MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by condiment | 2025-09-29 13:53:44+00:00
The 'cost of a bad hire' is received wisdom that needs to go away. The first order effects of your team's time investment are easy to see and make good content for your engineering leadership blog when you're aiming for promotion. The second order effects are what get debated in threads like this ad infinitum.

Paradoxically, a higher bar for hiring increases these consequences for everyone. A bad hire is only consequential in the first place because hiring managers are slow to cut them loose. Managers are slow to cut loose because they are morally culpable for the consequences to the individual they hired. When a manager extends an offer, they are accepting some responsibility for a significant change in a person's life. It's very difficult to walk that back when it's a bad fit, knowing that hiring is a slow process and every other company out there is scared of making a bad choice. But at the end of the day, interviews are an approximation of the candidate/company fit in what is ultimately a matching problem. More attempts make for better matches. Companies and candidates both would be better served by being faster to hire and faster cut loose.
by beAbU | 2025-09-29 13:53:46+00:00
My MIL has an ungoogled huawei phone. She was trying to get some app and family told her she needs to get the play store to get the app.

Holy fucking shit. What a hive of scum and villany you encounter when searching for the play store. The first link on google launches a full screen PWA that looks _exactly_ like the play store. It took me a hot minute to realize that I was about to install something unsavoury. I almost wanted to dunk the phone in some bleach.

I'm an android user, and I prefer it over iPhone, but the surface area for attacks is way way way too large. Users who are less technically inclined are so damn vulnerable. I don't know how to fix this.
by seec | 2025-09-29 13:54:26+00:00
Yeah but that's mostly because they dominate the benchmarks. And part of it is better hardware engineering but also part of it is coupling with optimized software bits that they pushed to devs very well.

It was very well done and strategic on their part but realistically without that they are not that much better than AMD and the margins would be much smaller if it had 1-to-1 compatibility as an x86 has.

Also, since improvements have been plateauing and entry level is becoming enough for more and more people the margins are going to diminish even more, high-end GPU is going to become even more niche overtime IMO.

So, I'd say he is not wrong in spirit, the timeline is just bigger than expected.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-29 13:54:29+00:00
Having an MBA for strategic business decisions probably is more relevant than having an engineer aside from some highly technical niche sector. You need an open culture to discuss strategy and involve different perspectives (No, it doesn't matter if your MBA of choice is black or not).

Most MBAs know too that wanking to quarterlies doesn't make a good long term strategy. Most companies just forget to do any long term strategy as long as such basic controlling data points look decent.
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-29 13:55:00+00:00
> Asking a candidate to solve some problem which lets a candidate work in a slightly less high stakes environment. but requires candidates to do extra work, taking longer than just the interview.

I refuse a lot of these. I've put a lot of time into many of them, just to be ghosted.

Typically, when the take-home comes with a laundry list of frameworks and 3rd party libraries, I walk away. Coming up to speed with all of them is too time consuming for the probability of getting ghosted.

It takes a lot of work on the interviewers side to come up with a good take-home. It requires discipline to reject the temptation to just throw in a laundry list of requirements.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-29 13:55:01+00:00
They work for contractors -- alot of the companies that used to do stuff like newspaper and courier delivery got into this, but it varies dramatically be region.

For the lousy contractors, it's sort of an uncanny valley between UPS and a crowdsourced model like DoorDash or Laser. The employees are sketch. At work, i used them to ship WFH user equipment -- they'd do shit like deliver laptops to dumpsters at apartment complexes (complete with pictures). In NYC, the couriers park on a side street, stack packages on the street and have casual labor deliver them.

I've also had bad experiences with dropboxes where the couriers pilfer high value items - return iphones in particular. They get misdelivered to incorrect addresses on purpose.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-09-29 13:55:01+00:00
hard skills are difficult enough to try and assess; soft skills even harder. Most try with behavioural questions which have very little signal IMO. I'm a senior manager / director now so most interviews focus on softer skills. My strategy is to give very concrete examples to the "tell me about a time" style questions. Every other answer is easily forgettable.
by latexr | 2025-09-29 13:55:13+00:00
> I am not a coder (much), but I have to wonder if my experience is common in the coding world?

It is, yes. Surely someone will come and tell you it doesn’t happen to them, but all that tells you is that it ostensibly isn’t universal, but still common enough you’ll find no end of complaints.

> Maybe there are ways to avoid this (and others) pitfall with prompting?

Prompting can’t help you with things not in the training set. For many languages, all LLMs absolutely suck. Even for simple CLI tools, telling an LLM you are on macOS or using the BSD version may not be enough to get them to stop giving you the GNU flags. Furthermore, the rsync change in macOS is fairly recent so there’s even fewer data online on it.

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2025/04/06/rsync-replaced-...

> 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.

And that’s the best case scenario. It also happens that people blindly commit LLM code and introduce bugs and security flaw they cannot understand or fix.

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown

https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-29 13:55:20+00:00
> firing is much more expensive than hiring

It's the reason why most jobs, even in Europe, have a probation period. During this oeriod firing is inexpensive. In my current employment the probation period was 6 months.

If in 6 months you still can't figure out if a hire was good or not, interviewing won't save you.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-29 13:55:46+00:00
The issue with professional licensing, is that it's very, very specific.

In things like civil engineering, there's usually mandated context. You have to work within certain parameters, so it's not too difficult to test with real-world criteria.

With software engineering, it's all over the place. In fact, one of the most exciting things that I used to look for, in potential candidates, was people who were not bogged down with dogma, and would bring alternative viewpoints to the team.

Since anyone coming into my team would require a ton of training; regardless of their seniority, I always had a nice, long on-ramp, in which I could evaluate people.
by corytheboyd | 2025-09-29 13:55:52+00:00
That is a really neat interview format, the lightning round of varying themes of common tasks! This right here proves to me you are a good interviewer:

> I'm not worried about whether the string split command takes its parameters in this or that order, I just want to know you know it exists

I’ve run quite a few “can you write code” interviews in the age of practical AI, and I don’t know if I’ve been lucky, am good at breaking through nonsense, or if internet claims are exaggerated, but I can hardly tell the difference between now and the before times. You get someone on a call, you explain a problem, you see how they approach it, you probe along the way. I don’t work for a giant FAANG-like, maybe that’s part of it.
by Swoerd123 | 2025-09-29 13:55:58+00:00
The irony is that the civilian drone market exploded (no pun intended) because of cheap innovation, and now the same qualities (small, cheap, adaptable) make them nearly impossible to regulate without sweeping bans.

I suspect that an increasing number of countries and cities will move toward permanent drone bans, as battlefield technology inevitably filters down to organized crime—and eventually even petty crime.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-29 13:56:14+00:00
Rewriting an existing working codebase rather than committing to its incremental improvement is usually a sign of bad decision making. So I'd be concerned if a team that had an existing mature codebase in C++ and a team of engineers hired on that path were taking on such a venture.

But that's kinda... not a bloggable topic, frankly.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-29 13:56:15+00:00
Attacking the DMV doesn't make licenses vanish into thin air

Nevada's DMV was part of a hack a couple of months ago, and it caused chaos beyond just drivers licenses.

https://www.2news.com/news/local/nevada-restores-fingerprint...

This is an excellent real-world example of why having all your data eggs in one basket is a terrible idea.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-29 13:56:20+00:00
> It's a leveraged buyout

Correct: “the transaction will be funded by a combination of cash from each of PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners as well as roll-over of PIF’s existing stake in EA, constituting an equity investment of approximately $36 billion, and $20 billion of debt financing.”

EA currently carries about $2.6bn in non-current liabilities of which $1.5bn is long-term debt. So an order of magnitude more debt.
by rob_c | 2025-09-29 13:56:30+00:00
80%+ at peace time. I.e. not with mandated farming practices and not with a national focus as part of priority to fix this.

Unlike the Sudan we don't produce the remaining 15%+/-5 because we're a wealthy nation and can engage and have become semi-reliant a little on trade. And our tastes have changed as a result of the availability of luxury goods. This is wildly different to not having capacity or infrastructure which can be tweaked. (I'm not saying magically tonnes of milk and honey appear from nowhere) And this is ignoring the scary word of rationing.

Sudan either can't, won't or is constrained from producing the missing part of the food required to feed their people. But that's more linked to US foreign policy than this hypothetical discussion otherwise.

Edit in not even touching RoI vs UK army. I'm not pretending any show down would be bloodless, but the UK has a few plain numerical overwhelming superiorities. Again stating simple facts.
by ng12 | 2025-09-29 13:56:46+00:00
I was going to agree with you until the implication that it's learning the nitty-gritty details that's important.

I can teach someone the details on the job. Give me a new grad with strong fundamentals, a love of programming, and an interest in the domain and I'll teach them in sixth months whatever they missed in college that's relevant to the job.

However I've noticed that the fundamentals are so watered down, even at top-tier schools, that young devs like that are harder and harder to find.
by belorn | 2025-09-29 13:57:16+00:00
Its been a well known secret that Russia has been using incursions into Swedish airspace and Swedish land as a part of troop training for decades. The only major change in recent time is the rate of the incidents, and the use of interference that is more noticeable to civilian infrastructure. Boat captains from multiple industries are complaining that they have to go back to use physical maps rather the GPS when plotting courses through the Baltics, as the gps indicator just spins in circle and produce visual noise. It is a new situation, through built on top of past behavior. The general theory is that this represent a change towards a more drone-heavy strategy with different attack and defense technologies being used as part of training and testing.

I do not see it as a direct way to manufacture consent for a war, but the impact on civilian infrastructure is starting to be annoying enough that the military of multiple nations around the Baltics are looking to do something, and the effect of that something may create political waves. Same things with the attacks on undersea cables and the suggested counter measures, which also include military aspects to it.
by red_rech | 2025-09-29 13:57:17+00:00
I’m still desperately looking for an out from this industry.

The layoff and market conditions helped me realized just how useless my career has been.

I knew I never wanted to work professionally in software, but it was the only thing accessible that pays well.

Even now it’s the only thing keeping me afloat, so I don’t see any way out but slow painful [career] death.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-09-29 13:57:34+00:00
> Anyone living, working, or otherwise contributing to society in America is an American.

No. That is very much not a legal or even sociological definition. There are plenty of people who live and work in America who have other nationalities and would prefer to not be considered American, even. A lot of Americans (I am one, before you assume something else) have a weird complex where they think everyone wants to be them. But that is very, very wrong to assume.
by pixl97 | 2025-09-29 13:57:44+00:00
>Mapping out the unknowns

and

> isn't about some all-knowing deity

Seems like a big conflict of your own thoughts.

Or as they say....

> there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.
by guywithahat | 2025-09-29 13:58:10+00:00
As far as I can tell, modern C++20/23 is as safe (if not safer) than rust. So much of rust compares itself to C++99, where modern C++ doesn't use exceptions, has smart pointers (RAII), improved casting and array management, and has an extensive suite of checking tools and flags. The conversations I've seen at my company for using rust tend to be "well it would be tun to do something different", which just aren't very compelling to me. I worry Rust is going to end up like Haskell in 5 or so years
by jmull | 2025-09-29 13:58:16+00:00
> I actually have no idea how big teams work on large C++ codebases.

They choose a memory management strategy and stick to it. Of course, the problem, relative to something like rust, is the compiler doesn't enforce it. You can use linting tools and/or reviews.

> Usually, you need to have a good idea of how the whole thing works. You can change one part of the code, and it will introduce bugs in the whole project

That's not a problem with C++ specifically. That's a problem with organization. It's probably best know as the "Big Ball of Mud" architecture[1]. Rust has no particular defense against it, nor other languages that I am familiar with. If you don't see it as much with rust it's only because it takes time to develop. (counter-intuitively, it's an impressively successful architecture -- so many long-lived projects use it).

[1] http://www.laputan.org/mud/
by ben_w | 2025-09-29 13:58:22+00:00
>> it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped.

> But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

An S-curve is exactly the opposite of "suddenly" stopping.

It is possible for us to get a sudden stop, due to limiting factors.

For a hypothetical: if Moore's Law had continued until we hit atomic resolution instead of the slowdown as we got close to it, that would have been an example of a sudden stop: can't get transistors smaller than atoms, but yet it would have been possible (with arbitrarily large investments that we didn't have) to halve transistor sizes every 18 months until suddenly we can't.

Now I think about it, the speed of commercial airlines is also an example of a sudden stop: we had to solve sonic booms first before even considering a Concorde replacement.
by fuglede_ | 2025-09-29 13:58:45+00:00
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

I know of some work on trying out various heuristics for A*; Section 5 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.06508 gives some examples of what works and what doesn't. I don't think D* Lite specifically has ever featured. There's plenty of room for trying to come up with other heuristics, and just for other takes in general.

> But for bigger boards you won't be able to materialize the whole graph.

If we restrict to boards corresponding to solvable puzzles, the number of vertices is https://oeis.org/A002884 (1, 1, 6, 168, 20160, 9999360, 20158709760, …) and indeed grows quickly. It's possible to manipulate the 7×7 case (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01467, shameless plug) but anything bigger than that seems hard.

One can ask, for example, how many moves are needed for the hardest n×n Swapple. For n = 1, …, 7 the answers are 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 respectively, but we don't know what the answer is for n = 8.
by accrual | 2025-09-29 13:58:53+00:00
One additional downside to professional licensing is that it can be time consuming and costly. For example, to bring a new physician on board to a practice they must be:

* Licensed (allowed to practice in that state)

* Credentialed (degrees and experience verified)

* Enrolled (able to be imbursed via insurance)

* Priviledged (authorized to perform certain tasks/roles)

This could take weeks or months per physician and there is usually an entire team (Medical Staff Office/MSO) dedicated to the work.
by groovy2shoes | 2025-09-29 13:59:07+00:00
> the rather chaotic and unprofessional (and potentially insecure) nature of the way Cargo project dependencies explode into a hard-to-reason-about mess.

this is one of my biggest gripes, too. that alone has been enough to cause me to avoid Rust for projects wherefore it would otherwise be a good fit. you can pull in "one" dependency and find yourself downloading hundreds of gigabytes of zillions of tiny dependencies, sometimes the same one at multiple versions. it's by no means a problem exclusive to Rust, but that's no excuse.

it's been a while, but my other major gripe was the way so many crates would require the nightly. the rust devs have done a good job maintaining backward compatibility between stable releases, but afaik there isn't any guarantee regarding the nightly. keeping up with the nightly is infeasible when each compiler release and all your dependencies needs to be vetted by your security team.

i also long found myself disappointed by the lack of a real specification, but that one is relatively minor. less of a frustration.
by Arch-TK | 2025-09-29 13:59:15+00:00
The fact that 95+% of the population is unaware of the problems with this doesn't make it okay. There are lots of things 95% of the population don't know or think about which we don't just throw our arms up and ignore.

Moreover, age verification is trivial to circumvent or opt out of. The only way to opt out if this thing will likely be to leave the country. Which certainly increasingly seems like a good idea to me.
by motbus3 | 2025-09-29 13:59:31+00:00
Now with AI, cheap labour is overrated and all Those people want is for you to make a contract with openai/meta whatever or to break your business for them to take.

There will be no new jobs. The BBB comes with a hidden line saying that no billionaire should get sad for any reason The only people losing the competition is those who cannot afford to pay more anyway that will need to use AI or get out of the market completely.
by xnorswap | 2025-09-29 13:59:37+00:00
The best decision I ever made was moving from a company that acted on the whims of whomever the sales team spoke to last, to a company that had a strong product vision and was happy to say no to their customers on occasion.

It's a lot less exhausting when you're not changing priorities every quarter.

You also avoid the soul crushing experience of working really hard, crunching to get a feature out, only to realise your time was given away free to land a deal. Sometimes a deal that fell through anyway.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-09-29 14:00:05+00:00
These are kind oddly specific criteria, no?

Your ideal candidate needs to know: assembly, trivia about the history of eBPF, an obscure data structure specific to a certain field. As a bonus you would like them to know a little electrical engineering, and written on OS kernel as well?

Are those really things you think new grads need to know? I'm not sure you could find more than a handful of mid level or senior engineers with familiar with more than 2/3 of that.

This reads to me like things you know, that you think everyone should know.

Why not details on the network stack? Or database design and internals? Why not file systems specifically?

Those are much more relevant to the majority of modern development that the differences between bpf and epbf.
by rickydroll | 2025-09-29 14:00:15+00:00
The Citrix fuckery triggered the development of XCP-ng. I've been using the XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra stack for several years now, both in my homelab and professionally. It is so much easier to work with than KVM that it's part of my go-to toolkit.

If you have a spare machine or feel like picking up a tiny form factor i5 PC, you can play with Zen and Xen Orchestra fairly easily.

I once ran a three-node cluster of TinyFormFactor PCs running Xen, and it was A good framework for learning. The only reason I moved away from it is that the TFF PCs only had one gigabit Ethernet port and were limited to 32GB of RAM. I moved to more traditional small desktop PCs so I could add multiple 10-gigabit Ethernet interfaces and RAM.

Someday, I'll write up how I did an easy DMZ with XCP-ng.
by chrischen | 2025-09-29 14:00:44+00:00
I think you can make arguments for and against the fundamental right to record or to not be recorded.

If someone is doing something bad/illegal, do we have a right to record/document it? If I am outside minding my own business and not doing anything bad, do I have a right to not be recorded?

What is the difference between seeing and recalling something that happened vs recording? What happens when technology blurs the difference (for example if we all start wearing and using camera AR glasses)?
by jackstraw42 | 2025-09-29 14:01:04+00:00
the thing is, I didn't mean to argue. I'm merely responding to people's comments, who started an argument?

I am very, very concerned about our ability to communicate with each other as human beings these days. Maybe this thread was meant to be an example of that, I don't know. I didn't realize everyone was trying to prove me wrong with this. sheesh.

further, I am seeing why some folks decided to close themselves off completely to stuff like this. I enjoy intellectual curiosity and try to find others who do, but I realize many people don't enjoy it and many even hate it. it's not because it's a lack of intelligence. It's that everyone seems uninterested in the thoughts that made me type that initial comment, they're more concerned with proving me wrong. Am I accurate in this assessment, or can I trust you to not treat this question as an argument, if that is a better way to put it?