MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-29 13:40:40+00:00
I do like your approach more than many alternatives but there are still lots of challenges. Two big issues: 1. this is not typically how even a confident, prepared, solid developer approaches coding problems, so they can be poorly prepared for this style of interview. The result is you don't get an accurate representation of the individual. 2. it takes an awful lot of the interviewer's time to prepare, even if you can scale to multiple candidates with much of the same work. You need a very strong technical resource to deliver this style of interview, and they could probably be doing higher value work.

I've hired a lot of the past ~5 years and my take away: it sucks for everyone - on both sides - except the early HR-led functions, and they don't add any value or much help. They may actually make most of the challenges much worse.
by pgaddict | 2025-09-29 13:40:55+00:00
I did a lot of tests comparing the io_method choices, and I'm yet to see a realistic query where it makes a significant difference of more than a couple percent (in either direction). I'm sure it's possible to construct such queries, and it's interesting, but for real workloads it's mostly not noticeable.

At least that's how I see it right now, we'll see how that works on a much wider range of hardware and systems. The github repo linked from the pgsql-hackers post has a lot more results, some charts include results for the index prefetching patch - and there it makes more difference in some cases. But the patch is still fairly rough, it could be a bug in it too, and it changed a lot since August.
by AlexandrB | 2025-09-29 13:40:55+00:00
AAA gaming feels so tired (and tiresome) that this news barely registers for me. The last EA game I played was the excellent C&C remaster - and EA's main contribution was getting out of the way of the project. They still own the rights to a ton of legendary IP - SimCity, Command & Conquer, Battlefield, but I don't have illusions that new iterations of that IP will be any good.

I know this is probably part of the Saudi strategy of "sportswashing"[1], but I don't really care about EA or their legacy anymore.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/ea-sports-fc-24-boss-on-sportswash...
by animuchan | 2025-09-29 13:41:09+00:00
> Hamas, Hezbolla or Houthis are hardly Russian allies

I beg to differ.

* Russia sent missiles to Houthis just this year. Also assists with intelligence for attacks, at least according to https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/10/26/russia-provides-targ...

* The meeting where Putin says they have longstanding ties with Hamas: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/17/putin-meets-with-r...

Iran, well, we agree: they're very much aligned politically, seem to have shared weapon programs (rumor has it, Iran's Shahed drone == RF's Geran' drone).

Having said all that, I now realize that I must've misused the word ally to mean political sympathizer, my bad. I meant "closely aligned" more than anything, like when the Russian media says "Anglo-saxons" to describe the political bloc.

Re: Assuming that's true, should we extrapolate that too? -- Honestly, maybe? I don't have an opinion, much less an educated one.
by zecg | 2025-09-29 13:41:12+00:00
I only tolerate the piece of shit phone because of F-Droid. Most of google's apps are banned from connecting to the network (like their fucking keyboard, I don't need or want any internet-requiring options) via Rethink VPN through which all network traffic is routed.

If this goes through, I'm taking my sim card out and putting it into the cheapest dumbphone I can find, using the smartphone strictly offline for OSMAnd navigation and media, uploaded over USB cable.
by randomtoast | 2025-09-29 13:41:38+00:00
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me

We are getting monitored all the time, we are in an age where cameras are omnipresent. Everyone carries one in their pocket in the form of a smartphone, and countless stationary cameras are installed throughout cities.

When you walk through streets, buildings, and especially public facilities, you can see cameras almost everywhere. While it is often said that these devices exist only for security purposes and that footage is routinely deleted, this is no longer the reality. In many cases, people can request this footage through FOIA and use it as they wish, including uploading it to platforms like YouTube.
by raincole | 2025-09-29 13:41:52+00:00
> memory unsafeness, can be significantly mitigated when developing with a certain modern subset of the C++ language.

Right.

> Most existing and popular databases are developed in C/C++, providing a wealth of resources and innovations we could leverage.

Right.

But two rights can make one wrong. How are you enforcing 'good part of C++' when you're interoperating with others' code?
by mooreds | 2025-09-29 13:41:53+00:00
Agreed. It's one thing to ask the AI to solve the problem; it's another thing to be able to explain the way the problem was solved in real-time.

(Though you have to watch out for folks that are using the AI to answer your questions.)

In fact, I'm okay with people using AI to solve coding problems, as long as that is acceptable behavior at work as well. That should all be spelled out in the interview expectations.
by WCSTombs | 2025-09-29 13:42:55+00:00
The article isn't claiming there is a "one true modern subset" of C++ that they use. It's merely pointing out that you can significantly mitigate the main criticisms of C++ by making certain sacrifices, which is pretty much true.

There are good reasons the standards committee doesn't make those sacrifices on your behalf, because ultimately there are tradeoffs there that the programmer is supposed to understand and have control over. However, there is an argument to be had about what the default "safety setting" should be and whether C++ makes a good choice. IMO that's actually the main difference between safety in Rust and C++, since you can make Rust just as unsafe as C++ if you want, only you need to explicitly mark your code as unsafe.

Also, I believe the C++ standards committee does care about this, which is why Profiles [1] are being considered.

[1] https://github.com/BjarneStroustrup/profiles
by palebluedot | 2025-09-29 13:42:59+00:00
We were worried about that as well. But we have found that most people are not doing well on our take home. If we get to the point that most people are crushing it, then we may need to think more about AI and take homes (maybe tweak the it with the explicit expectation that they may use AI, etc.)

They also need to be able to reason well about why they made the choices they did. Something useful when talking to them can be asking questions like "If X changed, how would that impact your design?". If they were reliant on AI for vibing (rather than just using it as a tool), then those can be more difficult questions to answer well.
by MisterTea | 2025-09-29 13:43:21+00:00
I would just outright put a ban on any app that advertises itself as solving health related issues. I can't go around and call myself a therapist or doctor without a license and neither should a computer program and its benefactors. If they can prove that it is safe and reliable then sure, but real humans must verify and certify. Changes to the model then means the model must be reverified. Sounds too complex? So is the human mind. Don't play dangerous and stupid games for profit.
by fullshark | 2025-09-29 13:43:31+00:00
Welcome to the club. Sorry I don't have any advice other than survive in the short term if you need the paycheck but balance that by making moves so longer term you find a sustainable working arrangement.

If that means an extended break is necessary, get your finances in order so you can take one.

Another thing to be aware of: no one at work cares. They only care if it means you are going to quit or change teams and create problems for them. Don't tell anyone, just get out and recharge.
by kragen | 2025-09-29 13:43:48+00:00
As I showed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413633, which I hadn't posted when you posted your comment, about 10–25% of mobile phone users have the Google Sheets app installed, because it has over a billion downloads. So it seems like your atypical personal experience is leading you into orders-of-magnitude errors.

I also use spreadsheets rarely, most recently three weeks ago, and often end up regretting it, but I do occasionally find them very valuable. I would find them even more valuable if I didn't know more powerful programming languages, which presumably is what you are alluding to with "write a real program".

I agree that cellphone screen input methods are clumsy. On the other hand, I've written probably ten thousand words of prose on this one, plus a fair bit of Python, Lua, and C, so a few spreadsheet formulas would hardly be an obstacle.
by zmgsabst | 2025-09-29 13:44:25+00:00
We have numerous laws that ban those things in shared public spaces:

- littering

- jaywalking

- excessive noise

Etc.

And we impose fines for all of those — under the consistent logic that you can’t infringe on others use of public space with your own.

I’m glad that you can admit this is not about your usage of public spaces though — it’s just about you wanting to be a nuisance to others without consequence.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-29 13:44:25+00:00
IME: the only valuable signal comes from direct personal referals. If you have someone who you think is good, and they recommend someone who they say is good from a previous engagement, odds are it will work out. There's a transitive, holistic measure in play; they're not going to destroy their reputation by recommending a weak player or even a strong jerk. The problem here is scale (you quickly milk direct networks dry) but nothing else seems to work well.
by lapcat | 2025-09-29 13:44:25+00:00
Cameras on police are mostly irrelevant. This has been proved repeatedly, at least as far back as Rodney King in 1992. We saw the video of the police beating Rodney King, but the police were nonetheless protected by the legal system. It's extremely rare for police to suffer consequences from their behavior.

Any minor transgression from most people will be punished severely. Even the worst transgression from powerful people will be forgiven. That's how our system works. Don't ever think that Orwellian surveillance will put everyone on a level playing field. As an ultra-powerful person, Larry Ellison is well aware of this.
by the_af | 2025-09-29 13:44:30+00:00
Yes... Joel Spolsky puts it a bit uncharitably here [1]:

> I’m exaggerating a lot, but the point is, when you select 1 out of 200 applicants, the other 199 don’t give up and go into plumbing (although I wish they would… plumbers are impossible to find). They apply again somewhere else, and contribute to some other employer’s self-delusions about how selective they are.

----

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/
by nacs | 2025-09-29 13:44:32+00:00
Strange - the model is marked as "Trains on data" ("To our knowledge, this provider may use your prompts and completions to train new models. This provider is disabled, but it can be re-enabled by changing your data policy.").

This is usually not the case for paid models -- is Openrouter just marking this model incorrectly or do Deepseek actually train on submitted data?
by Hikikomori | 2025-09-29 13:45:04+00:00
Just a few months into the year I couldn't see any other way of this ending other than a general strike or military coup. If trumps goons meets real resistance in Portland we'll likely have a massacre, they're primed to do this already and trump and his administration is not afraid of it happening, that may be the trigger for a military coup or general strike that might be enough to oust and imprison this administration. But this is also the country that didn't give a shit about Kent state massacre so I don't have my hopes up.
by baka367 | 2025-09-29 13:45:10+00:00
Yet I have met very few truly bad engineers in my life. Most of the "bad" ones were not bad in skills, but a bad match due to their willingness to die on one hill or another and complete refusal to work with others.

Yet, most of the interviews put way too little focus on the soft skills and way too much focus on the hard skills.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-29 13:45:18+00:00
UPS is pretty close to this. UPS Ground will usually load stuff onto multi-modal containers and ship via rail where practical. Fedex does for east->west coast, but they seem to do alot of relayed truck shipping.

Rail is almost always cheaper, and has mostly displaced long haul trucking.

The missing link is water, and the Jones Act, which was specifically intended to destroy intra-US shipping in favor of trucking, has been incredibly successful in doing just that.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-29 13:45:30+00:00
I mean. There was nothing as stupid as people saying trust the science as a way to sound smart when science is all about the method, questioning and skepticism.

But hey, when you can't argue, label. Specially when you have the government censoring people AND coercing health and science professionals to not go against policy.

It wasn't nice talking. But this is the kind of hypocrisy that you're used to. Go support authoritarianism, or do you not want to protect the children? We need chat control NOW!
by bluGill | 2025-09-29 13:45:44+00:00
Interviews have been extensively studied by phd, figuring out what works and what doesn't. I have yet to see anyone write a blog or comment that shows even an awareness that this research exists, much less what it in it. (I know this research exists, but I'll admit to not knowing how to find it. My company insists the interview process they make me follow is based on it)
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-29 13:45:44+00:00
It is wrong that autocracies don't have the same problems, perhaps or probably even more significant. The premises are wrong. If we think all politics stream down from Xi, you would be mistaken. The largest threat to him are his own party members and that is true in every autocracy.

So instead of making some grand technocratic beneficial decisions, the decisions are mostly oriented towards keeping you in power. A power that is very fragile. At times that still might net sensible policies, but the same is true for democracies who have to deal with public opinion. Democracies have the benefit that even a mob (the public) has some capabilities for learning.

The solutions to domestic manufacturing would be solved completely differently in both countries because the problems are different. A large factor is simply labor costs for developed nations for example.

I don't think there is a solution aside from import/export taxes. If that is true, is Trump secretly a good president? Perhaps not, but you would need to come up with solutions yourself. A democracy where a public just demands solutions is ineffective, but so are most if not all more autocratically governed nations.
by bonoboTP | 2025-09-29 13:45:50+00:00
This has truth but is not the full story. It gets your foot in the door, but I think junior researcher overinflate the importance of numbers. At the end of the day when you interview, your future boss will ask about your research, and it doesn't matter all that much how many papers they are and how many are top published. Yes you should have some top conf papers, but one great Arxiv paper that is actually used by others can have more value than 4 meh papers that slipped through the reviews.

Remember that nobody is a passive actor in the system. Everyone sees the state of conferences and review randomness and the gaming of the system. Senior researchers are area chairs and program chairs. They are well aware and won't take paper counts as the only signal.

Again, papers are needed, but it's really not the only thing.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-29 13:46:15+00:00
> The EU does not regulate keeping historical records though.

My experience dealing with GDPR and other EU regulations across several companies is that the laws are very vague in their wording. We encountered a lot of scenarios where the law was just vague enough that our lawyers advised us to avoid anything that could be interpreted as infringing. The penalties assigned in some of these laws are indicated as a percentage of global profits, so we would play it safe to avoid any possibility of some EU politician trying to score political points by getting headlines about a big fine they extracted from a tech company.

I don’t know about their political advertising laws specifically, but I would not be the least bit surprised if they deleted these ads to be 100% safe in dodging potential fines under vague laws.

> because we can't imagine a good reason they'd go out of their way to have someone spend time on deleting information.

Note that they didn’t remove the archive for non-EU countries. They only did this in the EU. By this logic, they spent extra effort exclusively doing this for the EU while keeping it for other countries. That suggests to me that some EU specific reason is in play.
by wintermutestwin | 2025-09-29 13:46:16+00:00
I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving forward and it clearly doesn't do that. I am sure I could have figured it out on my own in 5 mins, but I couldn't stop watching the trainwreck of this zeitgeist tech wasting my time doing a simple task.

I am not a coder (much), but I have to wonder if my experience is common in the coding world? I guess if you are writing code against the version that was the bulk of its training then you wouldn't face this specific issue. Maybe there are ways to avoid this (and others) pitfall with prompting? As it is, I do not see at all how LLMs could really save time on programming tasks without also costing more time dealing with its quirks.
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-29 13:46:19+00:00
> Are there any other ways to make hiring less risky?

Professional licensing.

Many other fields require professional licenses. I don't understand there's so much opposition in our field.

(Ok, I do understand.) In general, licensing has some risks:

The lemons will get excluded from the field. (Which is kind of the point.)

Or, the lemons will decide what the criteria for a professional license is; which turns it into a BS hurdle.

---

That being said, the article gets closer to the point of what a professional license is for: "An interview is like running 100m and a job is like a 10k.". If the license is more like running a 10k, then interviewers can rely on it to do a better screening than they could ever hope to do.
by posterguy | 2025-09-29 13:46:25+00:00
worth looking into Camera Lucida by roland barthes, sontag's on photography and for something more recent, bernard stiegler's writings on cameras as technics if interested in some of the headier aspects of what cameras and photography do to culture and human relationships (as opposed to, say, legal implications). i tend to agree with the author: the presence of cameras in community spaces have completely ruined my relationship to those spaces. ive seen people here call the author a karen which, maybe, but the last time i went to a small DIY rock show in my community there were more people taking pictures than there were watching the show. what value is it if everyone films and uploads a set from a local band on youtube? what is the point?
by codedokode | 2025-09-29 13:46:31+00:00
Why do you need a banking app, do you want to share your contact list and geolocation with the bank so badly? Do you need a bank app's antivirus to scan your phone and flag you as a suspicious user? Are you missing notifications offering a credit card with 45% yearly rate? Do you want to make investments while riding on a train while several suspiciously looking beggars carefully look at the numbers? Do you want to allow anyone who has a Linux kernel exploit to access your bank account?

I don't understand. It's unsafe and inconvenient.
by nneonneo | 2025-09-29 13:46:36+00:00
jadx (https://github.com/skylot/jadx) is similar, but for Android Java (Dalvik bytecode). I use it extensively and it works very well.

Over in .NET land, dnSpy (https://github.com/dnSpyEx/dnSpy) works very well, even on many obfuscated binaries.
by epgui | 2025-09-29 13:46:49+00:00
I don't exactly disagree, but I also don't like how this article confounds concepts and considers the idea that "people value different things" in a bit of a vacuum.

Usually I would expect an engineer to be able to gauge roughly "what values" are most important in a given practical context. Let's call those the "hard constraints" of the problem being solved. Let's set the hard constraints aside and consider "taste" only in the context of the remaining degrees of liberty.

In other words, we often impose on ourselves additional constraints that are not strictly necessary. An artist in a given context may technically be required to use oil paint and a 4x6 canvas. But the work product will be judged on what additional constraints (or lack thereof) the artist plays by.

As a rule of thumb, I'll stick my neck out and say that good software engineering taste, while notionally similar to artistic taste, is unique in that it is 1) aesthetically minimalist, and; 2) maximalist in self-restraint.

I think the notion of taste still eludes this description, but whenever I've encountered something I found truly in bad taste, it usually went counter to these principles for no obvious reason: in other words it was sacrificing something without any benefit. Oftentimes bad taste is taking a loss and calling it a tradeoff: in my experience this often occurs when people confuse simplicity for familiarity.
by amval | 2025-09-29 13:46:56+00:00
You don't think that the fact that Ellison is a staunch defender of regimes that disregard the international order in favour of military might is relevant to the fact that is also advocating for building a surveillance state?

In case you don't, to me it's painfully clear that these are just different aspects of the move towards more authoritarian forms of government. You CANNOT support a genocide and expect that this will not have an effect on democracy.

EDIT: Also note that I am trying to take your comments on good faith, but characterising support for genocide as "a foreign policy disagreement" feels a bit like an understatement.
by agentultra | 2025-09-29 13:46:59+00:00
Invert a binary tree, find the optimal path in an n-dimensional space of real numbers given by a function, design a horizontally scalable build system, get grilled by at least two people on your leadership skills... then, if you're extremely lucky, get hired to configure the button to be blue and have round corners. And get laid off in 9 months.

(Not saying this happened to me but it's a common story I've heard in the last few years)

I agree with the author that it is hard to assess someone's skill if you have a list of 100 people to interview and you know nothing about them. The bigger the stack of applications the easier it is to treat them like data and not people.

I know plenty of software developers who write, maintain, or contribute to OSS libraries; they write blog posts, give talks at conferences/meetups, and make videos in their spare time (or sometimes as part of their work). I've rarely walked into an interview where the hiring manager or the technical interviewer hadn't just read my name off my resume as I joined the meeting. Get to know the candidate's work before assuming they know nothing!

Maybe people involved in the hiring process should be given more time to properly research a candidate. Relying on ATS' and putting the burden on applicant's to do the work of proving themselves is causing a lot of folks to burnout just trying to get a job.