MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluGill | 2025-10-23 13:27:10+00:00
Interviews have been research extensively. Yet every article I've seen gives me the strong impression that nobody is even aware it exists, much less has tried to look for it (or even better yet found it!). Everyone is "this is what I think works", but nobody gives me any reason to think their system works - they haven't verified it in anyway and so it might just be luck that they have hired good people.

Most people are reasonably good, so luck doesn't seem that unlikely - someone should draw resumes at random from their pile and make an offer to whoever wins - I'm curious how selecting for people who are lucky (or who God approves of if you want to go there) compares to your process. If you cannot show me data on why your process is better than that (or something else) I have to assume you don't really know.

PLEASE, when someone talks about how to interview can they at least put forth the effort to cite real research. If you cite someone else you can tell me you think it is invalid for whatever reason, but at least show me you care enough to read it before you tell me what I should do.

Personally I don't think this topic exciting enough to dig into (scientific papers tend to be hard to read, I want "an executive summary"). But when I interview someone I limit myself to the questions my HR department tells me to ask because they are scientifically validated to be useful.
by duped | 2025-10-23 13:27:14+00:00
Most plugins don't use these APIs directly, they rely on wrappers like JUCE. Once JUCE supports CLAP the plugins will follow. That should happen in the next year.

The bigger problem are hosts. While Apple and Avid will probably never support CLAP, everyone but Ableton does. They move slower than the rest of the industry (taking a decade or so to implement VST3). Which is odd because CLAP is significantly easier to use from both the host and plugin side.

That said, you can wrap a clap plugin as a vst3 or AU today. It's probably the lowest friction way to do it to be honest.
by gk1 | 2025-10-23 13:28:01+00:00
The Augmentation vs Abdication framing is great. It also reflects my own experience in a different field: marketing. More specifically, coming up with messaging & positioning.

If you want something clear and compelling you can’t one-shot it, so you end up spending all day and night going back and forth with Gemini or Claude or whatever your cup of tea…

In the end I had something that looked great from the surface, but I felt completely lost in it. I couldn’t tell you what’s the core idea underpinning the whole thing, let alone explain it convincingly to the founders I work with.

The feeling is unsettling, but it has a benefit: it’s a signal that you’ve gone too far and need to re-calibrate.

In the end I found a great balance between the AI’s ability to synthesize vast information and offer endless alternatives to phrasing, with my personal taste and intuition. Augmentation.
by abustamam | 2025-10-23 13:28:07+00:00
I don't think you can call any sort of arrest a simple friendly deterrent, or intended not to punish. That shit's traumatizing. Should he have done that? Probably not. But did he deserve arrest for finding a vulnerability? This could have been a conversation that didn't involve police. The kid could have helped them improve their systems instead of spending taxpayer dollars to send cops to the kid to arrest him.
by lukeh | 2025-10-23 13:28:10+00:00
I worked on a Swift ASN.1 compiler [1] a while back (not swift-asn1, mine used Codable). I saved myself some time by using the Heimdal JSON compiler, which can transform ASN.1 into a much more parseable JSON AST.

[1] https://github.com/PADL/ASN1Codable

[2] https://github.com/heimdal/heimdal/tree/master/lib/asn1
by rvz | 2025-10-23 13:28:40+00:00
>...instead, he follows a drill-down approach where he chooses a project the candidate has worked on, asks questions with the goal of having the candidate teach him about his project.

This approach is similar to what I have always said with open source contributions to credible projects since these days, Leetcode puzzles can be solved with AI tools.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45530672
by jmpman | 2025-10-23 13:29:49+00:00
I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days”

Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar?

I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.
by the_af | 2025-10-23 13:29:56+00:00
They claim a way to interview is pair programming to solve a bug in a codebase unknown to the interviewee. They also claim to allow AI.

I get what they are aiming for, but I foresee trouble:

For one, this kind of interview is way harder to set up than simply asking the candidate to solve an algorithmic question (which is flawed but way simpler).

Also, it can be hard to fine tune so that it's not unfair to the candidate. Some bugs can only be solved after days of looking at the problem, so you have to iterate over this interview setup to find the right difficulty, unfairly ditching candidates in the process. And it becomes "a project"; a lot of companies cannot afford to spend much time on this.

Finally, if you're pairing how do you refrain from helping too much? You're not the one being interviewed, the candidate is! If you allow AI, how do you tweak the problem so that it's both self-contained and reasonably easy, while keeping it impervious to being one-shot by AI?

Of course, traditional interview techniques share some of these problems, but they are way easier to set up. That's what missing here, there's a cost/benefit analysis for interviewers too.
by kaoD | 2025-10-23 13:30:30+00:00
Temporal[0] is coming which solves many many many issues with JS Date, 1-based months[1] included!

Can't wait for it to be stable and widely available, it's just too good.

> month values start at 1, which is different from legacy Date where months are represented by zero-based indices (0 to 11)

[0] https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/

[1] https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/plaindate.html#month
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-23 13:30:38+00:00
Makes me think of the incomprehensible bills I get from my property insurance company which often sends me things that look like bills that say THIS IS NOT A BILL; in all the confusion we got a termination notice WHERE 40% OF THE AREA IS A BOLD LARGE CAPS LARGE TYPE EXPLANATION OF HOW REDLINING IS ILLEGAL AND I CAN WRITE TO SOME STATE AGENCY IF I THINK I AM BEING REDLINED AND I WANT TO WRITE THEM AND SAY MY CIVIL RIGHTS ARE BEING VIOLATED WHEN I GET SENT BILLS THAT ARE NOT BILLS AND KEEP PAYING MY BILLS AND GETTING MORE BILLS.

If I was running for office my platform would be (1) respect DNT or go to jail and (2) if you send somebody a bill that says THIS IS NOT A BILL, do not pass GO, go directly to jail.
by protonbob | 2025-10-23 13:30:49+00:00
> Try to get as narrow as possible, even to implementation details.

I think this is a great way to tell if someone knows their craft but it could also select for people with 1) really good memory 2) really good bs. I have made lots of technical decisions that I stand by but I have a hard time remembering what I made for breakfast. I kind of have to have the code in front of me to remember those kinds of details.
by mxek | 2025-10-23 13:31:31+00:00
Thanks for the link, super interesting!

We have a super early form of runnable code, called "Surflets". More info here: https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/SURFLETS.md

Basically you can supply input context and a runnable file will generate & run in your document. Useful for creating interactive charts or small applets.

Our philosophy is that if you want to update it, you should be able use your local code editor, not be stuck in Surf!

(we have work to do to make this solid)
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-23 13:32:06+00:00
>they don’t need to do anything to conform to your arbitrary organization choices

They don't need to. It'd be smart. It's not "arbitrary". It's fucking library science.

>hashes are as long or short as you need them to be

Hashes might uniquely identify a computer file, but they don't uniquely identify an edition/release of a published book. Some jackass on libgen decides to tweak a single byte, now it has a new hash... but it's not a new edition.

>publication timestamp is in every ebook’s metadata

As someone who takes a look at every internal opf file, no... they're not in every ebook.

You're suggesting I go to the extra trouble of doing a job they could do easily, when I can only do it poorly, and I don't know why... because the first person to respond was a dumbass and thought I was attacking him? I swear, 99% of humans are still monkeys.
by rvz | 2025-10-23 13:32:41+00:00
> One problem with this is that it presupposes that the interviewer is skilled enough to spot problems, ask the right probing questions, etc. Casey is definitely skilled enough. I can’t say that’s universal.

That is the entire point of the technical interview.

Someone who is already experienced in a particular subject is also at least qualified to ask the right questions to the candidate related to the subject.
by msluyter | 2025-10-23 13:32:41+00:00
A third problem is that, depending on the project, one's recollection might be pretty fuzzy. A fourth is that, while you might be a great programmer, perhaps you've never had the opportunity to do the work of the design or greenfield development, meaning, you may not have a ton of insight into the design work that went into the project. E.g., perhaps you mostly do maintenance work on a large number of projects, so your overall knowledge of each is fairly shallow.
by leenify | 2025-10-23 13:33:02+00:00
Are you certain that this is secure? What about parsing depth/DOM clobbering, etc?

See https://mizu.re/post/exploring-the-dompurify-library-bypasse... for an example of why this is really hard. Please do not roll your own sanitizers; DOMPurify has very good maintenance hygiene, and the maintainer is an expert. I have reported a bunch of issues and never waited for more than two hours for a response in the past. He is also one of the leading authors of the specification behind `setHTML`.
by techblueberry | 2025-10-23 13:33:16+00:00
Nope, I used to believe the hype that it was anti-intellectual to say its sucks and it’s useless, or that “this is the worst it will ever be”. but I think sentiment is changing.

But I think the best example is - the phone was invented in 1876. A few years later, there could be a crazy visionary who imagined the iPhone and started iterating, and poured billions of dollars into it and maybe pulled the date in a few years? Maybe we’d get it in 2005 instead of 2008? Look at babbages original computers. If he’d committed to them, would we have gotten the first digital computer dramatically earlier? I assert no, that yes, we can pour billions or even trillions of dollars into this technology, but it’s probably just too early to do so, and in fact, it may make the trust problem worse.

Also, just for clarities sake - I’m drawing a line in the sand and making broad statements, there’s obviously more nuance. There are plenty of uses for the current iteration of AI and obviously slowly iterating is a good strategy. I think what I would say is that we are iterating too quickly. There’s a reason that most computer usage was relegated to “nerds” for a long time. Same with the internet, but we’re not rolling out AI to a few small groups of nerds, we’re rolling it out to everyone, and that won’t dramatically increase long-term adoption or utility. Also, I do think there may actually be a chance that it gets worse before it gets better.
by mikanisa | 2025-10-23 13:33:28+00:00
I’m working on an early-stage project (still seeking a technical co-founder) built around a simple belief: most people never meet the minds they were meant to build with.

Not people with the same hobbies — but people who think at a similar depth, share silent values, challenge you without reducing you, and understand how you arrived at your thoughts even when they disagree.

The idea: use conversational AI to map how someone thinks (their cognitive patterns, lenses, metaphors, reasoning flow) — and use that to connect people whose minds resonate, complement, or ignite each other.

Not a social network. Not a dating app. More like a “cognitive matching layer” for collaborators, co-founders, deep conversational partners, builders, philosophizers — including quiet outliers who normally stay undiscovered.

I’m currently working through how to design thought signatures based on dialogue and how to ensure alignment + ethical transparency (no dopamine traps, no commercialization of vulnerability).

If this sparks something in you — whether you’re into AI, cognitive modeling, meaningful digital architecture, or just the idea that the right conversations can change lives — I’d love to jam, get feedback, or maybe even find the right partner to build this with.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-23 13:33:46+00:00
> Where are you getting this idea from? That's not a thing.

It absolutely happens with kids who fall on the playground and similar minor traumas. If the parent freaks out the kid will cry and cry. If the parent laughs, the kid will shake it off and laugh. I don't think it's completely outlandish to speculate that this kind of effect might come into play in more serious situations than falling off the monkey bars.
by nomilk | 2025-10-23 13:34:24+00:00
> Regulators can already police the data used as inputs in decision-making in industries like insurance

How enforceable is policing which data can be used as inputs though?

It's common for insurance companies to price based on age and sex (e.g. teenage boys will typically pay higher car insurance premiums than similar aged girls). Presumably insurers are not allowed to price on a factor such as race. Unlike collusion, overt use of a variable like 'race' in a pricing model could be detected and enforced via a company whistleblower.

But how would a regulator find/prove algorithmic collusion?

In an extreme case, regulators could ban all use of competitors' data in a sellers' pricing models. But that seems extreme and unproductive since it could stop price wars (downward prices), as well as muting good effects of the 'invisible hand' (higher prices attracting more market entrants and greater investment)
by eska | 2025-10-23 13:34:41+00:00
When he introduces himself to a new audience on podcasts his standard intro is that he is not a performance guy, and he refers to his past colleagues who he learned a lot from as being on a higher tier than him.

He preaches reasonable performance instead of completely shitting the bed or optimization to the maximum (although he also teaches that).

Look at the JetBeans Java challenge on YouTube where he coaches a (imo below average) programmer. He is very kind. So your assessment just seems unfair to me.
by melissajade_m | 2025-10-23 13:34:45+00:00
Hey everyone,

Launched V1 a year ago. It flopped. Built a sales tracker nobody wanted.

Talked to marketers about what they actually needed. The problem isn't tracking sales, it's connecting influencer campaigns, events, organic posts, and blogs back to revenue.

So I rebuilt it. V2 tracks marketing across channels with AI insights that show what's actually working vs vanity metrics. Built for agencies, brands, and businesses tired of guessing which campaigns generate leads.

The gap between V1 and V2 almost killed this.

Burning savings, working solo, doubting everything. Would love feedback.

What am I missing?
by boringg | 2025-10-23 13:34:52+00:00
Agree with you - Starlink doesn't have a government connection. In fact the reason it was successful is that it didn't have one. The government connected internet was the landlines that the cable companies were trying to deploy in the rural America for high cost tax paying dollars.

It is a US company though - but I think this is very tin foil hat territory here.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-23 13:35:23+00:00
I mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the human driver problem.
Ask HN: Hardware to use MacBook keyboard and trackpad to control Mac mini
by WorldDev | 2025-10-23 13:35:29+00:00
Does anyone know of a hardware solution, like a mini KVM/USB switch, that uses directly the integrated keyboard and trackpad of a mac book, to control a mac mini?

Basically I'd like a KVM set up, but without the need for an external keyboard and trackpad.
by sznio | 2025-10-23 13:36:31+00:00
No it doesn't.

In my case, that reassurance finally gave me a foundation to work on.

I finally knew that it wasn't my fault. I understood thst I didn't deserve what happened. I didn't need to chastise myself for breaking down during flashbacks. For the first time in my life my emotions got a concrete basis of "Yes, that is trauma. It's fucked up. You can work on it." and not "Why are you still worrying about stuff from 20 years ago" or "Well that happens to everyone, and they don't break down like you".
by gaogao | 2025-10-23 13:36:35+00:00
> It's a pity they don't do a complete rewrite with a functional language as the driver.

It's open source, so seeing such an extension would be quite cool. There's much that could be done with native Rust actors and code that get maybe at what you want, but nothing precludes mixing PyTorch and other backends.

For example, you could wrap a C++ inference engine as part of one of the actors generating data for other actors doing distributed training.
by iwanttocomment | 2025-10-23 13:36:53+00:00
Not hardware solutions, but:

Universal Control: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102459

Synergy: https://symless.com/synergy

The Mac keyboard and trackpad do not have external connectors. A hardware solution would require opening the MacBook and wiring ports and a switch from those devices. There is not a plug and play solution.
by softwaredoug | 2025-10-23 13:37:07+00:00
AI ruins your flow. That's the biggest problem. I sit here and wait for Claude to do something. Then I get distracted by social media.

No these things don't actually work if you study human psychology:

* Switching to another work task (what for like a minute?)

* Playing chess or something (sure its better than social media, but still a distraction)

But I do like AI tools that don't interfere with my flow like Github Copilot, or even chatting with Claude / ChatGPT about a task I'm doing.
by faangguyindia | 2025-10-23 13:37:30+00:00
why even interviews are necessary?

It all can be solved by a system where 1 company hires programmers then other companies can rent specific programer by hour and leave reviews.

This way a programmer doesn't need to interview, he's always employed and getting paid.

If they find no company to bid on your time, they can fire you after sometime.
by shellfishgene | 2025-10-23 13:37:34+00:00
This is already the case in Europe. We have:

Pedelecs up to 25 kmh, motor only supports pedaling, max 250 watt

- Regulated like bicycles

S-Pedelecs up to 45 kmh, motor only supports pedaling; and e-bikes with a throttle

- Need helmet (specific ones, not any bike helmet)

- Need license plate

- Need insurance

- Need small motorcycle driving license (included in car license)

- Minimum age 16

- Can't use bike paths
by pton_xd | 2025-10-23 13:38:06+00:00
Recollection of specific implementation details of an old project may be fuzzy, but I'd hazard that any competent programmer should be able to discuss the themes and challenges of the project in depth, along with approaches for different requirements.

Overall shallow knowledge is not a positive signal, in my opinion. If they really are a firefighter who constantly jumps around, the interviewer should lean in to the organizational challenges they face when identifying and fixing problems across a variety of projects and domains. There's always a way to drill down with more specific questions.
by lukan | 2025-10-23 13:38:29+00:00
> 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."

But if it comes coupled with this:

"The lack of life here, and the lack of any finding in fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. "

I very much agree to it. But thanks for the recommendation, will look into it.
by ahi | 2025-10-23 13:38:35+00:00
I know this thread is dead, but I should have elaborated. The quality of the individual worker is as good or better with an illegal immigrant, but it's a legal nightmare. If you pay decent wages and have decent working conditions, you don't have to get into that shadiness. There's a reason awful jobs, e.g. roofing, are filled with hard working illegal immigrants and meth heads.
by thelittlenag | 2025-10-23 13:38:35+00:00
I've now done probably close to 100 system design interviews. One of the main things I've looked for in candidates is their ability to identify, communicate, and discuss trade-offs. The next thing on my checklist is their ability to move forward, pick an option, and defend that option. Really nimble candidates will pivot, recognizing when to change approaches because requirements have changed.

The goal here is to see if the candidate understands the domain (generic distributed systems) well enough on their own. For more senior roles I look to make sure they can then communicate that understanding to a team, and then drive consensus around some approach.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-23 13:38:46+00:00
Yeah definitely. I have terrible memory and would probably do badly at this even though I'm a very competent programmer (and modest!). And similarly I have interviewed some people who could talk the talk but literally couldn't write a for loop.

I think we also need to shift our vocabulary around "leetcode interviews" because there are two very different things that that word is used for, and I think one is fine and the other is not, but because we use the same word for both people end up talking past each other. Basically there is:

1. Fizzbuzz-level (and a little bit higher) programming problems where there's no real puzzle solving, it's just checking that you can literally code at all.

2. Hard puzzle-style algorithmic leetcode questions. The stuff on leetcode.com. For some reason like 80% of this is dynamic programming questions.

I think fizzbuzz level questions are fine and necessary (yeah I wouldn't have believed it either but there's no way I'm hiring someone who can't write a simple for loop).

At the other end hard leetcode questions are not very good - they are often so hard (in an interview context) that they just select for people who have seen them before (e.g. if you grind the top 100 leetcode.com questions), or have had a lot of recent practice (especially of dynamic programming, which is crazy because I've never used dynamic programming once in my life despite doing a very algorithm-heavy job for a few years).

Even worse they often are selected because the interviewer read the solution, thought "ah yes that solution looks easy" and then it makes them feel good about knowing the solution - they don't even realise how hard it actually is.

So, hard leet-code questions should be avoided, but that doesn't mean you should have no whiteboard coding questions.