MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danans | 2025-10-01 15:26:17+00:00
> How to hire the right junior engineers...

The advice given doesn't just apply to junior software engineers, but also senior. It's pretty much how all the senior engineers at my company (including me) were hired.

While I found the process heavy as a candidate, it did seem to select for like-minded and similarly motivated co-workers.

That said, the company has also hired several university interns through a similar process, and they have been great co-workers.
by Rohansi | 2025-10-01 15:26:34+00:00
I wonder how much of that issue is related to crappy lid open sensors. AFAIK most of them work by sensing a magnet placed in the frame. MacBooks don't do this so your laptop doesn't sleep randomly when a magnet passes over your laptop. It's dumb that they use a single magnet instead of one on each side, but it sure is cheaper.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-10-01 15:26:45+00:00
I've used LLMs to try to help digest some advanced maths. Eg. "Explain the number field seive with lots of numeric examples".

Yes the numeric examples often don't work. The consequences of this though are similar to a failed web search. As in it's not a big deal and when it does work it's very helpful.

Maths is one of those things with so much objectivity that even the LLM usually realizes it has failed to create a numeric example. "Here the numeric example breaks down since we cannot find a congruence of squares in this example without finding more B-smooth numbers in step 1". Ok that's a shame, i would have loved to see an end to end numeric example.

I think people get too hung up on any possibility of LLMs not being perfect while still being extremely helpful.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-01 15:26:48+00:00
Information is physical and part of the physical entropic universe, Landauer showed that.

When we imagine something in our brain we are physically testing or creating something even if ephemeral, these thoughts you make have meaning and are real just with low distribution.

They can be very complex thoughts, you can invent worlds and objects and play around with them in your mind for relatively low cost, this is the root of humanities power, the ability to create meaning, to create arbitrary coherence (even if it's just internal coherence)

You can distribute this meaning to others, as a written or spoken word.

You can investigate if your thought has correspondence to something that exists in the exterior world. This can be science and discovery.

But you can also create something that you know doesn't exist and then work to have it realized in the external world.

What's the casual path from Gene Rondenberry to the iPod? Hard to compute.

We create meaning. It's what we do.

The funny thing is this, we keep talking about people's search for meaning, but if we look at the observable facts, to speak poetically, if the universe was sentient (and I don't personally believe it is) it would be looking to us to see what meaning we create and new shit we discover and why it works the way it does.
by bunderbunder | 2025-10-01 15:26:52+00:00
Also the FSI estimates are for what it takes to get people who've tested into a FSI language program to that level. Individual differences are known to be a huge factor in language education, and FSI has the luxury of only needing to worry about teaching people who they know are well-suited to learning using their methods.

I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.
by getnormality | 2025-10-01 15:26:57+00:00
Everything described there sounds like old-school adaptive algorithms. I don't see anything about generative AI or LLMs.

I asked Google if MA does LLM tutoring and got back this answer:

> Math Academy does not offer Large Language Model (LLM) tutoring. While the company advertises itself as "AI-powered," this is in reference to a machine-learning-based adaptive learning system, not an interactive LLM tutor.

And here is a HN comment that indicates LLMs are a complement to MA, not part of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43281240
by eadmund | 2025-10-01 15:27:02+00:00
> mdadm+luks+lvm still do not quite provide the same set of features that ZFS alone does even without encryption. Namely in-line compression, and data checksumming, not to mention free snapshots.

Sure, but LUKS+ZFS provides all that too, and also encrypts everything (ZFS encryption, surprisingly, does not encrypt metadata).

As this article demonstrates, encryption really is an afterthought with ZFS. Just as ZFS rethought from first principles what storage requires and ended up making some great decisions, someone needs to rethink from first principles what secure storage requires.
by stego-tech | 2025-10-01 15:27:19+00:00
This. I have no medication as I built up immense resiliency and masking mechanisms over the course of my life. Others may take a cocktail of meds just to make it to lunch.

It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.
by jofer | 2025-10-01 15:27:44+00:00
This depends a lot on what you do. Try working with a decision analyst sometime. The entire economic model with a decision tree and monte carlo analysis of cost overruns, etc for a multi-trillion dollar decision will literally be a arcanely-complex spreadsheet or two on someone's laptop.

With that said, it's still a great tool for the job because the different stakeholders can inspect it.
by inkyoto | 2025-10-01 15:28:12+00:00
A zero (0, not NULL!) pointer is a valid pointer in C/C++. It is not a UB, and it means one simple thing: «give me the contents of a memory cell (a byte, a word, a long word etc) at the address of 0». Old hardware designs used the address of 0 to store a jump address of the system boot-up sequence (i.e. firmware), and I personally wrote the code in C to inspect / use it in the unpriviledged hardware mode.

The prevailing number of modern systems do not map the very first virtual (the emphasis is on virtual) memory page (the one that starts from zero) into the process address space for pragmatic reasons – an attempt to dereference a zero pointer is most assuredly a defect in the application. Therefore, an attempt to dereference a zero pointer always results in a page fault due to the zeroeth memory page not being present in the process' address space, which is always a SIGSEGV in a UNIX.

Embdedded systems that do not have a MMU will allow *ptr where «ptr» is zero to proceed happily. Some (not all) systems may even have a system specific or a device register mapped at the address being 0.

You are conflating several unrelated things, and there is no pedantry involved – it is a very simple matter with nothing else to debate.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-01 15:28:14+00:00
There are blocklists for transphobes, but users are under no obligation to subscribe to one, and they’re not on by default.

Personally I use one; I have seen enough of transphobes’ One Joke to last me a few lifetimes. Deeply tedious people.

You’re not being censored, people are just opting to filter out your nonsense.
by cbrinicombe | 2025-10-01 15:28:20+00:00
I think what you say about having 'outgrown' the platform is basically hitting the nail on the head here. Duolingo knows their audience is people just looking to start learning a language. That's the top of the funnel and therefore the place where they can capture the most users, which for them makes sense because the majority of users are monetized through ads.

There are so many other platforms around Duo though, Preply being one of them, that go a lot deeper with techniques that are great once you have that baseline understanding but maybe wouldn't work so well on people who are maybe just starting to try to commit to a habit. If from day one you make someone sit down and have a 50min conversation they are much more unlikely to be doing it 7 days later (and therefore watching ads) than if you just introduced them to a few basic words and concepts.

So i don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing that duo is built this way, it's just serving one audience. And that audience are the ones that need the most help in habit forming and motivation - hence the gamification is strongest.

Sure maybe they've gone too far, and maybe the way they've done some features like the leaderboards and leagues kinda sucks but even if these things are always a bit marmite, they do work for a lot of people. We've built a very similar system in trophy and we see the data - streaks, achievements etc really do work.

I do think if duo made the leagues, points, challenges etc more friend-focused rather than being put into cohorts of people who you have no idea who they are then that would be better. I think at one point I was asked to 'import my contacts' but tbh phone contacts are such a dead feature in 2025 that I don't want some rando that I spoke to 10 years ago being my friend on Duo lol. If I had a way to discover my friends maybe by username or whatnot then that could be better. Not sure if they already have this...
by mdale | 2025-10-01 15:28:23+00:00
Was spending a lot with cursor switching between sonnet and opus 4.1s like 1500 to $2k a month. Was doing a lot of tabs in parallel of course. Output was like 5k lines on Good day. (Lines not the best measurement) But a yard stick against feature testing and rework.

Now with gpt-5-codex and codex vs code ext .. getting through up to 20k line changes in a day again lots of parallel jobs; but codex allows for less rework.

The job of the "engineer" has changed a lot. At 5k lines I was not reviewing every detail but it was possible to skim over what had changed. At 20k it's more looking at logs performance / arch & observation of features less code is reviewed.

Maybe soon just looking at outcomes. Things are moving quickly.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-01 15:28:47+00:00
Symbian didn't use X in any way. That was Maemo, used on the 770. But there were also some Symbian-based touch devices like the 5800 XpressMusic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5800_XpressMusic

But Symbian didn't have any roots in Linux. It came from the Psion organiser line originally (and specifically the 5/7 series, not the earlier 3's).
by shae | 2025-10-01 15:28:56+00:00
At the 2018(?) ICFP, I sat between John Wiegley and Conal Elliot. They talked about expressing and solving a programming problem in category theory, and then mapping the solution into whatever programming language their employer was using. From what they said, they were having great success producing efficient and effective solutions following this process.

I decided to look for other cases where this process worked.

I found several, but one off the top of my head is high dimensional analysis, where t-SNE was doing okay, and a group decided to start with CT and try to build something better, and produced UMAP, which is much better.

In short, this does work, and you can find much better solutions this way.

(random link https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/402668/intuitive-e... )
by scythe | 2025-10-01 15:29:06+00:00
This comment prompted me to go look at the various spreadsheet software available, since I was only familiar with the usual Excel / GS / Libre. There is also GNOME's Gnumeric, KDE's Calligra, Apple's Numbers, an online variant of LibreOffice called Collabora, an Excel clone made by a German company called PlanMaker, a Latvian effort called OnlyOffice, and then probably the most unusual variant, but somehow it isn't surprising that somebody made a spreadsheet based on Python:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyspread
by j45 | 2025-10-01 15:29:29+00:00
There is a bit of oversimplification here.

Understanding if the student has actually learned is a competency piece, in math it’s mostly show your work and/or did you have the right answer.

The continued top down attempts to boil the whole sea with LLMs is part of the current problem.

It’s getting pretty good though for focused tutoring.

For students, models setup to tutor too often are trying to boil a sea (all education) instead of a kiddie pool. The reality is that more and more seems like k-6 if not k-12 students can be supported.

If we look at the EdTech space from the bottom up, namely learner-centric, there is both a real need and opportunity.

For school age students, math largely has not changed in hundreds of years, and doesn’t change often. Either you understand it or have to put in the work.

There’s no shortage of human created written teaching resources. A teacher could create their own touring assistant based off their explanations.

Alternatively, an open source textbook could be inputted. There’s a reason why training or fine tuning on books has caused lawsuits - it can increase accuracy many fold.

Teachers are burdened with repetitive marking, there’s def a place for personalized marking tools.

We know LLMs respond differently to different input. Their superpower is being able to regenerate an input as many different many different ways, which can include personalization.

Just because one has experimented with LLMs doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to get a result from them just because we haven’t been able to understand how.

If examples of the chat logs or prompts can be provided of what did or didn’t work it helps have a conversation without the subjectivity.

Mathematics is a great lens to see that folks are trying to get non-deterministic software to behave like all the deterministic software we’ve had before, instead of finding the places where non-deterministic strengths can shine.

It’s not all or nothing, or one or the other.
by allenu | 2025-10-01 15:29:55+00:00
This is how I feel about it too. I got into programming because I liked making software that did interesting things for me. I enjoyed learning new languages and techniques to improve my programming skills to make software better, larger, faster, but after having been doing this in some capacity for 30 years, I find I'm often doing the same things to create these solutions, so I'm not necessarily learning new things all the time. The typing out the code part becomes something that just has to be done to get to the solution, but doesn't necessarily make me better or bring me joy.

Using AI has been exciting because I can now just focus on designing the user experience and architecture at a high level and do less of the typing out stuff by hand. I still have to steer it in the right direction, though, because it does make mistakes but it does beat just typing it out by hand.
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-01 15:30:00+00:00
I keep coming back to a text file in my home folder, and a shell command that opens that file in a text editor and scrolls the cursor to the line for a new entry.

Also +1 for paper and pen if that's viable. It's a lot easier to do diagrams, symbols, formulas, simple maps, and other visual media that way.
by k1w1 | 2025-10-01 15:30:10+00:00
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Aha! is profitable, you can work from anywhere in North or South America, and we offer excellent benefits. We use our own product to manage our work (which is especially rewarding) and we deploy continuously.

Our entire team has always been 100% remote - in North American timezones so we can collaborate during the work day.
by simonw | 2025-10-01 15:30:10+00:00
You're right, I may have misinterpreted what tptacek said: he said he was using LLMs and that he was using Math Academy but I interpreted that as "Math Academy includes LLM features" - actually it's equally likely he's using Math Academy and having LLMs tutor him on the side.

(Confirmed I got this wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45439001)
by wduquette | 2025-10-01 15:30:15+00:00
Leuchtturm 1917 dot grid journal, Uniball Jetstream pen, and a minimalist version of Ryder Carroll's bullet journaling advice. (https://bulletjournal.com)

I like the Leuchtturm journals because they have page numbers and they don't fall apart.

I record todos, appointments, significant events, and detailed notes on anything I'm studying or thinking about in detail. Each successive journal gets a number, so that so I can easily and unequivocally reference any page in any journal.

Knowledge-base-stuff goes in Obsidian.
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-10-01 15:30:36+00:00
"Bank runaway" and "Loss of confidence in markets" does it.

That works for your country. Why aren't banks in smaller countries affected? Their security is not good, and markets aren't important.

In Costa Rica there was an incident where the equivalent of the IRS was held ransom and the government didn't pay. (Thumbs up to them.) Again, why doesn't that happen to banks there?
by xp84 | 2025-10-01 15:30:48+00:00
Personally, I think TikTok and other video platforms are already awash in AI. So, in my opinion, a platform that is explicitly declared as containing just AI videos is actually less disturbing to me. Every minute spent watching known-fictional AI videos on this platform is a minute not spent watching deceptive imagery disguised as reality on TikTok.

Please note that I’m not necessarily commenting on whether the existence of AI generated video is good or bad for our society, because I think it’s pretty moot what we think about it. It’s not going to just go away even if the majority of people here at HN or in general feel that it’s problematic.
by soulofmischief | 2025-10-01 15:30:53+00:00
This is a massive oversimplification of both autism and ADHD which approaches uselessness. Impulsivity is one possible symptom of ADHD, but doesn't even begin to describe the experience, and by itself paints an incorrect picture of the experience. Same for autism and structure. I know plenty of people with autism who absolutely do not deal in structure.

I know it feels nice to be able to craft a simple narrative, but this narrative feels more harmful and misconstrued than useful.
by ikerino | 2025-10-01 15:30:58+00:00
Eh, this just feels like "software engineering simulator." I don't have autism but a good bit of this feels familiar (am I on the spectrum?) I'm an introvert and have struggled to cope with corporate work for a while.

What helps:

- Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?

- Owning your calendar and timing for meetings to better suit your energy.

- Regular therapy and reflection, honestly.

- Regular exercise, doesn't matter who you are or what form, this is essential.

I can respect that this "simulation" fosters empathy, but worry that it also awfulizes/catastrophizes solvable problems. Figuring out functional routines and managing burnout is just as big a part of the job as writing code. It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
by boxed | 2025-10-01 15:31:05+00:00
> Realistically we can't fix media literacy education and we can't fix journalism, both are systemically broken. But I would never blame people, everyone is the product of their environment and a victim of the system.

I think it's a lot more reasonable to expect change journalism. Or maybe not journalism per se, but information dissemination/world model updates. News/journalism is just the form we've sort of settled on for that kind of job, but it's fundamentally the wrong thing. It's like asking for a faster horse when we want a car. Or asking for email notifications when we really want is a way to know the current status of something.

> Media literacy in that context would just refer to reliable sourcing, reliable sources post retractions/corrections.

I think the reach of those corrections is as much a problem as if they are published. Posting retractions to a printer that is directly hooked up to a shredder is technically "posting retractions", but practically it's not. Same as most news sources really. The retractions are functionally buried for almost all sources, including the most prestigious source Nature.
by alterom | 2025-10-01 15:31:10+00:00
Pretty big. The key word is "comorbidity"; having one of them means you are more likely to have the other than a random person.

There's also an overlap in traits.

I'm AuDHD (autism + ADHD). You can read about my ADHD side if the experience (with memes!) here:

https://romankogan.net/adhd
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-01 15:31:38+00:00
I would guess that a large part of it is that it's the oldest period of time for which we have significant details, and a strong association with the people there as our ancestors (in the respective countries where such fairs are prevalent). We have much less idea of what ancient Roman or Celtic or Norse or Thracian etc day to day life actually looked like, and to the extent that we do know, it's much weirder and more foreign.
by theYipster | 2025-10-01 15:31:44+00:00
Looking at the Zig vs. Rust angle — an interesting takeaway from the article is that Zig makes it considerably easier to build statically allocated applications than Rust.

For all of Rust’s talk about “safety”, assuming the above assertion is true, than perhaps Zig is a better choice to augment or replace C in embedded, safety-critical software engineering, where static memory allocation is a core principle.
by herculity275 | 2025-10-01 15:32:07+00:00
There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
by tptacek | 2025-10-01 15:32:08+00:00
That's exactly what Math Academy is: I'm operating with a grounded set of correct, validated content, and using LLMs to (1) fill in more conceptual explanation and (2) check where I went off the rails when I get things wrong. You can't play the "hallucination" card here. An LLM can reliably do partial fraction decomposition, spot and solve an ODE that admits direct integration, calculate an arc length, invert a matrix, or resolve a gnarly web of trig identities. If you say a current frontier model can't do this --- and do it from OCR'd screencaps! --- I'll respond that you haven't tried.

I can't think of a single instance where O4 or GPT5 got one of these problems wrong. It sees maybe 6-12 of them per day from me. I've been doing this since February.
by r2_pilot | 2025-10-01 15:32:09+00:00
True, and there's also no fitness scorekeeper. Wars are fought and won by having a diverse set of abilities. Physical prowess is one, as is intelligence and social skills (diplomacy keeps fighting from happening). So if reality is that we recognize differences in physique for sport, then we can accommodate these physiological differences in a well-rounded military that is inclusive to all who participate in the common defense of the nation.