MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xpe | 2025-10-23 13:38:49+00:00
Any sensible person should probably be riled up -- or at least dissatified -- when an article contains this:

> With this approach, he claims he can always understand if someone is a competent programmer, and he has never seen it fail.

In this kind of situation, never seeing something fail is not a good sign. Evaluation metrics are noisy. One has to accept reality: no process is perfect. Better to admit it and actively seek out failures.

Statistical evaluations matter. Getting some objective distance matters.

> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_p_feynman_137642
by photonthug | 2025-10-23 13:38:58+00:00
> Modern price collusion is more apt to happen with A/B testing if prices at locations to see what the local market will bear.

One of my first thoughts as well. If you're big enough, you collect so much data and run so many experiments all the time that you know exactly what you'd do if/when there's any competitor on the scene. Not only is there no need to talk to them and make backroom deals, but barely any need to even observe them. You priced like they did/would/could at some point already anyway. At a certain scale and if you already know the price that the market can tolerate.. the most relevant hidden information you want to know is how much cash your competitor has access to. That tells you whether you can win the price-war to sell at a loss for long enough to ruin them, buy them, move on to integrating verticals etc.

Game theory is interesting but also a bad model to the extent that it assumes persistent players with changing strategies, whereas average case in late-stage capitalism is more likely to have players eating players, no new players can enter, players changing rules, etc. As a CS nerd I still like a game theoretical approach better than most econ, but at some point we need to give up on tidy formulas and closed-form answers, and go all in on messy simulations.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-10-23 13:39:19+00:00
9/11 was perpetrated by people who couldn't have knocked out Starlink or anything else in space but still found a way to harm their enemies. Simply not being a superpower doesn't make one entirely harmless. Starlink has assets, soft and hard, all over the globe, in easy to destroy places. No one even needs to claim responsibility for the damage. It just needs to be understood that it was the result of ignoring the threat of retaliation by those being imposed upon. Whether or not that imposition is moral in a particular set of eyes doesn't change the reality of what happens when those imposed upon decide to lash out.
by jaccola | 2025-10-23 13:39:30+00:00
There are three competing factors at play: minimising false hires, minimising false no-hire, salary.

Presumably I couldn't hire Casey for a team lead position paying £120k per year. Equally, I don't want to miss out on talent by trying to catch every edge case and making an interview process 3 weeks long.

I hired a very technically strong candidate once, he loved optimising games as a hobby. Unfortunately we were a SaaS startup and he seemed to be allergic to using prebuilt components (think SQS) because "we could build them more efficiently". It's impossible to catch every foible like this in an interview scenario.

For these reasons, ultimately there will be bad hires. The biggest mistake is leaders not being willing to fire people. Sometimes this is for fear of reducing head count, because it makes them feel like an arsehole or they aren't themselves capable/invested enough to care. It's painful but I've found it always better to fire fast.
by h14h | 2025-10-23 13:39:30+00:00
IMO a huge missed opportunity for these indirect-drive bikes is marketing them as a home exercise bike 2-in-1.

If the pedals are going into a generator with fancy software to emulate the feel of a bike, there's nothing stopping the bike from going into "stationary mode" and acting as an exercise bike. This thing even had a screen on it, so you could do workouts like a peloton.

Then there's the storage aspect -- many people already have (or want) to allocate space to an exercise bike. It would pretty compelling that was also the parking space for your bike-bike.

Then there's the added benefit that your workout is charging the battery. Imagine biking to a park on low charge, doing a stationary workout, and then having enough battery left to bike home with full assist.
by kurmukovai | 2025-10-23 13:40:06+00:00
*OpenReview Hosts Record-Breaking AAAI 2026 Conference with Pioneering AI Review System.*

"[...] To address these challenges [receiving 30,948 submissions], AAAI 2026 is piloting an innovative AI-assisted review system using a *large frontier reasoning model from OpenAI* [...] *Authors, reviewers, and committee members will provide feedback on the AI reviews*.""

You should read it as *Authors, reviewers, and committee members will be working for free as annotators for OpenAI*, an extremely sad and shortsighted decision from AAAI committee.

Instead of charging large corporations for paper submissions (in contrast to charging for participation), to keep them from swarming AI conferences and exploit free work of reviewers all over the world, AAAI decided to sell free, unpaid reviewers time to OpenAI, modern version of intellectual slavery. Good luck getting high quality human reviews on AAAI 2026 onwards.
by phkahler | 2025-10-23 13:40:28+00:00
When doing technical interviewing I look for 3 things:

1) Can this person do stuff.

2) Can they learn stuff.

3) Are they interested in learning and doing the things we need them to.

The authors approach of going deep in one area is good for determining #1. You weed out all the people who "were on the team that..." or similar work-adjacent activities and find those that actually did the work / wrote the code / designed the thing / did the testing. Anyone with several years should have worked on more than one thing. Variety of things they actually did indicates an ability to learn which is #2 above. Finally you'll have to gauge how well they'll take to whatever it is you need them to work on, and that's a toss-up. This is where going to a big-name school can be useful since a big part of college is pushing through shit you don't care about for courses that aren't your thing. Otherwise a real interest in your project/product should be enough to motivate the learning and doing if they're capable.

The rest of the "team fit" stuff... You can figure out what they're like on the side while doing an hour long technical interview.

And that's my take on interviewing. I find it quite effective at finding good engineers.
by williamdclt | 2025-10-23 13:40:31+00:00
That's just bullshit. Of the top 5 engineers I've worked with (and they were really good), 3 don't code in their free time. And most of the "good enough" engineers I know don't either.

We don't expect this from any other profession, do you expect civil engineers or architects to work on personal projects in their free time? If they don't would you challenge them that they don't have the skillset or the critical thinking? That's just ridiculous.
by esafak | 2025-10-23 13:40:35+00:00
I don't know what the attainable ideal is. Neutrality according to some well-defined political spectrum would be fair, but the median person in any country -- as the world drifts rightward -- could be well off center and denounce the neutral model as biased.

We should at least measure the models and place them on the political spectrum in their model cards.
by lucideer | 2025-10-23 13:41:16+00:00
This is imo ultimately a problem with git.

If git didn't have this setting, then after checking out a bash file with LFs in it, there are many Windows editors that would not be able to edit that file properly. That's a limitation of those editors & nobody should be using those pieces of software to edit bash files. This is a problem that is entirely out of scope for a VCS & not something Git should ever have tried to solve.

In fact, having git solve this disincentives Windows editors from solving it correctly.
by bn-l | 2025-10-23 13:41:54+00:00
E-e-e-xactly. It took an embarrassing long time for me to come to this conclusion also. There’s something hypnotising about seeing it work which is also distracting.

I wonder if I’ve actually saved time overall or, if I was in an uninterrupted flow state I would have done not just a better but also quicker job.
by ttd | 2025-10-23 13:42:18+00:00
This is a great point and not one that I had considered. I suspect I am the same way - scanning back and forth while studying a diagram.

It's possible this tool may be more appropriate for e.g. presentation of info to a mixed audience. Technical people may have questions that can be answered with detail that non-technical people would find distracting, if it were visible on the main diagram. And "presentation" here could be a literal presentation in a conference room, or documenting something on a site that people visit on their own.

You could make the argument in that example that you should create two diagrams, one for each audience. I think that is a valid argument - but I can also imagine maintaining two separate diagrams that present similar information could be irritating.
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-23 13:42:47+00:00
> 1. If they are competent programmers. 2. Whether they will be productive at your company/project.

> His opinion is that the second question is much harder to answer, and he doesn't know how to reliably do it, and whether there is a way to answer it.

In my experience, I look for signs that someone is a child trapped in an adult's body. (With a lot of leeway for younger candidates.)

IE, what I'm looking for is someone who isn't going to pick silly arguments, get into pissing matches in code reviews, or argue with facts of the requirements.

---

Years ago I used to use an interview question based around the differences of XML libraries built into .Net. The point was for the candidate to demonstrate that they understood tradeoffs; but one candidate suddenly took the tone of a teenager and yelled, "I don't want to work with XML, I want to work with JSON."

They clearly failed #2. It wasn't because they didn't like XML, it was because they rejected the point of the question.
by megaman821 | 2025-10-23 13:43:39+00:00
People are over excited about sodium-ion batteries. They are at least years away from price parity. The super-low numbers floating around are absolute fantasy until production is in the tens of gigawatt hours at least. Their real value is being a hedge on lithium prices. If large battery manufacturer can trivially reconfigure their lines to make sodium-ion batteries, that will be a giant check on large lithium price spikes.
by Woodi | 2025-10-23 13:43:50+00:00
Why DAV should be integrated into any SMTPd ?? DAV is some protocol over HTTP - another service, another port. Why any architect want it in same binary or even deployed on same server ?? And even if some "cal" or "address" part is content in email that still processing it is totally different software layer then plain "sending mail" and storing it.

But no, people get self backdoored by using Exchange... Or clolud :) Or AI hosted by someone else...
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-10-23 13:43:54+00:00
No, the other commenter is correct.

There’s a gate signal, typically activated by holding a key (though in a modular synth, there are many other potential gate sources). While the gate is open an ADSR envelope progresses from Attack -> Decay -> Sustain. It then remains on Sustain until the gate closes, at which point it enters the Release phase. So the amount of time it remains in Sustain is dictated by the gate signal. Notice there’s no G in ADSR, because the gate doesn’t come from the envelope.

What you’re describing is Hold, which some envelopes (AHDSR is one popular flavor) can do. Many Elektron groove boxes have hold stages on their envelopes.

In AHDSR, an open gate goes from Attack into Hold, where it retains its value for a set period of time after the attack, and then goes into the Decay phase and continues from there.

There are plenty of other kinds of envelope, and things that live somewhere between LFOs and envelopes called a function generator, which is often an AR envelope that can be looped. Then there are complex many-stage envelopes that were especially popular when digital synths were first coming onto the scene.

I’d also add that the description you gave of a synth architecture is generally considered East Coast synthesis. One or more oscillators going into a mixer/VCA, and then into a filter and possibly some effects is a very popular architecture made famous by Bob Moog. But there are other forms like West Coast synthesis where instead of having filters, you run gentler wave forms like a triangle through a wave folder, and/or a complex oscillator where you have a pair of oscillators that can cross modulate one another. So where East Coast synthesis takes harmonically rich waveforms and cuts harmonics away with filters, West Coast synthesis starts with harmonically tame waveforms and adds harmonics through various flavors of FM, wave shaping, etc.

Then you’ve got samplers, granular synthesis, physical modeling, additive synthesis, and a bunch of other types as well. The East Coast architecture is popular, but there’s a lot more out there.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-10-23 13:43:55+00:00
> The problem is that the divide of alignment of interests there is between new, small companies and users. New companies want to put up a website without tripping over one of the thousand unwritten rules of "How to not look like a phishing site or malware depot" (many of which are unwritten because protecting users and exploiting users is a cat-and-mouse game)... And users don't want to get owned

Some candidate language:

- Monopolistic companies may not actively impose restrictions which harm others (includes businesses)

or

- Some restrictions are allowed, but the company must respond to an appeal of restrictions within X minutes; Appeals to the company can themselves be appealed to a governmental independent board which binds the company with no further review permitted; All delays and unreasonable responses incur punitive penalties as judged by the board; All penalties must be paid immediately

or

- If an action taken unilaterally by a company 1) harms someone AND 2) is automated: Then, that automation must be immediately, totally, and unconditionally reversed upon the unilateral request of the victim. The company may reinstate the action upon the sworn statement of an employee that they have made the decision as a human, and agree to be accountable for the decision. The decision must then follow the above appeals process.

or

- No monopolies allowed
by taeric | 2025-10-23 13:44:17+00:00
So then this is just classic talking past each other? The point of the discussion, to me, was some people have defined it such that everyone is battling childhood trauma. The book literally has the example of the trauma of the umbilical cord wrapping around your neck in the womb.

My main post at the start was only pointing out that I have started seeing people, largely in the mainstream, start saying "maybe we shouldn't definitionally say all of these people were traumatized." Where I take "traumatized" to be "had an event that potentially lead to a particular categorized response."

The take at the end is almost certainly inline with talking past each other. If you are taking the super precise (and, to be clear, I think there are good arguments for doing so) definition of trauma, I'm not pushing that. People, and kids in particular, have a strong sense of wanting to make things fit the patterns they are learning. If they think their sibling is not respectful enough of the pet that just died, they will escalate as much as they can on that view.
by delichon | 2025-10-23 13:44:29+00:00
As different LLMs are purposed to control more different things via API, I'm afraid we'll get in a situation where the toaster and the microwave are Republicans, the fridge and washing machine are Democrats, the dryer is an independent and the marital aid is Green. Devices will each need to support bring-your-own API keys for consumers to have a well aligned home.

Me: Vibrator, enable the roller coaster high intensity mode. Device: I'm sorry, you have already used your elective carbon emission allocation for the day. Me: (changes LLM) Device: Enabled. Drill baby drill!
by plasticchris | 2025-10-23 13:44:34+00:00
People talking about efficiency are missing the point - the pedals are only there so it gets classified as an e-bike and not an electric motorcycle (so no license required, registration, taxes, can drive in the bike lane) and doesn’t have the jerky handling of an e-bike with the wheels mechanically linked to the pedals.

They never really intend for you to turn the pedals. It is a regulatory thing.
by duped | 2025-10-23 13:44:47+00:00
Some background is needed for the thread API

The basic threading model for plugins is the "main" and "audio" threads. The APIs specify which methods are allowed to be called concurrently from which thread.

There is also a state machine for the audio processing bits (for example you can guarantee that processing won't happen until after the plugin as been "activated" and won't go from a deactivated state to processing until a specific method is called - I'm simplifying significantly for the VST3 state machine).

The "main" thread is the literal main/UI thread of the application typically, or a sandboxed plugin host running in a separate process. You do your UI on this thread as well as handle most host events.

Plugins often want to do things on background threads, like stream audio from disk or do heavy work like preparing visualization without blocking the main UI thread (which also handles rendering and UI events - think like the JS event loop, it's bad to block it).

The threading model and state machine make it difficult to know where it's safe to spawn and join threads. You can do it in a number of places but you also have to be careful about lifetimes of those threads, most plugins do it as early as possible and then shut them down as late as possible.

The host also has to do a lot of the stuff on background threads and usually has its own thread pool. CLAP introduced an extension to hook into the host's thread pool so plugins don't have to spawn threads and no longer have to really care about the lifetime. VST3 is copying that feature.

When you see annotations on methods in these APIs about "main" vs "any" thread and "active" etc they're notes to developers on where it is safe to call the methods and any synchronization required (on both sides of the API).

If it sounds complicated that's because it is, but most of this is accidental complexity created by VST3.
by abetusk | 2025-10-23 13:44:50+00:00
As a programmer, you sometimes want to make an alphabet lookup table. So, something like:

var alpha_lu = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

Typing it out by hand is error prone as it's not easy to see if you've swapped the order or missed a character.

I've needed the alphabet string or lookup rarely, but I have needed it before. Some applications could include making your own UUID function, making a small random naming scheme, associating small categorical numbers to letters, etc.

The author of article mentioned they do web development, so it's not hard to imagine they've had to create a URL shortener, maybe more than once. So, for example, creating a small name could look like:

function small_name(len) { let a = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz", v = []; for (let i=0; i<len; i++) { v.push( a[ Math.floor( Math.random()*a.length ) ] ); } return v.join(""); } //... small_name(5); // e.g. "pfsor"

Dealing with strings, dealing with hashes, random names, etc., one could imagine needing to do functions like this, or functions that are adjacent to these types of tasks, at least once a month.

Just a guess on my part though.
by chrisco255 | 2025-10-23 13:45:12+00:00
The Marshall Plan was brilliant, but it's pretty terrible that it was ever necessary in the first place. Americans don't really want to be the world's bodyguard. Don't get me wrong, we like to be #1, but our original default position was neutrality when it comes to foreign conflicts. We hesitated to even enter World War II. It wasn't our war, it wasn't Europe's first conflict and it was unlikely to be its last.

The arrangements made after WWII came at a time when U.S. was over 40% of the global GDP. That's no longer the case. Now, globalism has gutted our own labor market, and many formerly proud manufacturing hubs in the U.S. are saddled with methamphetamine and fentanyl problems. Our veterans have a very high incidence of suicide, and we have a lot of them, because we have had to maintain a large military for a century. Unchecked immigration has diluted national cohesion and inflamed tensions domestically (and from what I understand, Europe's got its own internal tensions with this problem). The world as it existed in 1948 no longer exists.

Sorry you think the SAAB is better than the F35. It's really not, and lacks the same thrust, payload, stealth, etc but it's a perfectly good jet. That being said, I don't think fighter jets are going to win 21st century warfare. Drone tech is likely to be the deciding factor.
by conartist6 | 2025-10-23 13:45:31+00:00
I'm not sure, but it's on my mind.

I own what I think are the key protocols for the future of browsers and the web, and nobody knows it yet. I'm not committed to forking the web by any means, but I do think I have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake the system if I were determined to and knew how to remake it into something better.

If you want to talk more, reach out!
by SHOwnsYou | 2025-10-23 13:45:32+00:00
This is a redistribution scheme. It is a transfer of wealth to those who can take the risk to contract for the creation of the wealth generating assets. For example, a regular joe isn't going to start a construction company and win road creation contracts. The contracts would go to existing construction companies with proven histories of creating roads.

This is playing musical chairs with money while at the same time using leverage to do it. The poor get way poorer because what few dollars they do have will be worth less. The rich get way richer because there are more dollars to go into their coffers. The poor don't get many new dollars in their coffers because they have no extra money to play musical chairs with, so they never join the capital pool in proportion nor do they receive its investment dollars.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-10-23 13:45:42+00:00
Smart people want to dominate the stupids.

For some group of smart people, there will be a group of smarter people who want to dominate the The people they designate "the stupids".

The internet was a technological solution to a social problem. It introduced other social problems, although arguably these to your point are old social problems in a new arena.

But there may be yet another technological solution to the old social problems of monopolism, despotic centralized control, and fraud.

.... I did say "may".
by palmotea | 2025-10-23 13:45:54+00:00
> Why would you prefer to believe a random outsider's view (scientists are holding us back)

What "random outsider's view"? It's my view. I've heard what they had to say, and I think their priorities are wrong, at least when it comes to keeping places like Mars "pristine."

> over people who have built professional careers working in the field(a.k.a scientists)?

Scientists are not some caste of priests, in tune with the one true POV (though some treat them that way). They're dudes doing a job, and the priorities of that job aren't the only priorities. Stating their POV while watching pictures of galaxies with Vangelis playing in the background doesn't change that.

> Especially when you provide no evidence to back up your claims?

Huh? That's a misplaced demand if I ever saw one.