MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-08-01 14:08:17+00:00
I’m a long time user of raspberry pis for various tinkering projects. I think the GPIO and camera interface are important, but also the size. The pi zero I would consider to be generally the most functional format of the pis.

Hardware has also evolved over the years. I had been using a pi to run pihole, but an incident one day that caused my SD card to burn up made me go looking around at other options.

There is now a whole stockpile of used “thin clients” which can be had with case, power supply and more RAM for less than the cost of a pi, with other niceties like an extra SODIMM slot and M.2 with a few more lanes than a pi.

These are also fanless systems that idle at a few watts and generally serve that purpose better in nearly every way. That said, the sticker price on one of those systems is not competitive and only the somewhat recent turning over of supply from call centers and other places with low computational needs has really entered them into the market (and also driven the continued development of the atom chips used in mini pcs).
by dkarl | 2025-08-01 14:08:25+00:00
Add me to the list of people who acknowledge the problem but haven't heard any alternative. Every job opening, you encounter people who can talk and act like software engineers, but can't write code. I've been in the business for about a quarter century now, and looking back at times that teams decided to overlook someone's failure to demonstrate coding skills in interviews, sometimes it has turned out they can write code, but often not.

Younger engineers trying to find jobs in the industry should consider how much the other parts of the hiring process privilege older engineers regardless of ability. I'm sure many of the people I worked with who lacked basic coding competence twenty years ago still lack competence and are employed right now in jobs that require it, jobs that could go to younger, more capable people except that their resume, their experience, and their ability to say the right-sounding thing don't match up.

Hiring someone to write code without ever seeing them do it is like hiring a guitar player for a band by verifying their MFA in music theory, talking to them about music for an hour, and checking their references. All that is fine, but can they play the guitar? You can acquire everything else, the lingo, the knowledge of music theory, the pros and cons of competing techniques, the familiarity with current and past great performers and performances, without ever putting your hands on the instrument. And some people are built like that. Some people are guitar connoisseurs: they gave up their hopes of playing the instrument long ago, but they're huge fans and nerd out over the art and science of it. If those folks needed to be in a band to have health insurance, and they didn't have to audition, you can bet some of them could talk their way into it.

Finally, when a team interviews someone for a position that requires writing code, they are inevitably making a judgment about whether they think they can do it. If you ask someone to guess without any direct evidence, you're inviting them, almost forcing them, to fill the gap with bias. Do they collect subtle little hints and make fragile deductions like they're Sherlock Holmes? Do they trust their instincts about whether the person in front of them looks and acts like the kind of person who could code? Either one is guaranteed to be rife with bias and problematic preconceptions.
by booleandilemma | 2025-08-01 14:08:48+00:00
I think for the past 20 years or so, possibly longer, American politics has been hijacked by people who are just interested in making money for themselves, full stop. Any benefit they provide to the public is incidental, anything they say is lip service. Maybe there are a couple exceptions, such as Bernie, but even he is a millionaire, not an ordinary person.

But yeah, it's just people who are trying to maximize how much money they can get into their pockets. They don't care about the public. They don't care about anything. Democrat, Republican, it's all the same.
by piva00 | 2025-08-01 14:09:36+00:00
The deflection to "TDS" is rather boring, intellectually lazy and dishonest, as if any criticism of the absurdities happening in the US right now can all be distilled to "you hate Trump, your opinion is invalid".

I still can't believe there are HN users, whom I consider better well-informed than the average Joe, who will defend this administration (and Trump especially) somehow...
by LargeWu | 2025-08-01 14:10:02+00:00
I like to say the market is undefeated thoughout history.

You can add regulations or limitations that incentivize the market one way or another to achieve social goals, but these distortions add up. And when there are too many distortions in the market, it stops acting how you want it to act, and starts acting how it will. And usually, that means negative unintended consequences.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-01 14:10:04+00:00
I grew up in a small village. Such towns place social cohesion above all. As a child I thought that as long as I am right, I'd be able to reason my way out of everything. But I learned that in a crowd shit can go from 0 to 11 very fast, which is why I have a deep fear of people, and especially crowds. When you're there with one person you might have a slim chance of reasoning with them, but crowds behave unpredictably, emotionally, and violently. They almost always follow the most charismatic leader, not the most logical one. The older I get, the more I hate people and the more disgusted I am with them. I understand why so many old people are bitter cunts. I want to make it until retirement and then move far away from everyone else, just me and my internet connection. I want to gain financial independence so that I don't need to rely on people's petty games to make a living.

I still try to find those few people around me who aren't garbage, but it's a tough job.
by josefritzishere | 2025-08-01 14:10:06+00:00
This is the very real state of affairs in the US. The Federal government has fallen to an openly corrupt, self-enriching administration. The argument that "it's been that way for a long time" has some merit but completely ignores the sudden and rapid decline this year. We have armed masked groups roaming the streets, sometimes with military support kidnapping people off the street. This is not normal in a developed country. This is nowhere near normal.
by vel0city | 2025-08-01 14:10:13+00:00
> but you put 20% in the down payment

The median isn't even 20%, it is a bit less than that. Median first-time home buyers put only 9% down. Even the median repeat buyer, who just sold a house and had probably been paying mortgage payments for a while, only put 23% down.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/mortgages/average-down-pa...

But you are right though, a 3.7% drop probably wouldn't put even most first-time home buyers underwater.
by baggachipz | 2025-08-01 14:10:18+00:00
My company uses google workspace and every google doc, spreadsheet, calendar, online meeting and search puts nonstop callouts and messages about using Gemini. It's gotten so bad that I'm about to try building a browser extension to block that bullshit. It clutters the UI and nags. If I wanted that crap, I'd turn it on.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-01 14:10:30+00:00
If I make a sign that says "Nazis are Evil", and a guy gets upset and says "you can't say that about me" - what do you call that guy? A Nazi.

If I make a sign that says "End the Zionist Genocide", and a Jewish person says "you can't say that about me", they don't feel uncomfortable because they're Jewish.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-01 14:10:43+00:00
In my experience, choosing the priority option is nearly a guarantee that I will get a driver who makes extra stops while delivering my order.

It's wild because this happens maybe 10-15% of the time for me when I don't choose priority, but it's around 80% when I do.

I ignore the option now and just bump the tip if I want a chance of better service.
by Ukv | 2025-08-01 14:10:47+00:00
I'd say no, for three reasons:

1. LLM philosophy can't really diverge from human philosophy with how models are run currently, since any insights/deductions are isolated to a single chat instance. Wouldn't be impossible to let models evolve their own body of knowledge, but would take a lot of work to ensure stability, so at least for now I think they'll pretty much hold to whatever positions are in their training data

2. I don't believe LLMs have the introspection capability needed to form these conclusions. For instance they choose between "I'm certain the answer is definitely 42" and "I think the answer is possibly 42" not based on some measure of their own internal uncertainty, but instead by whether they've seen uncertainty expressed in that kind of scenario. They only even really act as an "AI assistant" instead of a "wild-west cowboy" because that's how the system prompt sets up the conversation. If not explicitly told, I'm doubtful as to whether an LLM could make the required introspections to figure out that it's an LLM ("I can seemingly speak human language, but I can't smell or taste, so [etc.]")

3. When some new architecture or training method does give a model the capability for introspection, I don't see how else it'd describe tokens but as seemingly irreducible intrinsic inputs - i.e. qualia - into its internal train of thought. Its own experience would be highly conducive to reductive physicalism, where "philosophical zombies" are impossible and the question of whether humans have qualia/internal thought/etc. can be answered with a check of our brain
by domrdy | 2025-08-01 14:10:47+00:00
I think certificates are interesting in theory, and there’s an entire industry built around them. AWS does a solid job with its certifications: if you earned one five years ago, it’s still more or less relevant. I'm not sure how certifications would work for proprietary technology.

Labor laws in many places are less “flexible” than those in the US, and they don’t support what you’re proposing, for good reason. I wouldn’t quit my job or uproot my family just to convince a manager I’m worth keeping.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-08-01 14:10:50+00:00
If people can explain their decisions, I'd say it's fair game. It would be nice to know up front if someone used AI of course.

The other implication here is that if a candidate can use AI for a take home and ace the interview, then maybe the company doesn't have as tough of problems as it thought and it could fill this seat quickly. Not a bad problem to have.

Leetcode for CRUD app positions is overkill.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-01 14:11:03+00:00
At one point I was wondering if there was a preexisting protocol for a character-based framebuffer of some sort, that we could then use to slice the problem in a different way: a framebuffer multipliexer running terminal emulators inside it instead of a terminal multiplexer emulating multiple terminals into a framebuffer and then translating it back into terminal controls for the parent.

Unfortunately, my conclusion was that the only independent character-based terminal tradition is IBM’s 3270 stuff, but even setting aside IBM weirdness it’s simply not that. (Yes, there’s also such a protocol within tmux but it’s not really compatible with anything else.)
by crest | 2025-08-01 14:11:44+00:00
There is no way to demultiplex incoming QUIC or HTTP/3 connections based on plaintext metadata inside the protocol. The designers went one step too far in their fight against middleboxes of all sorts. Unless you can assign a each destination at least its own (IP address, UDP port) pair you're shit out of luck and can't have end-to-end encryption. A QUIC proxy has to decrypt, inspect, and reencrypt the traffic. Such a great performance and security improvement :-(. With IPv6 you can use unique IP addresses which immediately undoes any of the supposed privacy advantages of encrypting the server name in the first place. With IPv4 your pretty much fucked. Too bad SRV record support for HTTP(S) was never accepted because it would threatten business models. I guess your best bet is to try to redirect clients to unique ports.
by plipt | 2025-08-01 14:11:53+00:00
The article mentions that this Skydweller UAS completed a 73 hour flight.

Back in 2022 there was a solar powered Airbus Zephyr drone that was tested over the Southwestern US with a flight time of 64 DAYS. I wonder how this new drone is different and how a 73 hour flight is significant in comparison.

Here is an article about the Zephyr Drone and its crash that ended its nearly record-tying flight:

https://simpleflying.com/airbus-zephyr-flight-ends/

Here is a flight replay from adsbexchange showing one day's worth of its flight path where it traced out the Liberty Bell(?) and the shape of the lower 48 at nearly 70,000ft. (Scrolling through its other dates show more playful flight paths)

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae1313&lat=33.419&lon=-...
by pelcg | 2025-08-01 14:12:14+00:00
The truth the employers won't admit is that there is just too much money in this industry for very little effort.

Why do you think that famous employees get straight offers without doing anything verses many engineers still getting leetcoded and get left with no offer despite being over-qualified?

Soham was able to pass most programming assessments so well, the folks at bookface were discussing to ban him from applying to their startups.

You can see that another system has been created to make sure that the role is reserved for friends of the founder, ex-collegues of another team over an extremely qualified engineer out of no where.
by dumbledoren | 2025-08-01 14:12:36+00:00
The Nordic countries act as if they were an extension of the Angloamerican culture for some reason. They sure would object to their data being used by China or Russia for example, but American companies doing it doesnt pose a problem. But France has its own national identity, and it does not see itself as the extension of Angloamerica. So its natural that Angloamerican corporations having unfettered access to its data would be a no no.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-08-01 14:12:37+00:00
If nations have legitimacy then they can enter into supra-/international bodies and agreements with legitimacy much like two persons can agree on an arbiter to resolve differences in their mutual contracts. This is nothing new and we've been doing it for a long time—the Egyptian 18th dynasty entered into the first known peace treaty with a foreign nation 1500 years BCE; NATO and the United Nations are modern examples. The US, of course, is a country that has been notoriously difficult to get into international agreements (Paris/Kyoto, WHO, ICC).
by milchek | 2025-08-01 14:13:07+00:00
First off, congrats on the funding and the progress so far!

I’ve seen a a couple of start ups pitching similar ideas lately - platforms that use AI personas or agents to simulate focus groups, either for testing products or collecting user insights. I can see the appeal in scaling audience feedback, reducing costs, reaching demographics that are traditionally hard to access.

That said, this is one of the areas of AI that gives me the most concern. I work at a company building AI tools for creative professionals, so I'm regularly exposed to the ethical and sustainability concerns in this space. But with AI personas specifically, there is something a little more troubling to me.

One recent pitch really stuck with me, in this case, the startup was proposing to use AI personas for focus groups on products and casually mentioned local government consultation. That's where I think this starts to veer into troubling territory. The idea of a local council using synthetic personas instead of talking directly to residents about policy decisions is alarming. It may be faster, cheaper, or even easier to implement but it fundamentally misunderstands what real feedback looks like.

LLMs don't live in communities. They don't vote, experience public services, or have lived context. No matter how well calibrated or "representative" the personas are claimed to be, they are ultimately a reflection of training data and assumptions - not the messy, multimodal, contradictory, emotional reality of human beings. And yet, decisions based on these synthetic signals could end up shaping products, experiences, or even policies that affect real people.

We're entering an era where human behaviour is being abstracted and compressed into models, and then treated as if it's a reliable proxy for actual human insight. That's a level of abstraction I'm deeply uncomfortable with and it's not a signal I think I would ever trust, regardless of how well it's marketed.

Would be curious to know what your approach is to convince others that may also be skeptical or not want to see this kind of tech being abused for the reasons listed above?
A macOS application to remove Apple's AEA encryption format
by TheiPhoneDev | 2025-08-01 14:13:16+00:00
I made a macOS app called AEA Buddy, that allows users to decrypt iOS 18 or later firmwares by removing Apple’s AEA encryption format. The app is open source and available on GitHub, requires macOS 15.0 or later. I built it on top of the IPSW tool written by Blacktop. Let me know what you think about it. If you’re interested: https://github.com/TheiPhoneDev/AEABuddy
by kylebenzle | 2025-08-01 14:13:18+00:00
The problem is that if anyone at any time feels like they're just annoyed with you or don't want you around anymore they can make an accusation, completely unfounded, that will destroy your life.

The problem is is that a lot of guys walking around that haven't had it happen to them assume it hasn't happened to them because they've been doing everything right when really you've just been lucky so far.
by em-bee | 2025-08-01 14:13:35+00:00
it's not fancy graphics that's missing from the terminal. but things like selection of text areas. (you can only select across the whole screen now, and if you are lucky you can select rectangles. but if i display text in multiple columns i'd like to be able to select one column at a time for example. this bites me every time when i use tmux or vim split windows. also filesystem navigation could be improved, multiline commandline editing is sorely lacking. fish tried that, but failed to make it work. clearly a limitation of the terminal.

so no, terminals are not a solved problem.
by derbOac | 2025-08-01 14:13:53+00:00
> In California you can literally just claim a new highrise will block your sunlight and make you sad. That's enough to delay a construction

So what's the problem?

Land use should be regulated imho, just like air pollution and other commons phenomena.

I don't care what kind of towel you buy to dry yourself off with, but I do care if a developer affects the environment and housing around it.
by lubesGordi | 2025-08-01 14:13:55+00:00
I'd guess that people fail the mentioned test specifically because they forget how to determine if a number is even. How often do you do that in real life? I haven't had to do that professionally in probably my entire career (>10years) and for the last 10 years I've written C++ nearly every single day. Tell me I can't code because I forget %2==0? Seriously?

Being a senior engineer means having confronted a shitload of different minutia type problems from network stuff, compiler bugs, language nuances, threading nuances, etc. and having spent time figuring each one out. Not that senior engineers can reiterate all that minutia off the top of their head, but it gives them a good intuition for how to solve problems when they hit them making them significantly more productive than junior devs that have to figure them out from scratch.

I don't understand what's so hard about this, testing algorithmic knowledge tests if the individual studies and implements algorithms. It's very simple. And yes, people have stress reactions in test type settings (I don't for paper tests in school but apparently I do for live coding mostly because I don't know how to implement different algs).

Stress during interviews is insane. Once I was at the tail end of solving an interview problem but it came down to multiplying 9 * 3 and my brain wouldn't fucking do it (apparently I can't fucking multiply).
by amosslade | 2025-08-01 14:15:03+00:00
Brick layers are easy to fire on day one.

I’ve hired many construction workers over the years. In the construction industry, if an interview goes longer than 15 minutes you’re doing it wrong.

Interview summary: Interviewer: “Can you do the work?” Interviewee: “Yes.” Interview over.

When they start working, if they can’t do the work, they’re fired.
by acjohnson55 | 2025-08-01 14:15:07+00:00
I was a contestant on Jeopardy, and led going into Final Jeopardy 2 out of the 3 matches I played. So I'm an above average Jeopardy competitor. My edge is not in pure trivia. I'm probably below average, by the standards of people who have won a match on Jeopardy. I suspect I'm above average in dealing with the competitive aspects of it and the stress management. It makes a big difference in a fast-paced game. The reality is that Jeopardy is not just a trivia game, but also a game of reflexes, decisionmaking, and stress management.

I wrote about this here: https://acjay.com/2023/11/12/everything-all-at-once-inside-a...

There are certainly jobs where you need someone who is cool under intense pressure, where what happens inside an hour matters. That's what these interviews are revealing. But I think this is a tiny minority of dev jobs.

However, I also think when people talk about hiring practices, the elephant in the room is that the true purpose our interview processes have evolved to serve is taking the candidate pool from a lot of people to something that is decidable. We can't fully evaluate 500 candidates, but we can evaluate 5. The process of weeding out 99% is designed to be inexpensive, at the cost of accuracy. The hope is that you'll have one person squeeze through the filters that is a good fit. If that happens, then all the false negatives are tolerable.

But we really, really don't like to admit this. We tell ourselves that we are running interview processes that are predictive of performance when there is actually very little evidence to support that, and plenty of reason to doubt that it's true.

If quality were paramount, I think we'd do hiring completely differently: https://acjay.com/2019/05/16/hiring-developers-is-easy/
by kamaal | 2025-08-01 14:15:26+00:00
>>e.g. I was asked about the structure of an inode in UNIX v6 - I told him I didn't know it but gave a general response about the type of information Unix-y systems keep in inodes, and with more detail about Linux; to add to it, for the role in question a knowledge of filesystem details was irrelevant

These sort of questions are far too common in these companies.

I have once been rejected by a company here in Bangalore, for not reading the interviewer's favourite paper(The one Google published on BigTable). Which according to him was so important anyone who hadn't read it and re-read it several times like him couldn't possibly be a coder.

This is despite finishing the take home assignment, implementing 3 more features onsite, more code review sessions, general interview sessions.

Some people are not serious about getting work done, and whatever they are claiming to do with hiring people. Unfortunately they are neither looking to hire people to get the work done, nor hiring the best.