MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ascorbic | 2025-09-13 07:29:12+00:00
LC interviews were made popular by companies that were started by CS students because they like feeling that this stuff is important. They're also useful when you have massive numbers of applicants to sift through because they can be automated and are an objective-seeming way to discard loads of applicants.

Startups that wanted to emulate FAANGs then cargo-culted them, particularly if they were also founded by CS students or ex-FAANG (which describes a lot of them). Very, very few of these actually try any other way of hiring and compare them.

Being able to study hard and learn something well is certainly a great skill to have, but leetcode is a really poor one to choose. It's not a skill that you can acquire on the job, so it rules out anyone who doesn't have time to spend months studying something in their own time that's inherently not very useful. If they chose to test skills that are hard and take effort to learn, but are also relevant to the job, then they can also find people who are good at learning on the job, which is what they are actually looking for.
by badsectoracula | 2025-09-13 07:30:43+00:00
> I have always heard that MSAA doesn't work well with deferred rendering which is why it is not longer used which is a shame.

It works fine, but it needs more work. AFAICT (this is the first time i see it) the page you linked does implement MSAA with deferred rendering. Personally i implemented MSAA with deferred rendering in an engine[0] i was writing ~12 years ago.

Nowadays in my current engine[1] i use Forward+-ish since i can just tell OpenGL "give me MSAA" and it just works :-P.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15dGcvN7mEA

[1] https://i.imgur.com/fypn318.jpg
by qnleigh | 2025-09-13 07:30:58+00:00
> when a good algorithm that is known to exist

Sure, if a good algorithm exists and is simple to implement, then go for it. But if it is non-trivial, then you have to make a judgement call whether it is worth the trouble to solve in a more optimal way. You acknowledge yourself that that this can take days.

Personally I really have to be disciplined about choosing what to optimize vs what to code up quick-and-dirty. There's always a temptation to write clean, custom solutions because that's more interesting, but it's just not a good use of time for non-performance critical code.
by beAbU | 2025-09-13 07:32:44+00:00
I learned to drive on a manual car, and all my cars were manual for the past ~20 years. My current car is an ev/auto.

For me the learning curve was remembering to _not_ press the brake with my left foot, thinking it's the clutch when I'm mentally downshifting or stopping. A left foot on the brake thinking it's the clutch is for sure a powerful thing!
by DeathArrow | 2025-09-13 07:32:46+00:00
>I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
by badsectoracula | 2025-09-13 07:33:25+00:00
Pretty much every temporal AA i've seen looks like a smeary mess though.

MSAA by default handles aliasing at triangle edges, however at least in OpenGL and Vulkan (i couldn't find anything relevant in D3D11 last time i checked and D3D12 did have something that could be relevant, but i'm not sure) you can set the minimum amount of samples so you could also get some antialiasing in polygon interiors. Of course this is heavier (though still cheaper than SSAA) but IMO produces a better image than TAA.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-13 07:34:33+00:00
Suppose we allow only short published stump speeches and nothing else.

What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?

Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
by pas | 2025-09-13 07:34:38+00:00
... voters (or however we want to handwave preference aggregation) are very passive about carbon-free energy (and global warming and sustainability and economics and ...)

they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)

but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
by dustrider | 2025-09-13 07:34:53+00:00
I agree with you on the quality of the study. My point was that value shouldn’t be considered a given, we’re still figuring it out.

In my team I see examples like yours, but I also see engineers having to clean up slop when one of them got over their skis.

My _belief_ is that it’s a net positive, but we’re far from taking that as a hand wave fact. And it certainly ain’t the 5-10x people are shouting across the board.
by Timwi | 2025-09-13 07:35:02+00:00
> every one of us who attended schools without devices learned to pick up that skill some other way.

Everyone? You sure? That has not been my experience at all. (It's also a very bold statement on your part to be speaking for a whole generation of people.)

My experience is that people who are not absolutely raving mad about tech do not, in fact, pick up computer skills on their own. My parents have been struggling with technology their whole lives (even basic things like writing in Word, keeping an email address book or bookmarking websites). I picked up these things as a child but I was also interested in programming and networking and more complex tech things, and it was blindingly obvious to me that this is rare because there was maybe one, at most two other kids like that in my school. Nobody else in class had the faintest conception of what programming is really like.

Even today, while talking to people online as well as offline, I am constantly reminded of this. People do not pick up tech skills, period. That includes people in intellectual fields (math teachers, puzzle enthusiasts, what have you), so it's not a matter of intelligence.

Now, I want to make clear that I'm not saying people need tech skills, or that tech skills should be taught in schools, or that a lack of tech skills is somehow an indication of some sort of lack or decline. I'm actually of the opposite view: I think most things taught to children in schools are useless in later life and I think we are squandering children's talents, curiosity and creativity by trying to force, coerce and mold them. As such, I agree with the sentiment that sitting every child in front of a screen for hours every day is detrimental. I just wanted to clear up this vast misunderstanding that just because you picked up certain skills without being taught, everyone would. It does not work that way. You picked it up because you were interested and passionate about the subject. Not everyone is.
by ggm | 2025-09-13 07:35:05+00:00
A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inheritance.

Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.

Labour mobility predates the modern era.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-13 07:36:35+00:00
Yes, this is the real answer. Nuclear, which is currently dropping as a percentage of global electricity demand and is now under 10% needs a miracle to reverse that and maybe reach 15% if everything goes well for it.

Meanwhile renewables are surging and every relevant expert suggests they'll dominate the future.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-world-is-gettin...

The graph without the relatively flat hydro is even more stark.

The stuff people say about nuclear on this forum is on the level of flat earthism and they seem totally unashamed of this.
by TFYS | 2025-09-13 07:37:25+00:00
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
by kasabali | 2025-09-13 07:40:13+00:00
it's not a misunderstanding, it's reality. yes in theory you can render text in dimensions you want, but in practice we have like 20 different UI systems running at the same time and each have their own quirks and limitations and the end result is unless you're using 96dpi or it's exact multiples. either som ui elements will be looking ridiculously out of proportion compared to something else, another element or image will look like a blurry fudge, and the end result always looks horrible.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-13 07:40:24+00:00
> My take is you build it, and THEN they come. Put in some GOOD transit. Make sure the utilities are in place.

The problem is, that costs money that, for a few years at the very least, will not be recouped. Not many politicians have the ability to push such efforts through regardless of profitability, especially not when the topic in question will be abused by the opposition in their usual culture war bullshit.
by antiraza | 2025-09-13 07:40:59+00:00
Why is that a bad thing, or even a non-expected thing? If you pick up a paintbrush, you don't always nail each stroke on the canvas -- just because it's programmatic doesn't mean it should be like a calculator.

LLMs and image generators are cross pollinating human language and human visual information -- both really fuzzy mediums.

I think learning how to 'use this instrument' and 'finding the perfect brush stroke' are part of how they are supposed to work (at least in their current form). I also don't know that just because they are showing good outputs from the inputs that this is framing the narrative as one-and-done... I think the rest of the owl is kind in of implied.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-13 07:42:03+00:00
Wrong on both counts.

The only wrinkle is that when the German government made electricity production from nuclear power illegal, it had to take over some of those responsibilities, for obvious reasons.

It also took over the money that had been saved up thus far, which is almost certainly more than needed to cover the costs. Well unless those costs are driven up to infinity with ever more creative mechanisms by politicians.

But that's a political problem.

Finland just built a site for around €1 billion.
by v9v | 2025-09-13 07:42:04+00:00
"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." -Brian Eno
by peterfirefly | 2025-09-13 07:42:38+00:00
> Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima)

Don't put the emergency diesel generators in the basement where they are certain to be flooded if the tsunami wall is too low. Also, don't build too low tsunami walls.

> So yeah. Oil has bad disasters. Nuclear has EPIC disasters.

No. Hydropower has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
by jwr | 2025-09-13 07:43:04+00:00
I wrote a little thing that connects to my IMAP server (I run my own E-mail), goes through the unread E-mails in the inbox, processes them (process MIME multipart, extract HTML, describe images and links, etc) and feeds them to an LLM with a prompt. The LLM decides if the message is spam or not.

It's amazingly accurate.

The interesting thing is that after experimentation I found that it's best if the prompt doesn't describe what is spam. The LLMs are somewhat "intelligent", so the prompt now describes me — who I am, what I do, my interests, etc. It's much more effective and generalizes better to fight new kinds of spam.

And a nice side observation is that this kind of system requires no training (so I no longer collect samples of spam) and can't be gamed, because it describes me instead of describing specific kinds of spam.

I have to write it up in a blog post.
by rmunn | 2025-09-13 07:43:21+00:00
UTF-16 is simpler most of the time, and that's precisely the problem. Anyone working with UTF-8 knows they will have to deal with multibyte codepoints. People working with UTF-16 often forget about surrogate characters, because they're a lot rarer in most major languages, and then end up with bugs when their users put emoji into a text field.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-09-13 07:43:43+00:00
I'm worried and surprised to see the many comments here that, contrary to what I'm used to reading here, nobody seems to have dug deeper, looked critically at the evidence. Quite a lot of just ad hominem and insinuations.

This looks like brigading to me. Which is the only way for govs to fight against protonmail: spreading doubt.

Hence I am reinforced to continue being a strong supporter of Proton.
by xbmcuser | 2025-09-13 07:45:44+00:00
Well if they are buying Chinese electric equipment they will be saving money in capital costs as well. As Chinese equipment can be up to 50% cheaper than western brands like Caterpillar. The global south will move to electric a lot faster than most projections I feel. As chinese solar, batteries and cheaper heavy machinery directly running on electricity will be a dramatic change to the feasibility of many development projects.
by m101 | 2025-09-13 07:47:07+00:00
You suggest people forget that without considering that perhaps you don't know:

- We killed nuclear power in countries that can be trusted so that is not relevant.

- Nuclear accidents are not as harmful as people imagine.

- We have plenty of access to uranium resources in the west.

- the time to build a reactor is often in large parts regulatory burdens. France built out 10% of its electricity generation needs in a year, for a number of years. That is what is possible.

- Part of the reason there is no innovation in this sector is because regulation has strangled it. There are many innovative ideas in nuclear.
by neobrain | 2025-09-13 07:48:48+00:00
> Proton's CEO/Proton[1] loves the current US admin

The CEO once expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side in the same social media thread.

Calling that "love for the current US admin" (which hadn't even taken office when those statements were made) is pure disinformation.
by Jensson | 2025-09-13 07:49:30+00:00
Because chess is more unrelated to the job? It is easy to see that LeetCode problems are closer to a programmers job than what chess is.

But yeah, people used to ask that level of unrelated questions to programmers, and they were happy with the results. "Why are manhole covers round" etc. LeetCode style questions do produce better results than those, so that is why they use them.
by Conch5606 | 2025-09-13 07:50:20+00:00
This is not quite the same, it's for migrating from one device to another while keeping the file system writable, but it's quite neat: dm-clone[1]

I've used it before for a low downtime migration of VMs between two machines - it was a personal project and I could have just kept the VM offline for the migration, but it was fun to play around with it.

You give it a read-only backing device and a writable device that's at least as big. It will slowly copy the data from the read-only device to the writable device. If a read is issued to the dm-clone target it's either gotten from the writable device if it's already cloned or forwarded to the read-only device. Writes are always going to the writable device and afterwards the read-only device is ignored for that block.

It's not the fastest, but it's relatively easy to set up, even though using device mapper directly is a bit clunky. It's also not super efficient, IIRC if a read goes to a chunk that hasn't been copied yet, that's used to give the data to the reading program, but it's not stored on the writable device, so it has to be fetched again. If the file system being copied isn't full, it's a good idea to run trimming after creating the dm-clone target as discarded blocks are marked as not needing to be fetched.

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/device-mapper/dm-clone.h...
by mpweiher | 2025-09-13 07:50:40+00:00
> I already know where your numbers come from: the Quadrennial Technology Review by the US Department of Energy from around 10 years ago.

That turns out not to be the case.

Even if it were the case: an official study by the DOE was "thoroughly debunked", in your esteemed opinion, because some random Australian twitter user claims to have talked to a friend.

Right.
by littlestymaar | 2025-09-13 07:50:47+00:00
The unfortunate thing with their Qwen3-next naming is that it doesn't reflect on the fact that the architecture is completely different from Qwen3. Much more different than the difference between Qwen2 and Qwen3 even.

So support is likely to take quite some time because it's not just regular transformer blocks stacked on each other, but a brand new hybrid architecture using SSM.
by TFYS | 2025-09-13 07:52:49+00:00
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
by ako | 2025-09-13 07:53:39+00:00
I’ve experimented with feature chats, so start a new chat for every change, just like a feature branch. At the end of a chat I’ll have it summarize the the feature chat and save it as a markdown document in the project, so the knowledge is still available for next chats. Seems to work well.

You can also ask the llm at the end of a feature chat to prepare a prompt to start the next feature chat so it can determine what knowledge is important to communicate to the next feature chat.

Summarizing a chat also helps getting rid of wrong info, as you’ll often trial and error towards the right solution. You don’t want these incorrect approaches to leak into the context of the next feature chat, maybe just add the “don’t dos” into a guidelines and rules document so it will avoid it in the future.
by plst | 2025-09-13 07:54:26+00:00
> I replied to someone else in the same vein but having had a garmin watch in the home there was nothing that it would have done better if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary stuff

Maybe to you. Garmin watches cannot respond to notifications on Apple devices, for example. Detailed article about restrictions on iOS from Pebble: https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...

> If random devices of unknown provenance were able to freely connect with Apple devices then the security of Apple's ecosystem would take a hit. This would be bad.

Random devices are not able to connect over bluetooth to your device without your consent. Then, the bluetooth device can only get as much information as the companion app will allow it to get.

Besides, we have that on Android (and PCs) and the security of these "ecosystems" is not worse because of it.
by flohofwoe | 2025-09-13 07:54:29+00:00
> most long lasting

...which also applies to nuclear waste unfortunately, and that answers part of your question - e.g. as irrational as it may be, but at least in Germany nobody wants to have a nuclear waste storage in their backyard (the other part of the answer is Chornobyl - and for the same 'not in my backyard' reason).

Also when looking at recent years, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to have a few large nuclear power stations in the middle of Europe, see the 'hostage situation' around the Zaporizhzhia NPP.
by ookblah | 2025-09-13 07:55:40+00:00
unrelated, but i logged in the other day to fb after months away (after the school and charlie kirk shooting b/c i was curious). huge mistake, every other feed item was something political either from a friend or some random page. the experience was decidedly worse than the last time i logged in. i had not been engaging in months and i could instantly feel the pull of wanting to respond or react to something inflammatory. promptly deleted the app again.

SM in its current form is truly a cancer on society. i can't say IG is that much better, but at least i can sort of curate what i want to see and i still see photos from friends and such and just random ads. i know it's just pointless scrolling for a few mins. FB truly is one of those pull you into the echo chamber to tell and show you how to think and it only took a few minutes. i don't even know what years of that does to you.

anecdotally, most people my age already left for other pastures. the ones left there are largely those who joined up to connect back when FB was actually useful and are now around for the ragebait.
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-09-13 07:56:06+00:00
> We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job.

Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.

Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.

I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.

I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
by userbinator | 2025-09-13 07:56:44+00:00
I think it's fair to say that there's nothing, at _all_, remarkable about a computer beating a human on a buzzer.

As anyone who has experienced early video game consoles can attest --- even the <2MHz CPU of a NES is far more than fast enough to beat a human at reaction time, which is what makes it all the more impressive when humans do things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38841080