MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abound | 2025-08-16 14:46:31+00:00
You don't need to entirely forget this. I've made a habit of regularly seeking out job opportunities and interviewing even when I'm entirely happy with my job, which is to say I've done a ton of these kinds of interviews (on both sides of the table).

Unless the initial question requirements are insane (build Twitter at Twitter scale), I start with the smallest, dumbest thing that will work. Usually that's a single machine/VM talking to a database (or even just SQLite!). Compute and storage are so fast these days that you could comfortably run your fledgling service on a Raspberry Pi, even serving three or four-digit QPS depending on the workload.

Of course, you still have to "play the game" in the interview, so make sure to be clear about how you'd change this as requirements changed (higher QPS, more features, etc)
by DennisP | 2025-08-16 14:46:51+00:00
What I mostly see from EVs is varying the number of motors. You get the manufacturing cost reduction on your motors without having to actually over-spec your base model.

Even this isn't the whole story though, at least at the high end. The Model S Plaid has an extra motor but also uses different rear motors, designed to be more efficient at high RPM. And Tesla puts a lot of emphasis on parts commonality in general.
by root_axis | 2025-08-16 14:47:20+00:00
> That could certainly be the case yes. You don't understand consciousness nor how the brain works. You don't understand how LLMs predict a certain text, so what's the point in asserting otherwise

I don't need to assert otherwise, the default assumption is that they aren't conscious since they weren't designed to be and have no functional reason to be. Matrix multiplication can explain how LLMs produce text, the observation that the text it generates sometimes resembles human writing is not evidence of consciousness.

> God knows what else

Appealing to the unknown doesn't prove anything, so we can totally dismiss this reasoning.

> Consciousness without a body or hunger in a machine that does not need to eat is very possible. You just need to replicate enough of the sort of internal mechanisms that cause such feelings.

This makes no sense. LLMs don't have feelings, they are processes not entities, they have no bodies or temporal identities. Again, there is no reason they need to be conscious, everything they do can be explained through matrix multiplication.

> Now ask it to do any random 15 digit multiplication you can think of. Now watch it get it right.

The same is true for a calculator and mundane computer programs, that's not evidence that they're conscious.

> Do you have any idea what that might mean when 'that kind of text' is all the things humans have written

It's not "all the things humans have written", not even remotely close, and even if that were the case, it doesn't have any implications for consciousness.
by johnecheck | 2025-08-16 14:47:23+00:00
This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea.

It sounds nice. But to have that, you need resources. Whoever controls the resources will get to decide whether you get them. If AI/machines are our entire economy, the people that control the machines control the resources. I have little faith in their benevolence. If they also control the political system?

You'll win your bet. A few humans will work on more ambitious things. It might not go so well for the rest of us.
by ok_computer | 2025-08-16 14:47:27+00:00
If you hadn’t discovered this already with you mac CLI commands, OpenSSH from OpenSSL ‘ssh-keygen’ command is a good way to create SSH keys in ClI and ships in many OSes or is a lightweight download. The OpenSSL website name is unambiguous, which is a benefit.

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...
by _fat_santa | 2025-08-16 14:47:34+00:00
This goes back to "interviews go both ways". All those answers you gave are very reasonable and if I was your interviewer I'd pass you with flying colors. On the other hand if you're interviewing at a place that doesn't pass you with flying colors for those responses, that really says more about them than it does about you and may not be a great place to work.

But to your point, many times one interviews for a job they don't really have the luxury of getting rejections and need to land somewhere fast so they can keep paying the mortgage. So while yes interviewing is a two way street, there's still quite a bit of calibration to make sure you land on the other person's side of the street so to speak.
by anenefan | 2025-08-16 14:47:35+00:00
To myself it's darn odd to read these sort of stories ... since it was just over 30 years ago when I used it with the idea it would hopefully strengthen some of my weakened neck muscles via the serious whiplash due to a cycling accident. I only did so after reading the various studies on it and after an article in New Scientist was examining how safe and beneficial it might be to older people in nursing homes. I used a lower dose rate than body builders at the time.

The take away after taking it for a number of months - use quality creatine - unflavoured 100% or of high analysis with minor impurities. (Yes some is cheap and nasty, regardless of what the shop is charging - these days I would recommend purchasing from a pharmacy or equivalent.) Ensure the dose is completely dissolved in the water / fluid before being swallowed and not just a cordial suspension.

After a while I noted benefits apart from helping sore and tired skeletal muscles - gut seemed to work better - a much calmer state of mind / more mellow, way less chewing over whichever idiot said and did - the serious near continuous cold that had plagued me for more than a couple of years, was finally beaten, even after I stopped using it.
by fluidcruft | 2025-08-16 14:48:10+00:00
Frankly Gnome apps are very strange. Things are hidden in weird menus in odd places with barely noticable icons. Like... it's pretty and things are there but it makes no sense to me. It's like the mental model going on whiffles over my head. It's nice but whoever this is designed for does not even remotely think like I do. If that makes sense. I don't know if I'm just overwhelmed with UIs being different everywhere (Android vs iOS vs Windows vs MacOS vs every website doing it's things to be unique) but it feels like an extra and unnecessary puzzle that somehow hasn't gotten the memo about what's "common" or "typical" or emergent in the pile of visual chaos. Don't get me wrong, some parts they do the best (mostly shell related) and I miss them instantly on Windows or MacOS but some things (mostly in individual apps like the text editor and PDF viewer) really leave me scratching my head.
by maccard | 2025-08-16 14:48:16+00:00
> In all Linux desktop environments, you have to spend a bunch of time cleaning out its adware, surveillance, work around its desire to use a remote password to access your local computer, and somehow suppress its desire to move your local files to the cloud?

Hold on a second, that’s not what I said. I said that Linux environments have “annoying stuff”. Firefox has been “slipping in” stuff for the past decade, Ubuntu and gentoo have terminal ads, Debian required extra steps to get my hardware working, and arch is the epitome of “I will never be done tweaking stuff”
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-08-16 14:50:21+00:00
> How about in-app purchases and subscriptions? The code is already there. Is it abusive?

Sometimes yes and sometimes no. Pure software is a bit different than hardware as copies are effectively zero cost. Same would go for e-books, music, etc. Not that they get a full free pass, these media can also engage in abusive practices.

> Is it abusive because it is tied to hardware?

Yes. Another example of the absurdity is if you want to buy half an apple and the store charges you enough to cover the costs of a full apple, then pull out a full apple and destroy half of it before handing it to you. Does that seem ok? Putting in extra effort to make something worse is bad.

> A 6 and a 8 core processor is probably the same die also and produced at the same cost. Maybe 2 cord were turned off because they were faulty or maybe they were turned off because some people don’t have the need and money for 8 cores.

Big difference between these two cases. If the two extra cores were faulty, then charging a lower price makes sense. Like paying less for used tires that have some wear on them. But taking a perfectly good chip and purposefully disabling two cores is like taking a belt sander to a new tire and then charging less.
Show HN: Spin up 5 agents that don't trip over each other in 10 lines of code
by lexokoh | 2025-08-16 14:50:26+00:00
I’ve been playing with multi-agent systems and kept hitting the same issue: agents duplicate work, step on each other’s tasks, or return conflicting results.

So I built a tiny package: Kage Bus - https://github.com/kagehq/bus

It’s a lightweight message bus that makes sure only ONE agent handles each task.

Example:

```js import { createBus } from "@kagehq/bus";

const bus = createBus();

bus.on("task:research", (payload) => { console.log("Research agent:", payload.query); });

bus.on("task:research", (payload) => { console.log("Backup agent:", payload.query); });

bus.send("task:research", { query: "latest AI news" });

Right now it:

- Routes tasks to one agent (first-claim wins)

- Supports conflict resolution (last-writer-wins)

- Logs everything to agent-bus.log

Repo: https://github.com/kagehq/bus

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@kagehq/bus

It’s just an MVP, but I’d love feedback from folks experimenting with multi-agent workflows: Is this useful? What features would make orchestration actually production-ready?
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-16 14:50:27+00:00
>This has nothing to do with the user, read the post and pay attention to the wording.

It has something to do with the user because it's the user's messages that trigger Claude to end the chat.

'This chat is over because content policy' and 'this chat is over because Claude didn't want to deal with it' are two very different things and will more than likely have have different effects on how the user responds afterwards.

I never said anything about this being for the user's benefit. We are talking about how to communicate the decision to the user. Obviously, you are going to take into account how someone might respond when deciding how to communicate with them.
by Muromec | 2025-08-16 14:50:30+00:00
The point they are making is the privacy protection doesn't extend both ways. There are two ways the information can leak:

- from the IDP to a port side, so the porn site will know what's your name (what a shame, how would I pretend it didn't happen after I close the tab);

- from the porn site to the IDP -- now your government knows that you watch porn and maybe the exact type of porn, so they can charge you a different tax rate for being straight.

Then of course, just by correlating ip addresses and timestamps in logs of the IDP and the porn site one can deanonimyze the visitors. Or just by ip in the logs itself because you don't pay your ISP in bitcoins.
by nickv | 2025-08-16 14:51:36+00:00
No, if somebody has access to edit your home page directly, your blog, your company site, etc - you've already lost the game.

How is this any different than your email address being compromised? How is this different than having your laptop compromised and somebody downloading your .ssh folder?

The issue here isn't "is this reliable identification" - because it IS reliable. Your concern is "how likely is this to be compromised vs other things" and that's a fair concern - but there are plenty of very secure web sites out there. This isn't saying "I am john doe and this is my identity", this is saying with some confidence "this person on mastadon is the same person as the person who wrote this web site copy" and that's a totally fine piece of identification for the right context.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-16 14:51:55+00:00
They are doing less work. Designing a lower performance engine is harder and more expensive than producing more of the higher performance engine and limiting it.

It works in the market because sellers sellers want to charge as much as buyers are ready to pay. People who want a powerful engine are ready to pay more, so make them pay more. The limited power option is sold at a lower but still profitable margin to those who don't want to pay for the extra.

Market segmentation like this is seen everywhere. It is just that the subscription thing makes it particularly obvious.
by 30minAdayHN | 2025-08-16 14:52:00+00:00
This is such a timely article. It was a HUGE electric fence for me as a founder. I was hesitant asking for introductions, help and advise. It took a lot of internalization that I would always welcome asking for help and others would think the same. One fence I still struggle with is following-up. Usually people don't respond the first time and my fence natural thinks that they read and were not interested. But the reality is that most people are bad at following-up. Even me, many times think I will write back to them and I forget. So same thing happens to others. Reaching out multiple times - at least twice - usually works. It still takes a lot of energy to remind them the second time when they haven't responded.
by lovich | 2025-08-16 14:52:33+00:00
I really appreciate this generation of my fellow countrymen who just completely ignore all the benefits of brain draining literally every country on the planet of their ambitious and intelligent youth.

Oh well, better tell em all to go back. Might as well tell our allies to rearm because we’re worried about being ripped off. I for one will not feel ripped off when Germany has a functioning military again. It has always gone well for the planet when Europe is armed and angry
by nostrademons | 2025-08-16 14:52:38+00:00
I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1].

This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high.

But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306
by os2warpman | 2025-08-16 14:52:42+00:00
There is no evidence the heart attack gun ever existed.

Every description of it is ludicrous.

>here, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired.

The device held up by Senator Frank Church was not a modified Colt M1911. It was an air pistol with absurd rifle sight attached.

That device has no mechanism for cooling the pellets. The second a frozen pellet is inserted into that device it will begin melting.

Very few handguns, to the point that "none" is accurate ENOUGH, have an effective range of more than ~50 meters. There are some calibers, not nearly-silent ice pellets, that can travel further but their ballistics out of short barrels are so poor that demos at 100 yards and beyond are exercises in exhibition and bragging rights.

No known combinations of mechanisms needed to propel a projectile 100 meters are virtually noiseless. Even air rifles that can fling a metal pellet several hundred yards as their "maximum range" but operate in 50-60 yards as their "effective range" make a shit ton of noise.

Any small dart-like ice pellet would immediately disintegrate into dust at the forces needed to travel even a fraction of 100 meters with enough energy to pierce human skinned clothing.

Any large .45 caliber ice pellet would shatter and if it struck a target with enough force to penetrate skin it would leave way more than "a tiny red dot"'s worth of signature.

Saxitoxin is not, and has never been since its isolation, undetectable. It doesn't "disappear" from the body after death (indeed the mechanisms that would cause its distruction cease upon death) and can be detected with simple tests.

This doesn't make sense except as a distraction from things the CIA really didn't want investigators to see.
by mettamage | 2025-08-16 14:53:14+00:00
Hey, this is perhaps a bit random.

But do you want to chat a bit about your math journey? I saw it here [1]. I'm curious about it. If you're (potentially) up for it, my email is in my profile.

Cheers!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899552
by monknomo | 2025-08-16 14:53:18+00:00
I'm puzzled how AI is supposed to be a job creating technology. It is supposed to either wholesale replace jobs, or make workers so efficient that fewer of them are required. This is supposed to make digital and intellectually produced goods cheaper (although, given reproduction is free, the goods themselves are already pretty cheap).

To me it looks like we'll see well paying jobs decrease, digital services get cheaper, food+housing stay the same, and presumably as displaced workers do what they need to do physical service jobs will get more crowded and pay worse, so physical services will get cheaper. It is unclear whether there will be a net benefit to society.

Where do the jobs come from?
by dadoum | 2025-08-16 14:53:23+00:00
Honestly the second screenshot with Sticky Notes is definitely ugly, but that one? It looks fine for me. The left margin is where the text is, and on the right there is an illustration which has (almost) uniform padding on the right and on the bottom, which leaves enough room for the popup not to feel cluttered. You could maybe add a little more margin to the left of the text, but it really isn't that visible to me. I would rather complain about the settings icon which feels bigger than the close button, if anything.
by perrygeo | 2025-08-16 14:53:25+00:00
It's easy to get lost in the geodesy details, which really matter at a local scale! But on a global scale the earth is effectively round.

Many of us have seen images like this: https://www.asu.cas.cz/~bezdek/vyzkum/rotating_3d_globe/figu... which are effective at showing the shape and gravitational anomalies but is wildly exaggerated on the height axis. Visualizing to scale would look indistinguishable from sphere.
by dkarl | 2025-08-16 14:53:40+00:00
> And what exactly do you buy yourself?

APIs can be evolved much more easily than shared database schemas. Having worked with many instances of each kind of system, I think this outweighs all of the other considerations, and I don't think I'll ever again design a system with multiple services accessing the same database schema.

It was maybe a good idea if you were a small company in the early 2000s, when databases were well-understood and services weren't. After that era, I haven't seen a single example of a system where it wasn't a mistake for multiple services to access the same database schema (not counting systems where the read and write path were architecturally distinct components of the same service.)
by indigoabstract | 2025-08-16 14:53:43+00:00
That was a just plot twist (play against another DK), not a badly designed puzzle. They are very different.

The author is complaining that because the game didn't warn him to change his strategy, he was unfairly beaten and forced to restart the level (and so wasting his valuable time and money). And indeed, you cannot break enemy walls in DK1, nor can they break yours, that's by design.

But this is just playing a 30 year old game with today's mindset. Now everything is faster, gamers have more limited time and even more limited attention spans and different expectations. Back then, you would just see it as a challenge, restart and beat the level, all without making any fuss about it.

It's like, did people in the middle ages complain that washing was hard and they needed washing machines to save time?

Probably not, but people today certainly would. It comes down to expectations.
by tremon | 2025-08-16 14:54:35+00:00
But converting a SQL relation to a set of dictionaries already carries a lot of overhead: every cell in the resultset must be converted to a key-value pair. And the normal mechanics of vertical "slicing" a set of dictionaries is much more expensive than doing the same in a 2d relation array. So while you might want to offer a dictionary-like interface for the result set, please don't use a dictionary-like data structure.