is not a reasonable question to ponder. What is, is that maybe the added friction of more elaborate security practices would deter users, or at least that's what [0] suggests to me. But then the importance of user account security or the benefit of 2FA really isn't even a question, it's accepted to be more secure, it's more a choice of giving up on it in favor of some perceived other rationale.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34312937
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-10 11:26:06+00:00
If you have a target on your own back thanks to cert transparency logs, it's a bit like closing the barn door late for you to find fault in your own being in Texas when sharpshooters are about. If your only defense was obscurity, your ass is hanging out, and it's no one's fault but your own when you find fault with others for simply saying so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
by _heimdall | 2025-08-10 11:27:23+00:00
I have Ego's bicycle handle brush cutter, think a weed whacker on steroids with a metal blade.

That think does some serious work. I've cleared acres of overgrown mess with it. 2 6aH batteries will outlast me (~2 hours) before I need a break and the fast charger tops one up in maybe 30 minutes.

Lawn mowers are really where batteries fall apart. They go through a charge extremely fast, especially if the grass is even moderately overgrown. Most mowers are meant to be finish mowers where you aren't taking off much grass at all, say 1/4" up to maybe 1". Electric mowers really demand that or you'll run out of juice very fast.
by notahacker | 2025-08-10 11:27:52+00:00
Apart from anything else, some members of the "elite" are actually smart and driven enough to be able to parlay their early life advantages into meeting the academic requirements of top schools, and those who aren't tend to end up with top school alumni running many aspects of their affairs for them anyway. Especially if they're the sort of elites that are interested in investing in startups or being active in politics or having science endowments named after them.

Top schools are also entirely capable of attracting members of privileged elites to network at their events without shepherding them through the curriculum.
by westurner | 2025-08-10 11:27:53+00:00
FWIU aluminum waste can feed into steel production; (would be) waste outputs can be inputs to other processes.

For example "red mud" is a waste output of aluminum production.

"Green steel from red mud through climate-neutral hydrogen plasma reduction" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06901-z
by pfdietz | 2025-08-10 11:29:00+00:00
This reminds me a bit of single cell protein, a technology that is also driven by fossil fuel chemical energy. It was used to make animal feed, but ended up being uncompetitive.

Technologies like this are ways to monetize stranded natural gas that would otherwise be flared. It's in competition with other means of using that gas or getting that gas to market (ammonia, methanol, electrical energy, LNG, etc.)

Eventually they could make this from captured CO2 and green hydrogen, but that's clearly not competitive with cheap gas (without CO2 charges) at this point.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-10 11:31:56+00:00
I honestly don't think Btrfs is ever going to take off.

We're better off just making a clean room implementation of ZFS, and just go with the better technical solution.

Meta, although morally bankrupt, _usually_ makes sane technical decisions. Backing Btrfs isn't one of them unless they plan on rewriting the whole thing from the ground up, and from what I've seen in the linked presentation, they're trying to rehab the worst data loss and performance bugs. They will never find them all.
by sudhirb | 2025-08-10 11:35:10+00:00
By no means are better background agents "mythical" as you claim. I didn't bother to mention them as it is easy enough to search for asynchronous/background agents yourself.

Devin is perhaps the one that is most fully featured and I believe has been around the longest. Other examples that seem to be getting some attention recently are Warp, Cursor's own background agent implementation, Charlie Labs, Codegen, Tembo, and OpenAI's Codex.

I do not work for any of the aforementioned companies.
by zmgsabst | 2025-08-10 11:38:03+00:00
I think it’s more subtle:

Imagine that you’re trying to access an API, which for some reason fails.

“Let it crash” isn’t an argument against handling the timeout, but rather that you should only retry a few, bounded times rather than (eg) exponentially back off indefinitely.

When you design from that perspective, you just fail your request processing (returning the request to the queue) and make that your manager’s problem. Your managing process can then restart you, reassign the work to healthy workers, etc. If your manager can’t get things working and the queue overflows, it throws it into dead letters and crashes. That might restart the server, it might page oncall, etc.

The core idea is that within your business logic is the wrong place to handle system health — and that many problems can be solved by routing around problems (ie, give task to a healthy worker) or restarting a process. A process should crash when it isn’t scoped to handle the problem it’s facing (eg, server OOM, critical dependency offline, bad permissions). Crashing escalates the problem until somebody can resolve it.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-10 11:39:07+00:00
> I think it's self-evidently true that there is a not ignorable group of people who can't create enough value to be worth being paid $20/hr (plus the employer-paid overheads

Ignore the mock outrage of my sibling comment, they are uninformed.

You are absolutely right that some people aren't capable of work valuable enough to pay at least the minimum wage, and in fact there are programs in place specifically to serve these people. The Fair Labor Standards Act allows qualifying employers to hire people with disabilities (including mental disabilities) for less than minimum wage. This is specifically to ensure that employment opportunities still exist for such people, who otherwise could not provide labor worth at least the minimum wage. In some cases, other state programs may pay part of the disabled workers income, effectively the state subsidizing the employment of the otherwise unemployable.

The real problem I think comes from people who are able-bodied and mentally capable, with no legitimate disability, who are just unwilling to take the jobs available to them because it doesn't fit their desired lifestyle (e.g. let them be lazy and keep their hands clean.) Entry level jobs in manufacturing settings have better pay than being a cashier at a burger joint. A first time factory job for a 19 year old highschool dropout with no developed skills but a willingness to show up on time and try hard will almost always pay more than the minimum wage, but finding people who are willing to even apply to such jobs can be challenging due to perceptions of social status and entitlement. These are people who have no legitimate disability but are unfit to work due to their poor attitudes towards working. Our system doesn't accommodate them, unlike people with legitimate disabilities, because the general consensus is those people need to get bitch slapped by reality and man the fuck up.
by vendiddy | 2025-08-10 11:39:08+00:00
I think the slogan was meant to be provocative but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted more often than not.

For example, imagine you're working with a 3rd party API and, according to the documentation, it is supposed to return responses in a certain format. What if suddenly that API stops working? Or what if the format changes?

You could write code to handle that "what if" scenario, but then trying to handle every hypothetical your code becomes bloated, more complicated, and hard to understand.

So in these cases, you accept that the system will crash. But to ensure reliability, you don't want to bring down the whole system. So there are primitives that let you control the blast radius of the crash if something unexpected happens.

Let it crash does not mean you skip validating user input. Those are issues that you expect to happen. You handle those just as you would in any programming language.
by DannyBee | 2025-08-10 11:40:29+00:00
The time bounds here are confused and then compared in confusing ways - you have to click through to the sketchy ideas link to see them.

For example, it assumes that hash function calculation is O(1) for keys of varying lengths, but it's basically never that.

Hash tables are not O(1) lookup in the size of the key, the are O(1) lookup in the number of elements.

They then compare this element-count time bound to a kind of trie whose time bound is expressed in terms of size of key.

But ~all hash functions take O(k) time where k is the size of the key, because they look at all the bits of the key.

Example: "Exact-match lookups are normal O(1) hash map lookups. Predecessor / successor searches use binary chop on the length of the key. Where a qp-trie search is O(k), where k is the length of the key, a p-fast trie search is O(log k)."

The O(1) in the first sentence is about number of elements, and cannot be compared to the other time bounds, which are about length of key. The exact match lookups are O(k), and thus at best as fast as the qp-trie, unless you use a hash function that is guaranteed to look at less than a constant factor of all of the bits of the key. They don't say this, or give an example of one that they want you to use. In order to be faster than the qp trie, they would have to, at minimum, use a hash function that is log(k)[1]

Additionally, if you look at the idea for search:

" To search, start by splitting the query string at its end into prefix + final chunk of bits. Look up the prefix in the hash map and check the chunk’s bit in the bitmap. If it’s set, you can return the corresponding leaf object because it’s either an exact match or the nearest predecessor."

Unless i'm missing something (maybe i am, it's hard to tell without even pseudocode), this is also O(k) already.

Maybe this is a good idea, maybe it's a bad one, but it's really hard to tell what it's supposed to be fast at or not, and to better analyze the timebounds, without pseudocode of some sort.

[1] This actually is worse than i gloss over, because hash tables are O(1) lookup in amortized time and assume ~even distribution by the hash function in the table to achieve this. But if we are limited to hash functions that take log(k) time, it's not obvious that this distribution is achievable or guaranteed. So it's not even clear it would still be O(1) in the number of elements either. Maybe it is, but at a glance this would seem to imply you can achieve guaranteed perfect hashing without having to look at all the bits of the key. If you did this I would think i could always construct keys that only differ in the bits you don't look at and ruin your distribution, making it no longer O(1) in the number of elements for lookups.

Again, i haven't thought tremendously hard about this, so feel free to tell me i'm wrong :)