MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-08-01 13:44:22+00:00
> I have had almost exclusively positive interactions with the other parents and kids at the playground.

These stories were all over Reddit for years. I remember a thread asking for examples of things Reddit led them to believe that weren’t true, and the top voted comment was that Reddit made them think that going to the playground as a lone dad would cause women to view them as a predator. In reality, going to the playground as a dad in most places is a non-event. It’s common for dads to be there alone with their kids. When I go, it’s a mix of moms and dads and we all talk and interact.

Yet to a non-parent reading Reddit it seemed like going to the park as a dad was asking for trouble. The story was repeated so often.

I’m sure these events do happen some times. When it does, I wouldn’t be surprised if the accuser was reading their own Reddit equivalent social media website where stories about men being creeps at the playground get passed around as fact. To them, it’s just how they see the world working because they’ve heard it repeated so often.
by munksbeer | 2025-08-01 13:44:29+00:00
Could you give some intuition on why this is likely to be the case more frequently than accessing different values from a single entity?

I'm not a games developer, so I don't have a good feel for why you'd need to iterate over every monster's health property in a tightly loop vs accessing each monster and calculating their position, what properties they have and updating one or more of their values in an iteration.
by psychoslave | 2025-08-01 13:44:36+00:00
Well, what they need is obedience, and to obtain it they often reach for the path of spreading fear, doubt, uncertainty, violence, menace, murder, torture, and so on. Sure that's not the less brittle way to grab and retain political power in your claws, as it certainly also foster an environment full of people eager to stab you too death at first possible occasion. But there is not much morale and brillant about greed.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-01 13:44:44+00:00
I sit down with juniors and sketch out designs or code for them while talking through the thought process at least once a week, and even when solo coding, I expect everyone produces work that explains itself. For particularly complex/nuanced changes, people do hop on a call to talk through it.

Like I said the deadlines work for both sides. If a company wants to give homework instead of having their own senior engineers spend time talking to me, that tells me what I need to know about how they value my time.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-08-01 13:44:46+00:00
The largest type theft done in the United States, by far, for decades, is wage theft. In terms of dollars stolen.

All other forms of serious crime have dramatically fallen since the 90's per Capita. Some are at 1/3 the rate they were then. (FBI UCR)

remember that next time you see a headline or politician speak about crime.

We are safer, doing less crime to each other, and seeing more prison population than ever before.

While corporations crush us illegally and face no consequences.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-01 13:44:53+00:00
I've started to treat live coding screening sessions as a "conversation about code." I make sure that the candidate knows that I'm trying to make sure we can discuss code.

Why?

Purely being a "good programmer" isn't just enough for the job. It's important that we can develop a good working rapport, and communicate.

For example: Someone who's an expert programmer might misinterpret a discussion and build the wrong thing; or someone might be a great programmer but otherwise be impossible to actually conduct a technical discussion.

IE, this is why "Fizzbuz"-style questions work so well: It's not really screening that you're a great programmer, it's screening your ability to have a technical discussion.
by vidarh | 2025-08-01 13:44:59+00:00
Very rarely with people watching.

I've had only two oral exams, and they were awful, but even then they were far more conversational in nature, as opposed to a coding interview.

I do well on written tests.

I also do well in interviews, but I detest having people look over my shoulder while I code, and it absolutely tanks my performance. I only pass them because I'm experienced enough that I can be stressed out like crazy and perform really horribly compared to what I normally do and still do okay.

I've seen fantastic coders totally freeze up and be unable to do anything at all when being asked to write code in front of people, even though they have no problem talking through problem solving.

And I'm similar to that. I've held speeches in front of thousands, been on TV, held plenty of presentations, and can talk the ears of an interviewer with passion about complicated technical concepts, but have me write code while you watch, and I'd frankly much rather have a root canal treatment (I've been known to fall asleep during those).
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-08-01 13:45:02+00:00
> Ylva Johansson

In the 1988 general elections Johansson was elected as a member of the Riksdag for the Left Party – Communists

This party was the sole political force in Sweden supporting the Soviet Union in the Winter War against Finland. They also supported Soviet military expansion along its Western border.

She may be center left now but she was a card carrying member of the communists before. She is a crook and completely bought by the lobbies. So no, I do not agree that she is center left.
by justcuriousab | 2025-08-01 13:45:22+00:00
But Safe C++ and Circle are different languages, right? And Circle is not the same as the Safe C++ proposal that was submitted, right? There are presumably differences between them, and I do not know what those differences are, and I do not know if those differences were documented somewhere. I cannot find any occurrences of "reference implementation" in the Safe C++ draft.
by xp84 | 2025-08-01 13:45:35+00:00
I haven't spent almost any time in Europe, but in the US at some point it seems to have gone from a setup to incentivize that "soft skills, fast response, engagement" to one that I don't feel does that much due to the social obligation. When your worst case scenario is 18% and your best case is likely 20% + rounded up, who bothers to change their behavior? In my experience it's more like a commission than a tip, and that's because the only real impact is it encourages the waiters to remember to promote expensive alcoholic drinks before and during the meal, since you can earn way more money getting 18% from a table who orders 2 drinks than you do by earning 21% from a table drinking water. As a commission, it should be paid by the employer.

I call tipping the "A*hole discount" because only someone who is comfortable being seen as one would consider tipping 0% or even 10%. And servers will tell you that if you receive terrible, horrible, very bad service you should never tip zero, you should speak to the manager instead (since yadda yadda, the tips are for everyone, you don't know whose fault it is, etc). So instead of tips being a way to reward good service, it's actually just a discount reserved for people who are so uncouth that (A) they don't care if everyone at their table thinks they're an ass, and (B) they don't mind taking food off the table of low-wage workers (very low in states that have the horrible policy of a lower "tipped" min wage). Do those people really deserve a discount?
by exasperaited | 2025-08-01 13:45:48+00:00
Yes -- I do think there is a lesson about the pile-on.

A few years back I criticised someone (without naming them) online (since the egregious, thoughtless conduct itself was online) and triggered something of a pile-on that I thought was a bit too much.

Subsequently I realised that I had under-read the situation myself, and the conduct wasn't simply thoughtless at all, it was repeated, self-interested and very calculated; people finding that out was actually the accelerant of the pile-on.

So I wasn't really so guilty of it after all. But I definitely witnessed what you talk about -- the "you're with us or with them" of it all, the social compulsion to join the pile-on.

I will probably still openly criticise people if I think it is very merited, but any criticism needs to be tempered with as much of an antidote for a simple pile-on as it can.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-01 13:46:06+00:00
I think the difference is "perceived cost of the catastrophe". Many parties believe or choose to believe that all the damage done can be reversed, or it can't be that bad (which is very wrong, BTW) or, I'll die anyway, who cares.

For space, this perceived cost might be higher so, the limited number of parties might be more cautious.

Indeed I'm aware of The Tragedy of Commons, but from my view, space is a bit more nuanced.

Wish we were much more diligent about our planet though. We, humans, pillage it like all resources are infinite. Sad.
by le-mark | 2025-08-01 13:46:11+00:00
I used this at Menards two days ago. The product location told me where the item was. Turned out that aisle g94 wasn’t aisle 94 but a kiosk at the end of aisle 27 on the other side of the store (these numbers are made up I don’t recall the specifics). I still had to ask a human where it was. So yeah not there yet and this type of service could really help.
by apwheele | 2025-08-01 13:46:24+00:00
I expect `python hello_world.py`, but if people are confused I just nudge them to what I expect. It is not meant to be a trick question.

If people do not have local setup, I just have them write out in text editor and walk through the steps. Maybe not 75% fail rate, but more like 50% of people fail this step in the tech round.
Show HN: An API to extract structured data from any document without training
by dbvitapps | 2025-08-01 13:46:34+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm the founder of Ninjadoc AI. I've spent years working with document processing, and I've always been frustrated by the existing solutions for structured data extraction.

The core problem is that most tools force you into one of two bad options:

Template-based extractors: You define fixed regions or rules. These are incredibly brittle and break the moment a document layout changes slightly (e.g., a new invoice template from a vendor). ML-based extractors: These require you to gather hundreds (sometimes thousands) of your own labeled documents to train a custom model for each document type. It's a slow, expensive, and data-intensive process. I wanted a "zero-shot" solution that worked out of the box, so I built Ninjadoc AI.

Our approach is different. Instead of training, you use a tool to define your desired schema once. For example, you define fields like invoice_id, due_date, and line_items. The AI then uses this schema to understand the document's structure and context, allowing it to extract the correct data from any layout variation of that document type. It's layout-agnostic.

A few key technical features:

It's a REST API: Simple to integrate, returns structured JSON. Bounding Box Coordinates: For every piece of extracted data, the API returns its precise coordinates on the document. This is useful for building verification UIs or for record-keeping. To my knowledge, we're the only zero-shot tool that provides this. Visual Schema Builder: No code is needed to define what you want to extract. You just upload one example document and map fields visually. Those rules then apply universally. No Training/No Templates: It works immediately on your documents without any model fine-tuning or sample uploads. The goal is to provide a powerful, developer-friendly API that skips the most painful parts of document data extraction.

I'd be grateful for any feedback, especially on the API design and the overall developer experience.

You can try it out here: https://ninjadoc.ai

There's a free plan with 5,000 credits (no credit card required), which is enough to run a few hundred pages through it.

Thanks for checking it out!
by schiffern | 2025-08-01 13:47:03+00:00
It's possible that your completely invented number is true if you average over the entire Earth, but I don't care about mosquitos in some deep mountainous Montana wilderness. I care about the subset of mosquitos near my house.

Just to be clear, my recommendation is to mitigate both man-made and natural breeding sites. Fortunately mosquito dunks don't harm other species.
by Paul-Craft | 2025-08-01 13:47:06+00:00
> I sit down with juniors and sketch out designs or code for them while talking through the thought process at least once a week, and even when solo coding, I expect everyone produces work that explains itself. For particularly complex/nuanced changes, people do hop on a call to talk through it.

That's not equivalent to what I said, nor is it live coding.

Again, those deadlines are artificially short compared to real world scenarios, and completely arbitrary. They are so short, in fact, that they render the interview an invalid test of real working ability. A work sample has been proven time and again to be the most valid measure of whether a candidate can actually perform the job, but the conditions under which a live coded "work sample" is performed in an interview render it invalid.
by smugglerFlynn | 2025-08-01 13:47:15+00:00
> we have to replace them with something that works

We don't. The simple solution is to stop maintaining the illusion that 100% perfect hire is possible.

Design your post-hire process around imperfect hiring rate / quick feedback loop, and accept the losses (they will happen anyway despite any perfectionistic illusions you choose to maintain).

These are few questions that really matter:

- Is there a track record of delivering meaningful results? - Does their past experience seem credible? - Are their soft skills and communication skills up to your expectations? - Do they demonstrate adequate hard skills for the role? - What interests and motivates them on professional and personal level?

Your interview process will always be just an attempt at answering these somewhat accurately, with diminishing returns after a certain point. Getting actual accurate answer to these is only possible through collaborative work in real environment.
by anarticle | 2025-08-01 13:47:26+00:00
The smugness of my interviewer during live coding tests has caused me to stop immediately and says “thanks for the opportunity”. Either ageism, or just being a jerk for some reason. Guy was breaking my balls over tree searches, which I have written from scratch.

I didn’t need the job that bad.

I’ve worked on one man projects that were hard realtime C image analysis (Fourier, calc, stats), large data science eval projects, devops stuff. CS degree and used it for published research.

I also had a five rounds of interviews a MANGA corp. Didn’t bother with the second because I didn’t have two months to waste.

Went hired gun and never looked back. Homey network uber alles, I make 10% less but I call all the shots, and am way healthier.

It will probably get worse before it gets better out there, between RTO and whatever LinkedIn is doing to CEOs.
by wulfstan | 2025-08-01 13:47:33+00:00
I do not accept that this is "naked bias".

If the accusations are true, then this is yet another example of a pattern of behaviour played out so regularly, across cultures, centuries and communities, that it is boringly predictable: "Senior community member, almost always a man, sexually exploits vulnerable women seeking acceptance into that community."

When a possible situation arises you should investigate it and, if there is reasonable evidence that it is true, do what you can to stamp it out and ensure it stops happening.
by paxys | 2025-08-01 13:48:06+00:00
There are two ways to interview:

1. Make sure you pick every good candidate, but some bad candidates will slip through as well.

2. Make sure you reject every bad candidate, but some good candidates will fail as well.

Candidates want process #1, but companies have no reason to push for it. The cost of accidentally hiring a bad employee is simply too high, way more than rejecting a good employee. The current system in place prioritizes #2. Yes they are rejecting great candidates, and they are aware of it.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-08-01 13:48:11+00:00
In most of the western world, firing employees is a high risk, high cost task. Ideally companies would hire quickly and fire poor matches just as quickly once they've been evaluated in the real world environment of the company. For this to work, on the employee side there needs to be knowledge that this is the company's process, financial depth to deal with the job not being stable, and a savviness to not relocate into a job that's risky. On the employer side, there needs to be a legal and social environment that doesn't punish removing non-productive employees.

The legal environment is what it is and unlikely to change. The social environment is fickle and trend driven. Workers can't always fully evaluate their odds of success or the entirety of risk of leaving a job that's valuable for the employee and employer for one that might end up as a poor match, even if both sides have been transparent and honest. It's a difficult matchmaking problem with lots of external factors imposed and short term thinking on all sides.

Ideally young workers would have an early career period that involves a small number of short lived jobs, followed up by a good match that lasts decades, providing value to both the employee and employer. Much like finding a spouse used to be a period of dating followed by making a choice and sticking with it so a life could be built together, employment ideally should result in both sides making the other better. Today however everyone seems focused on maximizing an assortment of short term gains in search for the best local timescale deal at the expense of the long term. It's interesting how the broken job market and broken family formation process in the western world mirror each other so much.
by jasode | 2025-08-01 13:48:25+00:00
>A brick layer isn't asked to build a wall prior to getting a job. A certificate confirming he did learn the job is enough for companies to employ them.

It depends. A welder looking for a job -- even with a certification -- will often have to demonstrate his welding skill to the jobsite supervisor before he is hired. An airline pilot -- even with a rank of "captain" with 5000+ hours -- when trying to find employment with another airline, will still have to demonstrate piloting skills with a "check ride" as part of the hiring approval process. Sometimes, experienced pilots fail the check ride for whatever reason.

The common theme is that "existing credentials" is sometimes not enough.
Show HN: I built an AI that turns scripts into AI stock footage
by JonyYadgar | 2025-08-01 13:48:37+00:00
Hey HN, I made this because I tried to make a faceless AI YouTube video for fun (in the style that channels like "Bible Stories" make), and it took me hours individually generating the AI stock footage. (For example, if you want an image to change every 10 seconds in a 1 hour video, you need to generate 360 images).
by radiofreeeuropa | 2025-08-01 13:49:07+00:00
Not while performing in front of an audience, no, very, very little of that.

You know the trope of almost all students dreading going up in front of the class to solve a problem on the blackboard/whiteboard? A thing that I think I personally only actually did a countable-on-fingers number of times ever, and only in lower grades?

It's a trope for a reason, and it's because the vast majority of people do in fact hate having to get in front of an audience and perform. Hell, it's often a component of recurring nightmares.

It's like that but way worse because it's also far more high-stakes than that, the problems are far more complex, the point is explicitly for everyone in the audience to judge you and not just your assumption that they all are causing the stress, et c.

It's more like the stress from getting up at an open mic night, than any kind of stress I've ever actually encountered on the job. Even the dynamic in a meeting with clients where you have to diagram something out on a whiteboard or something is totally different—for one thing, you generally have people in there who are very much "on your side", and you don't have to worry if you misspell something that you're personally about to be/remain unemployed, or lose out on a huge raise, or whatever (nobody generally cares about minor mistakes on a whiteboard in an ordinary context, and maybe they don't in some interviews, but they do in others, and candidates worry they might in all of them).
by Olshansky | 2025-08-01 13:49:20+00:00
Sharing my quick personal anecdote here.

- Past: ~8 years in big tech as an IC - Currently: ~4 as CTO a < 10 person startup.

I always hated doing and conducting coding interviews. When I became in charge of the interview process, I swore to myself not to have them.

I had to let go of a person after ~3 weeks in because he just didn't write any code. This was about 1 year post the ChatGPT moment.

He had lots of experience. Great communicator. Culture fit (or so I thought). Etc...

Interviews can provide a signal, but nothing trumps a month of working with someone. If both parties are open to it, a well paid short term contracting gig goes a long way.
by xorcist | 2025-08-01 13:49:28+00:00
Interviewing is Hard(tm). I accept all the problem with live coding the article mentions but I still do it, at least a little bit.

What's the alternative? Take home problems come with their own problems, and select for people with no family and lots of time. Going by general vibe alone also works, kind of. But we're going to work together, so having something that at least faintly resembles work is kind of useful.

The leetcode type problems are useless however, fully agree on that. But a trivial loop with conditional, perhaps iterating over a list of lines shouldn't be that bad, especially if you get help with the syntax.
by guhcampos | 2025-08-01 13:49:28+00:00
I can't really explain why, but to me they don't feel the same at all.

I've always finished exams absurdly quickly. I used to finish 60 min exams in like 20 min and sleep the rest of the time when the professor didn't allow us to leave, because I had likely spent the previous night drinking and partying my way through college. I'd usually ace most of them.

Thing is, at those times we were working with freshly acquired knowledge that you've been practicing a lot. That's not the case with most leetcode interviews. As a senior/staff engineer, I'm not using double pointers to perform little math tricks on a daily basis, I'm troubleshooting cascading timeouts on distributed systems. I'm not worried about how fast I'm going to iterate over a batch of a couple thousand records on a list I'm worried about how much latency I'll accrue if I rely on a primary source of truth instead of hitting a cached answer.

Code interviews don't measure experience or competence. I don't even think they measure stress as the article mentions. To me, they just measure how much leetcode you practiced for that interview. Nothing more.
by simgt | 2025-08-01 13:49:29+00:00
My shallow experience of Japan tells me that if there's one country that can regulate the shit of the airbnb problem, it's this one. We're so used in the west to see properties as an asset that only appreciates that we've lost sight of what homes are meant to be. Meanwhile the whole Mediterranean coast is being bought by foreigners with the help of greedy local fucks. I've been told the Portuguese have it much worse even.
by Herring | 2025-08-01 13:49:57+00:00
It's just a power grab. And yes, both parties have been treating the rest of the world like that for a long time.

One great strategy in the prisoner's dilemma is tit-for-tat. When it's your turn, repeat exactly what your counterpart did last turn. The rest of the world learned that with tariffs, and hopefully team blue figures it out too.