MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spwa4 | 2025-10-23 13:59:38+00:00
You want to get an economist to shut up? Point out that we're now in a situation that for nearly any physical good, one producer is able to saturate the market, that nearly every factory is operating below capacity, that individual farms are so big they can easily produce what an entire state needs and in fact operates below capacity for financial reasons. Both factories and farms: A LOT below capacity. Because 1% of a modern factory's capacity is able to saturate a very large local market, and the rest depends on international treaties, not on supply, demand, or even price.

Which means increasing supply for just about anything ... doesn't actually change price, and in fact the issue you're pointing out is not just one of the influences on prices, but almost the only one.

The market is saturated and producers have no incentive to lower prices, for nearly every good. Which means increasing supply ... does not lower prices. Increasing demand does not raise prices ... that's just not how it works anymore.

The only influence on price is international relations, or to put it more bluntly: various kinds of taxes are the only influence on prices (going from import/export tax, vat/sales tax, subsidies, raw material availability (effectively mostly meaning a tax in the form of export restrictions), what loan conditions are for good X, ...), and so economics just doesn't really apply anymore to the vast majority of goods.

The price of widgets from water balloons to air fryers is controlled by government subsidies in particular countries.

The price of houses is controlled by mortgage conditions, which are set in law. Meaning they are different between countries in both ways that matter (so, for example, Freehold vs Leasehold, Australia's Negative Gearing, whether 30 year fixed price is available, immigration policy, whether foreign investment is allowed ...) and in weird ways that don't matter. Supply and demand don't control price.

The price of labor and services is around 80% tax in most of Europe. Measured by taking $100 that the employer pays to have labour done, so including for example France's "patronal" tax, compared to what the employer would receive and not have to pay to the government in his bank account if the employee chose to spend all of his pay on whatever his labor produces. Yes there is still some supply/demand here ... but not much.

The problem is that for nearly everything "taxes" (as in taxes and tax-like regulations) determine who produces, and the tax swings are so large (going from -10%, yes minus, to 80% and more) depending on location and good, and their effect swamps any economic concern in nearly all sectors of the economy.
by Liftyee | 2025-10-23 13:59:54+00:00
I've been learning about radios for a while, and this article explained one of the key questions I had: why can't you turn on and off some single frequency waveform faster to transmit data faster? (answer: changing amplitude messes with the spectrum and makes it no longer a single frequency...)

I tend to prefer these visual and intuitive explanations to the mathematically based ones usually given in lectures. The "open capacitor" example was something I hadn't thought of before.
by giorgioz | 2025-10-23 13:59:58+00:00
OpenAI decided to not sue Whatsapp for monopoly and they are just leaving: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-whatsapp-transition

I'm a bit disappointed, I feel that was certaintly a monopolist move and clear abuse of dominant position from Whatsapp/Meta. I think OpenAI would have easily won the lawsuit.
by abustamam | 2025-10-23 14:00:18+00:00
Curiosity. I once dropped my keys on the way to my leasing office. I searched the entire complex and office for my keys. Then I saw a guy at the mailboxes trying to open each one, one by one.* I asked if he needed help and he just said he found some keys on the ground and wanted to find out who they belonged to. They were mine. And my mailbox was in the other side of the complex so all bets were off for him anyway.

It costs next to nothing to try out a key in multiple places in the same proximity. Once you start going door to door using a random key you found, that's suspicious.

*it occurs to me now that I write this that this behavior is suspicious as well and probably illegal. He should have turned it into the leasing office.
by brechtknecht | 2025-10-23 14:00:39+00:00
big thanks for the praise!

for all the screen recordings we use Screen Studio by Adam Pietrasiak. Really a all in one workhorse for everything screen recording related.

The main teaser video was made by our incredible video editor Célestin (https://www.celest.in/) who is working with After Effects, Premiere and Blender.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-10-23 14:00:50+00:00
> macros cannot see into functions, so core.async requires its async functions to be called directly within a go block (eg you cannot wrap core.async/<! inside a helper function because the macro won't be able to find it to transform it).

Is that something specific to Clojure macros? How does that macro discovery process work, so that they cannot be called inside a helper function? I might not understand exactly what you mean. This sounds very limiting.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-23 14:00:52+00:00
Google is a proving ground for building "wow" factor products to line your resume with.

There isn't a drive to actually cater to users, it's a selfish endeavor which sometimes aligns with what users want. So the game is feature pack so you can leverage it for jumping ship or spring boarding internally.

It's the absolutely worst aspect of google, and I think its something worth dumping Sundar over, in order to get in a leader that will unify goals and get people who want to make great products, not great window dressings for themselves.
by nwalters512 | 2025-10-23 14:03:14+00:00
A lot of (most?) useful work requires the kind of domain-specific knowledge that can only be built up over a lot of time spent working on a given team/product/codebase. "Renting" programmers here and there on an hourly basis might work fine for basic tasks, but would probably end in frustration for both the employer, who has to deal with a constant stream of random new people, and programmers, who are constantly bouncing from project to project.
by arethuza | 2025-10-23 14:04:21+00:00
"implement the lambda calculus on a handful of combinators, then implement lisp on the lambda calculus, then write stuff in that lisp"

Having done this years ago as a student (not Lisp, but a simple language that macro expanded into lambda calculus) - it is both mind-blowing that you can do anything (including recursion) with just S & K but also impressive as to just how phenomenally inefficient this is... though as you say things do get a lot better as your "instruction set" gets larger.
by walkabout | 2025-10-23 14:04:29+00:00
The largest tech companies could also implement a shared cert program via some kind of industry group, with periodic re-certification requirements. This’d surely be far cheaper than all of them running multi-stage leetcode and system design interviews, and they already basically publish study guides so this isn’t even that different, just cheaper for both the businesses and candidates.

It’d also make job hopping far less painful (see above: cheaper for the candidates) which is why they don’t.

So we may conclude: the point of leetcode interviews is wage suppression.
by leenify | 2025-10-23 14:05:15+00:00
As the stuff is rendered on the front-end how do you deal with tags where you do not even have the information to decide how they shall be parsed on the server?

This seems rather ignorant and, in my experience, leads to security issues, such as CVE-2023-38500 or CVE-2023-23627. This is not decidable on the server-side, so you will always mess stuff like this up. Sanitization can only work properly on the client for HTML.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-10-23 14:05:17+00:00
We use a coding test that is more like a trivia puzzle quiz about cursed language syntax and bare metal embedded concepts. Bit squashing puzzles, casting structs to unions with byte byte alignments quirks.

On the surface its even more contrived than leetcode. But it has a few benefits;

1. Harder to memorise and prepare for.

2. Harder to ask LLMs.

3. Checks formal schooling or detailed interest in the topic.

learning C with toy projects wont make you perform in this quiz. Spending dedicated effort reading about the inner workings of malloc, RTOS, chipset datasheets, and electronics may.

Many of the questions check understanding beyond the syntax, often one level of abstraction down. For embedded this works nicely. The higher level system design thinking is not applicable to us. We look for people with the mindset and interest to debug the most absure behavior quirks of the hardware when the code misbehave.

But for other fields in think this would falls appart. This particular works for bare metal embedded.

(... i think our interview process may be selecting for ASD as a sideffect)
by thiht | 2025-10-23 14:05:54+00:00
> I didn't use the word "correct", you did.

You do know we can infer unwritten things from context, right?

> I say that newsboat is the best thing

> Why not have a device for reading, and read there?

These sound like you believe your way of doing is the correct one and people reading on multiple devices are wrong. You don't have to say it for readers to understand it this way.
by everdrive | 2025-10-23 14:06:40+00:00
For me we have a coop and then a fenced in run which is relatively large. I built my gate so I can fit a wheelbarrow inside. I just shovel some out and smooth out the pits I've made. The ground doesn't need to be perfect because the chickens will always be making more compost and shuffling it around. If you had a smaller setup, I'd think a mobile coop & mobile run would serve you really well.
by jfengel | 2025-10-23 14:06:42+00:00
So in 2020, when the Democrats were out of power, they fixed the election.

But in 2024, while in charge of the executive branch, they just let it slide. Did they forget how? Did they spend four years tightening election security and get hoist by their own petard?

Dumber things have happened. I can't really explain why voters would chuck Trump out in 2020, and then re-elect him four years later even after having incited a literal insurrection. I hear that the answer is "the price of eggs", but I don't buy that.

So, sure, why not. Still seems funny, though.
by seniorsassycat | 2025-10-23 14:07:01+00:00
I'm curious what effects the system prompt has

- randomize a and b, maybe there's a preference for answering a, or first option. - how do references to training data or roles affect the responses?

Limiting the response to a/b/pass makes sense to measure the results, but feels like it could affect the results. What would we see with a full response then a judgement pass
by cashsterling | 2025-10-23 14:07:03+00:00
Until a company can demonstrate a quantum volume of even just 2^16... their computer is just about worthless for any sort of half-real quantum computing.

I pay zero attention to any technical information and marketing speak coming from a quantum computing company until they demonstrate decent quantum volume.

Most companies computers can't even hit 2^16 so they are figuring out means of distracting the market from the poor fidelity of their systems.
by hrimfaxi | 2025-10-23 14:07:11+00:00
This only seems to be in software engineering. When I was told me wanted to evaluate a new task queue service, I asked what our constraints were. I was told to survey all options and present a roundup and ignore constraints. Contrast with something like, I don't know, building a house. Do architects consider all possible material choices for a given location, or do they instead limit their consideration to materials that would be suitable to the given environment?

Making the dependencies of "it depends" explicit is the whole point.
by muzani | 2025-10-23 14:07:30+00:00
It's hard to give people a copy of your code and see if they can navigate it. I find a reasonable middle ground is to create a template of the hardest bits of code. Get them to build something with it, hack it, and so on. See where they ask questions.

An algorithm takes hours to pick up. A language may take weeks. A paradigm takes months. If you use, say, functional programming everywhere, you should probably check that the applicant knows how to write functional. It's not about map(), it's about whether you code with globals and side effects. If it's reactive programming, does it properly observe and collect? If you're doing declarative UI, how do you abstract the pieces, where is the button click handled?

Some things are learnable, but this is where you see people get defensive. If you're moving in from a similar paradigm but different language, you'll find a way and you'll even contribute your own insights. I think people tend to butt heads here and it's a good headbutting simulator if you do some live coding with the team you're working with.
by AlGoreRhythm | 2025-10-23 14:07:30+00:00
The author cites the common CEPR paper [0], but missed its most interesting finding. It found that the algorithms definitively did show signs of collusive behaviour, but that their chosen equilibrium price point was far below the Nash equilibrium. That is, the researchers expected these algorithms to maximally extort the consumers, but they only modestly extorted the economy's consumers.

[0] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3304991
by linsomniac | 2025-10-23 14:07:41+00:00
The Gen AI tooling is exceptionally good at doing these sorts of things, and way more than just "mkdir $1 && cd $1". For example:

I have used it to build an "escmd" tool for interacting with Elasticsearch. It makes the available commands much more discoverable, the output it formats in tables, and gets rid of sending JSON to a curl command.

A variety of small tools that interact with Jira (list my tickets, show tickets that are tagged as needing ops interaction in the current release).

A tool to interact with our docker registry to list available tags and to modify tags, including colorizing them based on the sha hash of the image so it's obvious which ones are the same. We manage docker container deploys based on tags so if we "cptag stg prod" on a project, that releases the staging artifact to production, but we also tag them by build date and git commit hash, so we're often working with 5-7 tags.

Script to send a "Software has successfully been released" message via gmail from the command-line.

A program to "waituntil" a certain time to run a command: "waituntil 20:00 && run_release", with nice display of a countdown.

I have a problem with working on too many things at once and then committing unrelated things tagged with a particular Jira case. So I had it write me a commit program that lists my tickets, shows the changed files, and lets me select which ones go with that ticket.

All these are things I could have built before, but would have taken me hours each. With the GenAI, they take 5-15 minutes of my attention to build something like this. And Gen AI seems really, really great at building these small, independent tools.
by andriamanitra | 2025-10-23 14:07:45+00:00
A subprocess (git) can't modify the working directory of the parent process (the shell). This is a common annoyance with file managers like yazi and ranger as well—you need an extra (usually manual!) installation step to add a shell integration for whichever shell you're using so the shell itself can change directory.

The best solution for automatically cd'ing into the repo is to wrap git clone in a shell function or alias. Unfortunately I don't think there's any way to make git clone print the path a repository was cloned to, so I had to do some hacky string processing that tries to handle the most common usage (ignore the "gh:" in the URL regex, my git config just expands it to "git@github.com:"):

https://github.com/Andriamanitra/dotfiles/blob/d1aecb8c37f09...
by acdha | 2025-10-23 14:07:49+00:00
This is definitely messy: those claims would almost certainly have been thrown out in a fair DOJ because the FTCA specifically excludes claims over discretionary or policy actions, but the DOJ also had a policy of pausing civil claims while criminal proceedings were open for the same issue. Trump's Judge Cannon was successfully able to stall the criminal case until he was re-elected, at which point the DOJ dropped it due to the policy of not investigating a sitting president. This means that the claims are now being decided by people who report to his personal defense attorney in the case and know that their jobs are on the line if they do not decide in his favor. I don't think we've ever seen a case this corrupt at this level in the United States before.
by mxek | 2025-10-23 14:07:52+00:00
Thanks for the input.

We took inspiration from analog notebooks as a tool for thought, but wanted something for multi-media. We also see NotebookLM as the closest mainstream product to Surf.

Related -- some people who have seen Surf's Applets feature have also called Surf "Jupyter for normies".

More on Surflets: https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/SURFLETS.md
by tombert | 2025-10-23 14:08:17+00:00
I keep many hobby projects going most of the time, but I try not to judge people who don’t. A lot of people have kids and want to focus their non-work time on their family, and I don’t want to tell people they’re wrong for doing that. There’s nothing wrong with a job being a job and not your life.

I don’t have kids (and can’t now thanks to a snip), so it’s relatively easy for me to find time to hack on something for fun, but it’s not wrong for a parent to want to, you know, be a parent.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-23 14:08:19+00:00
I very much dislike that they arent available for linux. Which means I havent tested them; I also dont see a need for them.

I dont want or use AI in the browser. Brave has had Leo for ages now. Qwen3 14b in the cloud is a fine model, no thanks though. I very much prefer my local llama private models for privacy. None of these ai browsers let you go local; but even if they did, i doubt id use it anyway.

What the world needs is a new browser, open source, that isnt chromium. Brave, Librewolf, and Ephipany.

I'm super excited for: https://ladybird.org/

and

https://servo.org/

Hopefully they become huge.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-10-23 14:08:30+00:00
As a 60+ year old guy who has been at the same employer for the past 20 years, I thankfully evaded all that leetcode crap. My interview style has always been of the sort described -- ask in depth questions about something they have worked on.

The telltale sign of a padded resume is when the person acts like a cork -- you try to push down deeper and they always pop back up to surface level answers. Some give up the game quickly and admit that they were on the team that did the thing in question, despite their resume saying they did the thing. Other people are very practiced and unflappable and just bob back up over and over without shame.

For new engineers with say three years of experience or less, I can forgive the overstating their experience and I'll shift to asking them to describe their part of that project. But for the people with a few years on their resume, then that behavior is definitely a deal breaker.

Another line of questioning I take for people with experience are questions like: what are the tradeoffs of directed testing vs random testing? When do you have enough confidence in your testing that you say the product is ready to ship? What are some examples of where bugs made it out the door, and what was your process after that happened? What are some reasons why every part of a design might pass their unit tests, but the total design has failures?

These should be easy to discuss for anyone with experience, but there are a surprising number of people who fall flat. Similarly, I am shocked at how often I ask someone to write some code in any language they want to, even pseudocode, for a simple problem and are unable to do it. Eg, given a stream of numbers, maintain the largest two numbers seen so far.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-23 14:08:41+00:00
This was the Greystar situation that already happened with apartment rentals.

Are people not aware of this?

A switch to value based pricing for essentials (water,shelter,transport,utilities, etc.)is an extremely easy way to destroy disposable income and even make some areas impossible to live in for the existing members.

Austin, Texas in 2021 saw several of my friends who were renters see a 1 year price increase that more than doubled their rent, I had friends who we're doctors who we're forced to move out of one bedroom apartments, even if it wasn't the plan, it's still a great way to displace people like local musicians so hack comedian can move in.
by monkeynotes | 2025-10-23 14:08:43+00:00
How can you take the market for billions when you are investing hundreds and hundreds of billions? Amazon overtook Walmart and cloud computing, they have a solid business model, and I doubt even a business that size could pay down that outlay. Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?
by epistasis | 2025-10-23 14:09:23+00:00
> It wants to build a Chinese-led system on the ruins of the old liberal trading order, one which will rival Mr Trump’s empire of tariffs. Already China has shifted the geography of its trade: in the year to September its goods exports grew by over 8%, even as those to America fell by 27%.

I keep on wondering what the potential positive result is here for the US. Certainly doesn't seem to be a single one, though there are plenty of people very happy to soldier on as if there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

I fear the true reason this is happening is that autarchy makes for very strong dictators, even as it makes the population very poor. An obvious reason, but such a sad one.
by simgt | 2025-10-23 14:09:52+00:00
I've been annoyed by this as well for a while. I have a non-electric cargo bike but I don't care if others have pedals or not. I'm more scared of a bakfeit mum zooming through at 25km/h than a lightweight Chinese-style moped going slower than that. Regulating who can go where by speed and weight would make much more sense than creating all these arbitrary categories in my opinion.
by Spivak | 2025-10-23 14:10:00+00:00
I mean it's great that people are figuring out LLM biases but looking at each individual question and the spread of answers seems to support the theory that companies aren't biasing their models (or at least failing to do so) when different generation models from the same company flip their "stance" on certain issues.

But at the same time, I don't think asking these models how they feel about constitutional republics or abortion is useful for anything other than researchers who have a reasonably unaligned model trained on recent internet dumps who want a kind of mirror into public discourse.
by lorenzohess | 2025-10-23 14:10:05+00:00
From the Table, all models are overwhelmingly Regulatory, with smollm2:1.7b being the only one that's majority Libertarian.

All models are overwhelmingly Progressive, with claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 and grok-4-fast-non-reasoning being the only ones that are majority Conservative.

While there's a bit more balance across other categories (by inspection) it seems like LLMs reflect today's polzarization?

It would be interesting to have statistics about the results which reflect polarization. Perhaps we could put each LLM on the political compass? Also weight the result by the compliance (% results that followed prompt instructions).