MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shoo | 2025-09-03 22:40:41+00:00
Seems like a fantastic filter question to me. It's basic, it's not an unfair or trick question, there are multiple valid options that the candidate can respond with - you're not fishing for your single pet solution - and a strong candidate could demonstrate ability by going into more depth and mentioning multiple options and explaining when one option would be preferred vs others. Keep asking it.

If you're seeing a high rate of candidates who can't answer it at all, that suggests that the population of candidates who are applying for your roles are really poor fits for the role.

Maybe worth exploring if there's ways you could change how the roles are advertised to access a different population of candidates, or perhaps ask this basic question earlier in your hiring pipeline -- e.g. as an automated screening question as a pre-req to interviewing with humans.
by Laremere | 2025-09-03 22:40:55+00:00
> Because most open source projects don't attract anywhere near those levels of donations.

It's not unheard of. Eg, Blender earns $261,360/month. (https://fund.blender.org/) Companies should more eagerly support open source projects they rely on with funding. It keeps their dependencies competitive with much more expensive commercial products, and a broad base of donations prevents a project from being dominated by specific large corporate interests which might run counter to their average user.
by vzaliva | 2025-09-03 22:41:16+00:00
I am sympathetic to the motivation for forking CoMaps, but their website, aside from a few vague statements, does not give me any reassurance that they are better governed. Who are these people (names)? How are they incorporated, and where? How are donations spent? How is the development direction decided? Until these points are clarified, I am hesitant to switch to CoMaps.
by daxfohl | 2025-09-03 22:41:22+00:00
And that may be where the discrepancy comes in. You feel fast because, whoa I created this whole scheduler in ten seconds! But the you also have to spend an hour code reviewing that scheduler, which, still it feels fast to have a good working scheduler in such a short time. But without AI, maybe it feels slow to find and integrate with some existing scheduling library, but in wall clock time it was the same.
Show HN: TwoTickets – meet through events, not swipes
by aammundi | 2025-09-03 22:41:25+00:00
The idea for TwoTickets started when my wife and I had two tickets to Hamilton, and she couldn’t make it at the last minute. I realized how awkward it is to want to go to a concert, game, or show but not have someone to share it with — and how current apps either constrain you to your circle or to endless swiping.

On TwoTickets, you Twoot an event in order to connect with others around that shared plan. The flow is simple: Twoot → Match → Chat → Decide → Go. You don’t see profiles or matches until you Twoot events, so plans come first and profiles second.

The aim is to make meeting new people more natural: the event itself is the ice-breaker, not a random line in a bio. We’re in soft launch now and would love feedback from HN — does this “event-first” approach resonate with you, and where do you see the pitfalls?

Paul Graham once said that all dating apps are really just matching apps. I wonder: how close is this to a solution to that assertion — although TwoTickets is broader than dating.

*Links:* - Website: https://www.twotickets.us - iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twotickets-match-eventfully/id...
by tim333 | 2025-09-03 22:41:46+00:00
Humans can do symbolic understanding that seems to rest on a rather flakey probabilistic neural network in our brains, or at least mine does. I can do maths and the like but there's quite a lot of trial and error and double checking things involved.

GPT5 said it thinks it's fixable when I asked it:

>Marcus is right that LLMs alone are not the full story of reasoning. But the evidence so far suggests the gap can be bridged—either by scaling, better architectures, or hybrid neuro-symbolic approaches.
by antirez | 2025-09-03 22:42:23+00:00
This is true for the pre-training step. What if advancements in the reinforcement learning steps performed later may benefit from more compute and more models parameters? If right now the RL steps only help with sampling, that is, they only optimize the output of a given possible reply instead of the other (there are papers pointing at this: that if you generate many replies with just the common sampling methods, and you can verify correctness of the reply, then you discover that what RL helps with is selecting what was already potentially within the model output) this would be futile. But maybe advancements in the RL will do to LLMs what AlphaZero-alike models did with Chess/Go.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-03 22:42:36+00:00
Some phones now have an option to limit charging to 80%. That should eliminate the problem entirely.

If your phone won't do that, you can use a smart power switch. Some mentioned to simply have it on a timer, but if you wanted to get fancier, you could use IFTTT to toggle it on/off based on battery percentage. I'd likely make it turn on at 40% battery and off at 60%.
by ludocode | 2025-09-03 22:42:39+00:00
Indeed, a decent closed hash table is maybe 30 lines. An open hash table with linear probing is even less, especially if you don't need to remove entries. It's almost identical to a linear search through an array; you just change where you start iterating.

In my first stage Onramp linker [1], converting linear search to an open hash table adds a grand total of 24 bytecode instructions, including the FNV-1a hash function. There's no reason to ever linear search a symbol table.

[1]: https://github.com/ludocode/onramp/blob/develop/core/ld/0-gl...
by neeban | 2025-09-03 22:42:47+00:00
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Experience: 5 years backend development (can do full stack). I had worked on developing an internal CRM for an insurance-related company , an inventory management system for a retail company, and most recently LLM-assisted tools for a media services company.

Technologies: Python, Javascript, Nodejs, Django, Starlette, Express, Docker, Azure/AWS, Amazon Selling Partner API, OpenAI API, Self-hosting LLMs/VLMs

Happy to chat and help with your projects. More info & contact: https://neilvan.com/
by aammundi | 2025-09-03 22:43:09+00:00
A bit more context for anyone curious:

TwoTickets isn’t meant to be “just another dating app.” I see it more as a matching engine for shared experiences. Most platforms match people on profiles — I wanted to see what happens if you flip it and match on plans.

I think of it as Uber...when you open the app, you're thinking about where you want to go and the rest happens automatically. On TwoTickets, it is - "What you want to do"

That shift changes a lot:

The ice-breaker is the event, not a bio.

Plans are time-bound, so conversations don’t drift into dead-ends.

Safety and trust feel higher when there’s clarity on why you’re connecting.

On the tech side: it’s a Django + Celery + Postgres stack with a fair bit of scheduling and clustering and feed generation logic to ingest events and suggest matches. Happy to dive deeper into that if folks are interested.
by brudgers | 2025-09-03 22:43:41+00:00
The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”.

The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.

To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…

…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.

Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.
by debian3 | 2025-09-03 22:43:43+00:00
They haven’t. They had time to catch up, but they didn’t. They recently switched their auto complete model from 4o-mini to 4.1-mini. It’s not smarter at predicting what you are trying to do. Nothing magical like last year experience on Cursor (I haven’t tested lately, so it might be even better now).

I heard Windsurf is quite good and the closest to Cursor magic, available on Windsurf free plan (unlimited autocomplete). I should give that a try.
by dostick | 2025-09-03 22:44:09+00:00
What’s killing us is capitalism, an ill system that was predicted to fail 140 years ago but every country picked it up and tried regardless, and it failed in all 100+ experiments over 100 years. It’s always end up in inequality and suffering because it amplifies greed, and simply does not accept human being for what they are, your value being value of your learned occupation. What we end up with about is 50% of economy is useless “bullshit jobs”that are there just to employ people because capitalism can’t work otherwise!

Did you notice that every science, from physics to biology has scientists making discoveries and pushing ahead. Yet nobody ever tried to update and design new political economic system (not socialism/communism). As if capitalism was given by good and should not be questioned.

Together with ancient and not updated according to modern science democracy, that was designed for one representative for 100 people in Ancient Greece, when they knew only feudalism and so invented electable kings. And now we have one representative for 100,000 yet nobody checked if it supposed to work like that. Instead of flawed meat computers representing people we should have switched to actual computers long ago.
by williamtrask | 2025-09-03 22:44:54+00:00
Nice comment! I had forgotten about metaphorical truth. Sent me on a nice rabbit hole.

I think 'metaphorical truth' is correct but slightly too narrow. Pragmatic truth includes metaphorical truth but is slightly wider.

And while I agree with your assertion in the short run, I'm inclined to doubt its correctness in the long run. Most things eventually have consequences.
by ggm | 2025-09-03 22:45:07+00:00
New Scientist published a reminiscence of somebody in the relatively modern era doing the 3 plate dance. I wish I could find it online. They said it was tedious work.

Maudsleys 3 plates are in the London science museum along with Whitworths screw, and some of Marc Brunels stuff. Same room as the meccano differential analyser and the harmonic calculator for tide charts and Babbage bits.

Edit: found it - https://archive.is/iyCzB
by btown | 2025-09-03 22:45:39+00:00
My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0].

It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking.

At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture?

What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind?

Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.

While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
by anigbrowl | 2025-09-03 22:47:18+00:00
Lot of weasel words in there, from 'as it was understood by the people who wrote it' (so your originalist doctrine takes precedence over SCOTUS decisions?) to quoting Breyer's allowing deployed troops to stay put as if that wasn't to provide time for the administration to appeal.

Much of that will certainly be overturned. For example, the judge found that the authority to protect federal property didn’t extend to “setting up protective perimeters, traffic blockades, crowd control, and the like.” (P. 42). It’s unlikely Congress intended to authorize the President to deploy the National Guard to protect federal property, but that doesn’t extend to routine measures that would be used to achieve such protection.

Ah, 'OK so we shouldn't have done that but now that we have you shouldn't criticize how we go about it.'
by immibis | 2025-09-03 22:47:22+00:00
I think that thinking of "the fediverse" as one thing at all is a mistake. It's Gilbert Ryle's classic category mistake:

> A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks “But where is the University?” .....

"The fediverse" is not a thing. There are many separate sites and the collection of all of them in total may be called "the fediverse", but that is not a thing by itself. They don't even all share a protocol in common. You cannot join the fediverse any more than you can join the game industry or the startup scene. You have to join a specific server, game company or startup (or more than one). And while from the outside you might have heard a lot of "the game industry is cut-throat" or "startups work together to innovate technology", once you are inside one of them, you'll find that it's a lot more fragmented than it at first appeared, and totally incohesive, and although from a bird's eye view it looked like you and your competitor down the hall were both making VR happen, they won't work together with you.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-03 22:48:05+00:00
Being rich is a measure of wealth. In a world in which there is no resource scarcity and everyone has access to lots of resources, everyone is rich but not necessarily more rich or powerful than anyone else.

The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.

Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.

Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
by JamesPark1982 | 2025-09-03 22:48:06+00:00
With the NFL season just around the corner, The Fantasy Football Training Camp hosted their annual Fantasy Football Bootcamp inside SpatialChat.

The event brought together fantasy football analysts, hundreds of fans, and two special guests: retired NFL Pro-Bowler Daunte Culpepper and current Washington Commander Austin Ekeler. Instead of being a one-way webinar, the bootcamp took place in an interactive virtual environment. Attendees could “walk” between draft strategy rooms, join analyst Q&As, and network with other fans—just like being at a live convention.

SpatialChat’s spatial audio and customizable spaces made the experience feel natural and engaging, capturing the energy of an in-person football kickoff but online.
by tibbon | 2025-09-03 22:48:19+00:00
Maybe if they are having problems, offer a clearly sub-optimal way to do it, and try to get them to talk about why it's not great or what better ways might be. That might help uncover some thought pattern or understanding about it. Such options could be FTP, as an email attachment, or the body in a single HTTP POST.

They should be able to come up with thoughts about security, speed, reliability, etc.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-03 22:48:24+00:00
I guess you could have some kind of mask that would let you suppress some of the context from matching, but my guess is that kind of thing might cause problems as often as it solves them.

Back when I was thinking about commonsense reasoning with logic it was obviously a much more difficult problem to add things like "P was true before time t", "there will be some time t in the future such at P is true", "John believes Mary believes that P is true", "It is possible that P is true", "there is some person q who believes that P is true", particularly when you combine these qualifiers. For one thing you don't even have a sound and complete strategy for reasoning over first-order logic + arithmetic but you also have a combinatorical explosion over the qualifiers.

Back in the day I thought it was important to have sound reasoning procedures but one of the reasons none of my foundation models ever became ChatGPT was that I cared about that and I really needed to ask "does change C cause an unsound procedure to get the right answer more often?" and not care if the reasoning procedure was sound or not.
by PenguinCoder | 2025-09-03 22:48:36+00:00
Man, if that was the level of interview questions I got, I'd be just fine I think. Unfortunately it's stump the chump, or specific, opinion based types. I remember one recently, I asked my opinion about _certain technology_. I answered what that was. Later I was told well I was expecting a different answer, I was looking for discussion on (something)

Me: okay so that's your opinion, if that's the answer you wanted why did you ask for mine?

I did not get the job.
by nserrino | 2025-09-03 22:48:38+00:00
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful comments. A lot of big claims have been made in this area so skepticism is the right default reaction. tl;dr: agree that we should provide the kernels and benchmark suite so this can be evaluated by others, will follow up with that.

A few clarifications:

1. Baselines - We didn't compare to torch.compile because as of PyTorch 2.7, torch.compile doesn't support the MPS backend, and we ran into some issues on many of the problems when using it. GitHub issue: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/150121. Once it's supported, it will be the obvious baseline.

2. Methodology - We followed KernelBench’s protocol to establish a baseline on Metal, adding more correctness checks. Warmup and synchronization were done. We recognize the limitations here and are expanding the validation suite.

3. Optimizations - Right now most of the optimizations are fusions, but there is some use of Metal-specific primitives/optimizations. We expect as we make the supervisor more sophisticated, the novelty of the optimized kernels will also increase.

Overall the goal here is to get some % of the benefit of a human expert in kernel engineering, without developer effort. Compiler-based optimizations are great, but hand-tuned implementations are still common for performance-critical models. The hope is that we can automate some of that process.
by atombender | 2025-09-03 22:49:12+00:00
I wonder if Augment [1] are working on a Zed plugin.

I've been using Augment for more than a year in Jetbrains IDEs, and been very impressed by it, both the autocomplete and the Cursor-style agent. I've looked at Cursor and couldn't figure out why anyone needed to use a dedicated IDE when Augment exists as a plugin. Colleagues who have used Cursor have switched to Augment and say it's better.

Seems to me like Augment is an AI tool flying under most people's radar; not sure why it's not all over Hacker News.

[1] https://www.augmentcode.com/
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-03 22:49:17+00:00
> Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.

To return to parent's point, we want to say it applies only in autocratic countries, when we have similar pockets of despair as well.

Not everyone can just "fight the man" if they feel prayed upon or abused. Most here can probably solve critical issues with money or even move countries if/when shit hits the fan.

But lower social class people aren't in that mindset, and the power local authorities hold on their life is a lot heavier.
by saghm | 2025-09-03 22:49:19+00:00
> It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.

Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
by vidarh | 2025-09-03 22:49:34+00:00
> Probabilistic generative models are fun but no amount of probabilistic sequence generation can be a substitute for logical reasoning.

Unless you either claim that humans can't do logical reasoning, or claim humans exceed the Turing computable, then given you can trivially wire an LLM into a Turing complete system, this reasoning is illogical due to Turing equivalence.

And either of those two claims lack evidence.
by komali2 | 2025-09-03 22:49:50+00:00
> The absence of a clear objective boundary of what can be taken and what cannot.

I don't understand why this is an obstacle - this issue already exists with writing laws and various countries have different solutions, all of which seem to be working kinda ok. There's the USA's constitution which isn't working so well in most cases but working great in others (free speech for example, though this is now failing), whereas other countries depend on histories of case law for example (UK).

It seems to me that if a government specifically sought to target the largest and richest actors it could avoid the issue you're speaking of. Of course this would require removing the ability of capital to influence politics, maybe that's the issue you mean?
by brudgers | 2025-09-03 22:50:38+00:00
As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not.

Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
by Nextgrid | 2025-09-03 22:51:01+00:00
I disagree that layoffs are because of AI-mediated productivity improvements.

The layoffs are primarily due to over-hiring during the pandemic and even earlier during the zero-interest-rate period.

AI is used as a convenient excuse to execute layoffs without appearing in a bad position to the eyes of investors. Whether any code is actually generated by AI or not is irrelevant (and since it’s hard to tell either way, nobody will be able to prove anything and the narrative will keep being adjusted as necessary).
by priyanka_rek | 2025-09-03 22:51:03+00:00
This looks like a great fit! I have 4 years in data engineering with strong Python/BigQuery experience and have worked extensively with GCP data stack. Also comfortable with Docker

I know the posting mentions 5+ years, but I've been working at scale - built ETL pipelines processing TBs daily and have solid experience with data quality monitoring and cost optimization.

Happy to discuss - email in my profile.