MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potholereseller | 2025-12-08 00:11:30+00:00
Consider pair work (a generalization of pair programming):

Spin up a VM for you and the candidate to SSH into. Start a shared screen/tmux session. Work on some sysadmin task(s) together. Switch between driving/typing and navigating/directing at regular intervals (15 minutes is typical, though a 30 minute interview would require a <10 minute interval).

You'll have to come up with a task (or set of tasks) that deals with the skills you need. The task(s) would ideally be very difficult for an LLM or search engine to provide a complete answer for; but they shouldn't be gotchas, since that might be false negatives.

Test your task(s) with other people in your company first, so you'll be comfortable when doing it with a candidate.

I can't say that this will 100% prevent cheating. But, you will surely learn a lot about the candidate's habits, in terms of reasoning and communication. If the candidate pastes commands, then that's a possible indication of LLM-usage; if the candidate doesn't use tab-completion, then they might be typing text in from somewhere else (e.g. an LLM, a guide).

I enjoy using the command-line, so I suspect I would enjoy this sort of interview.

At any rate, I hope you find a good candidate.
by stackghost | 2025-12-08 00:12:18+00:00
>And there are step functions here — even a decade ago it wasn’t possible to get safety processors with sufficient performance for eVTOL control loops (there’s no “just spec a faster chip”)

The idea that processors from the last decade were slower than those available today isn't a novel or interesting revelation.

All that means is that 10 years ago you had to rely on humans to write the code that today can be done more safely with auto generation.

50+ years of off by ones and use after frees should have disabused us of the hubristic notion that humans can write safe code. We demonstrably can't.

In any other problem domain, if our bodies can't do something we use a tool. This is why we invented axes, screwdrivers, and forklifts.

But for some reason in software there are people who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cling to the absurd notion that people can write safe code.
by sponno | 2025-12-08 00:12:24+00:00
From James Hoffmann he recommends 2 minutes. If I recall correctly waiting longer did slightly improve the results but after 2 minutes you get a good brew. https://aeroprecipe.com/recipes/james-hoffmann-aeropress-rec...

I like the button idea. 1. I'd love to see it battery powered. 2. I found a vape thing yesterday - I would love to see a battery from a Vape re-used if possible. 3. Lastly - based on a project I'm trying to do now. Can you somehow sleep the microcontroller so it uses no power while in standby and then starts the timer, so you have close to indefinite battery life?
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 00:12:32+00:00
Thanks. It was hard won. I spent maybe a decade naively thinking that if we just made software methods that worked in service of stated business goals and values, they'd get adopted and we'd all live happily ever after.

It took me a long time to come to grips with the POSIWID [1] version of the purpose of planning and estimates. One of the things that really blew my mind is Mary Poppendieck's story about how they built the Empire State Building on time and under budget even though they didn't have it fully designed when they started. [2] Different, more effective approaches are not only possible, they exist. But they can no longer win out, and I think it's because of the rise of managerialism, the current dominant ideology and culture of big business. [3]

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

[2] Talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/ And transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20140311004931/https://chrisgagn...

[3] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
by andrew_lettuce | 2025-12-08 00:12:36+00:00
Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline, and everybody knows it. There is absolutely no incentive to add value beyond the next sale, and often you only need to add the perception of value. To quote my CTO of a PE owned company: "we want to make it look like we're on the road to <big investment in strategic roadmap>", not actually accomplish it
by buu700 | 2025-12-08 00:13:20+00:00
Just in case it was unclear, I extensively use AI and agentic coding with current models on a daily basis. The only thing I haven't tried in a few months is specifically one-shotting a greenfield project.

I know computer-use agents exist, and theoretically have tooling and permission to do all the things a human sitting in front of a computer can. I just haven't heard of anyone successfully claiming to have had one do exactly what I described for a non-toy project in one shot with zero mistakes, or of any tool like Replit claiming to support such a capability.

I'd be very interested to know if my impression is out of date. As in, if I could send a single message to some AI service and say "Here's my credit card, banking info, and entity info/EIN; build me a production-ready Google Drive clone with religious branding and 10x higher pricing called God Drive with native Android/iOS/Linux/macOS/Windows apps, then deploy it to production on an optimal cloud architecture capable of scaling to a billion users at whatever domain name you like best and release the apps to all major app stores/repositories", then go to bed with high confidence that I'd be able to start creating God Drive docs/spreadsheets/presentations for work the following morning.

If that isn't the case, it isn't a criticism of the technology. The fact that we're even seriously discussing the scenario is incredible.
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by aalbatross | 2025-12-08 00:13:59+00:00
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by jefftk | 2025-12-08 00:14:02+00:00
> Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi.

Composites are older than you think: putting thin layers of high quality wood over a lower quality wooden backing goes back at least to the Egyptians and Romans:

Pliny, Book 16: The principal woods for cutting into layers for using as a veneer to cover other kinds of wood are citrus, turpentine-tree, varieties of maple, box, palm, holly, holm-oak, the root of the elder, and poplar. Also the alder, as has been stated, supplies a tubcrosity that can be cut into layers, as do the citrus and the maple ; no other trees have tuberosities so much valued. The middle part of trees is more variegated, and the nearer the root the smaller and the more wavy are the markings. This first originated the luxury use of trees, covering up one with another and making an outside skin for a cheaper wood out of a more expensive one. In order that one tree might be sold several times over, even thin layers of wood have been invented. https://archive.org/details/naturalhistory04plinuoft/page/53...
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 00:14:02+00:00
> it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc

It is unreasonable, a lazy argument of supremacists. We don't know how much (could be minimal), how many, what exactly the effects are ('propensity' is quite vague - exactly what is affected, in what ways, and to what degree?), etc. It's also the anti-democracy, anti-freedom crowd trying (again) to create intellectual cover for seizing power.
by grouchy | 2025-12-08 00:14:12+00:00
I'm curious what makes you say this? I feel like I discover how most sufficiently complex apps work by googling, or youtube.

I'm also not convinced this makes traditional methods: walkthroughs, support videos, trainings etc impossible?

My friend just discovered coding agents (lol), and he's constantly finding new things it can do for him...

"Oh it can ssh into my raspberrypi and run the code to test it. Wow"

That was an emergent property of the cli coding agent that had no "traditional" discoverability.
by gerdesj | 2025-12-08 00:14:13+00:00
I'm not a fan of Brexit but it is what it is.

I doubt that you are really a fan of all things EU but I am with you on unity being important and I absolutely agree we fucked up that one. I'm pretty sure we mildly screwed our economy from day one of Brexit - simply by inviting mutual tariffs for a smaller entity and losing the unified border.

However: I'm old enough (55) to remember quite a lot of EU history. Do you recall or have been told about wine lakes and butter and grain mountains?
by gruez | 2025-12-08 00:14:30+00:00
>There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor)

Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?

>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.

Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.

>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.

This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 00:14:41+00:00
> what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse

The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less.

My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 00:14:57+00:00
> Also, Clojure’s start up time was off-putting, and would probably be even more so today, coming from Bun and Go.

Why is that? Never understood the complaint about slow Clojure startup time. Usually the context is either your local development environment, where you start the process once until you're done for the day, or you're deploying on a server and 5 seconds vs 10 seconds doesn't make that big of an impact. Short-lived CLIs aren't really suitable for Clojure in the first place, you'd use something like Babashka for that.

So why is the "slow startup" actually a problem? I don't seem to hit that issue ever myself, wondering what kind of situation people find themselves at where this hurts.
by zackmorris | 2025-12-08 00:15:05+00:00
This is great!

I started programming on an 8 MHz Mac Plus in the late 1980s and got a bachelors degree in computer engineering in the late 1990s. From my perspective, a kind of inverse Moore's Law happened, where single-threaded performance stays approximately constant as the number of transistors doubles every 18 months.

Wondering why that happened is a bit like asking how high the national debt would have to get before we tax rich people, or how many millions of people have to die in a holocaust before the world's economic superpowers stop it. In other words, it just did.

But I think that we've reached such an astounding number of transistors per chip (100 billion or more) that we finally have a chance to try alternative approaches that are competitive. Because so few transistors are in use per-instruction that it wouldn't take much to beat status quo performance. Note that I'm talking about multicore desktop computing here, not GPUs (their SIMD performance actually has increased).

I had hoped that FPGAs would allow us to do this, but their evolution seems to have been halted by the powers that be. I also have some ideas for MIMD on SIMD, which is the only other way that I can see this happening. I think if the author can reach the CMOS compatibility they spoke of, and home lithography could be provided by an open source device the way that 3D printing happened, and if we could get above 1 million transistors running over 100 MHz, then we could play around with cores having the performance of a MIPS, PowerPC or Pentium.

In the meantime, it might be fun to prototype with AI and build a transputer at home with local memories. Looks like a $1 Raspberry Pi RP2040 (266 MIPS, 2 core, 32 bit, 264 kB on-chip RAM) could be a contender. It has about 5 times the MIPS of an early 32 bit PowerPC or Pentium processor.

For comparison, the early Intel i7-920 had 12,000 MIPS (at 64 bits), so the RP2040 is about 50 times slower (not too shabby for a $1 chip). But where the i7 had 731 million transistors, the RP2040 has only 134,000 (not a typo). So 50 times the performance for over 5000 times the number of transistors means that the i7 is only about 1% as performant as it should be per transistor.

I'm picturing an array of at least 256 of these low-cost cores and designing an infinite-thread programming language that auto-parallelizes code without having to manually use intrinsics. Then we could really start exploring stuff like genetic algorithms, large agent simulations and even artificial life without having to manually transpile our code to whatever non-symmetric multiprocessing runtime we're forced to use currently.
by NotGMan | 2025-12-08 00:16:05+00:00
Comparing bike riding and innate talent for math has to be one of the stupidest analogies I have heard in the last few months.

How many people can ride a bike? Everyone, all humans, except those with certain physical disabilities can do it.

How many people can code software competently or do science? Not many.

The fact that you cannot acknowledge your own childhood experience in school, that is, that you had smart and stupid schoolmates, is very telling that your comment is ideology based.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-08 00:16:17+00:00
The S-400 isn't even really capable of shooting down the basic "quadcopter" drones, they're too small and fly far too low. You'd have to be extraordinarily lucky to be able to hit one.

I'm talking about Ukrainian shahed-equivalents here.

9M96E/E2 can be used to shoot down shahed-like UAVs, but it's not something you'd generally want to do. They don't exist in sufficient numbers and are far better suited for shooting down missiles. It's something you'd do as a last resort, when necessary. Not something you'd do to shoot down thousands of drones.
by jezek2 | 2025-12-08 00:17:20+00:00
In my case, as a developer of a programming language that can compile to all supported platforms from any platform the signing (and notarization) is simply incompatible with the process.

Not only is such signing all about control (the Epic case is a great example of misuse and a reminder that anyone can be blocked by Apple) it is also anti-competitive to other programming languages.

I treat each platform as open only when it allows running unsigned binaries in a reasonable way (or self-signed, though that already has some baggage of needing to maintain the key). When it doesn't I simply don't support such platform.

Some closed platforms (iOS and Android[1]) can be still supported pretty well using PWAs because the apps are fullscreen and self-contained unlike the desktop.

[1] depending on if Google will provide a reasonable way to run self-signed apps, but the trust that it will remain open in the future is already severely damaged
by pjc50 | 2025-12-08 00:18:05+00:00
This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter.

You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.
by timschmidt | 2025-12-08 00:18:24+00:00
No. It is clear that non-coding DNA serves many vital functions, many of which are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA#Noncoding_genes

We will likely continue to discover ways in which non-coding DNA is used by life, however there is no question that non-coding DNA is far from "useless" and hasn't been for some time.

Within non-coding DNA there do exist some sections with no known biological function which some people call "Junk DNA" however, there is much disagreement about this, and we have only relatively recently begun to directly image structures on the scale of DNA and proteins in situ via cryo-electron-microscopy, allowing us to study the mechanisms and motions of biological machinery frozen in action. DNA and cellular machinery is still far too complex to simulate fully, so CEM is one of the best available tools for studying it. For those reasons, and the fact that the percentage of what folks refer to as "junk dna" has steadily dwindled over the years due to discovery of these functions, it's reasonable to expect we'll discover more.
by Herring | 2025-12-08 00:18:33+00:00
Give it time. The first iPhone sucked compared to the Nokia/Blackberry flagships of the day. No 3G support, couldn't copy/paste, no apps, no GPS, crappy camera, quick price drops, negligible sales in the overall market.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
by joeevans1000 | 2025-12-08 00:19:05+00:00
Agreed. And this is the real miss of much of the Clojure community. There is a handful of amazing people in there pulling 90% of the weight of bringing noobs in to the language. And the rest don't even seem to notice their efforts. Little awards and grants here and there, yes. But the majority don't even care if the language has wider adoption or not. It works for them and that's enough. But many of the successful projects are toy or side project ones. A large number have comically minimal UIs... sub useful in today's world. Quite a few Clojure programmers use 2D languages in their day jobs, only bringing Clojure in for small parts if at all. All of this is a top down vibe. The core team has never meaningfully addressed the terrible error messages the language spits out because they are able to decode the problem themselves. Empathy or concern for noobs or wanting to grow the language seems a far priority for them. The same for the cryptic documentation, seemingly written for themselves at best. Very talented people, mind you... just not concerned with the things that would have caused adoption of their entirely unadopted language (percentagewise).
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 00:19:25+00:00
> you either have something to channel or don't

Again, any evidence? What exactly is 'cognitive ability'? A hallmark of the lack of substantive argument is vague terms that can mean anything the speaker likes, and by not defining the term they prevent any substantive critique - nobody really knows what they're talking about (and usually, not the speaker either).

I highly doubt it's all or nothing. While there are likely variations in anything, they can be quite insignificant. For example, everyone, with tiny exceptions, can learn to speak & understand language, and write & read - highly sophisticated cognitive abilities. And they can improve those abilities through education.

These baseless generalities don't show much 'cognitive ability'.
by sholain | 2025-12-08 00:19:49+00:00
RAG and LLMs are not the same thing, but 'Agents' incorporate both.

Maybe we could resolve the bit of a conundrum by the op in requiring 'agents' to give credit for things if they did rag them or pull them off the web?

It still doesn't resolve the 'inherent learning' problem.

It's reasonable to suggest that if 'one person did it, we should give credit' - at least in some cases, and also reasonable that if 1K people have done similar things ad the AI learns from that, well, I don't think credit is something that should apply.

But a couple of considerations:

- It may not be that common for an LLM to 'see one thing one time' and then have such an accurate assessment of the solution. It helps, but LLMs tend not to 'learn' things that way.

- Some people might consider this the OSS dream - any code that's public is public and it's in the public domain. We don't need to 'give credit' to someone because they solved something relatively arbitrary - or - if they are concerned with that, then we can have a separate mechanism for that, aka they can put it on Github or Wikipedia even, and then we can worry about 'who thought of it first' as a separate consideration. But in terms of Engineering application, that would be a bit of a detractor.