MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arter45 | 2026-01-11 18:31:50+00:00
I’ve just asked that to ChatGPT and this is the exact answer it gave :) Ironic, isn’t it?

Would you ask a prospective employee to send you code they wrote in their previous company?

Short answer: *no, I wouldn’t—and it’s generally a bad idea to ask.*

Here’s why, and what to do instead.

---

## Why you shouldn’t ask for code from a previous employer

1. *Legal and contractual issues*
Most employment contracts assign ownership of code to the company. Asking for it puts the candidate at risk of violating:

* IP assignment clauses
* NDAs
* Trade secret laws

2. *Ethical red flag*
A candidate who does share proprietary code is signaling that they might do the same to your company later.

3. *Biased signal*
Some candidates (especially senior or well-trained ones) will refuse on principle. You’d be selecting for the wrong behavior.

4. *Low signal-to-noise ratio*
Real-world code is often:

* Highly contextual
* Entangled with proprietary systems
* Hard to evaluate without full context

---

## What to ask for instead (better options)

### 1. *Open-source contributions*

Ask for:

* GitHub / GitLab profiles
* Public PRs or issues
* Personal projects

This shows real-world collaboration without IP risk.

### 2. *A take-home or live exercise*

Design something that:

* Can be completed in a few hours
* Mirrors the work they’ll actually do
* Is clearly stated as theirs to own

Bonus: allow them to explain tradeoffs rather than just write code.

### 3. *Code walkthrough (descriptive, not shared)*

Ask them to:

* Describe a complex system they built
* Explain architecture, tradeoffs, and failures
* Talk through how they’d improve it today

This is often more revealing than code.

### 4. *Pair programming / problem discussion*

Observe:

* How they reason
* How they ask questions
* How they handle ambiguity

---

## When it might be acceptable

Only if *all* of the following are true:

* The code is explicitly non-proprietary
* The candidate confirms they own the rights
* It’s already public (e.g., open source)

Even then, I’d still be cautious.

---

## Bottom line

> *If a candidate shares proprietary code, that’s not a plus—it’s a liability.*

Strong hiring processes test:

* Judgment
* Reasoning
* Communication
* Craft

—not their willingness to break an NDA.

If you want, tell me:

* The role (junior/senior, IC/lead)
* The domain (backend, ML, frontend, systems)

…and I can help you design a fair, high-signal interview process.
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-11 18:31:59+00:00
Normal investor: "I'll give you money to grow your autism center. Take your time, focus on quality care."

Private equity: "I'll buy 500 autism centers using borrowed money. The centers will pay back that loan themselves. I'll also charge
them 'management fees' for my services. I need to sell these in 5 years for 3x profit, so cut staff, raise prices, extend waitlists.
Quality doesn't matter - the math does."

The special thing about PE firms: they use a playbook that prioritizes financial extraction over the actual service.

I made a dictionary of these terms because they're deliberately confusing: https://founderstowne.com/extraction-terms.html

Terms like "Roll-Up Strategy", "Debt Loading", and "Portfolio Optimization" sound sophisticated. They mean: buy many, make them pay
for it, cut costs, sell fast.
by bespokedevelopr | 2026-01-11 18:32:17+00:00
For work related items I’ve been building out agent tooling for building some models and PoC projects related to energy industry applications. Been doing the consulting thing for a bit now and gaining more broad knowledge on some of these data center builds. Hoping to spin this into a product soon.

Started playing with gas town which is really cool. I had a naive version built that was just not good enough. This feels like a step in the right direction.

Haven’t had much time to work on any of my physical hands on hobbies lately but maybe when the weather gets better I’ll head back out to the shop again.
by csa | 2026-01-11 18:33:06+00:00
> How much of a session is based on "reading players" vs "playing the odds"?

Several good answers here, but I will add my own take.

“Playing the odds” is basically playing good, fundamental poker. This is a baseline that most players will use when sitting down at a table of unknown players. This is often called a “balanced” strategy (note some people erroneously call this “GTO strategy, assuming the balance, which is not actually what GTO is).

“Reading players” is a thing, but it can be broken up into (at least) two categories: 1) physical tells, and 2) player habits.

Physical tells is not a big thing. Some people give off a lot of tells, but some folks are also decent (not good) at giving reverse tells. Honestly, you can be a wildly successful poker player while knowing nothing about physical tells.

(Side note: One of the most reliable tells is bet timing tells. This can sometimes even be a tell online, especially when people are taking shots at higher stakes or are deep in a tournament. It can also be faked, but some folks are super reliable with timing tells, and they don’t realize it.)

The second kind of tell is player tendencies — things like when players play too many hands or when they play too few (e.g., fold too often).

One very reliable way for good players to smooth out their earnings curve is figure out which players fold too often and in which spots. Once they’ve figured that out, they try to set up that spot and basically print low-risk (sometimes even no-risk) chips.

Taking advantage of these tendencies is called an “exploitative” strategy (as opposed to the “balanced” strategy mentioned above).

Really good players can take rec players on a journey through a series of emotions (and accompanying predictable gameplay) such that the good player can read the rec player like a book. The odds tip heavily in favor of the good player at this point.

Pro player and strong amateur players are so far ahead of recs in ways that the recs don’t even realize.
by znpy | 2026-01-11 18:33:09+00:00
> But these obstacles are not intrinsic technical limitations so much as ecosystem and investment gaps, areas where community projects, standards efforts, and wider adoption could drive improvement without sacrificing freedom.

Are you sure? My second-hand thinkpad still won't hibernate properly. It's not a weird model, it's a ryzen-based X13 Gen1 so not even shiny new. You can imagine on a laptop one would want hibernation to just work.

The fault is surely on Lenovo's table... Yet it would work if I was to run Windows (which I don't want to do).

So yeah... Now I have a laptop from a brand which is known and appreciated for linux compatibility, and a basic thing like hibernation does not work.
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-11 18:33:45+00:00
This exists partially - you can often find it by searching "[company name] acquired by" + checking the acquiring firm.

The bigger problem: PE firms deliberately obscure ownership through multiple holding companies. It's part of the strategy.

Example with autism centers:
- PE firm creates "AutismCare Holdings LLC"
- That entity owns 500 centers
- Each center keeps its local brand name
- Parents have no idea they're paying a PE-optimized operation

The glossary I made includes terms like "Portfolio Company" and "Management Company" that explain this structure:
https://founderstowne.com/extraction-terms.html

A database would be valuable, but PE firms would just add more shell companies. The obfuscation is intentional.
by schiffern | 2026-01-11 18:33:46+00:00
https://archive.is/zPsmq

For the predictable reasons, the article overemphasizes "number of satellites" and under-emphasizes "height of satellites" and "inclination of satellites."

The CTC-1 constellation proposes to be at 510 km altitude and 97.4 degrees inclination[0], which is already a heavily-populated orbit[1] due to being in a Sun-synchronous orbit. Since the collision risk scales as the object density squared, this is an especially foolhardy decision from the perspective of space debris and space sustainability.

Remember that most of the satellite collisions occur in a "halo" around the North and South poles where the SSO orbits all pile up. Avoiding these orbital slots (and in fact, removing defunct objects from these valuable orbits) is the best thing we could do for Kessler syndrome. China is doing literally the exact opposite.

It also doesn't help that China just abandons their upper stages in orbit, rather than doing proper deorbit burns.[2] Since each Chinese rocket also can only launch a handful of satellites (vs almost 50 per SpaceX launch), the number of abandoned debris upper stages is truly massive, and again they're all being carelessly discarded in pretty much the worst possible orbit.

[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;...

[1] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=44021.0

[2] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/everyone-but-china-has...
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-11 18:33:52+00:00
The problem I see with most people is that it just doesn't occur to them that there are alternatives. They're so used to a shitty experience with Windows and MS apps, and to them there's no such thing as os" and "hardware", in their minds they're lumped together.

So they shrug, say "meh, computers, I just can't understand them," and go on their merry way rebooting Windows for the 10th time that day.

Now, don't get me wrong, Windows has improved a lot from a robustness standpoint. Moreover, most people only use computers that come pre-configured, either from the factory or by their IT department. They won't face the crazy shit I have to put up with when I manually reinstall mine. Half the things on my 5 yo HP Elitebook don't work out of the box and I need to install a bunch of drivers from HP with dubious names, like sp1234 which makes the touchpad work, and sp4321 which enables the webcam. After a further set of updates, I can use my external screen connected to the intel integrated gpu and finally try to get some work done. Good times.
by Chance-Device | 2026-01-11 18:34:16+00:00
Everyone is talking about moving to Linux lately, it’s a bit of a trend. I wish they’d stop, for one simple reason: I’ve been using Linux exclusively (when I’m not forced to use use macOS by work) for several years now, and I rather enjoy the lack of malware, spyware and other bullshit on the platform.

If the general public comes over this situation might end. Desktop linux isn’t a target right now because its niche, I’d prefer that didn’t end.

Oh well. Maybe nothing lasts forever.
by Marsymars | 2026-01-11 18:34:23+00:00
> We had done an initial batch of Dell Pro 16 laptops and with 16gb of ram + the 255h (now 258v) it's over $1100 a laptop. Only problem is... they need 32gb of RAM on Windows 11. We were seeing average 88% memory usage for our G&A team at 16gb.

Is that really much different than macOS? Checking my 32gb Mac Mini now, I'm sitting at 84% memory usage with just browsers, chat apps, some RDP/terminal windows, Mail and Apple Music open.

I'd also note that Dell does sell Qualcomm laptops - I've got a 12-core/32gb Dell Qualcomm as my work PC - every piece of software I use for work is now native ARM64 and I've got no complaints about performance/functionality.
by MarkusAllen | 2026-01-11 18:34:29+00:00
The challenge: these entities are designed to be hard to identify until after you're locked in.

With autism centers specifically:
- They keep the local brand name after acquisition
- By the time you realize service quality dropped, your kid is mid-treatment
- Long waitlists at other centers make switching costly

The best "opt-out tool" is learning to recognize the patterns before signing up. Questions to ask:
- Was this recently acquired?
- Do therapists mention high turnover?
- Are there unexplained price increases?

I made a glossary of the terminology these firms use: https://founderstowne.com/extraction-terms.html

Understanding terms like "Roll-Up" and "Cost Optimization" helps you pattern-match before you're stuck.
by xpe | 2026-01-11 18:34:52+00:00
> I don’t see a world in which our tools (LLMs or otherwise) don’t learn this.

I agree, but maybe for different reasons. Refactoring well is a form of intelligence, and I don't see any upper limit to machine intelligence other than the laws of physics.

> Refactoring is a very mechanistic way of turning bad code into good.

There are some refactoring rules of thumb that can seem mechanistic (by which I mean deterministic based on pretty simple rules), but not all. Neither is refactoring guaranteed to be sufficient to lead to all reasonable definitions of "good software". Sometimes the bar requires breaking compatibility with the previous API / UX. This is why I agree with the sibling comment which draws a distinction between refactoring (changing internal details without changing the outward behavior, typically at a local/granular scale) and reworking (fixing structural problems that go beyond local/incremental improvements).

Claude phrased it this way – "Refactoring operates within a fixed contract. Reworking may change the contract." – which I find to be nice and succinct.
by bwb | 2026-01-11 18:35:05+00:00
I've got two going :)

https://shepherd.com/

Building a really unique book recommendation platform to help readers find books they might not otherwise know about. We just started working on a full book app that will be a private book diary, along with recommendations and insights based on your Book DNA. Think Goodreads, but rebuilt for readers who want a private space to track what they read, keep notes, and get truly personalized book recommendations (like Pandora or Spotify for books).

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

This is a fun one I do with a good friend. Basically, to see if a website is down, or if it is just you, along with reported reasons from the community. We are working to add user accounts so you can create your own custom lists of websites/services to track
by desireco42 | 2026-01-11 18:35:13+00:00
First you don't have to dump anything to use Linux. The whole thing should not be as antogonistic.

I switched to Linux, Arch btw, Omarchy, sometime last year when it was announced. I installed it on my old Thinkpad and it worked wonderfully, for most part. I realized that I am more productive there in real sense and experience is more delightful.

When I would go back to Mac, I would realize I need several clicks to accomplish something I had on shortcut available. Having websites/apps on shortcuts as an app is huge help. Also working on command line is really much more focused.

Sometimes in September I plugged Thinkpad to desktop setup and in December I set my powerful computer to Omarchy as well.

It isn't seamless experience, there are issues switching from speakers to headphones and dictation can be hard to setup. Overall whole machine seems more powerful and interesting to work on.

This is first time in many years that I can both play and work on same machine which is definitely welcome and surprising.
by lukebuehler | 2026-01-11 18:35:20+00:00
I’m building AgentOS [1], trying to experiment where agent substrates/sandboxes will head next. It's a deterministic, event-sourced runtime where an “agent world” is replayable from its log, heavy logic runs in sandboxed WASM modules, and every real-world side effect (HTTP, LLM calls, code compilations, etc.) is explicitly capability-gated and recorded as signed receipts. It ensures that upgrades and automations are auditable, reversible, and composable. The fun bit is a small typed control-plane intermediate representation (AIR) that lets the system treat its own schemas/modules/plans/policies as data and evolve via a governed loop (propose > shadow-run > approve > apply), kind of “Lisp machine vibes” but aimed at agents that need reliable self-modification rather than ambient scripts.

[1] https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os
by 650REDHAIR | 2026-01-11 18:35:22+00:00
My top of the line XPS battery swole so much it broke the keyboard.

Repaired under warranty.

Less than a year later that battery was swollen.

No warranty replacement. No OEM batteries available through Dell.

I buy 4 replacements from Amazon and none work. The XPS line has battery DRM.

I have an i7 with a discrete card, 64gb of ram, and a 4k screen that’s worthless.
by jofla_net | 2026-01-11 18:35:47+00:00
>they have a better understanding of the world and their position in it.

Try not to use better/worse when advocating so vociferously.
As described by the parent they are short-term pragmatic, that is all. This discussion can open up into a huge worldview where different groups have strengths and weaknesses based on this axis of pragmatic/idealistic.

"Companies" are not a monolith, both laterally between other companies, and what they are composed of as well. I'd wager the larger management groups can be pragmatic, where the (longer lasting) R&D manager will probably be the most idealistic of the firm, mainly because of seeing the trends of punching the gas without looking at long-term consequences.
by prameshbajra | 2026-01-11 18:36:01+00:00
I am working on a very simple browser extension that allows you to take notes right on youtube. It is open source, offline and everything is locally stored.

Here are the links.

Chrome store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/video-notes/phgnkid...

Firefox store: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-notes-f...

I actually would love some feedbacks and suggestions from someone here :)
by monatron | 2026-01-11 18:36:05+00:00
I'm on a deep dive fine-tuning how I organize and manage my personal knowledge base - focused on entity extraction and strategic information retrieval and based on the AgREE paper from Apple[0] and persisting it in Memgraph.

I've got a nice ingest, extract, enrich process going for the graph - I'm currently working on a fork of claude-mem[1] that uses the graph as a contextual backend for agentic coding workflows.

0. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04118
1. https://github.com/thedotmack/claude-mem/
by dataviz1000 | 2026-01-11 18:36:20+00:00
Using Claude Opus 4.5 to query time-series data.

I have GBs of time-series data in a TimescaleDB database. It’s more complicated than this, but the gist is: I use natural language to ask questions about relationships in the data, Claude Opus 4.5 generates queries, and it finds patterns.

For example, I classify tens of thousands of news articles using different classification models. Then I ask Claude to write a query that tests for statistically significant changes in the time-series data at specific intervals after a given classification of article—and it finds patterns.

It passes train / test split validation. It will train on 2 years of data (2023 and 2024) and being able to effectively predict movements on the time series data using the classified news articles on the last year of data (2025).
by keyshapegeo99 | 2026-01-11 18:36:25+00:00
Thanks for the recommendation! I've been playing around with Niri for the past hour and I have to say there's a lot here that I like. I'm still going to need to figure out how to adjust the trackpad gesture sensitivity a bit (which doesn't seem especially straightforward to do) - but this is considerably more buttery than anything I've experienced before on Linux
by iLemming | 2026-01-11 18:36:25+00:00
> in a country where everyone drives on the right

What if I told you that your analogy breaks completely if you actually consider what Org-mode is. Think of Markdown as a noun (a thing) and Org-mode as a verb (a system that does things). It's like comparing HTML and React components - it's not about "preferable side of the road to drive", we're talking about a complete different mode of transportation - i.e., in a nation where there's infrastructure and roads for cyclists - the rules change from "drive on one side and obey traffic signs..." to be something different. Similar, yet different.

That's what everyone's missing when they try to compare Markdown and Org-mode, while looking at it only through the angle of the markup structure. Markdown is a markup - pure structure, no logic, no state, no content with behavior, no executable source blocks, no embedded logic - and that's the point.

Arguing which one should be "the default choice", is like saying - "just always drive a car, cars are more popular..." - an argument that has no sense whatsoever. If people find Org-mode useful (because it is), well, there's really not much you can do about it, right? Just like you can't tell people to prefer a bike, car, moto or a boat - each has pros and cons and suits different scenarios.
by Amezarak | 2026-01-11 18:36:46+00:00
I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. Indecent faked pictures of public figures may be gross and indecent but it isn't clear they're always illegal and outrage is highly selective - there used to be one going around of Trump with a tiny penis. Anyway people get banned for that too.

People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. Obviously all social media platforms have people posting this garbage, and while they enforce the rules as much as they can, stuff slips through. X is not uniquely awful. It's just in the hands of the wrong guy. Elon may be a polarizing and offensive grifter, but I have zero interest in continuing to go down this road.
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 18:37:01+00:00
Am I under a rock because I haven't seen the articles, or because the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian?

Since you say "last couple years" I'm guessing you mean the articles, it's only in the past year that the government has become undemocratic and authoritarian through the destruction of its constitution, the abdication of checks and balances by Congress and the Supreme Court, and an authoritarian running unchecked and saying that the only thing controlling him is his own morality.

Or perhaps I'm being too pedantic, but if you're going to accuse me of living under a rock hell yes I'm going to be pedantic.
by enaaem | 2026-01-11 18:37:07+00:00
Former libertarian here. The issue with libertarianism is that it does not explain the state of the world. The world is inherently unregulated. If libertarianism was superior it would have outcompeted other systems and it would have been the dominant system right now.

Historic explanations are even more problematic. How does libertarianism explain nomadic cultures or rice growing cultures (that tend to be highly collectivist)?
by nickmade | 2026-01-11 18:37:09+00:00
I’m building a simple CSS redesign for Hacker News on Safari iOS as an extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/y-redesign-for-hacker-news/id6...

I have a few other small side projects that generally improve my day-to-day life, including a better calendar widget for shift workers and a video speed controller that floats on websites where I frequently watch videos for easy access.
by redwall_hp | 2026-01-11 18:37:27+00:00
Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.

It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.