MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcus_holmes | 2025-12-05 01:12:56+00:00
Came here to say this. What he describes is not really servant leadership.

Servant leadership is more or less just the concept that the leader's job is to make sure the team are working to their full capacity. This is in contrast to authoritarian leadership which says that the team's job is to do whatever the leader tells them to do.

A lot of leaders have a problem with the "servant" in servant leadership, there's an ego hit in the title that doesn't sit well with people who have more authoritarian ideas about what leadership is. That doesn't seem to be the author's problem, though.

The author's idea of transparent leadership seems centred around the idea that the team doesn't need a leader, in that the leader should be trying to make themselves redundant and should be training everyone else to be able to function without them. I agree that this is an absent manager.

If they succeed in making themselves redundant, the team will have selected another, informal, leader. Possibly a dynamic set of leaders who each take up leadership in different circumstances. Humans just do this, it's how we work together.

I think the author just doesn't want to be a leader at all, and would prefer it if they could go back to solving technical problems. This is perfectly valid. Management isn't for everyone.

I suggest the author looks at Dyad Leadership [0] where the management role is split into two parts; one part provides the leadership role (setting the vision, coaching, quality, behaviours, etc) and the other provides the administration function (approving holidays, organising events, handling HR, etc). This is used in the healthcare industry a lot, and works in the right situation. It might work for the author because they're obviously providing leadership but don't seem keen about the management part.
by bakugo | 2025-12-05 01:13:03+00:00
Kilo Code lets people use Grok Code Fast 1 for free, using OpenRouter as the provider. And Grok 4.1 Fast was completely free directly on OpenRouter for some time after its release.

So yeah, their statistics are inflated quite a bit, since most of that usage was not paid for, or at least not by the end user.
by striglia | 2025-12-05 01:13:40+00:00
I find this infra perspective so fascinating, as a career-long product platform engineer and solidly staff+. I don't argue that sean's writing (which is amazing) is a little overly mercenary in framing, but I'll pick a few choice sections I don't agree with here too. tldr I think the "product cares about speed; infra cares about leverage" staff engineer archetype is a false dichotomy we shouldn't encourage.

"In the product environments Sean describes, where goals pivot quarterly and features are often experimental, speed is the ultimate currency. You need to ship, iterate, and often move on before the market shifts." -- I disagree that speed is the ultimate currency! A great product org also respects long term leverage, it's just _always_ harder to argue for. But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds. Frankly it's a sign of a relatively junior product engineer if they are myopically focused on speed at the cost of all else.

"But the more powerful return is systemic innovation. If you rotate teams every year, you are limited to solving acute bugs that are visible right now. Some problems, however, only reveal their shape over long horizons." -- Extremely true, and this is _equally or more true_ in product domains. My most valuable contributions have come from sitting in a product area long enough to generalize 5 micro optimizations into the macro engineering leverage we needed to drive an order of magnitude more value from the same engineering input.

"For some engineers, navigating this [high visibility driven] chaos is a thrill. For those of us who care about system stability, it feels like a trap." -- my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]. In most cases you must care about both, and it's worth advertising yourself as such. If you self select out of companies that only care about [pure stability/pure ship velocity] there should be a valuable balance to strike and staff engineers are in a unique place to enshrine that balance in engineered systems.

"In a product organization, you often need to impress your manager’s manager. In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers." -- surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs :) But it's a curious claim!

Great article, wonderful to hear more nuanced and deep discussion of the practice of extremely senior IC engineering. Kudos!
by deaux | 2025-12-05 01:13:40+00:00
That link supports the thesis if everything?

Top 0.01%, +9.1%

Top 0.1%, +13.9%

Top 1%, +15.2%

Top 10%, +6.1%

Middle 40%, -6%

Bottom 50%, -0.1%

This supports exactly GP's two statements:

> we are concentrating all the wealth and power into the hands of a few.

Correct, their slice of the pie is growing, the bottom 90%'s is shrinking

> This leaves the top 1% getting richer every year and the bottom 99% fighting over a smaller piece of the pie every year.

Also correct, the biggest growth of share being in the top 1% segment.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-05 01:14:09+00:00
"Batch allocation" in Rust is just a matter of Box-ing a custom-defined tuple of objects as opposed to putting each object in its own little Box. You can even include MaybeUninit's in the tuple that are then initialized later in unsafe code, and transmuted to the initialized type after-the-fact. You don't need an allocator library at all for this easy case, that's more valuable when the shape of allocations is in fact dynamic.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-05 01:14:45+00:00
We had this discussion in previous posts about congressional leaders who had the risk appetite to go tech heavy and therefore outperformed normal congress critters.

Going heavy on tech can be rewarding, but you are taking on more risk of losing big in a tech crash. We all know that, and if you don't have that money to play riskier moves, its not really a move you can take.

Long term it is less of a win if a tech bubble builds and pops before you can exit (and you can't out it out to re-inflate).
by harmmonica | 2025-12-05 01:15:05+00:00
An aside on tariffs, it’s a tax (either literally depending on the upcoming SCOTUS ruling, or if not in name then in whatever language SCOTUS decides to call an additional fee consumers pay when buying goods. But a tax either way).

Relevant to the post, when supporters believe that “foreigners are swallowing 100% of the cost of the tariffs” they cheer them on. Those same supporters when they’re told the truth that consumers do end up with inflated prices because of them? Their support plummets.
by snerbles | 2025-12-05 01:16:21+00:00
Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly.

---

So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside.

The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends.

If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment.

Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box.

The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.
by snvzz | 2025-12-05 01:16:34+00:00
>So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support

That'd be h264 (associated patents expired in most of the world), vp9 and av1.

h265 aka HEVC is less common due to dodgy, abusive licensing. Some vendors even disable it with drivers despite hardware support because it is nothing but legal trouble.
by mjk3026 | 2025-12-05 01:16:57+00:00
I also saw the hype on X yesterday and had already checked the https://nof1.ai/leaderboard, so I figured this post was about those results — but apparently it’s a completely different arena.

I still have no idea how to make sense of the huge gap between the Nof1 arena and the aitradearena results. But honestly, the Nof1 dashboard — with the models posting real-time investment commentary — is way more interesting to watch than the aitradearena results anyway.
by godelski | 2025-12-05 01:17:19+00:00
I'm always surprised by comments like the gp's. Even working on different types of programming jobs I would be surprised if the majority of time is spent on actually writing lines. The majority of my time is spent on understanding the codebase and how the new requirements best fit in there. I do see people jumping in straight to /a/ solution, but every time I've seen that happen it is hacky and ends up creating more problems than solutions.

I'm also surprised at how common it is for people to openly discuss how irrelevant leetcode is to the actual work on the job but how it is still the status quo. On one hand we like to claim that an academic education is not beneficial but in the other hand use it as the main testing method.

I think why I'm most surprised is we, more than most other jobs, have a publicly visible "proof of competence." Most of us have git repos that are publicly available! I can totally understand that this isn't universal, but in very few industries is there such a publicly visible record of work. Who else has that? Artists? I'm not sure why this isn't more heavily weighted than these weird code tests that we've developed a secondary market to help people optimize for. It feels like a huge waste of money and time.
by Maxious | 2025-12-05 01:17:27+00:00
The co-diagnosis of autism and ADHD became possible with the DSM-5 in 2013. According to the scientific literature, 50 to 70% of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also present with comorbid attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8918663/
by autoexec | 2025-12-05 01:18:57+00:00
I already keep SVG disabled for security reasons, but it's increasingly looking like I'll have to find some way to disable CSS too. It's too bad people couldn't leave CSS alone as a nice simple (sort of) way to format text because turning it into another programing langue is begging for it to be abused by hackers and other malicious actors (like advertisers) just like JS
by lvspiff | 2025-12-05 01:20:00+00:00
I setup real life accounts with etrade and fidelity using the etrade auto portfolio, fidelity i have an advisor for retirement, and then i did a basket portfolio as well but used ms365 with grok 5 and various articles and strategies to pick a set of 5 etfs that would perform similarly to the exposure of my other two.

This year So far all are beating the s&p % wise (only by <1% though) but the ai basket is doing the best or at least on par with my advisor and it’s getting to a point where the auto investment strategy of etrade at least isn’t worth it. Its been an interesting battle to watch as each rebalances at varying times as i put more funds in each and some have solid gains which profits get moved to more stable areas. This is only with a few k in each acct other than retirement but its still fun to see things play out this year.

In other words though im not surprised at all by the results. Ai isnt something to day trade with still but it is helpful in doing research for your desired risk exposure long term imo.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-12-05 01:20:05+00:00
> I find it very appealing to consider the idea that the world is not somehow running “hidden mathematics”, somewhere and somehow, to solve some complicated equations in a seemingly magical way, but rather, that things are radically simpler, in that the world is simply implementing a set of trivially simple rules. The world is not concerned with, or made with mathematics, mathematics just emerges, with inherent and irreducible complexity, from extreme simplicity.

Wouldn’t those simple rules be mathematics? It’s very hard for me to see how the world isn’t made of math. Then again, I am a Pythagorean.
by 453yuh46 | 2025-12-05 01:21:09+00:00
To me autism is defined by how some of our genes work(or doesn't work). I'm not into analogies, but the difference between normal Aspie and nonverbal person is not that big - by using your analogy both of them have stomach pain, but the result seems to be wildly different - one of them is able to communicate almost like other normal humans and they can't even tell that Aspie has a stomach pain.

As for different medical conditions - imagine, that previously mentioned Aspie in different environment can have stomach pain, because it is caused by environment and not by stomach pain. Yes - there are some medical conditions, that also comes from genetical conditions and those just happen to be in neighbourhood to autism for no other reason than just general damage to DNA. And the issue here is that we actually do not fully know how DNA functions - only some of the bits.
by 10000truths | 2025-12-05 01:22:08+00:00
Recursion: That's easy, don't. At least, not with a call stack. Instead, use a stack container backed by a bounded allocator, and pop->process->push in a loop. What would have been a stack overflow is now an error.OutOfMemory enum that you can catch and handle as desired. All that said, there is a proposal that addresses making recursive functions more friendly to static analysis [0].

Function pointers: Zig has a proposal for restricted function types [1], which can be used to enforce compile-time constraints on the functions that can be assigned to a function pointer.

[0]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1006 [1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23367
by anitil | 2025-12-05 01:22:16+00:00
I really enjoyed this, and following the link to the Antithesis talk was really interesting as well [0] as it goes in to some of the pitfalls of random testing and some of the properties that you'd like out of a good test system. This is a field I'm really interested in but it seems hard to grasp.

[0] https://antithesis.com/blog/sdtalk/
by dekhn | 2025-12-05 01:22:17+00:00
My first one- a Gateway 486/66- started with 4MB RAM (in 1993). It could run linux, X windows, emacs, and G++ in a terminal all at the same time, but paged so badly the machine was unusable during a compile. I spent $200 to double it to 8, then another $200 to double it to 16, then another $200 to double it to 32MB (over a couple years), at which point, the machine absolutely flew (no paging during compiles). It seemed like an obscene amount of money for a college student to spend, but the lesson taught me a lot about computer performance and what to upgrade.
by ajoseps | 2025-12-05 01:22:21+00:00
honestly i think LLMs make it easier to write with lower level languages and you get the upside of being able to optimize better since you have more granularity of control in something like C vs something like Python.

I don’t know if LLMs will completely take over, but they’re a useful tool today. I think it’s worth learning how to use them effectively, but also know how to work without them, and when to work without them.
by AstroNutt | 2025-12-05 01:22:56+00:00
Right before the lockdown, my buddy and I were talking about repairing the dock at his Dad's lake house. We never searched online for anything, since between the two of us, we already had the materials on hand and both of us are mechanically inclined. It was just a random conversation in his office about what supplies we'd need to gather up for the weekend.

The very next day I was visiting Phys.org like I usually do and an ad appeared about dock supplies and repair. I don't even have Facebook and never have! He does and is kind of active on Facebook. Both of our phones were with us at the time of the conversation and I was connected to his WiFi network at the time. I'm on Android and he's on Apple user. Out of all the ads they could have pushed to me... dock repair!? I wish I still had that screenshot I sent him. It creeped us both out.
by toast0 | 2025-12-05 01:23:06+00:00
The screenshots don't show spoofed SMS. Who is going to spoof a +212 or a +27 phone number when sending to the US. It's not that easy to get spoofed SMS to the US anymore. But it doesn't matter if sending from an international number works just fine. Same thing with email, but often worse ... DMARC makes it hard to spoof email, but most email clients only show sender name and not sender address, so it doesn't matter.

Phone call caller ID is getting harder to spoof, with stir/shaken, but I'm not sure that's fully rolled out either... and calls from a 'random' number still get answered, so spoofing isn't needed for normal scams.
by deaux | 2025-12-05 01:23:24+00:00
It's just irrelevant and ignorant to bring up in the context of this article. These things aren't correlated. I can name countries where academic fraud (fake papers, fake data) is much more rampant than the US, yet faking a disability to get a single dorm room is unthinkable. You're oversimplifying things and making connections that aren't there.
by shawneechase | 2025-12-05 01:23:26+00:00
Anthropic recently introduced Tool Search, which is supposed to let models discover which tool to call without loading thousands of tool definitions into context.

We wanted to understand how this behaves under something closer to a real production environment, not a demo with 10–20 tools. So we loaded 4,027 tools (Google Workspace, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, ClickUp, HubSpot, etc.) and ran 25 simple, unambiguous tasks.

We didn’t test tool calling — only retrieval. The question: Does the correct tool appear in the top-K results?

Some categories performed extremely well. Others failed on very basic cases (“send an email”, “post to Slack”). The unevenness was more significant than we expected.

This isn’t a critique of Anthropic — the underlying architecture makes sense — but the empirical behavior is worth sharing because tool discovery is becoming a foundational layer for agent reliability.

Full write-up + raw logs: https://blog.arcade.dev/anthropic-tool-search-4000-tools-tes...

Curious whether others have run large-scale tool retrieval tests or built custom search/ranking layers for agents.
by steer_dev | 2025-12-05 01:23:43+00:00
OP here. I wrote this because I got tired of agents confidently guessing answers when they should have asked for clarification (e.g. guessing "Springfield, IL" instead of asking "Which state?" when asked "weather in Springfield").

I built an open-source library to enforce these logic/safety rules outside the model loop: https://github.com/imtt-dev/steer
by _carbyau_ | 2025-12-05 01:24:36+00:00
I agree with your approach.

This is society though, hence it is an issue of law and people trying to tell other people what to do.

The Elbonia rite crowd don't just want this for themselves. They want to ensure that their vision of "what is right" is put onto everybody. And the AnkleShowers want their vision of "what is right" put onto everybody. And everyone else has their opinion too.

And the shit-shouting continues until finally someone says "But we can ALLLLLL agree that we want to protect our children yes?"

The issue has never been technical. It is how society has it's debates. Things like each issue becoming a two party extreme. Things like media rules that "both sides get equal airtime" even if one is a tinfoil hat wearing idiot.

As a society, we won't get properly better until we debate better and can accept middle grounds.
by steer_dev | 2025-12-05 01:25:03+00:00
Exactly. We treat them like databases, but they are hallucination machines.

My thesis isn't that we can stop the hallucinating (non-determinism), but that we can bound it.

If we wrap the generation in hard assertions (e.g., assert response.price > 0), we turn 'probability' into 'manageable software engineering.' The generation remains probabilistic, but the acceptance criteria becomes binary and deterministic.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-12-05 01:25:16+00:00
The accommodation process shouldn't be easier. I had to provide documentation to an employer per ADA rules.

For real mental disabilities, extra time is actually necessary because a person's brain isn't able to work at the same rate as a healthy person under that situation.

I'm bipolar and have personal experience with this. My brain can lock up on me and I'll need five minutes or so to get it back. Depressive episodes can also affect my memory retrieval. Things come to me slower than they usually do.

I also can't keep track of time the way a healthy person does. I don't actually know how much time each problem takes, and sometimes I don't know how much time is left because can't remember when the test started. I can't read analog clocks; it takes me 10~20 seconds to read them. (1)

Extra time isn't giving me any advantage, it just gives me a chance.

1: I'm not exaggerating here. I've have dyslexia when it comes to numbers.

Here's what I need to do to figure out how much time is left:

- Dig through my brain to find what time it's started. This could remember something was being heard, something I saw, or recalling everything I know about the class.

- Hold onto that number and hope I don't flip the hour and minutes.

- Find a clock anywhere in the classroom and try to remember if it's accurate or not. While I'm doing this I also have to continuously tell the start time to myself.

- Find out the position of the hour hand.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Look at the dial, figure out the hour and try to hold on to it.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Tell myself the hour number.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Find out the position of the minute hand.

- Tell myself the start time.

- Hour forgotten, restart from the hour hand.

- Hour remembered, start time forgotten, restart from the top.

- Both remembered.

- Look at the dial, figure out minute and try to hold to it.

- Hour and start time need to be remembered.

- Combined hour and minute from analog clock.

- Figure out what order I should subtract them in.

- Remember everything

- Two math operations.

Now that I have the time and I don't remember what I needed it for.

- Realize I'm taking a test and try to estimate how much more time I need to complete it.

I could probably use a stopwatch or countdown, but that causes extreme anxiety as I watch the numbers change.

I don't have this kind of problem at my job because I'm not taking arbitrarily-timed tests that determine my worth to society. They don't, but that's what my brain tells me no matter how many times I try to correct it.