MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smj-edison | 2025-09-12 18:50:46+00:00
Yeah, especially for learning how to use a solver!

> Most constraint solving examples online are puzzles, like Sudoku or "SEND + MORE = MONEY". Solving leetcode problems would be a more interesting demonstration.

He's exactly right about what tutorials are out there for constraint programming (I've messed around with it before, and it was pretty much Sudoku). Having a large body of existing problems to practice against is great.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-12 18:50:56+00:00
The problem of how you organize content in desktop user interfaces is far from solved. Often I have 6 virtual desktops, and maybe 5 Firefox windows and maybe a Chrome and an Edge (testing and the occasional app that doesn’t work with Firefox, a problem made worse by my employer forcing us to use the ESR) and those all have tabs. Not to mention various IDEs and distraction generators like Slack and Outlook that have enough urgent and important content that I can’t just get rid of them.

Adding a new kind of window or tab has the potential of organizing some little bit of this universe at the expense of there being more things to look at globally, I badly want to be able to hit a button and see not just the windows I have open but all the tabs and that counts browser tabs but also IDE tabs and ideally these sort of sub windows inside of browser UIs.

Reminds me of the startup I worked at where somebody got up at each standup meeting and said “we can’t find anything in the N different places (Slack, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Docs, …) places stuff could be so we need to add N+1 places.” For a while I pushed back against this obvious fallacy but nobody else did and management would approve another monthly subscription…. Until at some point the investors pushed back in the disorganization and added the distraction of OKRs and people thought “maybe we need a subscription to some service that reminds us to cancel subscriptions we don’t use”. One ring that would rule them all never seriously considered, I guess people didn’t actually expect “enterprise search” to actually work.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 18:51:20+00:00
The purpose of coding questions should be a problem that you can solve in about 20 minutes, then they ask another, and then you get 20 minutes to either finish or talk about other things. If you ask questions where either someone knows the trick and they pass, or they don't and fail you don't learn much. You need to watch the person write code to see if they are reasonable about it.
by HexDecOctBin | 2025-09-12 18:52:00+00:00
> It's like saying it was wrong for the Web to have common standards

Meanwhile, in real world, it is Chrome that is setting the standards, and everybody is following it while holding up a fig leaf to maintain some semblance of dignity. Why? Because W3C failed in making decent standards. Is CSS and Javascript anyone's idea of good architecture?
by pxc | 2025-09-12 18:52:28+00:00
Depends on what you consider to be "support", but this report is pretty interesting and says something like 24% of US adults sympathize greatly with Mangione, and 63% have some non-zero level of sympathy for him. Outright approval for his actions isn't directly quantified by this poll but is undoubtedly lower than that 24% figure.

One interesting thing is sympathy for Mangione doesn't seem very strongly influenced by income level or level of education. The two biggest mediators seem to be political alignment and age. It seems the vast majority of US adults under 50 have a significant amount of sympathy for him, with only 28% expressing no sympathy at all.

https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-suppor...
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-12 18:52:41+00:00
You need to do things to gain experience. Doing time is not enough. A 20 year old can in many cases have done and experienced much more already in life than some 40 year olds. The large majority of today's mass population have identical lives that are staked out for them from the cradle to the grave, and it is true that most only gain experience by accidents which accumulate over the years. But many people live real lives already from a young age, and have the experience which that gives.
by michaelt | 2025-09-12 18:53:15+00:00
> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.

Both teams are corrupt, but in different ways.

On my team it’s rules being bent but not broken, a few bad apples, everyone was doing it, parents wanting to give their children the best start in life, the inevitable results of the need to raise campaign funds to continue their great work, and/or they’ve already rightly been suitably punished.

On the other team it’s a problem that runs through all of them, reflecting their poor character, the lack of basic decency resulting from their hollow look-out-for-number-1 political beliefs, and is undoubtedly representative of a much wider problem that’s being covered up.
by etrez | 2025-09-12 18:53:22+00:00
Unfortunately the author of the TIOBE index has obeyed too quickly to what Mr Herrera told him. The hits about that "Ada Lovelace architecture" are a negligible part of the hits you get with: +"Ada programming" +"nvidia". The lions' share is about Nvidia's own usage of the Ada language. Those hits should be counted of course.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 18:53:37+00:00
Yeah, with the appalling civil forfeiture concept that I hope everyone is aware of, I also feel uncomfortable with this word "suspicious."

In brief summary: If the police search your car (let's just assume probable cause exists) in a routine traffic stop and find say, $50,000 in cash in a bag, they can charge the cash with a crime and arrest it, and unlike a person, it's guilty until definitively proven innocent. I don't think that's fair. And it's a big reason that holding more than a little cash is financially risky.

On the other hand, up till now I'd argue it's more risky (just specifically in terms of potential for loss of the money) to have your BTC in Coinbase or say, FTX where mine was, than in self-custody. These notions may reverse if your crypto private keys can be seized automatically as "suspicious," and the civil forfeiture thing has proven that the police will do that.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 18:53:45+00:00
Yes. I put a ton of work into it. I had about 60 pages worth of notes. On inverse kinematics, FABRIK, cyclic algorithms used in robotics, A*/RRT for real-world scenarios etc. I was super prepared. Talked to the CEO for about two hours. Took notes on all videos I can find of team members on youtube and their company.

Luckily the hiring manager called me back and levelled with me, nobody kept him in the loop and he felt terrible about it.

Some stupid contrived dumbed down version of this crane demo was used for the live test where I had to build some telemetry crap. Nerves took over, mind blanked.

Here's the take-home assignment requirements btw: https://i.imgur.com/HGL5g8t.png.

Here's the live assignment requirements: [1] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png & [2] https://i.imgur.com/aaiy7QR.png.

At this rate I'm probably going to starve to death before I get a job. Should I write a blog post about my last 2 years of experiences? They are comically bad.

This was for monumental.co - found them in the HN who's hiring threads.
by godelski | 2025-09-12 18:53:51+00:00
> a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.

Case in point:

Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.

Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.

Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.

Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.

We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-12 18:54:06+00:00
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.

https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
by reenorap | 2025-09-12 18:54:14+00:00
We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the prices, like PG&E in California. My rates have doubled in a few years to over $0.40/kWh and up over $0.50/kWh after I go up a tier depending on usage.
by gajus | 2025-09-12 18:54:18+00:00
Somewhat related to your ask https://github.com/gajus/pg-dump-parser

We use it internally to create folder-like structure representation of our database schema.

https://github.com/gajus/pg-dump-parser?tab=readme-ov-file#r...

Very handy when reviewing changes in version control, etc.
by dudefeliciano | 2025-09-12 18:54:21+00:00
> we have to talk to each other.

yes, the conversations need to be honest and on equal footing. Not rage/click-bait to further divide society, which is exactly what Kirk did. His "conversations" were not about exchanging ideas but "owning the libs".

> There’s a deeply concerning, common pattern of radicalized rhetoric on the left rejecting dialogue in favor of “action” (read: violence.).

Qanon, January sixth, Pizzagate, Plandemic, Birther and other conspiracy theories, the attacks on democrat politicians, the rhetoric around George Floyds murder and BLM, the rage against black athletes doing something as simple as taking a knee. See a pattern? Hell Trump's own words and those of his cabinet are radicalized rhetoric, so I really don't know what to tell you when you say "the left rejects dialogue and is violent". "The left" has tried for years to explain the world via fact checking and educational content, lots of good that has done!

> “If we don’t work out our disagreements with conversations, there’s only violence left.”

Charlie Kirk never planned to be swayed by a better opinion. His whole career was based on "prove me wrong", an obvious challenge to prove that he is right, and nothing can sway him. Give me one time where he changed his mind through dialogue. Even when shown a dolphin foetus and mistook it for human, he did not accept that he was wrong.

So yea, excuse me if I don't think you are arguing in good faith, just like i don't think Charlie Kirk ever was.
by Qwertious | 2025-09-12 18:54:42+00:00
Just because a device can do something, doesn't mean it should. The RM team, for all their faults, were intentionally minimalist, and did not set out to make their device an e-reader. Complaining that the non-e-reader reads e-books poorly is just missing the focus of the device. It's about imitating paper but without futzing around with reams of actual paper.
by mattmcknight | 2025-09-12 18:55:00+00:00
"the postmodernists attacking physics"

The Sokal affair was a physicist attacking the postmodernists for attacking physics (and scientific realism) by showing the postmodernists would publish complete nonsense.

The current attack is saying the physics establishment is backing a theory that doesn't adequately make predictions (not adequately supporting scientific realism).

It can be viewed outside the realm of power, that's a very postmodern view.
by boxerab | 2025-09-12 18:55:12+00:00
QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Martin, Mapserver, .... but they still have not managed to disrupt ESRI. I think because they are still too fragmented, and still mostly stuck on the desktop, while everything is moving to the cloud.
by greyw | 2025-09-12 18:55:25+00:00
> Quota tracking when using docker subvolumes is basically unusable due to the btrfs-cleaner "background" task (imagine VSCode + DevContainers taking 3m on a modern SSD to cleanup 1 big docker container). This is on 6.16.

I had to disable quota tracking. It lags my whole desktop whenever that shit is running in the background. Makes it unusable on an interactive desktop.
by philipbjorge | 2025-09-12 18:55:47+00:00
Important is subjective — In the healthcare space, I’d make the claim that most applications don’t expose themselves correctly (native or web).

CV and direct mouse/kb interactions are the “base” interface, so if you solve this problem, you unlock just about every automation usecase.

(I agree that if you can get good, unambiguous, actionable context from accessibility/automation trees, that’s going to be superior)
by delusional | 2025-09-12 18:55:50+00:00
> Democracy always has the risk of sabotaging itself by naive actors who don't respect fundamental freedoms because they fear the public.

That sounds like a very radical statement. How are we to decide on these "fundamental freedoms" without putting them through the same democratic process we usually employ? Are we to ask the king for his opinions on how our democracy must be restricted? Are we to ask you? If the democratically elected officials "feat the public" what are they fearful of? Not getting elected? Are you implying the democratically elected officials shouldn't do what the public want?

Additionally, do these "fundamental freedoms" include the right to transact with any counterpart at any point? I have not found that right in any established human rights framework.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-12 18:56:03+00:00
That makes me think of games where the story places the protagonist in a simulation, which is incredibly convenient for the real-world developers and authors. All the quirks and limitations of the real game (invisible barriers, fail on killing a story-critical NPC, etc.) can be blamed on issues in the fictional one.

For example, the Assassin's Creed series.
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-12 18:56:08+00:00
> My biggest problem with leetcode type questions is that you can't ask clarifying questions.

What is there to clarify? Leetcode-type questions are usually clear, much clearer than in real life projects. You know the exact format of the input, the output, the range for each value, and there are often examples in addition to the question. What is expected is clear: given the provided example inputs, give the provided example outputs, but generalized to cover all cases of the problem statement. The boilerplate is usually provided.

One may argue that it is one of the reasons why leetcode-style questions are unrealistic, they too well specified compared to real life problems that are often incomplete or even wrong and require you to fill-in the gaps. Also, in real life, you may not always get to ask for clarification: "here, implement this", "but what about this part?", "I don't know, and the guy who knows won't be back before the deadline, do your best"

The "coin" example is a simplification, the actual problem statement is likely more complete, but the author of the article probably felt these these details were not relevant to the article, though it would be for someone taking the test.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-12 18:56:15+00:00
I'd say that learning to solve tough LeetCode problems has very little (if not precisely zero) value in terms of you as a programmer learning to do something useful. You will extremely rarely need to solve these type of tougher select-the-most efficient-algorithm problems in most real-world S/W dev jobs, and nowadays if you do then just as AI.

Of course you may need to pass an interview LeetCode test, in which case you may want to hold your nose and put in the grind to get good at them, but IMO it's really not saying anything good about the kind of company that thinks this is a good candidate filter (especially for more experienced ones), since you'd have to be stupid not to use AI if actually tasked with needing to solve something like this on the job.
by cyberax | 2025-09-12 18:56:51+00:00
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.

Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.

After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
by Fwirt | 2025-09-12 18:56:59+00:00
There are a lot of people spreading FUD about these patents, but if you read the actual patent, it’s not like Nintendo now has a patent on all summoning of creatures in video games. The patent is for “you control a character, you throw Pokéball, Pokémon comes out and you control it, and if it comes near another Pokémon it starts a battle”. This is clearly aimed directly at Palworld.

Are most software patents stupid and overly broad? Yes. Should this one have been granted? No. Is this going to stifle the industry? Highly unlikely.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 18:57:01+00:00
Still though, bad bet. The other guy can easily keep arguing that it's still just a few more years from being repealed, until one of you dies of old age.

Unless your bet was that "it will be strengthened before it is repealed" and then his position was that "it would be repealed without ever being strengthened." Still possible for neither to happen indefinitely though, leaving the bet pending.
by dsr_ | 2025-09-12 18:57:16+00:00
That works for a conventional mouse: you've used one before. This one is a little different shape, a little bigger, ooh, no wires. That's fine: in five minutes you know whether it's OK.

How long does it take to decide whether you love or hate a thumb-ball? A big ball? A SpaceMouse? Has anyone who didn't use a ThinkPad decide to buy a keyboard with an integrated nubbin?

Sure, I can buy twenty devices for $200 each and return 19 of them. That puts 19 items into "open box" status, causes me to re-pack and re-ship and track 19 items, and makes 19 vendors vaguely cranky at me.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 18:57:32+00:00
> why do you do leetcode hard interviews?

I don't. I do easy code interviews because there are people who work great on a team and know enough buzzwords to sound like they know how to write code, but cannot. Something that isn't hard to solve in about 20 minutes (I can solve in 5 - but I've seen a solution several times and so don't have to think about the solution), but is different enough that you haven't memorized the solution. If you can't solve an easy problem then you can't code.
Ask HN: Favorite CSS / component framework for web admins?
by debo_ | 2025-09-12 18:57:32+00:00
I find myself about to build several administrative-type interfaces for a few different businesses. Similar stuff like create organizations / projects / users, view audit logs, things like this.

Do you have any favorite CSS or "fuller-stack" tools you reach for? I'm using Django (but not the Django admin) and would ideally prefer to just pull resources in from a 3rd-party CDN if possible (at least during dev.)
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-12 18:57:32+00:00
It's usually covered in a first or second year algorithms course. It's a recursive problem definition paired with tabling to eliminate redundant work. Critically, the recursive subproblems have to be overlapping (they'll do some of the same work as the other recursive steps) to see any benefit. You can implement it top-down and add a cache (memoization) or you can implement it bottom-up and fill out the table iteratively rather than through recursion.

If you just implement it recursively without tabling then you end up re-doing work and it's often an exponential runtime instead of polynomial.

To clarify on overlapping, consider Fibonacci:

F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2) # and the base cases

F(n-1) includes F(n-2) in its definition, and both F(n-2) and F(n-1) include F(n-3). If you implement this naively it produces an exponential runtime. Once you add the table, the single initial recursive call to F(n-1) will end up, through its chain of calls, storing the result of F(n-2) and now the implementation is linear instead of exponential.
by stahorn | 2025-09-12 18:57:42+00:00
Here's one. A great read: https://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientifi...

It's available online also: https://www.thesciencecouncil.com/pdfs/PlentifulEnergy.pdf

I read it 14 years ago or so, after the Fukushima accident. I don't think the science has changed since then, or since the 90s when this project was shut down. There continue to be so much money in coal, gas, and oil and it's from there I think most of the opposition to nuclear stems from.

Apart from fast reactors, there's also the traditional reactors and storage of spent fuel. Finland's close to opening their process facility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
by pwg | 2025-09-12 18:57:42+00:00
> Yet I notice some users clearly dig into it, upvote good posts, and bring hidden gems to the front page.

That is how almost all of the front page items get to the front page to begin with.

> just looking for things you personally enjoy?

Mostly, plus the new feed has more variety (and more noise too) than the front page. So you'll find items you enjoy but that don't actually ever garner enough upvotes to make it to the front page.