MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agedclock | 2025-09-29 13:47:03+00:00
Not at all. It is simply a score based on your ability to manage credit, it is scored differently based on the company making the assessment.

In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.

There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.
by systems | 2025-09-29 13:47:10+00:00
I think, that complexity cannot be eliminated, but it can be hidden and distributed, using the right abstraction

that being said C++ being a big language adds complexity (stemming from the language itself, i.e. stemming from the tool)

So you can use a complex tool, to make a complex task simple, or a simple tool and keep the task more complex, requiring more steps etc..

But with C++ its a complex tools, that while it takes some complexity from the task, I think it adds enough complexity, that could outweigh the complexity it reduces

We need better languages, C++ is not it
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 13:47:31+00:00
Good post. Thanks for that.

I tended to do the "Historical Interview" one. In my case, it worked well.

I think take-home tests are probably damn near worthless, these days. People will just feed the assignment into an LLM, and return the results.

I am not a fan of LeetCode, because I don't want to waste time, studying stuff that won't have any relevance to what needs to get done. I like to keep my dance card full, and wasting precious time to make someone else happy, isn't my idea of a good time.

That said, I understand why they are there. I just feel that they aren't really something that I'd use to judge senior-level talent; which was what I used to hire.
by latexr | 2025-09-29 13:47:42+00:00
> but it’s also just part of life.

It’s not, and your two examples are perfect proof of it.

Indoor smoking bans have been implemented in several countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans

https://health.ec.europa.eu/tobacco/smoke-free-environments_...

Countries applying the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic only allow honking in two specific situations. In addition, it’s culturally dependent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_horn#Regulation

https://e.vnexpress.net/news/perspectives/readers-views/the-...

Don’t assume something is an immutable part of life just because it was in place when you were already born. Change can and does happen.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-29 13:47:47+00:00
Sure, he might know what he's saying in a sort of evil mustache twirling realpolitik way. But as someone who experiences everything in a different way than the other 99.99% of society because of his wealth and power he is tautologically "out of touch".

"we'll just surveil everything and use AI and it'll work" " = "let them eat cake". What he's peddling just won't work (in all likelihood) and everybody else (most of the other 99.99%) knows it.
by teeray | 2025-09-29 13:48:01+00:00
> The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way

I still remember the “Westwood Studios Proudly Presents…” on the RA2 intro cutscene and that pride really shined through. Even the installer for the game was a blast (full-screen, dropped you into a faux game-UX and gave you a military briefing with their kickass soundtrack while the progress bar ran). Modern AAA games lack the soul that games of this time had.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-29 13:48:03+00:00
> It's become a vanity diagnosis for the rich and powerful.

It hasn't "become" anything and it's completely irrelevant to this discussion, take Kanye's behavior up with him.

> There was this study that found that "autists" have 5 different diseases

> Funny enough, before autism became a fad there were 5 different conditions for it in the DSM...

A few things to unpack:

1. autism isn't a disease, it's a disorder (or a difference from average)

2. they identified 4 *subtypes* of ASD, not distinct disorders

3. these subtypes have nothing in common with the conditions that were removed from the DSM-5

4. these are serious issues that have always had profound effects on people's lives, the only difference is that they used to suffer alone, in silence. Increased awareness doesn't make it a "fad" and your snotty, dismissive attitude towards them doesn't belong here or anywhere else
by poszlem | 2025-09-29 13:48:08+00:00
Which is ironic given the origin of the name, Electronic *Arts* once positioned themselves as a haven for “software artists,” treating games as creative works on par with music and film. Now they feel more like a licensing machine, recycling IP until it’s dry and chasing live-service revenue. The contrast between what the name promised and what the company became is kind of bleak.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-09-29 13:48:18+00:00
A surprising number of Russian oligarchs were very surprised to find their wealth didn't protect them from a crunchy encounter with the ground after mysteriously falling out of a window.

Evil always eats its own. Why would the US be any different? It only takes one ruthlessly ambitious murderous psychopath with a deviant personal life to spoil things for everyone.
by jweather | 2025-09-29 13:48:28+00:00
Well, TinyChat. Still mind-boggling. From the video description:

I built a small language model in Minecraft using no command blocks or datapacks! The model has 5,087,280 parameters, trained in Python on the TinyChat dataset of basic English conversations. It has an embedding dimension of 240, vocabulary of 1920 tokens, and consists of 6 layers. The context window size is 64 tokens, which is enough for (very) short conversations. Most weights were quantized to 8 bits, although the embedding and LayerNorm weights are stored at 18 and 24 bits respectively. The quantized weights are linked below; they are split into hundreds of files corresponding to the separate sections of ROM in the build. The build occupies a volume of 1020x260x1656 blocks. Due to its immense size, the Distant Horizons mod was used to capture footage of the whole build; this results in distant redstone components looking strange as they are being rendered at a lower level of detail. It can produce a response in about 2 hours when the tick rate is increased using MCHPRS (Minecraft High Performance Redstone Server) to about 40,000x speed.
by bhouston | 2025-09-29 13:48:41+00:00
> Would his statements be better if he were pro-Gaza or something else?

How about he and CBS News and TikTok be neutral and truth seeking rather than being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian? I would like news organizations to be truth seeking and I would like social media to not be tinting my view of the world towards what their billionaire owners want.

Maybe that is too much?
by zmgsabst | 2025-09-29 13:49:06+00:00
You’re the one trying to include people in your photos without their consent.

Everyone should be allowed to enjoy public spaces without you imposing on them for your activities — and that includes you taking photos.

Nothing about their desire not to be photographed requires that you not take photographs — just that if you do, without their permission and with identifiable features showing, you’ll have to take a few seconds to blur that before you upload it publicly.

Yes — that’s absolutely an antisocial imposition on their enjoyment.

And yes — you should be fined for doing that.
by Applejinx | 2025-09-29 13:49:30+00:00
I'm a youtuber to support my programming project, and I see many people in my situation being a lot more shy about doing that. It's a lot of work to do it properly and takes dedicated attention to not have your parasocial community turn sour or vicious on you: it's no joke.

I wonder how much of this is people expecting that ANY media presence will throw them into the troubles people experience when they have all the media presence. I know if I blow up big enough (not much of a threat right now) that someone will come to hurt me, no matter how I am. That's not about me, it's about statistics. If I blew up that big I could probably afford security…

I think some people assume you'll be confronted with that sort of problem right away just by appearing on youtube etc. Sure you will… eventually. Or if you're staggeringly unlucky.
by film42 | 2025-09-29 13:49:33+00:00
My guess is both will look about the same with real world workloads. Worker is certainly more predictable which is safer in general. That said, I appreciate the callout about signal throughput on workers (fewer connections farm to more processes vs each connection getting its own io_uring setup with upper bound being the throughput for a single process). Again, I doubt it makes any difference for 99.9999% of apps out there.
by kace91 | 2025-09-29 13:49:40+00:00
Your point is interesting but I don’t see how it answers the question.

“The majority of interviews being statistically rejections “is not obviously related to a need to make the interview process more demanding than the actual job - Testing for the role would also weed out bad candidates.

Here’s some alternatives:

- engineers testing for the idealized version of their job, rather than the realities of it - “a true engineer must know how to balance a binary tree! Nevermind that I spend my time dealing with support tickets regarding a null pointer that slipped by in a code review”.

- companies using long processes as negotiation tactics - “you went through two months of trials so you’re less likely to reject our offer now and start over”

- design by committee - “every interested party and team must give an approval in their own step”

- interview as marketing - “see? We deal with tough challenges, this is an interesting place to work at”.
by yangikan | 2025-09-29 13:49:48+00:00
The high salaries commanded by FAANG engineers right out of college motivated a lot of students to take up computer science as a major and this led to a massive oversupply. It might take a few years to cool.

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/computer-science-major...

"Between 2018 and 2023, the number of students majoring in computer and information science jumped from about 444,000 to 628,000."

Around 40% of MIT graduates are now in CS https://alum.mit.edu/slice/conversation-new-computing-dean-a...

Further, COVID has reduced a lot of friction for remote work, so now there is also global competition for these jobs.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 13:49:51+00:00
> it's painfully clear that these are just different aspects of the move towards more authoritarian forms of government

Sure. But, like, the evidence for that is the advocacy for a surveillance state. Not his support for a foreign policy project that yes, involves supporting an autocratic government in Israel (fighting, let’s be fair, an autocratic force in Gaza backed by an autocratic state in Iran), but also a whole bunch of other irrelevant things.
by hvb2 | 2025-09-29 13:50:07+00:00
> America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. We can help other people after that point.

But you do want to sell to all of the world, am I correct? So you basically want the pros and none of the cons?

And you also expect the rest of the world to buy an your debt? Because America as a country would be bankrupt instantly if that rest of the world stopped supporting you.
by mackman | 2025-09-29 13:50:09+00:00
As best I can tell we've never sold the same product twice. Product roadmap is "whatever the last person I spoke to asked for." And tech debt maintaining a grab bag of 5,000 almost-but-not-quite-entirely-production-grade "must have" features that the customers rarely if ever use despite claiming that not having it was a deal breaker, is, well, debty.
by btbuildem | 2025-09-29 13:50:28+00:00
It's interesting this thread is flagged, given that the scenario is a direct consequence of advances of technology, AI, and worship of wealth -- seems very core HN.

Entities with this level of resources and influence have very little in common with people, other than biology. We would do well to instead perceive them as dangerous alien parasites -- not precisely hostile, but lacking social connection to the rest of us, and indifferent to the suffering of humanity.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-09-29 13:50:30+00:00
> America exists for the sake of Americans

Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America can become an American.

> America exists for the sake of Americans, not the world, first and foremost. ... opportunity for foreigners [...] exceeding opportunity for [...] people born here, and that is a legitimate injustice.

That is IMO an un-American statement. America is, in theory, the land of opportunity. Not only for the "right kind of people".
by davidghowell | 2025-09-29 13:50:59+00:00
The security issues are probably orthogonal in the way most people install and use these MCPs, but the article mentions Cloudflare's "code-mode" running in v8 isolate sandboxes and calling rpc bindings that are pre-authed, no API keys or open slather internet access required, see: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/#running-code-in-a-san... This is at least interesting, possibly even novel.

"Wasting context window to understand and re-implement each integration is why MCPs exist" does seem to be exactly the point. Pointing the LLM at a swagger/openAPI spec and expecting it to write a good integration might work, but gets old after the first time. Swagger docs focus on what mostly, LLMs work better knowing why as well.

And,why not just use a locally installed cli rather than an MCP? You need to have one for a start, and use-cases (chained calls) are more valuable that atomic tool calls.

There is more behind the motivation for MCP and "tool calling" ability generally with LLMs. This motivation seems less and less relevant, but back when reasoning and chain-of-thought were newly being implemented, and people were more wary of yolo modes, the ability for an LLM harness to decide to call a tool and gather JIT context was a game changer. A dynamic RAG alternative. MCP might not be the optimal solution long term. For example, the way that claude has been trained to use the gh cli, and to work with git generally is much more helpful than either having to set up a git MCP or getting it to feel its way around git --help or man pages to, as you said "re-implement each integration" from scratch every time.
by nerdjon | 2025-09-29 13:51:20+00:00
I am finding myself having some conflicted feelings on this.

First, I absolutely hate who is buying them. Especially as a huge Bioware fan with a Mass Effect tattoo.

That being said, putting aside who is buying them for a moment. I would actually be happy to see more gaming companies going fully private. I feel like the need for constant growth (instead of just sustainability) is what has caused much of the issues in the current gaming market.

So not exactly super excited about how exactly this is happening, but I do hope that we can see other gaming companies do it with better sources.
by dematz | 2025-09-29 13:51:24+00:00
I feel like Go is a very natural step from Python because it's still pretty easy and fast to start with.

(and if you want to embrace static types, the language starting with them might get advantages over an optional backwards compatible type system)

You may have read this already but the biggest surprise one of the Go creators had was Go was motivated by unhappiness with C++, and they expected to get C++ users, but instead people came from Python and Ruby: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-29 13:51:33+00:00
> A doctor who has a diploma is much more likely to be a useful/good doctor than a person with a "computer science" diploma will be a good developer.

A few things to consider:

What we practice is "software engineering." Computer science is closely related to software engineering; but not the same thing. (It's like the difference between a degree in physics vs mechanical engineering.)

Doctors still have to be board certified, which requires self-study of topics that aren't taught in class. Some people do get their medical diploma and fail their board certifications, in which case they can't practice.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-29 13:51:34+00:00
It is pretty clear that Ellison seeks to shape the society he lives in and since he has the means to do so, that clearly makes him more in touch than every single ordinary person.

>Their goals and their perspectives should mean that they have absolutely no business making policy decisions

He doesn't make policy decisions and claiming he does completely undermines how corporations and their leaders wield their influence.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-09-29 13:52:05+00:00
Learning computer architecture is fine and good and useful, but in a secondary fashion to help understand the main tool people in CS use. However, it is not the core of what makes computer science "computer science", or even the main thing that makes CS grads hire-able, despite the common misconception that computer science is about computers.

I would emphasize something along the lines of an HtDP approach developed by Felleisen et al. which goes beyond just the coursework in the HtDP book [0]. It extends into several core courses and in fact much of the core CS curriculum was being overhauled by Felleisen until Northeastern unceremoniously decided to dumb down the curriculum to satisfy some idiotic administrative idea of "market fit" and the desire to homogenize content across their expanding network of satellite campuses. When the curriculum was implemented, companies became very hungry for NU CS graduates, esp. given their experience with them during co-ops.

CS curricula are sadly being bootcampified, because that is the will of university administration.

[0] https://htdp.org/
by celegans25 | 2025-09-29 13:52:22+00:00
Often but not always. For most newer FPGAs, routing is the main source of delay on the critical path, not logic. So if the synthesis tool lowers the logic depth, but does so in a way that increases the distance the signal must travel on the chip, it likely won't help FMax.

This can be caused by increased logic usage, if the synthesis tool must create significantly more LUTs to reduce the critical path. This may make it harder to place the logic on the critical path close together, increasing the routing delay.

Additionally, if the synthesis tool replaces something with a dedicated routing path (most FPGAs have dedicated routing for carries, some may have dedicated routing for local connections in a CLB or between CLBs). These dedicated routing connections usually have a lower delay than the general purpose routing network, potentially increasing delay

The figures they have listed look promising though, they're lower or comparable to the commercial tools in terms of resource usage, with lower or comparable logic depths. They do however not have support for things like carry chains, which may potentially make some things like adders slower than the other tools.
by ghostwords | 2025-09-29 13:52:25+00:00
uBlock Origin is an excellent privacy tool. However, uBlock Origin is not a replacement for Privacy Badger (nor is Privacy Badger a replacement for uBlock Origin).

For more see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...

That wiki page is a bunch of nonsense. For example:

>Redundant with Total Cookie Protection (dFPI)

https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
by pgaddict | 2025-09-29 13:52:30+00:00
> Right now async IO is used for sequential scans and bitmap scans, not for index scans. My initial guess would be that it mostly helps for complex queries (that use multiple indexes, so bitmap scans) and unoptimized queries (sequential scans), not so much for straightforward and/or optimized queries that use a single index. But this is really just a guess, I'm way out of my depth at this point. I'm curious how much it'll help once it is implemented for index scans as well.

Those are good guesses, IMHO.

For sequential scans, some of the "async" work could be done by kernel read-ahead, but AIO makes it explicit and loads the data into shared buffers, not just page cache. For bitmap scans we already had prefetching by fadvise, which is somewhat similar to read-ahead (also into page cache), and there were some bugs that made it ineffective in some cases, and AIO fixes that.

For index scans the difference can be an order of magnitude (say, 5-10x). Doing random I/O block by block is simply awful, prefetching data is important. I was just doing some testing on TPC-H, and on scale 50 I see Q8 going from 130s to 20s, and Q19 from 50s to 8s. And smaller improvements for a couple more queries. Of course, it depends on what else the query is doing - if it's spending 1% on the index, you won't notice a difference.
by anself | 2025-09-29 13:52:49+00:00
The 100m / 10k analogy is fantastic, but the reality is even worse. Let’s say you expect a candidate to stay for average five years. That’s about 1200 working days. If you get to interview them for 1 day, then that day is 8.3m to the 10k. You get to watch them run for 8.3m and decide how well they can run the 10k.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-29 13:52:50+00:00
I don't think "popularity contest" is accurate, but cultural fit is both a real - and important - component AND a risky opportunity to apply massive personal bias. Lots of variability here; I have a coworker who asked the exact questions to all candidates to avoid this, while I can't stop going off script. I know my risk is higher but I also find better candidates (while very likely passing on very good candidates for the wrong reasons).
by saghm | 2025-09-29 13:53:15+00:00
I don't think they are. Quite a lot of EA franchises seem to be struggling to appeal even to their core base lately. The Sims has gone through similar issues with trying to push paid content over quality, with a recent update to allow selectively disabling packs with new content apparently just corrupting the installation and making it impossible to actually run a lot of the time. From what I've read about the most recent Dragon Age game, meddling from EA also caused a lot of late changes in the game's development that ended up influencing the lackluster reception, which in turn was used as rationale for shuttering future development of Dragon Age games.

Things really do seem bad enough that clearly something drastic is needed if anything is going to change, For an unhappy fan of one of the many EA franchises, I don't have any trouble imagining that even a major change that's unlikely to produce good still offers more hope than the status quo. If there's a 1% chance that taking EA private will improve things, it still probably is more likely than things improving with the current management.
by Mumps | 2025-09-29 13:53:16+00:00
Tangent discussion if I may. This is the first I've ever seen gitAds, And well, I'm not even sure what I want to ask:

* Wouldn't github disapprove of it?

* The website doesn't give a ton of credibility to it (e.g. the user story slider) and I couldn't find much from a cursory web search on it. Do you find them trustworthy?

* Are you even finding it valuable?
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-29 13:53:40+00:00
> That is IMO an un-American statement. America is, in theory, the land of opportunity. Not only for the "right kind of people".

The people who live here have a right, first and foremost, to opportunities. If they are vocally and statistically proving that opportunities are bad right now, the H1B needs to be pulled for their sake. It can be put back once balance has been achieved.

> Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America is an American.

Absolutely not. If I export my new invention to Europe and it changes society, I am contributing to European society, but I am not European. If I take a visa to Europe and start doing contract work illegally, I am not European.