MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-01 13:26:37+00:00
Perhaps. There is also more to life than your job, family, friends, and finding love. There's things like grocery shopping, washing dishes, and going on vacation. That doesn't mean we should settle into occupations we don't like. Like it or not, your work is going to consume a lot of your time, and we should strive to do something we enjoy and find meaningful if possible. In the parent comment it sure sounds like it is possible for them to pivot, and that they might find much more happiness and meaning if they do.
by Moomoomoo309 | 2025-08-01 13:26:53+00:00
This, devoid of context, sounds reasonable. Of course, the international court charging the leader of Israel as a war criminal and having a warrant out for his arrest due to his actions against Palestine and its people may speak a different story with regard to international law. Israel caused the government of Palestine to be unstable by enabling Hamas over and over again, and its borders are not clearly defined due to Israel trying to steal its territory. I think an exception could be warranted.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-01 13:26:58+00:00
Quite the strawman there. Not wanting to work [at times literally] shit jobs without excessive compensation, is not the same as everybody being idle. I can list thousands of things I'd rather do than clean public toilets, and I don't even do thousands of things! Though yes - I do think a huge chunk of the population would be generally idle, if possible, in terms of commercial productivity, and I see nothing wrong with that, besides the fact it would crash any economy where it was possible.
by devoutsalsa | 2025-08-01 13:27:05+00:00
I firmly believe that the only good proxy for how well one can do the job is doing the job. Even if there are good proxies for doing the work, why would you choose to use a proxy when you can just do the work? And if you're work is some complicated that you can't break off some piece of it and do it in an interview, maybe you're making stuff too hard for no particular reason.

Let's say you need someone who can lift 10 kilograms:

- Good interview: "Please lift this 10 kilogram bucket by the handle."

- Not Good interview: "As a proxy for your overall strength, please take off your pants, squat, pick up this 1 kg bucket by clenching the handle with your butt cheeks, and then stand. We know this isn't a real test of your strength, but we want to see how you perform under pressure."

EDIT: what I mean by doing the job, I mean test the skills used on the job. See if a chef knows their way around a kitchen & actually cook something. See if a customer support rep has good written & verbal communication skills in a mock support interaction. See if a phone screening can do phone screens. Stuff like that.
by voidUpdate | 2025-08-01 13:27:11+00:00
This is exactly why we can't have nice things. There has been a lot of study in how to manipulate shoppers to get them to buy more things in your shops, from playing in-store music that is slower so they walk slower, to putting expensive stuff at eye-level, to putting common things at the back of the shop so you have to walk past everything else to get to them
by animal531 | 2025-08-01 13:27:16+00:00
I hate when you have code that you can't simply read to understand what it does. I'd like to say that probably 99% of the code that I write embodies that, I refuse to use complicated language constructs wherever I can, even if that makes the code longer.

When I was a kid and just started working I would still often code with whatever I came up with initially, but then you go back to that 3 months later and you have to throw the whole thing out because it's impossible to maintain or add to.

On the other hand there are sometimes additions to a language that's just so useful that you have to expand your vocabulary, for example in C# that's happened a few times. One of the notable additions there was LINQ that made manipulating data so much easier. It can become dangerous though, the same as for example with a complicated DB stored procedure.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-08-01 13:27:23+00:00
There's at least a few factors in play...

Christian sects that believe the second coming of Jesus is not too far away believe that Israel's existence is critical to bring that to pass.

People with anti-muslim or anti-arabian feelings see Israel as a counterweight to muslim and arabian power in the middle east.

There's a lot of people who, consciously or not, equate anything other than total support for Israel with antisemitism.
by HEmanZ | 2025-08-01 13:27:28+00:00
If general housing is abundant enough that it has very low ROI compared to other available investments, then no they won’t buy up housing. One pretty simple way to do this is to raise property taxes high enough that a vacant condo is a very bad investment. This is what it would mean to commoditize housing.

I think it’s a realistic goal for apartments/condos. Single family homes will always be constrained by land.

(Edit): I think you, and a lot of people who are anti-capitalist on housing, make the implicit assumption that all housing is a fixed good. There is only so much housing and our political goal is to allocate that fixed amount. In a lot of major US cities this is sort of true because we have regulated the construction of new housing to the point where even the government can’t build it. But the anti-regulation perspective is that if we get rid of the regulations preventing housing construction, then enough housing will be constructed that the allocation problem isn’t much of a problem. (Or something in between, ie it’s a lot easier to build/buy social housing to give away to people if housing is already made very abundant, and the fact that even governments like California have to spend truly ludicrous amounts of money just to get a few crappy studios built)
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-01 13:27:42+00:00
Tips are the most cynical thing I've ever seen.

Tips are supposed to be "in return for a service, beyond the compensation agreed on" (WordsAPI).

If tips instead mean "it's something you have to give when you had no problems with the service provided", and you expect routinely not to have problems with such service providers, then it's implicitly agreed that tips are required, so they are not tips anymore.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-01 13:27:59+00:00
Ah yes; for a bit my wife was making less as a preschool teacher than the minimum wage at McDonalds. I understand it caused a bit of turnover at the local public schools, since cafeteria workers and aides were making less than $20/hr in 2024 as well (I don't know if they still are).
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-01 13:28:42+00:00
Literally the first sentence of the op-ed admits propaganda from the IDF, which tightly controls what embedded reporters are allowed to see and say [1]:

> Over the weekend, I embedded with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, where I saw the enormous quantities of humanitarian aid the United Nations has been refusing to distribute.

Very weird that the military that controls access to the Gaza Strip is blaming the UN? Delivering aid themselves is ostensibly why Israel and the US created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (although the true motivation seems to be gathering desperate Palestinians in one spot so they can mass murder them; more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF's soldiers and mercenaries at GHF aid sites [2]).

Anyway, this conversation obviously isn't going to go anywhere. I'll just end by saying that it's extremely obvious to anyone remotely paying attention that Israel is committing depraved war crimes against a defenseless people here, which is why public opinion has shifted so dramatically against it.

Edit: I just looked up the author of that WSJ article and he's a former IDF sergeant? Pretty relevant detail for him to omit!

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/176919/cnn-abc-nbc-reporters...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_Strip_aid_distributi...
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-08-01 13:28:56+00:00
You are correct that mass manipulation is a critical issue. However, this vulnerability is shared by any system reliant on voters, including the representative one. It is not a unique flaw of direct democracy.

So there are three issues we're talking about in this context:

1. Reps are also uninformed.

2. Social media manipulation of the populace (or, generally, propaganda).

3. Concentrated influence on a handful of legislators.

Direct democracy eliminates the third vector.

Furthermore, the stakes and incentives for corruption are vastly different. A lobbyist gains far more from corrupting one senator who decides for millions than from swaying individual voters. The return on investment for corrupting concentrated power is orders of magnitude higher.

Even if propaganda shapes opinion, the resulting decisions still represent the people's will at that moment. Representatives can betray even that will for personal gain, adding another layer of distortion between what people want and what they get.
by aw1621107 | 2025-08-01 13:28:59+00:00
> Did Safe C++ ever have a full, correct, fully compliant, reference implementation, or was there only (closed-source) Circle as some kind of reference implementation?

Technically speaking the clauses on either side of the "or" aren't mutually exclusive. You can have a "full, correct, fully compliant, reference implementation" that is also a closed-source implementation!

Well, unless the implication that Circle isn't "full, correct, [and] fully compliant", in which case I feel I should ask "with respect to what?" and "why do you need those requirements?"
by wulfstan | 2025-08-01 13:29:04+00:00
Criminality is a very, very high bar for removing people from a community for misbehaviour, and much sexual misconduct isn't criminal. I don't think "leaving things to the police" is good advice in situations where a vulnerable minority group needs to be protected from predatory behaviour.

In this situation you have an accusation of misconduct made by 1) young 2) women 3) new to a community 4) who don't speak English well. These are all big red vulnerability flags.

I would ensure that every accusation of this nature is treated with respect and investigated by a trusted authority figure in a given community.
by threetonesun | 2025-08-01 13:29:08+00:00
I've read this a million times but worked at companies where the bar for hiring managers and leadership was shaking someone's hand the right way, which led to entire teams either running for the doors or actively led to ruin.

There's a separate problem here for hiring developers specifically, where realistically it should be easy to bring someone on limited term (say 3 months) and see how they work, but compensation and benefits in the US absolutely in no way support a system like that.
by voidUpdate | 2025-08-01 13:29:20+00:00
I find exceptionally annoying when I don't know if I need to look for my preferred moisturizer in "skincare" or "premium skincare" or some other section I've not seen yet (yes this is a common issue for me). If I could just load up their (horribly slow and memory heavy) website, go to the store locator and actually see where it is in the shop instead of "yeah we have it in stock, somewhere", that would be very useful
by notahacker | 2025-08-01 13:29:20+00:00
Satellite constellations in LEO tend to have short design lives of 5 years or so, but the net change in operating satellites since that 2021 graphic is huge: Starlink alone has over 8000 in orbit now (plus another 1200 deorbited). The later generations of Starlink are bigger, but the launch cadence increases...
by btown | 2025-08-01 13:29:24+00:00
I like to think about it as the tactical allocation of stress. As an interviewer, I do not want the interviewee to be stressed about optics, or about whether they'll "look bad" about needing documentation; I'll encourage documentation/LLM use as long as they do it on the screen, and disarm by giving context about why that doesn't matter.

But I do want to see how they cope with the stress of needing to track and articulate complex control flow and edge cases through their program in a timed environment - that's part of every day if you're building ambitious systems, and it's a skillset that continues to be relevant even in an era of agentic coding. Testing for the response to that stress makes coding interviews highly relevant in my experience.
by silentpuck | 2025-08-01 13:29:42+00:00
I don’t want to sound discouraging, but I’ll be honest.

First of all, you need to figure out what you really want and what you’re willing to do to get there.

Some people mentioned starting your own project above. I think that’s a really great path. I was in a similar situation: I started learning programming about five years ago. I don’t have a technical background at all — I’m actually a humanities student. I didn’t choose programming because it was trendy. I chose it because something inside me said, “This is my path.”

At the time, I lost my job. I had several children to take care of. It was a tough time, but I kept learning every day - step by step.

And now? I create things. Not for money yet - for craftsmanship, for freedom, for the future. And little by little, doors are opening.

That’s why I say: follow your heart, but don’t forget about your mind.

No problem is unsolvable. Sometimes the road is long. But it’s still a road.
by comprev | 2025-08-01 13:29:45+00:00
The stress in the Ops world is getting systems back to normal operation as quickly as possible because of lost revenue.

In the Dev world stress comes from the demand to add new features in unrealistic timeframes. The "product" has already been sold even if it's not finished yet. The business risks losing revenue by not delivering promised functionality.

Both Dev and Ops people experience equal stress from the same employer due to different reasons.
by Paul-Craft | 2025-08-01 13:29:52+00:00
> Live interviews are generally excellent at revealing how individuals perform when placed outside their comfort zone.

I suppose if by "outside their comfort zone," you mean in a potentially literal life or death situation (because, face it, most people can't live long without a job in the US), under an arbitrary and very short deadline, possibly using unfamiliar tools, and simultaneously having to explain every little thing they do, then yes, I would agree with this. I don't believe the sentence after this follows logically from it, though.
by herval | 2025-08-01 13:30:01+00:00
Live interviews are generally excellent at revealing that someone is comfortable with live coding interviews. I know plenty of people who excel at them and are unable to code on the job - and vice-versa.

I'm pretty sure there's no correlation whatsoever, after interviewing more than 500 people in a decade...

The correlation that I think _does_ exist is for _junior engineers_: Live coding interviews (particularly if you take typical CS problems) measures how much they're able to memorize and how much attention they paid in class (or in preparation). Which used to be a necessary requirement back in 2001, since it directly correlated to being able to learn by memorization. Unsure that's still a relevant skill since Google > Stack Overflow > ChatGPT, however...
by megaloblasto | 2025-08-01 13:30:06+00:00
I read their comment as saying that we shouldn't expect every subtask to be fun, but the overall task can still be fun. Do I want to sand wood? Not really. Do I want to grab sand paper from the drawer? No... Do I want to use a saw? A little bit. Do I want to build a chair? Yes! But if I break it down too much the overall big picture gets lost.
by deltarholamda | 2025-08-01 13:30:13+00:00
>you can form your own judgement about who is telling the truth based on what little there is to go on

Therein lies the danger. An outsider with little knowledge cannot make a good judgement. Their judgement will be based on intangibles, such as "something similar happened to somebody I know, so I tend to believe X's account over Y's account".

But that's not proof, or evidence, or anything really. It's just naked bias from a different situation applied to an unrelated one. Saying "history is replete with examples" is exactly that. If that is going to be used as a metric, then it is well worth it for men to consider that mentoring women carries with it a high degree of risk. No matter how you behave, a single accusation from somebody willing to lie or exaggerate--for whatever reason--will be supported and amplified using this same historical rationale.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-01 13:31:02+00:00
I've had take home problems for job interviews that were given a few days before and during the actual interview I only had to explain my code. But I wouldn't be sure this still works as a useful candidate filter today, given how much coding agents have advanced. In fact, if you were a sr dev and had a bunch of guys to bounce this problem back and forth, it wouldn't even have filtered out the bad ones back in the old days. There is very little that is more telling than seeing a person work out a problem live, even if that sucks for smart people who can't handle stress.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-01 13:31:09+00:00
It's surely not your contention that said apologies sound hollow because there is nothing really to apologise for and therefore it is inherently untrue?

There are some challenges with media-based apologies because they can only be done at all through media PR systems, of course, and there's an impact therefore on the shape and style of an apology that Marshall McLuhan might have written about if he were still here.

So there's an element of apology fatigue that will prompt some of those replies.

But even then, apologies that sound hollow or sound written by PR generally are somewhat hollow or written with help from, or experience of, PR. Usually the PR of a law firm, right?

It is wholly possible to apologise in ways that do not have those qualities, and wholly possible for people to recognise them.
by onion2k | 2025-08-01 13:31:21+00:00
I think there's a lot of developers who can ace a live-coding interview but who lack the understanding of engineering systems at scale so they'll make your whole codebase worse over time by introducing tech debt, anti-patterns, and inconsistencies. These are the people you really want to avoid, but very few interview processes are set up to filter them out.

There's an assumption that the company's existing senior architects and developers will stop a new person from making the code worse, but also devs at every company thinks their codebase is terrible so it obviously isn't working.
by ryanackley | 2025-08-01 13:31:42+00:00
I have mixed feelings. Cancel culture sucks. I think it's root is a culture of indulging in righteous indignation based on very one-sided information.

Even if the allegations are true, his life should not have been ruined over this.

On the other hand, when I read the accusers' accounts someone else linked in the comments, they sound credible. It fits behavior patterns we've all seen before.

I don't know who to believe.
by drweevil | 2025-08-01 13:31:43+00:00
“AI won’t have that much impact, anyway.”

That's a bit of a strawman. One doesn't have to be pro-AI to see that it will have a large impact. Whether that impact is for the good or not is the issue. Just for starters, in a time that the impact of anthropogenic climate change is becoming ever more obvious the promise of the riches AI will bring to its investors has nonetheless resulted in setting aside any pretense of dealing with that existential threat. Instead we are now heedlessly rushing to build and use more and more power capability. To what end? To duplicate what people can do at least as well, if not better? And the damage that this will do to society, what of it? The investors don't care, and in this increasingly undemocratic environment the people affected will have little or no say. To me the AI craze epitomizes the general problem we are facing now: an out-of-control financial class that prioritizes their economic needs above all others, with the help of an entirely captured government. As if the economy were not something that must support us all.

I'm not looking forward to the fallout.
by pc86 | 2025-08-01 13:32:09+00:00
What's crazy is that you can so confidently claim "tipping is a thing of the past" when it's... not? You can think tipping should go away, that's a completely valid viewpoint. But your statement is just objectively wrong.

I see this a lot (not specific to HN) - some person doesn't like $THING, so they just declare that that thing is bad, or "a thing of the past," or whatever.
by genericuser256 | 2025-08-01 13:32:29+00:00
In this case[0] the CEO (Chris Kirchner) stole ~20M$ from the company causing employees to go unpaid for months, and outside of California all they got was owed wages (no interest or anything). While mentioned in the article, what he was mainly convicted of was defrauding investors rather than stealing from employees.

> Apparently, projecting personal prosperity was more important to him than making payroll

He actually had the temerity early on in the debacle when he was still pretending there was money to tell us that they had decided to not pay us that week because it would be bad for the companies investments to withdraw funds then.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/slync-founder-sentenced...
by derektank | 2025-08-01 13:32:47+00:00
Sure. As I thought my first sentence made clear, I fully support anyone publicly airing allegations of wrongdoing and attempting to sway the opinion of others in doing so. It is sometimes the only way to meaningfully change a situation that can't be handled by the courts or private institutions.

What I object to is the social dynamics of cancellation, where people feel compelled to e.g. sign an open letter, lest they themselves be viewed as siding with the accused, without fully considering the claims and counter-claims for themselves. I also object to creating a false sense of urgency, in order to to encourage this behavior.
by ayaros | 2025-08-01 13:33:10+00:00
I just had an interview like this and I don't think I did well. It was a dumb stupid coding problem that, naturally, should have been easy, and it took me forever. I honestly don't know if I'll hear back from them at this point. :/

At least reading this post has helped me regain some of that lost self-esteem. Thanks for sharing it. <3