MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metadope | 2025-12-17 22:56:32+00:00
The only correct answer is... both answers (1 and -11).

That is, if you're really interested in pursuing the position.

Not only are you willing to take their tests, but you go beyond what is required, for your own benefit and edification.

That's why, when presented with the URL during the interview, you immediately load it, and right-click View Source into another tab, while simultaneously making small talk with the former CTO interviewer.

Even though you're a backender, you know enough frontend to navigate the interspersed style and html and javascript and so, you solve both puzzles, and weave into the conversation the two answers, while also deciding that this is probably not the gig for you, but who knows, let's see how they answer your questions now...
by int_19h | 2025-12-17 22:56:35+00:00
I'm currently working on a Lojban parser written in Haskell. This is a fairly complex task that requires a lot of reasoning. And I tried out all the SOTA agents extensively to see which one works the best. And Opus 4.5 is running circles around GPT-5.2 for this. So no, I don't think it's true that OpenAI "still has the lead" in general. Just in some specific tasks.
by rnhmjoj | 2025-12-17 22:56:55+00:00
This is the PoW scheme that Monero currently uses:

> RandomX utilizes a virtual machine that executes programs in a special instruction set that consists of integer math, floating point math and branches. > These programs can be translated into the CPU's native machine code on the fly (example: program.asm). > At the end, the outputs of the executed programs are consolidated into a 256-bit result using a cryptographic hashing function (Blake2b).

I doubt that you anyone managed to create an ASIC that does this more efficiently and cost effective than a basic CPU. So, no, probably no one is mining Monero using an ASIC.
by 9rx | 2025-12-17 22:57:24+00:00
While, again, anyone can define words as they see fit, most people consider the "junior" and "senior" labels to apply to the activity being conducted, not something off to the side. As the job is to use AI tools, these most experienced people would be considered "seniors" by most. Nobody was ever suggesting that you should cut good help because they're juniors in knitting or dirt biking.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-17 22:57:39+00:00
Google's feedback seems to suggest Rust actually might be a silver bullet, in the specific sense meant in the "No Silver Bullet" essay.

That essay doesn't say that silver bullets are a panacea or cure all, instead they're a decimal order of magnitude improvement. The essay gives the example of Structured Programming, an idea which feels so obvious to us today that it's unspoken, but it's really true that once upon a time people wrote unstructured programs (today the only "language" where you even could do this is assembly and nobody does it) where you just jump arbitrarily to unrelated code and resume execution. The result is fucking chaos and languages where you never do that delivered a huge improvement even before I wrote my first line of code in the 1980s.

Google did find that sort of effect in Rust over C++.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-12-17 22:57:59+00:00
Sure, it's not foolproof, but a large percentage of folks would just copy&paste rather than taking the screenshot. Now that may start to change.

There was story like this on NPR recently where a professor used this method to weed out students who were using AI to answer an essay question about a book the class was assigned to read. The book mentioned nothing about Marxism, but the prof inserted unseeable text into the question such that when it was copy&pasted into an AI chat it added an extra instruction to make sure to talk about Marxism in relation to this book (which wasn't at all related to Marxism). When he got answers that talked extensively about the book in Marxist terms he knew that they had used AI.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-17 22:58:01+00:00
I don't have actual statistics, but some factors I can think of:

- New car leases sometimes require dealership-only maintenance.

- Car warranties sometimes imply upcharges may be allowed (such as labor fees) during warranty services if non-warranty maintenance wasn't handled by the dealership.

- New cars sometimes come with discount plans or service subscriptions for maintenance at the dealership.

- Maintenance at a single dealership still sometimes gets reflected in resale value, including trade-ins to that dealership and also some people and auctions will pay a small premium for "single owner, dealer maintained" cars.

Yeah, dealers are an interesting experience at times, but there's an interesting web of reasons that people still use those services.
by Eckter2 | 2025-12-17 22:58:01+00:00
I do think running the code would be a tiny bit faster, even if it's merely seconds either way. Opening a python REPL and pasting that would take around 5 seconds in my case. Running the code in my head would take roughly the same at first, but then if it's in an interview I'd take the time to double check. And then check a few more times because I'd expect some kind of trick here.

Considering there's no (explicit) instruction forbidding or discouraging it, I'd consider the REPL solution to be perfectly valid. In fact some interview tests specifically look for this kind of problem solving.

I get it still, I'd expect some valuable signal from this test. Candidates who execute this code are likely to do so because they really want to avoid running the code in their head, not just because it's more straightforward, and that's probably a bad sign. And pasting that into an LLM instead of a REPL would be a massive red flag.

I just don't think answering "-11" here is a signal strong enough to disqualify candidates on its own.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-12-17 22:59:02+00:00
Virtual machines are treated as a security boundary despite the fact that with enough R&D they are not. Hosting minecraft servers in virtual machines is fine, but not a great idea if they’re cohosted on a machine that has billions of dollars in crypto or military secrets.

Docker is pretty much the same but supposedly more flimsy.

Both have non-obvious configuration weaknesses that can lead to escapes.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-17 22:59:34+00:00
In some areas, I absolutely agree... I think when it comes to vehicles, medical devices and heavy equipment, it would be better to see much more rigorous practices in terms of software craftsmanship. I think it should be very similar in financial operations (it isn't) and most govt work in general (it isn't).

In the end, for most scenarios, break fast, fix fast is likely a more practical and cost effective approach.
by pseudalopex | 2025-12-17 23:00:01+00:00
> That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:

The US rejected separate but equal since decades.

California domestic partnerships provided most of the same rights as marriage. Not all. The California legislature had to pass bills after to address this.[1]

The bill which afforded same sex couples married out of state the same rights as heterosexual couples married in state passed over 11 months after Proposition 8 took effect. The citation of the last sentence revealed this. You did not read it?

Heterosexual couples were not required to marry out of state.

> Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters

Most jobs have requirements which most California voters would not meet.

> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.

Obama opposed stripping rights by vote is a significant difference.

And Obama changed his public position by 2014. Eich was unable to say he would not repeat his harmful action.

And many people suspected Obama's opposition to same sex marriage was a lie in 2008 even. 1 of his advisers claimed this later.

> Eich _was_ fired for his political views

Eich said he resigned because he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.[2] Did he lie?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-ceo-eich-res...
by 3np | 2025-12-17 23:00:02+00:00
As sibling mentioned, unless you or the runtime explicitly mount the docker socket, this particular scenario shouldn't affect you.

You might still want to tighten things up. Just adding on the "rootless" part - running the container runtime as an unprivileged user on the host instead of root - you also want to run npm/node as unprivileged user inside the container. I still see many defaulting to running as root inside the container since that's the default of most images. OP touches on this.

For rootless podman, this will run as a user with your current uid and map ownership of mounts/volumes:

podman run -u$(id -u) --userns=keep-id
by arevno | 2025-12-17 23:00:18+00:00
> but you need to amortize in all the infrastructure and training and energy costs

The average American human consumes 232kWh of all-in energy (food, transport, hvac, construction, services, etc) daily.

If humans want to get into a competition over lower energy input per unit of cognitive output, I doubt you'd like the result.

> Better? Lol no

The "IQ equivalent" of the current SOTA models (Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1) is already a full 1SD above the human mean.

Nations and civilizations have perished or been conquered all throughout history because they underestimated and laughed off the relative strength of their rivals. By all means, keep doing this, but know the risks.
by sublinear | 2025-12-17 23:00:28+00:00
> Apps extend ChatGPT conversations by bringing in new context and letting users take actions like order groceries, turn an outline into a slide deck, or search for an apartment.

Between this description and their guidelines these don't really sound like "apps", but a way to integrate an existing app with ChatGPT sessions.

I'm trying to figure out what's in it for the developer other than ultimately taking users away from ChatGPT. And just like what happened with Alexa skills, these "apps" will become useless when they are unmaintained.
by jjj123 | 2025-12-17 23:00:34+00:00
Were they a python engineer? I interview folks all the time in languages I don’t understand, and I ask dumb questions throughout the interview. I’ve been a professional (non-python) programmer for over a decade now and I don’t really know what :-1 means, I can guess it’s something like slicing until the last character but idk for sure.
by fragmede | 2025-12-17 23:01:56+00:00
The other thing to note is that docker is for the most part, stateless. So if you're running something that has to deal with questionable user input (images and video or more importantly PDFs), is to stick it on its own VM and then cycle the docker container every hour and the VM every 12, and then still be worried about it getting hacked and leaking secrets.
by stouset | 2025-12-17 23:02:34+00:00
Do it as part of ticket work you're already doing. There is always a way to leave things better than how you found them.

I have worked across a wide gamut of roles (full-stack eng, infosec, deploy infra, devops, infra eng, sysadmin), companies (big and small, startups and huge multibillion-dollar players), and industries (finance, datacenters, security products, gaming, logistics, manufacturing, AI) over a thirty year career and I have never felt the level of helplessness that people seem to be claiming. Some places have been easier, some have been harder, but I have never once found it to be as difficult or impossible as everyone laments is the case.
by danparsonson | 2025-12-17 23:02:50+00:00
No firewall! Wow that's brave. Hetzner will let you configure one that runs outside of the box so you might want to add that too, as part of your defense in depth - that will cover you if you make a mistake with ufw. Personally I keep SSH firewalled only to my home address in this way; if I'm out and about and need access, I can just log into Hetzner's website and change it temporarily.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-17 23:02:52+00:00
Yeah, I didn't word it well but part of that is exactly what I was getting at in my post. In the US there's a weird crab-bucket mentality thing going on where we shoot ourselves and each other down when making an attempt to skill up. Maybe worse, if you ignore that and skill up anyway those same people will take it as a personal insult and act like you're trying to be "better" than them. "You're one of us, stay where you belong." It's a truly bizarre dynamic.

The money part is real too, though. It gets baked in early. I've had to try to shut out that nagging voice in the back of my head myself.
by andrepd | 2025-12-17 23:03:14+00:00
Indeed! I saw that you linked to Neri's work, so you were aware of Teju Jaguá. I might make a pull request to add it to the benchmark repo when I have some time :)

Another nice thing about your post is mentioning the "shell" of the algorithm, that is, actually translating the decimal significand and exponent into a string (as opposed to the "core", turning f * 2^e into f' * 10^e'). A decent chunk of the overall time is spent there, so it's worth optimising it as well.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-17 23:03:53+00:00
> Although we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year

Interesting, I was trying to estimate how much they spent on free actions per year. I thought it would be around $100m. This is the first actual number I've seen.

I expect the $184 million figure is the sale price rather than the actual cost to GitHub, and given that competitors offer the same service for 3-10x less it's probably more like $80m overall I'd guess.

Still a pretty huge amount of money that I don't think any competitors can really hope to match.
by acdha | 2025-12-17 23:04:17+00:00
The difference is that they’re charging extra for it, so people want to see benefits they could take to their management to justify the extra cost. The NPM stuff has a lot of people’s attention right now so it’s natural to ask whether something would have blocked what your CISO is probably asking about since you have an unlimited number of possible security purchase options. One of the Docker employees mentioned one relevant feature: https://socket.dev/blog/socket-firewall-now-available-in-doc...

Update the analogy to “like EC2 but we handle the base OS patching and container runtime” and you have Fargate.
by nec4b | 2025-12-17 23:05:25+00:00
Parent: "Or leftist politicians, where they can do it on an industrial scale by the millions in death camps, in the name of progress."

You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."

>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.

Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-12-17 23:05:30+00:00
In terms of majorities and minorities, HN commenters do not represent "almost all users"

There are some web users who are online 24/7

There are others who may prefer to stay offline

A wide variety of people use the web for a wide variety of purposes

HN commenters are a tiny sliver of "all users" and "all purposes"

As such, HN commenters are not qualified to opine on behalf of "almost all users" as almost all users do not comment on HN or elsewhere on the web. Almost all users prefer to express their opinions about the web, if any, offline
by CharlieDigital | 2025-12-17 23:05:47+00:00
Take your current technical assessment and think about the types of responses or code submissions that really impressed you. What was special about them? What did you see in the response that drew a positive reaction from your team?

Can you re-frame your process or the prompt to only elicit those specific responses?

So instead of a whole exercise of building a React app or a whole backend API, for example, what would really "wow" you if you saw the candidate do it in the submission for a project? Could you re-frame your whole process so you only target those specific responses and elicit specific outputs?

Now that you've taken what was previously a 2 hour coding exercise (for example) and distilled down to 3-4 key questions, you can seek the same outputs in 15-30 minutes instead.

There are several advantages to this:

1) Many times, candidates know the answer but they actually can't figure out what you're looking for when there's a lot of cruft around the question/problem being solved. You can end up losing candidates that know how to solve the problem the way you want, but because of the way the question was posed, the objective is opaque.

2) It saves a lot of time for both sides. Interviewer doesn't have to review a big submission, candidate doesn't have to waste time doing a long project.

3) By condensing the cycle, you can evaluate more candidates and you can hopefully select a top candidate before they get another opportunity. You shorten the cycle time because the candidate doesn't have to find free time to do a project or sit down for long interviews, you don't need to have people review the code submissions, etc.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-17 23:05:55+00:00
> For me, I'd often have these ideas of things I wanted to try, or do, or challenge myself with, and then for some inexplicable reason I'd never do them.

I think without a mentor or point of reference for why or how you'd go about doing something like that, it's just a completely abstract domain, much like software is to anyone who hasn't spent a lifetime coding or figuring out how computers work. The mental health work and the video by Craftyarts seem like the perfect timely combination to allow for peeling back those layers, literally and figuratively, further allowing curiosity to be actionable.

I've been doing that a bit with electronics, and a recent example that seems similarly daunting for me would be watching the end to end process of building a custom keyboard pcb. At first it seems like an immense rabbit hole, but dedicating a bit of money and time incrementally is insanely rewarding in aggregate, moreso the further away from your mainline discipline it is. I tend to avoid these until I have a specific challenge in mind.

The seed of interest question was framed poorly, but it was related specifically to the latex mask subject, and I guess I was just curious if there were any adjacent ideas that might be worth exploring, since you do seem to have an interest in vaguely related areas
by lbatchelor | 2025-12-17 23:06:06+00:00
Your landing page makes a lot of claims that are not true

- that the code is 100% mit licensed (it's not)

- that this is in any way gdpr compliant (there are literal rules around this)

- that your data is encrypted and private (it isn't encrypted? Unless being written in Italian is encryption now?)

- that they'll have 99.9% uptime (there is no SLA for vercel hobby tiers)

- "No middlemen. No third-party storage. Every submission lives in your GitHub..." (that is the very definition of third-party storage and a middleman)
by pdimitar | 2025-12-17 23:06:21+00:00
Thanks for entertaining the discussion, the civility and your willingness to expand is very welcome.

> while I believe a change in direction for Rust would be beneficial, the ecosystem advancement and entrenchment of Rust makes it basically a non-starter as of 2025

May I ask why? I think I am gathering from your comment that you think the language is too big (which I don't understand, could you please clarify?) and that maybe we as an area become too dependent on too few PLs / frameworks? Is your worry an increasing centralization perhaps?

> If every company was use to and had to invent at a minimum their own dialect of a broadly defined language types and then train employees to function within their language environment I would be thrilled.

I was not there but I heard from folks on HN that during the LISP era a good amount of companies did this: they built their own DSL that described their business perfectly (on top of LISP) and then even taught business people how to modify parts of the system by giving them access to only some modules. Result was reported to be a crushing success.

But if we go by your reservations, would you then say LISP is too big and at a risk to entrench itself everywhere (I mean if you were there back then)?

> The above would do a considerable amount to stop corporations from treating programmer like replaceable/disposable cogs in a machine

I would really _love_ for that to be true but I remain skeptical. In my 24 years of career I have only always noticed how businesses always work hard trying to replace us. It's a constant tug of war and we are more or less tolerated because they can't do without us. The moment they feel that they could, most of us would be fired in a heartbeat -- and some of that, in a much smaller scale than they wanted, already happened with the advent of good-ish coding LLM agents.

> where it really hurts for me is that Rust’s pervasiveness prevents moving to a better option in the space due to moneyed interest and cultural buyin

Here we agree at 100%. I do like Rust a lot (though I don't work with it for a while now, I keep using it for personal projects and a little bit of portfolio work) but I believe it's a local maxima that we would all be stuck with for a while.

But that's not an indictment on Rust in particular IMO; it's a judgement towards the risk-averse nature of the area and something I personally don't blame people for (you should not rewrite your business code once every 5 years after all).

--

All that being said, to me Rust is an objective improvement of the state of affairs. It's going to be the new C++ and maybe even the new C, we'll see. And I agree with you that it's not without faults (`async` could have been done better; it's a huge slog to learn it properly and that really did not need to be the case).
by hnburnsy | 2025-12-17 23:06:23+00:00
Search Google news and just this week and you will see Waymo blocked a parade for 45 minutes, drove into a police crime scene in LA, and two crashed into each other blocking a third. Stuff happens, but obviously Fred rarely reports the Waymo incidents but he is quck to write about every Tesla one.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/two-self-driving-waymos-...
by andrewsthoughts | 2025-12-17 23:06:53+00:00
Thanks for giving it a try!

On prompts: We've been competing with Cursor for the last 2 years in the enterprise with Zencoder, and winning nice deals based on quality. At some point, we were very protective of our prompts, but two things happened: -most of the coding vendors' prompts were leaked, there are repos online that have prompts from a bunch. The moment you allow a custom end-point for LLM, your prompts are sniffable. -agents became better at instruction following, so a lot of prompting changed to "less is more".

So with these two industry trends, we reversed the course: -moved our harness into CLI - this exposes our tips and tricks, but is better for user privacy and for user's ability to tinker the harness. For example, this allows a set-up where no code leaves your perimeter (if you use local harness and "local" model, where "local" means different things for different people) -opened the workflows in Zenflow (they are in markdown and editable)