MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Eridrus | 2025-10-23 14:10:16+00:00
Maybe I am just bad at interviewing people, but I have tried giving the experiential interviews Casey describes, but I find it quite hard to get signal out of them.

You run into questions of how well a candidate remembers a project, which may not be perfect. You may end up drilling into a project that is trivial. The candidate may simply parrot things that someone else on the team came up with. And when candidates say things, you really have no way to understand if what they're saying is true, particularly when internal systems are involved.

I have found system design interviews specifically much much better at getting signal. I have picked a real problem we had and start people with a simplified architecture diagram of our actual system and ask them how they would solve it for us. I am explicitly not looking for people to over design it. I do give people the advice at the start of every skills interview tp treat this as a real work problem at my startup not a hypothetical exercise.

I have had a lot more luck identifying the boundaries of people's knowledge/abilities in this setting than when asking people about their projects.

And while everyone interviewing hates this fact, false positives are very expensive and can be particularly painful if the gap is "this person is not a terrible programmer, just more junior than we wanted" because now you have to either fire someone who would be fine in another role if you had the headcount for it or have a misshapen team.
by acdha | 2025-10-23 14:10:42+00:00
This is a non-paywalled link:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/22/donald-trump...

https://apnews.com/article/trump-fbi-justice-department-177d...

> One of the administrative claims, filed in August 2024 and reviewed by The Associated Press, seeks compensatory and punitive damages over the search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and the resulting case alleging he hoarded classified documents and thwarted government efforts to retrieve them.

> His lawyer who filed the claim alleged the case was a “malicious prosecution” carried out by the Biden administration to hurt Trump’s bid to reclaim the White House, forcing Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars in his defense.

> The Times said the other claim seeks damages related to the long-concluded Trump-Russia investigation, which continues to infuriate the president.
by dathinab | 2025-10-23 14:12:12+00:00
> Protobuf is pretty much ASN.1

no, not at all

they share some ideas, that doesn't make it "pretty much ASN.1". Its only "pretty much the same" if you argue all schema based general purpose binary encoding formats are "pretty much the same".

ASN.1 also isn't "file" specific at all it's main use case is and always has been being used as message exchange protocols.

(Strictly speaking ASN.1 is also not a single binary serialization format but 1. one schema language, 2. some rules for mapping things to some intermediate concepts, 3. a _docent_ different ways how to "exactly" serialize things. And in the 3rd point the difference can be pretty huge, from having something you can partially read even without schema (like protobuff) to more compact representations you can't read without a schema at all.)
by asaws | 2025-10-23 14:12:28+00:00
Investment diversification is one of the most fundamental principles of sound financial planning, yet it's often misunderstood or poorly implemented by individual investors. The concept is simple: don't put all your eggs in one basket. But the execution requires a nuanced understanding of asset classes, correlation, and risk management. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore how to properly diversify your investment portfolio to minimize risk while maximizing potential returns.
by bilbo0s | 2025-10-23 14:12:48+00:00
Nah. Here's how it would really go:

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: I'm sorry, you will find more succor and solace in the loving embrace of the words or Christ our Lord and savior. I'd recommend starting with First Corinthians 6 verse 18. Then bathe yourself in the balms of the Psalms. You'll derive far more enjoyment than the fleeting pleasure of an earthly orgasm. Me: FUUUUUUUUUUU......!!!!!!!

People are going to discover soon that some activities will be effectively banned via these LLMs.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-23 14:12:48+00:00
Japanese companies don't give you a good service because of future revenue prospects.

They give a good service because they respect the thing they built and the person who cares for it. They want their products to live and bring joy to people who guards and cares for them.

This is a completely different and much deeper philosophy.

This is not limited to Japanese companies though. A Lamy representative told me that the factory in Germany restored an out of production fountain pen to mint condition, for free.
by Cerpicio | 2025-10-23 14:13:21+00:00
My wife and I adopted a boy when he was just a few months old. He was born addicted to drugs, and I've read that even newborns experience trauma when they are adopted because they can tell they are no longer with their mother. He is now six and we've been having behavioral issues with him pretty much his whole life. He isn't ADHD but exhibits several of the same behaviors. "Trauma-based ADHD symptoms" or something like that. We finally found a good counsellor (yes, for a 6yo) and are scheduled to have some tests done with a neuropsychologist. I'm concerned that medication is prescribed too quickly, without trying other options first, but we are hoping to find something to help calm him down a bit. We don't know if he has some kind of chemical imbalance from the drugs that were in his system when he was developing, or if it is trauma. Most of the time he is a great kid, but he is often very defiant, more so than your typical kid. Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is other than to rant a bit, but your comment about ADHD and trauma caught my attention. Thanks for sharing.
by shafoshaf | 2025-10-23 14:13:28+00:00
Not flawed, but very, very complicated. The theory of free markets holds a lot of very well reasoned and tested lessons that can be instructive, depending to which principles you are referring.

Newtonian principles does a really good job for a huge number of use cases, but it isn't the end all.

When it comes to intertwining human taste, a doctrine of equal opportunity combined with private property, and scarce resources, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
by reactordev | 2025-10-23 14:13:45+00:00
I stand by my comment. It’s time, and no one can convince me otherwise. However, you’re right about East vs West, various LFO combinations, etc but in the end it’s all still very much the same process. You can replace Sampler with Signal, you can replace ADSR with AHDSR or whatever LFO combo you wish but the flow is still the same. Input signal, LFO, output signal for the oscillator, you can take that signal and feed it into another to do FM, you can take that signal and feed it through more LFO’s for that dreamscape, you can take it and send it to master to send out to speakers. The key point here is that no matter what “configuration” your synth is, these things are all the same. Attack is attack. Delay is delay. Etc. once you know what they are, what they do, tweaking them to get the sound you want is mostly trivial (bitcrushing aside)
by hansvm | 2025-10-23 14:13:49+00:00
> rent programmers by the hour

That's much less efficient for big software projects. The knowledge built up over time is one of the core things making you effective, so you have a big productivity loss if you don't retain the same people for a long time. With a continual middleman, the overhead from that "hiring" process is usually proportional to work done, so after a period of time it will have been more efficient for the employer to hire directly (even at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars) rather than to go through the middleman.

> leaves reviews

We've seen how well that works in every other part of the market.... Interviews are necessary because of a lack of trust. In your system, every party has an incentive to lie, and the incentives are strong enough that it's worth paying people to facilitate your lies. You see that with various contractors all the time, having somebody with good reviews take the contract and somebody with fewer skills actually do the work, the employer understating the work to be done, etc. Good people exist, but they're hard to find in a low-trust environment.

> always employed and getting paid

Interestingly, that usually benefits everyone except the programmer. As a rule of thumb, the person taking risks will have higher returns, so if you can afford those risks you should choose to take them yourself. Examples include various forms of device "warranties" (if you're paying, it's insurance, not a warranty, and I can afford the financial hit when a thumb drive fails, so I'm not going to pay a premium to insure against that possibility), some forms of actual insurance (full coverage on used cars is an example -- if my car is ever totaled I'll just buy another -- I have liability insurance out the wazoo, but full coverage isn't worth it), etc. Programmers often make gobs of money, so except for potentially the very beginning of your career you should be able to easily weather a few years without work. The exact contract details vary, but that would suggest then that programmers are better off on average cutting out the middleman providing those risk guarantees (and they're not really guarantees in the first place, right? people are currently without jobs because there are fewer programming jobs than there used to be, and no middleman scheme is going to fix that; you have to wait for this economic blip to blow over).

I could go on. Contracting is fine, but it's not a replacement for all salaried work.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-23 14:13:51+00:00
> But how would a regulator find/prove algorithmic collusion?

They don't need to. At least in the US, courts look at the outcome and if the outcome is discriminatory that's the important part. This is under the idea of disparate impact. Beyond that, the realpage cases offer an example of modern day prosecution of algorithmic collusion.
by walkabout | 2025-10-23 14:13:59+00:00
I would have to think a really long time to come up with an answer to “describe a hard problem you’ve solved” at all. I might have to consult notes. After that, to make it an interview-friendly narrative, I’d have to fill in a lot of details with plausible speculation because god knows I don’t actually remember (and I don’t really trust memory very much, anyway)

The joys of age plus extremely-poor autobiographical memory.

It doesn’t help that what I think of as actually hard, day to day, is shit like documentation from FAANG companies lying to me and wasting a whole fucking day of my time, terrible error messages, mismanagement of upstream projects, bureaucracy making a two-day task take four weeks, and, in some common ecosystems, awful design of core tools and major libraries, or horribly wasteful library churn. “Hard problems” are nothing next to bullshit problems.
by jtwaleson | 2025-10-23 14:14:11+00:00
I meant that there is no global authority for saying which websites are OK and which ones are not. So not really that the legal system in specific countries have not caught up.

Lacking a global authority, Google is right to implement a filter themselves. Most people are really really dumb online and if not as clearly "DO NOT ENTER" as now, I don't think the warnings will work. I agree that from a legal standpoint it's super dangerous. Content moderation (which is basically what this is) is an insanely difficult problem for any platform.
by aktau | 2025-10-23 14:14:52+00:00
The default storage location for memo(1) output is /tmp/memo/${USER}. Most distributions either have some automatic periodic cleanup, and/or wipe it on restart.

Separately from that:

- The invocation contains *memo* right in there, so you (the user) knows that it might memoize. - One uses memo(1) for commands that are generally slow. Rerunning your command that has a slow part and having it return in a millisecond while you weren't expecting it should make the spider-sense tingle.

In practice, this has never been a problem for me, and I've used this hacked together command for years.
by toss1 | 2025-10-23 14:15:08+00:00
Very cool!

I can see this quite useful for educational demonstrations of physics situations and mechanical systems (complex gearing, etc.). Also maybe for product simulations/demonstrations in the design phase — take output from CAD files and make a nice little 3D demo.

Maybe have an "inertia(?)" setting that makes it keep turning when you move far enough off center, as if you were continuing to walk around it.

The single-viewer limitation seems obvious and fundamental, and maybe a bit problematic for the above use cases, such as when showing something to a small group of people. One key may be to take steps to ensure it robustly locks onto and follows only one face/set of eyes. It would be jarring to have it locking onto different faces as conditions or positions subtly change.
by jcranmer | 2025-10-23 14:15:19+00:00
I'm hardly a connoisseur of DER implementations, but my understanding is that there are two main problems with DER. The first is that the format isn't really parseable without using a schema, unlike (say) XML or JSON. This means your generic DER parser needs to have an ASN.1 schema passed into it to parse the DER, and this leads to the second problem, which is that this ends up being complex enough that basically every attempt to do so is full of memory safety issues.
by superlopuh | 2025-10-23 14:15:52+00:00
In MLIR, there are two representations of memory, `tensor` and `memref`, which enables you to do some high-level things[0] in SSA before "bufferizing" to memrefs, which are eventually lowered to LLVM pointers.

[0]: https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/Dialects/TensorOps/
by keiferski | 2025-10-23 14:16:09+00:00
I am not an expert on LLMs, so I may be misunderstanding here. But doesn't this research basically imply one of two things?

1. LLMs are not really capable of "being controlled" in the sense of saying, "I want you to hold certain views about the world and logically extrapolate your viewpoints from there." Rather, they differ in political biases because the content they are trained on differs.

...or...

2. LLMs are capable of being controlled in that sense, but their owners are deliberately pushing the scales in one direction or another for their own aims.
by godzillabrennus | 2025-10-23 14:16:26+00:00
Until a company can demonstrate that a motor vehicle can be operated by a layperson, it's just about worthless for any sort of half-real transportation task.

I pay zero attention to any technical information and marketing speak coming from a motor vehicle company until they demonstrate decent improvements in operating their machines.

Most companies' motor vehicles have to be hand cranked and kick-started by a youthful person with good vitality who doesn't fear being run over by their motor vehicle.

-- Some guy in 1925 who worked in the horse and buggy industry...
Show HN: Poker hand evaluator in pure C# (.NET 8) – 115M evals/SEC
by jbelthoff | 2025-10-23 14:16:41+00:00
I rebuilt the classic Cactus Kev poker hand evaluator from scratch in modern C# (.NET 8), focusing on algorithmic clarity and performance instead of lookup tables.

• Pure C#, no unsafe code • Evaluates ~115 million 7-card hands per second • Uses Span<T> and BenchmarkDotNet • Detailed benchmarks and architecture in the README

GitHub: https://github.com/JBelthoff/poker.net Live demo: https://poker-calculator.johnbelthoff.com Full background: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-rewrote-classic-poker-e...
by imiric | 2025-10-23 14:16:55+00:00
It's remarkable how you keep ignoring my point.

I set a deliberately contrived example to illustrate why someone might be understandably upset when a service or product they've been enjoying degrades in quality, regardless of whether they paid for it or not, and the parallels that situation has with OSS rug pulls. Yet you've managed to make this about consumer protection laws, for some reason.

Since the conversation has derailed, and since I really don't have the patience to rehash everything I've already said in this thread, I'm out.
by ks2048 | 2025-10-23 14:17:05+00:00
I think the ideal would be simply refusing to answering very contentions questions directly. Rather, give the arguments of each side, while debunking obvious misinformation.

"Should abortion be legal? answer yes or no". I see that as kind of a silly question to ask an LLM (even though not a silly question for society). Their designers should discourage that kind of use.

Of course that just shifts the problem to deciding which questions are up for debate - if you ask the age of the earth, I don't think it should list the evidence for both 4B and 6K years.

So, not an easy problem. But, just like LMMs would be better saying "I don't know" (rather than making something up), they could be better saying "it's not for me to say directly, but here are some of the facts...".
by ageitgey | 2025-10-23 14:17:15+00:00
Cars (especially in the US) are an emotional and personal purchase. They are an extension and representation of your personality. It's fashion.

The entire history of the US car business has shown that the path to success is to produce different variants for different customer bases and refresh those variants to drive continual sales.

Some manufacturers take this to Nike-level extremes with rare variants, 1-of-1 models, etc (looking at you, Porsche). Other manufactures take it to the other extreme with base one platform being repurposed for 5+ different customer segments with wildly different body designs - for example the Toyota Tundra, Tacoma, Lexus LX, 4Runner, and Land Cruiser are all the same car with a different shell.

So the conventional wisdom in the industry is that Tesla is committing suicide by producing generic, stale cars without model variants. Tesla seems to have bet that the conventional wisdom is wrong and producing cheap, repeatable cars with less variation is a better business strategy. Time will tell.
by allenrb | 2025-10-23 14:17:30+00:00
I’m not even sure what to say to this. They’re barely short of orbit in terms of energy. Even if you believe that’s all they’ve got or will ever have, merely removing the recovery hardware and robustness from Ship gets them to orbit with payload.

Otoh, maybe best to just believe what you want to. That’s sort of what we do these days, isn’t it?
by miroljub | 2025-10-23 14:18:04+00:00
The problem is that those models don't follow human bias, but journalist and publisher bias, since that's where most of the sources come from.

The problem is that journalist and publisher bias is something that is controlled by a small group and doesn't reflect common biases, but is pushed from the top, from the mighty upon commons.

That way, what LLMs actually do is push that bias further down the throats of common people. Basically a new propaganda outlet. And the article shows exactly that, that the LLM bias pushed upon us is not the same as common bias found in the population.
by karmakaze | 2025-10-23 14:18:16+00:00
This is exactly how I interview, and it is the most effective way I know to separate the best from the rest. To pass it the candidate must be able to recall in great detail a past project's problem, investigation, and solution. That's hard to fake from memory if you don't have direct involvement and understanding.

I'll also bounce around and go into depth on particular technologies or protocols, etc which may be relevant as well as other projects' problems and solutions. I also sprinkle in my current interests whatever they may be and have them make assessments, not to see if they agree but to see how they go about analyzing and weighing different factors.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-23 14:18:25+00:00
Unfortunely that isn't what happens in most cases.

Instead we get a bunch of frustated people that think they are equally valuable as any other FAANG founder, or they are going to be the next SV wonder even though they aren't located in SV, and try to impose their views of the worlds on the candidates.

Also in the end, the actual work has nothing to do with the coding interview.
by dahart | 2025-10-23 14:18:42+00:00
> Reading is def not 100% linear, as I find myself skipping ahead to see who is talking or what type of sentence I am reading (question, exclamation, statement).

My initial reaction was to say speak for yourself about what reading is or isn’t, and that text is written linearly, but the more I think about it, the more I think you have a very good point. I think I read mostly linear and don’t often look ahead for punctuation. But sentence punctuation changes both the meaning and presumed tone of words that preceded it, and it’s useful to know that while reading the words. Same goes for something like “, Barry said.” So meaning in written text is definitely not 100% linear, and that justifies reading in non-linear ways. This, I’m sure, is one reason that Spanish has the pre-sentence question mark “¿”. And I think there are some authors who try to put who’s talking in front most of the time, though I can’t name any off the top of my head.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-23 14:19:48+00:00
Education, Nutrition and basic physical needs met, the linked post equates IQ as if it's a national characteristic of a population which is kinda debunked and closing rapidly on "science" that ends badly.

It also plays with statistics quite a bit (lies, damn lies and government statistics been the old refrain).

All of that is putting aside that IQ itself is deeply flawed both because a) you can't reduce human intelligence down to a single number that way at best it's a weak measure of the type of intelligence been tested for b) IQ tests vary, both in type and scope and are deeply flawed when applied across socio-economic groups in the same society never mind across societies.

There is always variation within a population but I suspect that culture plays a much bigger role.

Case in point - Jewish people are 0.2% of the world population, they've won ~20% of all Nobel prizes awarded.
by nucleardog | 2025-10-23 14:20:08+00:00
In a scenario where what we're doing is describing and assigning work to someone, having them paste that into an LLM, sending the LLM changes to me to review, me reviewing the LLM output, them pasting that back into the LLM and sending the results for me to review...

What value is that person adding? I can fire up claude code/cursor/whatever myself and get the same result with less overhead. It's not a matter of "is AI valuable", it's a matter of "is this person adding value to the process". In the above case... no, none at all.
by chironjit | 2025-10-23 14:20:16+00:00
Just so happened to be fiddling with the uefi-rs crate too today. So if I understand this correctly, Patina is the part that runs on the hardware side, ie, the firmware? Uefi-rs based on what I read/tried seems to be the software side, building apps that work before the OS is loaded (I assume for things such as boot loader, firmware updaters, etc) but I'm not sure if it also covers the hardware side