MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jorl17 | 2025-09-30 04:29:54+00:00
My comment will focus only on a subset of the article: the part regarding AI.

While I agree with the sentiment that AI has changed the practice forever, and therefore it is pretty silly to forbid AI during interviews (much like it was always silly to me to forbid a candidate from googling something during an interview), I haven't really seen evidence that juniors with AI have faster onboarding times.

Onboarding, to me, is about having the new team member adopt the existing team's practices, such as learning preferred code patterns, communication channels, established frameworks, and overall just getting to truly be a part of the team (tech and non-tech team).

In that sense, AI has done very little to help. If, on one hand, AI can help us produce better documentation that will help with this process and studying existing libraries and practices better, on the other hand, AI also enables a new team member to seek others less early on (a point the article itself makes), which I believe makes the onboarding process (according to my definition) slower — i.e. less communication = slower onboarding.

As I mentioned, we can also relate onboarding to getting to know the codebase, in which case AI definitely helps (and as more code is written with proper AI engineering practices, it will help more), but I really feel that this is a small part of the equation.

Similarly, I think getting to know the actual domain of a project (the users, the requirements, the 'language', the problems, etc.) is an important part of onboarding and, again, AI helps here, but not a whole lot. It's about people, not bits.

Sure, if you hire a junior to get him to work straight away on a new project, the new hire will be "productive" faster (therefore seeming to have been "onboarded" faster) than before, because the AI does make them "go faster" than before, but I wouldn't say they were _really_ onboarded.

Perhaps it's just a case of a different culture, a too-rigid definition of "quality", or just a different set of workplaces, but this has not been my experience at all. Most junior hires take at least 6-8 months to produce code with our standards of quality without a decent chunk of supervision. Even a junior with a very solid capability to think the system as a whole has a tendency to over-engineer or place code in the wrong places due to inexperience, which definitely affects their productivity.
by janee | 2025-09-30 04:30:08+00:00
Yes but you need to setup quite a bit of tooling to provide feedback loops.

It's one thing to get an llm to do something unattended for long durations, it's a other to give it the means of verification.

For example I'm busy upgrading a 500k LoC rails 1 codebase to rails 8 and built several DSLs that give it proper authorised sessions in a headless browser with basic html parsing tooling so it can "see" what affect it's fixes have. Then you somehow need to also give it a reliable way to keep track of the past and it's own learnings, which sound simple but I have yet to see any tool or model solve it on this scale...will give sonnet 4.5 a try this weekend, but yeah none of the models I tried are able to produce meaningful results over long periods on this upgrade task without good tooling and strong feedback loops

Btw I have upgraded the app and taking it to alpha testing now so it is possible
by jrockway | 2025-09-30 04:30:20+00:00
There are a lot of projects that involve very little of high level experience and a lot of grinding things. Juniors can be very good at these, and there are probably enough micro-problems that aren't critical that their brain is still being used and they're gaining skills that will help them take on more complicated tasks.

Something I last worked on with a junior engineer was our in-place backup system. I designed it and wrote the tricky part that involves DLL hell in a docker container. He wrote the "list backups", "delete backups", "create backup" CRUD API and CLI. My time was then free to put out fires or design something new.

It's not necessarily a no-brainer to hire and mentor junior engineers like the article says, but it's something you should think about. You will be surprised how much people actually know at job #1, and how quickly they can take on more complicated work that pays back your time investment in their mentorship. Plus, someone probably trained you to get you to where you are today, so there is some fairness in continuing the cycle.
by komali2 | 2025-09-30 04:30:46+00:00
I noticed I had an immediate bias against candidates that showed up to interviews using Windows (except for one person who was in WSL and seemed very comfortable in bash), or, not having their SSH key set up for cloning the github repo we used for our interview, or fumbling back and forth with their mouse between vscode and the browser, not using all their screen real estate, or not knowing even the most basic of keyboard shortcuts (I nearly cut an interview short once when I saw someone right click copy right click paste in vscode but I wanted to give them a fair shake so gritted my teeth and went through with the rest of the interview. They did poorly.). I never used it as a for/against factor but for me lack of interest in computers, and a lack of familiarity with the tools of our trade, is a red flag.

On the flip side, immediate green flags for me were: using linux, using keyboard shortcuts to manipulate windows / within the IDE, using an IDE other than vscode (vim/nvim or emacs are huge green flags), having custom scripts, having custom themes, or, the biggest one, self-hosting some applications. And Lo, these candidates also seem to perform the best in my experience.
by mooiedingen | 2025-09-30 04:31:44+00:00
I argue that if using a llm that has been trained on 'human' text is a cause for more troubles when used to code opposed to when one uses a model trained only code allow me to explain: If one uses models only trained on code all one has to do is to write the instructions as a comment at the top of the document and the llm will do the rest: ``` #The Following piece of code #Shall be written in python #The goal of the code is to #Scrape news.ycombinator.com #Fetching the last 10 posts #using requests and BS4 #The output shall be parsed #Title and corresponding url ``` In fact if the model used is not capable to finnish the script at this point it means that the model cannot code,
by rogerrogerr | 2025-09-30 04:32:10+00:00
I have a Roomba 980 that I scored off a rich neighbor for $50. It cleans well, makes nice parallel lines on the floor and reliably does not get stuck. I can be out of the house, push the button for it to clean, and will always come back to a clean floor and a charging Roomba. Can't imagine wanting much more.
by windsignaling | 2025-09-30 04:32:44+00:00
I'm surprised no one else has commented that a few of the conceptual comments in this article are a bit odd or just wrong.

> The final accuracy is 90% because 1 of the 10 observations is on the incorrect side of the decision boundary.

Who is using K-means for classification? If you have labels, then a supervised algorithm seems like a more appropriate choice.

> K-means clustering is a recursive algorithm

It is?

> If we know that the distributions are Gaussian, which is very frequently the case in machine learning

It is?

> we can employ a more powerful algorithm: Expectation Maximization (EM)

K-means is already an instance of the EM algorithm.
by elevation | 2025-09-30 04:33:24+00:00
You get the best bang for your buck if you just hire teachable people and fill the gaps that matter to you.

Sometimes teachability subsides over the course of your career: A senior I know has terrible git hygiene but is so close to retirement, he simply won't change. But some juniors I've mentored have significantly improved their ability to compose an atomic commit with a quality commit message, and are now valuable team contributors.

Even the core concepts of your CS162 course are easily within the grasp of a CS major from a less rigorous program; you could assign some required reading as part of your onboarding process if missing these concepts would prevent them from thinking critically about problems in your org.
Show HN: An official Wiki speedrun game in Roblox
by DamianL | 2025-09-30 04:33:25+00:00
Hi HN! I'm a PM at Wikipedia and have been working on a way to make Wiki speedruns into a playable game for younger gens (hence Roblox). Since a Wiki speedrun is where you go from one article to another using links on the page, the thinking was, let's make a 3D navigable maze that responds to your choices.

We did it, and the feedback is pretty decent so far, but I feel like it needs something to make it more exciting. I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially if you're into games. How did we do?
by csomar | 2025-09-30 04:35:37+00:00
What people (managers?) don’t realize (or don’t want to realize) is that building software is much more complex than most other professions. Some software is easy and has been done n+1th time (like a simple crud app with a db connection). But some software is really hard and could fall more in the R&D category.

Which brings me to the following point: Earlier in my career, I was a medical student. All superiors were doctors, and though there were managers, no manager intervened in an operation. Also doctors selected their hardware and methods. No manager will ever come to a doctor and suggest that they do their work differently.

Now when it comes to software, everyone wants to chime in.
by coreylane | 2025-09-30 04:36:23+00:00
I've been building https://resolver.one - a DNS server that returns GeoIP data as TXT records. Query an IP directly as the hostname (e.g. dig TXT 8.8.8.8.rslvr.one) and get back country, ASN, etc.

Always been fascinated by repurposing established protocols for unintended uses - DNS is everywhere, passes through firewalls, and has built-in caching. Seemed like a fun way to deliver location data without HTTP APIs.

Super niche, definitely a bit odd, but that's the appeal.
by 100th_Coin | 2025-09-30 04:37:20+00:00
Hey, I'm the TASer who put this run together. This was 5.8 million inputs.

I share the full assembly code in the tasvideos writeup: https://tasvideos.org/8991S#HereSTheAsmCode

To summarize what I put in the writeup, the 7-bit PCM audio was streamed in at approximately 25 Khz, (reading from the controller and writing to address $4011 every 71 CPU cycles.) while occasionally dipping to 9 Khz while streaming in the graphics data.
by ggm | 2025-09-30 04:38:17+00:00
They could be doing this a bit for the optics, undoubtedly also for the bottom line. A lot of cost is sunk cost, unrecoverable, but also you have to believe the backlog of orders could be swung behind a new jet which carried less taint of the certification stuffups, and carried with it some of the more recent cost improvements for an airline's TCO.

I'd consider this a hopeful, win-win situation. On the Boeing balance sheet, the max won't be regarded as a fruitful place to have landed: better to take off and go somewhere else.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-30 04:38:46+00:00
This shutdown seems politically efficient for all parties involved.

Vought and friends want an excuse to cut the federal bureaucracy. A shutdown gives them cover to do this. Trump, meanwhile, is fighting for the power of the purse. A shutdown gives him an emergency to test expanding that authority. Congressional Democrats face increasing frustration from their base, particularly left-leaning and younger voters--the shutdown, here, grants a messaging win. The only folks getting screwed are probably Congressional Republicans, though I wouldn't put it past Schumer and Jefferies to bungle the messaging so badly that they come out none worser.

(The winning move is voiding the debt ceiling. For all constituencies. Trump gets a free hand. Congressional Repoublicans gain leverage. And in the deal to remove the ciling, Congressional Democrats gain exceptional leverage.)
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-30 04:39:07+00:00
Interesting - I see the appeal of this approach. Equally, I do the opposite - I give easy problems which can be solved quickly. I find people either can do them pretty quickly, or not at all.

I used to ask harder problems, like you, but found two failure modes: either smart people who panic and can't think straight in an interview, or people who can do high level thinking but then can't swap two variables in actual code.

That said, thinking back on my recent hires, I'm not sure this method has yielded any improvements.
by gen220 | 2025-09-30 04:39:46+00:00
What makes a company great?

I think by most rational business metrics (top line revenue growth, gross margins, operating margins, cash flow, balance sheet), Shopify in 2025 is a fantastic business that seems to only be getting better?

This is notably different from an analysis of whatever the market price for its equity is or has been. I think that market price is ~40% overvalued today and it’s been much more overvalued than that in the past… but the fundamentals of the business have never been stronger.

In what way is it getting killed?

To force a comparison within the sector, is Amazon not a great company? Market price point aside, it’s arguably more politically charged and less aspirational engineering culture-wise. But I think I’d still call it a great company, same as Shopify.
by buybackoff | 2025-09-30 04:40:02+00:00
For working with arrays elements without bound checks, this is the modern alternative to pointers, without object pinning for GC and "unsafe" keyword: MemoryMarshal. GetArrayDataReference<T>(T[]). This is still totally unsafe, but is "modern safer unsafe" that works with `ref`s and makes friends with System.Runtime.CompileServices.Unfafe.

Funny point: the verbosity of this method and SRCS.Unsafe ones make them look slower vs pointers at subconscious level for me, but they are as fast if not faster to juggle with knifes in C#.

The `fixed` keyword is mostly for fast transient pinning of data. Raw pointers from `fixed` remain handy in some cases, e.g. for alignment when working with AVX, but even this can be done with `ref`s, which can reference an already pinned array from Pinned Object Heap or native memory. Most APIs accept `ref`s and GC continues tracking underlying objects.

See the subtle difference here for common misuse of fixed to get array data pointer: https://sharplab.io/#v2:C4LghgzgtgPgAgJgIwFgBQcDMACR2DC2A3ut...

Spans are great, but sometimes raw `ref`s are a better fit for a task, to get the last bits of performance.
by davidmckayv | 2025-09-30 04:41:47+00:00
Having technical access to prompts doesn't equal knowledge for criminal liability. Under 18 USC § 842, you need actual knowledge that specific information is being provided to someone who intends to use it for a crime. The fact that OpenAI's servers process millions of queries doesn't mean they have criminal knowledge of each one. That's not how mens rea works.

Prior restraint is presumptively unconstitutional. The burden is on the government to justify it under strict scrutiny. You don't have to prove something is protected speech first. The government has to prove it's unprotected and that prior restraint is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means. SB 53 fails that test.

The FCC comparison doesn't help you. In Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, the Supreme Court allowed broadcast regulation only because of spectrum scarcity, the physical limitation that there aren't enough radio frequencies for everyone. AI doesn't use a scarce public resource. There's no equivalent justification for content regulation. The FCC hasn't even enforced the fairness doctrine since 1987.

The real issue is you're trying to carve out AI as a special category with weaker First Amendment protection. That's exactly what I'm arguing against. The government doesn't get to create new exceptions to prior restraint doctrine just because the technology is new. If AI produces unprotected speech, prosecute it after the fact under existing law. You don't build mandatory filtering infrastructure and hand the government the power to define what's "dangerous."
by blindriver | 2025-09-30 04:42:19+00:00
The point on loyalty made me laugh out loud. Loyalty has been dead both ways for over 10 years now. Millenials and Gen Z openly shared salary to help each other get more money. An average tenure at a company went from 2 years to 1 year as well.

The idea that juniors are somehow more loyal is a pipe dream and a bald faced lie. Not that I blame them, employers have gotten much worse in the last 10 years as well, especially since the pull back in 2022 and most especially since AI. So neither employer nor employee is loyal anymore it’s completely a free for all now.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-09-30 04:42:35+00:00
Because highly experienced seniors are rarely on the job market.

>The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.

>The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career.

>The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs. If they leave that company, it’s often to go to a startup with a friend, or to follow a great boss to another company, or because they decided they really want to work on, say, Eclipse, because Eclipse is cool, so they look for an Eclipse job at BEA or IBM and then of course they get it because they’re brilliant. [Replace Eclipse with $HOT_TECHNOLOGY, like AI agents this year.]

>If you’re lucky, if you’re really lucky, they show up on the open job market once, when, say, their spouse decides to accept a medical internship in Anchorage and they actually send their resume out to what they think are the few places they’d like to work at in Anchorage.

>But for the most part, great developers (and this is almost a tautology) are, uh, great, (ok, it is a tautology), and, usually, prospective employers recognize their greatness quickly, which means, basically, they get to work wherever they want, so they honestly don’t send out a lot of resumes or apply for a lot of jobs.

- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

Most of the best programmers I know have worked 2-3 tech jobs. An internship or entry level job, a cushy job at a major company, and either retirement or a third job that they took because the problem was incredibly interesting and they got nerd sniped. I even saw the "medical internship" scenario happen once; a great colleague of mine had to move to France for his partner's career in medicine, so he quit his job and found something over there.
by renewiltord | 2025-09-30 04:42:45+00:00
If I managed to get commit on a bunch of projects and got some code in and then said something outrageous like Satan Is Real And We Should All Eat Babies I wonder if I could get people to just have to rebuild most open source software.

But I believe in free association so it's good that people are able to say Not For Me. I also think I'm glad people can say Not For Me If You Use Other Things That Are Not For Me.

But they'll just have to opt out of my stuff and I'll consume theirs hehehe because I'm an indiscriminate consumer.
by BoorishBears | 2025-09-30 04:43:47+00:00
Landing site is completely broken on Safari, iOS 26, stable channel, iPhone 17 Air

A lot of content is off-screen, and can't be swiped back on-screen.

-

Actual app did let me theough the flow, but had things like dialogs staying open and covering content (I assume a non tech person would have missed them)

I think part of the AI gap right now is the UI/UX you're expecting. AI isn't able to meet the bar for UI work for me at all right now. I do use it via Tab completion, or chat for specific scaffolding, but the agentic form is rough
by t-writescode | 2025-09-30 04:44:11+00:00
Because over 10 years, you'll have attrition in your seniors as they retire and you'll have juniors that have climbed the ranks and have built half the systems that are now juniors replacing them.

And treating employees with respect the whole time builds an *incredible* amount of loyalty. You also get opportunities for your existing seniors to help grow new team-members, which some of them seek out, and so on.
by tavavex | 2025-09-30 04:44:30+00:00
You don't pay as much to retain an employee as you do to hire one. If your employee feels like they're earning 5-10% below market rate, it's probably far less likely that they'll want to find another job than if you pay them 25%+ below market rate. There is a cost and a risk to switching jobs, and most established people at the company won't jump ship due to a discrepancy as small as this. So, the upside is that you get to train people and pay them at a slight discount, as opposed to having to put up a higher senior pay offer to attract someone willing to do the job.

Though, as a current new grad, the desperation market is setting in. I am open to getting paid basically anything a person can survive on where I live to just gain more experience, and many other people are in the exact same situation. The junior market's demands will keep going down until either the benefit of employing us becomes large enough for companies, or until we all leave.
by majormajor | 2025-09-30 04:44:36+00:00
"Were they ever profitable" is an easy enough thing to look up, why not just do that instead of use it as a rhetorical device?

https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRBT/irobot/gross-prof...

From that, they had 13 straight years of profitable net income starting in 2009. Rough recently because they got eaten up by cheaper upstarts; happens to almost everyone eventually. But clearing several hundred million cumulative in net income over a decade+ (peaking 2018-2020, so they were consistently growing from 2009 to 2020 even) is far from "were they ever profitable" territory. They don't have pre-2009 there, but from some other googling it looks like they were profitable by when he left in 2008 after their 2005 IPO. So he was there from inception to IPO and millions-a-year-profitability, and then you're discounting that because 12 years after he left some companies in China had better copies. Building something for 15 years to IPO isn't some VC pump and dump scam, it's harder.

If that's not success you have a ridiculous bar. "So for me the guy never had a real success" - get out of here, do your googling before making claims like that.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-30 04:44:46+00:00
Let's say the "Secrets of the Universe" broadly consists of Graph of 100 "abstract" interconnected concepts. The concepts have to be abstract because it is describing everything. It has to be limited in number because we cannot be endlessly chasing the definitions till we reach the levels of atoms. Is it possible to get glimpse of that Graph just toying with abstract ideas. The exact nodes / concepts used in the graph maybe different (depending on field) but the structure will be isomorphic. It has to be discoverable in any field since we started with the assumption that the Graph is "Secret of the Universe" so it should apply to any subset as well and should be discoverable from that subset. This is like analytic functions where knowing its derivatives in a small enough interval can lead us to the exact function.
by jimbob45 | 2025-09-30 04:45:55+00:00
No one cares about FOSS experience. You’re lucky if they even visit your GitHub/Lab/Berg at all and even luckier if they look at anything past your heatmap.

Fact is, if FOSS experience counted for anything, then those charged with hiring would also possess the capacity to understand that C# and Java experience are nearly 1:1. Sadly, it doesn’t and they don’t.