MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by n1xis10t | 2025-10-23 13:17:52+00:00
In the “farewell” letter, the creator of searchcord recommends “Answer Overflow.” I haven’t tried it, but it’s opt-in so it’s probably a lot smaller than searchcord was. Also if you’re fine with building your own search engine, there is a dataset (I think 2 tb uncompressed and like 116 gb compressed) floating around out there with ~ 2 billion discord messages in it, which would be about 1/32 the size of searchcord I think. If you did do that, I would be interested in hearing how well it works.

There is an article you would probably be interested in reading located at: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline

There are strange details around the shutdown of searchcord as well. Would you like to hear about them?
by tomhow | 2025-10-23 13:18:06+00:00
You've posted about this brand/product several times on different threads on HN in the past few hours, having never posted on HN previously. This is an egregious breach of the guideline against using HN primarily for self-promotion, so we've had to ban this account. If you don't want to be banned, please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) and assure us that this was a mistake and that you will not make it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bluGill | 2025-10-23 13:18:10+00:00
Most people should not be hired if he gets the needed detail. Most people don't have significant open source experience. That means for most people the projects are things they can talk about at a high level, but this interview is digging into things that any court would consider trade secrets. Even if you don't have a NDA, you still have a moral, ethical (and likely legal but check your local laws) obligation to not discuss the details of someone else's code in that level.
by sd9 | 2025-10-23 13:18:13+00:00
I wish the HN title was "How to effectively conduct programming interviews", like it is in the article.

I find Casey Muratori completely insufferable and this title riled me up, but the content is actually pretty good. My perception of him is that he is a good engineer, but generally overconfident and unwilling to approach other peoples' viewpoints with an open mind. The current title played right into my biases.

(At the time of writing, the HN title is "Casey Muratori: I can always tell a good programmer in an interview")
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-23 13:18:36+00:00
You have to make this a back and forth, not a monologue. Nobody is going to criticize you for tailoring your response to what they want to talk about. Treat it more like a coworker you respect asking you about architecture options, not like a right/wrong graded quiz from college or a chance to assert your knowledge and experience. Your knowledge and experience will show anyway.
by sph | 2025-10-23 13:19:04+00:00
I don’t and I won’t. My large clients do not care. The day they start to require any of that nonsense, I’ll drop them as a client. Simple as that.

I have decided to be radical about AI and LLM: I don’t like them because they are a waste of time, and I would like them even less if they were this magical world-changing technology people want us to believe. I am at a point of my career where concerns of productivity or how to operate in large-scale tech companies are the least of my problems, while I increasingly appreciate the artistic craft of programming and computers, especially in small-scale to improve our lives rather than accumulate profit. So while I could admit LLMs they have their use, I want to consciously follow a path where human intelligence and well-being is of the utmost concern, and any attempt at creating intelligent machines is tantamount to blasphemy.

Under this philosophy, seeing that all the talk about imminent AGI has led to creating spam and porn at large scale, I can only roll my eyes and remain on the sidelines while we continue down this idiotic path of resource extraction and devaluation of human ingenuity for the profit of the few.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-23 13:19:04+00:00
Something that I might observe though is that - all sides seem to do this in their own way. Sure, one can talk about woke and the way that has an elite flair to it, but the example the author gives are things like addiction to social media, the banking system, the rental market, AI, blue collar automation, all things that I think the right is adding jet fuel too.

And part of this is maybe fast and slow thinking but Like, there’s a compartamentalized part of my brain that might be happy if MAGA actually seemed to do the things it described, but it’s allying with the forces that to me that exacerbate all the problems populists describe as problematic.

I can’t help but observe (again fast and slow thinking) that Christopher Rufo’s attack on Cracker Barrel may actually bring down Cracker Barrel faster, because the company now has less options to pivot for viability. But fast thinking just says: “we beat woke!”

Are the working class or whoever voted for Trump winning? It feels like the perception of winning. Emotionally sure, but practically is the populous more empowered or whatever they’re looking for? There goes my slow thinking again.
Show HN: Lhdns – A Ledger-Based, Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Naming System
by LHDNS | 2025-10-23 13:19:26+00:00
LHDNS (Ledger-based Hashed Decentralized Naming System) is a next-generation alternative to DNS — designed to provide censorship resistance, privacy, and cryptographic accountability for name resolution.

It replaces central trust roots with an ephemeral, ledger-backed system that uses rotating hash-tokens, decentralized gossip propagation, and short-lived identifiers instead of static records. Every query is unlinkable, every service is verifiable, and no single entity controls the namespace.

Key Features: - Ledger-based resolution with cryptographic proofs - Ephemeral state (no permanent name mappings) - End-to-end privacy via onion routing and cover traffic - Sybil resistance through staking + adaptive PoW - Compatibility layer with existing DNS (via gateways)

Whitepaper, annexes, and technical modules: → https://github.com/twincodesworld/LHDNS

Goal: to make global name resolution private, verifiable, and censorship-resistant — for everyone.

Feedback and collaboration welcome.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-10-23 13:19:35+00:00
I think this model fits a lot better to mid and small size businesses. FAANG et al will always need their leetcode barrier due to the sheer amount of interviews they have to conduct. I wouldnt think you can spare an engineer that can go through this type of interview on a daily basis, at that point the person will be solely conducting interviews and not coding at all.
by sodapopcan | 2025-10-23 13:20:06+00:00
I like this approach. The only problem (or at least one of the problems) is that many people do not have suitable personal projects, as in they might be 10 years old. If one of the goals is to filter out people that don't work on projects in their free time, then this works, but I know many good programmers who don't, or at least they don't anymore due to having kids and other responsibilities outside of work.

As this article touches on, I'm big into pair programming interviews. I was part of the pair programming step at a past company and we'd always use StringCalc [0]. It's starts out super easy and gets gently progressively harder. The goal isn't to finish but to just to see how people think. We would do pretty legit pairing where we'd help if they got stuck on anything or thought we had a better solution. This shows so much about how someone thinks, collaborates, and responds to feedback. Often within 10 mins I could tell how it was going to go. We always had to finish, though, just in case.

Of course it depends on what type of app you have and how your company works and so on and so forth.

[0] https://github.com/MokshankSoni/StringCalc_TDD
by nomilk | 2025-10-23 13:20:24+00:00
I look forward to 'semantic' page search (i.e. rather than searching for a string with ctrl + f, you can ask the LLM can you find 'x' on the page and it will likely locate it, even if you described it differently to how it appears on the page).

As a web dev, I'm really interested to see if I can write automated 'system UX tests' in natural language. E.g. The test would be something like "go to the home page, log in, update your status" it passes if the LLM completes it (the premise being if the LLM fails, your users probably will too).
by lateralux | 2025-10-23 13:20:44+00:00
I’d really like to see more plugins available in the LV2 format for my Ardour RT DAW. Also, a quick recommendation : LSP (Linux Studio Plugins) an excellent collection of several open source plugins supporting CLAP, AU, LV2, VST2, VST3, LADSPA, and a standalone Jack versions https://lsp-plug.in/
by jb1991 | 2025-10-23 13:20:46+00:00
That’s absolutely right, but there’s another issue with the LeetCode-style interview that hasn’t been getting much attention lately, including in this article. My company is hiring right now, and we’ve shifted all of our initial interviews to Zoom, where we include a brief coding task. However, it’s becoming more and more clear that many applicants are using LLMs to produce their code. It’s reached the point where it feels almost impossible to assess whether someone can actually code on their own in these remote settings. On the other hand, it’s much harder to lean on an LLM in a more open-ended, conversational interview without it feeling unnatural. That, I think, is one of the biggest flaws in the current remote coding interview setup.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-23 13:21:13+00:00
Having a single flat price is/was due to labor prices being high enough in the developed world to ignore potential profits from price discrimination.

When my grandparents went to the market in the developing country they immigrated from, they would bargain for everything, and every customer got a different price.

The developed world was rich enough that grocery stores didn’t need to waste time doing this, and could simply price high enough to earn a consistent profit margin and expect consistent sales. They did engage in price discrimination via coupons. Just not individually, until smartphones and apps came along.

Now that automation can handle a lot of the price discrimination, expect more of it, everywhere.
by abustamam | 2025-10-23 13:21:20+00:00
This absolutely boggles my mind. My last insurance company let me create a 20 character PW but limited the password field on the login screen to 16 chars. I didn't think to futz around with the code so I just recreated a less secure password. I suspect many other less technical people either did that too or just called support.

There is zero excuse for that though. 16 chars is just way too short for a proper secure pass phrase, but at least make it consistent with password creation!
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-23 13:21:56+00:00
>It presupposes that the interviewer is skilled enough to spot problems, ask the right probing questions, etc.

Actually, this is a case of Peters principle[1], clear as day.

Recruiters should not recruit programmers if they, the recruiters, have not worked in a programming context. The best software development recruiter is another programmer.

It also extends, of course, to technical managers and is another factor in how one should approach recruitment interviews - is this placement going to result in a high Peter principle, and if so - is the candidate going to be capable of rising above it, or dealing with it in a way that is conducive to the organizations goals?

Because Peter principle is not always a 'negative' - its more of just a condition that results from a lack of communication between parties who really should know each others jobs, better.

People who know how to understand other peoples jobs as well as their own, work great together.

[1] - not Flynn effect
by mikanisa | 2025-10-23 13:21:57+00:00
Hey Seph (and anyone else who's interested) — I think we might align on the “journey > destination” part.

I’m at the founder stage of a project that’s not OSS yet, but the core idea is deeply human: I’m building a system that uses conversational AI to map how people think, not just what they say — and then connect people whose thought processes resonate (builders, creators, deep thinkers, even quiet geniuses who rarely get discovered).

Not a social network, not a dating app — more like a cognitive matching layer where the right minds can finally find each other to collaborate, co-found, create, or simply be understood — maybe for the first time in their lives.

I’m still assembling the founding team and looking for early technical collaborators who care about meaningful architecture, ethical design, and building with depth — not engagement hacking.

If any of that sounds interesting, I’d love to chat casually, see if there’s resonance, and share more details.

Let me know if you’re open to exploring it.
by digdugdirk | 2025-10-23 13:22:10+00:00
Interesting! I'm very intrigued by the possibility of new forms of computer interaction made by breaking down app silos and linking data across various mediums. Something that caught my eye recently is Atuin Desktop, which seems to be a jupyter notebook style thing that runs your code natively.

The benefits of this is that I can connect this data, but in a computable medium. Does your product have any similar ability to bring code workflows "inside" the Surf application?

Atuin: https://github.com/atuinsh/desktop
by dirtbag__dad | 2025-10-23 13:22:11+00:00
> [Linear] mentioned that this approach is working very well for them, and they have achieved, at the time of writing, 96% retention.

Is this evidence that their hiring process is sound, and is it more a consequence of Linear being a rocketship? Perhaps if their retention number includes when a bad hire is let go, this is more believable that they are meeting their standards.

I’ve only worked at small startups, but usually “retention” means that no one has left for somewhere better.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-23 13:22:21+00:00
Leetcode tests programming; interviewing about previous projects tests software engineering, or at the very least the person's understanding of it.

My problem with that is that when I get interviewed about a project, I will talk about the whole project, not just my personal contributions to it which I believe is the primary purpose of a job interview. Of course, knowing about the whole of the project is important too, but if I just have an overview and little to no contributions, I wouldn't be a valuable asset to the company I'm interviewing at.

(Not to dismiss my own contributions of course, I'm a competent engineer and can do anything - it's more a matter of what I'm enthusiastic and energised about. I wouldn't be energised by clicking around in the AWS console, but I know of it, for example).
by willybraun | 2025-10-23 13:22:21+00:00
The argument is that most AI systems fail socially, not technically, because they don’t design the loop that compounds trust over time: transparent boundaries, recoverable errors, and feedback that feels fair to users.

Curious what people here think: does this “trust design” framing resonate with your experience?

Have you seen teams that intentionally engineer trust into their rollout process? Or is this more often a side effect of limited resources in early-stage startups rather than a deliberate constrained strategy?
by Simulacra | 2025-10-23 13:22:27+00:00
But is this still more because of Musk, the car, or the subsidy? Many seemed to adore Tesla the vehicle (AOC famously had trouble giving hers up) and then turned against because of Musk. Other's turned away from EVs because of the removal of subsidies etc.

So which is it really, or is it a mix? Political, Personal, or Financial?
by Bengalilol | 2025-10-23 13:22:28+00:00
> "Another benefit of LeetCode style interviews is that they are somehow standardized. Standardized processes help large organizations stay consistent."

I may be overlooking some really important concepts here, but there I bug. It looks like the need is not for a "good programmer" (the article should define what is a good programmer btw) but for a programmer who applies to the standards for whatever it means. It is a bit chilling. And afaik those leetcode interviews tend to fade away.

> "How they navigate unknown codebases." That point seems very short-term sighted. For how long a codebase is considered as being "unknown" ?

Globally, "good" is not defined and the "scope" of the programmer's job isn't even touched, which I think changes the way you hire someone.

Anways, it was a nice read although I don't really know what to conclude. The pair programming concept is, for sure, the best I would like to experience in an interview.
by simonw | 2025-10-23 13:22:38+00:00
This particular post was a talk I gave in person on Tuesday. I have a policy of always writing up my talks, it's a little inconvenient that the one happened to coincide with a busy week for other content.

What do you think of this one? I'm trying a new format: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/23/claude-code-for-web-vi...
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-23 13:22:39+00:00
>Mindset explains the other users complaint perfectly I guess.

Yes, how dare SW engineers work to just put food on the table for their families, and not fight your imaginary tech revolution against MS-shops?

> Take pride in your work? Dont go MS shop.

Sorry buddy, but I work the SW equivalent of "putting the fries in the bag", my work has no impact on the tech issues in your life, and I don't live in The Valley, or the US, or some major international tech hub where hip, non-MS jobs fall from trees in order to make an impact, and so MS shops make the brunt of the jobs market where I live. Should I go homeless and hungry just to virtue signal on HN on how righteous I am via your self-defined Russian nesting doll of obscure purity tests?

>that attitude explains why [...]

Hate to break it to you, but some people on HN like you guys in this thread, are so over privileged with your career opportunities, that their delusions take over rationality and common sense views of the reality outside their bubble, and think the rest of the world must conform to your viewpoints or else they're somehow the "evil ones" responsible for the issues you perceive.

By all means feel free to have your own beliefs and values that differ from others, just don't try to virtue signal, judge others, or impose your view on others, as nobody likes such obnoxious arrogant people on their high horse thinking they're on the right side of history and everyone else is wrong. Live and let live, that's my life's mantra.
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-23 13:22:48+00:00
> "and the thought that was there was the memory of.."

I haven't read the book; what's the distinction between "the brain has a painful memory which is making it tense muscles" and "the muscles are tense because the memory is encoded in the body and muscles"?

I mean, if someone sees a balloon and curls/cringes/flinches their body away because they hate balloons bursting, how would one tell apart "flinching is caused by brain memories of stressful noise" and "flinching is caused by body memories of stressful noise"?
by oliwarner | 2025-10-23 13:23:08+00:00
They've sold ~8 million units. Well past the technical argument and the devs who can't be told, that's 8 million Windows licenses they haven't bought. I thin they've more than paid off the salaries of the few people they've hired to make Proton a reality.

Not sure I see your comparison to Netbooks; they failed because ultra-cheap laptops are inherently bad. You cut that many corners, you lose quality. They lost out to tablets, better phones, and Chromebooks, each doing something a netbook did but better. Steam Decks are a format that will persist.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-23 13:23:16+00:00
> (i.e. in practical terms, there's no way regulators can police what algorithms sellers use - I can't think of exceptions to this, but perhaps there are some special cases)

Regulators can already police the data used as inputs in decision-making in industries like insurance, so policing the algorithms that operate on that data doesn't seem like too much of a reach.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-23 13:24:06+00:00
I recommend you to read Hyperion Cantos then. All four volumes. Takes a couple of months, but it's worth it.

It demands the reader to pay attention and think about what they read, though. I need to warn.

To add:

> Science is creation.

No. Science is knowing. How & why. You can create something with that knowledge, but it's up to you. You shouldn't create everything you can create (e.g.: mirror life, biological weapons, etc.).

> We can do it, so we will do it.

This mentality brought us up to here, but it's now harming us more than benefiting us. Maybe we should revisit this.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-23 13:24:43+00:00
Does anyone know / care to speculate how they actually make this work, in terms of the LLM call loop? Specifically: does it call back to the LLM after each keystroke sending it the new state of the interactive tool, or does it batch keystrokes up? If the former, isn’t that very slow? If the latter, won’t that cause it to make mistakes with a tool it hasn’t used before?
by churchill | 2025-10-23 13:25:21+00:00
I can denounce Nazis while admitting an objective point made by Schmitt. Churchill himself was a ghoul who considered Indians, Africans, etc. inferior and while he denounced the Nazis' tactics, he had no problem using similar ones to suppress colonized natives.

In other words, Churchill might have hated the Nazis (because they threatened his beloved England), but he believed in the state of exception they promoted. He believed he wasn't obligated to obey basic decency when dealing with non-European natives because, like Schmitt would say, "sovereign is he who determines the exception."
by chasing0entropy | 2025-10-23 13:25:26+00:00
Negative. It is nearly impossible to build a broad skillet and critical thinking skills working exclusively on directed projects towards niche business goals.

Any skillset requires practice. Any invested programmer will code in their free time; -the newbie modifying css scripts, -the veteran coding utilities for repetitive tasks, -the pro writing a driver back end to bypass resolution or buffer limit - the webdev's customized dashboard and scriptlets

Programmers have at least ONE hobby project, open source contribution, or tasked project that is not scoped under an NDA. If they don't they certainly will not be productive and probably not creative.
by herpdyderp | 2025-10-23 13:25:35+00:00
Honestly I don't really care about a candidate's previous projects. It's fun to talk about if we have the time for sure, especially if it's immediately relevant to the role.

I want to get a glimpse into how the candidate is going to handle our tech stack, our code base, not one of their old code bases.

I still think this is very possible to learn without LeetCode (which I also disdain and never use).
by ineedasername | 2025-10-23 13:25:49+00:00
Its from Character AI but they used Wan, and MMaudio. I'm not sure their licenses disallow creating a closed model from their work for commercial purposed but either way they've done nothing with a true moat, they were merely first to the table for something this all-inclusive. Even apart from their efforts, assorted tools, all open, can be used to achieve these effects , but requires more techinical knowledge to setup, and each new gen would require a fair amount of reconfiguration of modules. But this is still significantly easier than similarly available tools 9-12 months ago. As an approach it also trades turnkey from tons of control and flexibility such that competent use will still often be simpler or get to a more refined result than Sora and others.

I think the moat here will ened up being value adds for convenience, tooling, IP licensing, integration into the rest of the pipeline used for content production, etc.