skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow this triggered some neural pathways I forgot I had.

I remember using both of those clients.
In my mind, spending too much time on a computer instead of physically going “outside” and touching grass can’t be healthy.

Or even staying inside and spending time with family
Queue the next batch of YC sand companies
Ask HN: How to assess SWE in times of remote and AI?
Last time I hired SWEs, remote work wasn’t a thing, AI didn’t exist, and interviews were in-person.

What’s your go-to approach for assessing remote engineers? Take-home assignments? Live coding?

Do you try to separate AI-generated work from the candidate’s genuine work, or do you just care about the final output?

I thought about a take-home assignment and ask candidates to reflect / document how they used AI, followed by a live discussion to gauge their understanding of their own solution.
Funnily enough, Windows itself does stuff like this to allow applications written for Win9x (where e.g. Program Files were writable, so many apps would create files in their install folder). This is what the stuff in ~/AppData/Local/VirtualStore is.
In the handwriting I learned, x had hooks on all four ends, while greek chi only on two.

Anyway, I usually use simple cross as x, because it's only very rarely confused with cross product (and you can always parenthesize).
You’re picking Boeing for their safety record? Why is that?
The Bell Curve is a great book that is unfortunately maligned by people that dislike what it says but all too often have no actual arguments against what it says.

Separated twin studies show conclusively that IQ is (partially) genetically determined as does, yknow, all common experience and intuition.
class Foo(object):
def run(self, context): ...

Objects with only a single method to run it are already built into Python, they are the functions.

def foo(context): ...
should have been done 5 years ago
I read "innovative" as coming up with a novel solution to a known problem.

Sometimes the things we consider already solved can be solved better with nuances that maybe weren't considered before.
This Reddit thread [1] says that the battery lasts ~22h based on some benchmarks. The vendor claim was at ~29h but I think the point is to be comparable to Apple chips. Indeed is a game changer.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1efsvcj/lenovo_cl...
> Don't most AI either incorporate or surpass GAN architecture

No.

Most generators don't bother because it is time consuming. Maybe they will if there is a popular detector like this. But it sure increases the cost of training and do people really care? Probably not unless you're explicitly trying to create subversive content. It's also important to remember that tuning a model can also have adverse effects. Sure, you get better in one way, but that can often mean you get worse in another. There's no free lunch.

To "Um AcKtUaLlY" you, GAN is actually a training technique, not an architecture, though we all know what you mean.
Maybe worth noting, that our GAN based networks tend to result in much smaller and faster generative models which can thus produce higher resolutions with much lower resources. The best face generators are still GAN based btw. But you still need big architectures to match diffusion models and you tend to lose your advantages (not all, but it gets nuanced).

> making good software detector impossible to build?

It is a cat and mouse game. I'm not sure there is anything wrong with this, but detector systems tend not to be continually updated, aimed at specific models, and I think their communication is very unclear. You should never say anything is 100% generated, it should be "suspect." So "low suspect" to "high suspect" but never "not AI generated" or "AI generated." The communication is problematic and leads to kids getting flagged for plagiarism when they just wrote something generic.

Though tbh, with a lot of the LLM based detectors, I am really confused by the methodologies. Like why is there this big focus around perplexity? LLMs are trained to be entropy minimizers, so it really doesn't make sense to me that detectors are often looking for... entropy (since perplexity is scaled entropy).
The registry hasn't been the recommended place for Win32 app settings for well over two decades now. The guidance is to only use it for system stuff that's already these, and have config files in the standard designated locations under %AppData% (depending on whether they are machine-specific or user-specific; ideally, apps are supposed to support both).
I Built a Deep Learning Library from Scratch Using Only Python, NumPy and Math
The equivalent of .config on Windows is ~/AppData.

The problem, as usual, is that apps ignore it and do whatever they want. Such as e.g. using dotfiles directly in ~ instead.
Wait, you mean the SLS that could not bring astronauts back from the International Space Station? It's nine months in and they are still up there.
Not wanting 2 languages is ridiculous. Only one of them is actually safe. Whatever Linus thinks, empowering someone to say “no” to “two languages” is pretty idiotic; if someone did that to me, I wouldn’t go to social media to bitch about it, but I can sure as heck sympathize with the sentiment.

Whoever owns DMA or whatever and rejected rust out of hand like this should frankly be _forced_ to resign. This is truly arrogant and egotistical behavior, almost certainly contingent upon FUD and insecurity and laziness about not just learning Rust.

Good grief, last time I feel excited about submitting a kernel patch; what a ridiculous situation.
> Whether it’s debates like the shift from master to main in git or deeper discussions around inclusivity in language (master/slave rename in redis), these things can shape team culture.

Well, that'll certainly do something to team culture. If an EM seemed to be significantly invested in this sort of decisions then I would form strong opinions about their ability to prioritise.

This is just not an issue that is going to determine the success of the company. If, in some amazing conjunction of circumstance, it does there are terrible terrible problems in the hiring pipeline or in who is being promoted to leadership positions because it suggests the company is a barely controlled powderkeg.

And, frankly, this is not what culture looks like. This is preformative name changes to provide a distraction from whatever the real cultural activity is - which is determined by what the EM rewards and punishes; not by what they signal in low-impact cosmetic policies. That is branding - which is important but not a fraction as important as culture.
Popular in 2022 (130 points, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33267518
They said that the work was a Greek Epicurean work, but described it as finding fulfillment in the pleasures of life. The Greek Epicureans were of the opinion that avoiding pain and suffering was the object of ethical philosophy, which is not the same thing, at all.
I see no evidence that "keeping up appearances" toward critics has been a priority for anyone else in the last two weeks.
What I am saying is that this is a natural phenomenon assuming no technical solution. People will tend to optimize their software based on the performance of their hardware.

I completely agree that many apps are horrendously slow, but given the alternative are hard pressed to arrive, I can only conclude they are considered "good enough" for our current tech level.

The difficulty involved in rewriting modern apps is one of the reason I would give that result in slow software. Can't really complain about the number of independent web browsers when you look at the spec. Ensuring the software we use is easily reimplementable by a few or one developer in a few days would go a long way improving performance.

Another reason would be the constant need to rewrite working code, to work on new platforms, to support some new trendy framework, etc. etc. You cannot properly optimize without some sort of stability.
how can anyone possibly make money off of that with transport costs and labor?
But concrete is measured by volume at least in the US (cubic yards…sigh). I think this is because different mix designs can change the resulting weight. I’ve even heard of adding air to make for better pumping.
Not just rural areas but places like Orinda and the Berkeley Hills where I will pay to underground lines at massive expense.

There is also a huge moral hazard problem where we make it cheaper than it should be to live in fire zones by subsidizing electricity and insurance. So people build a lot of houses in fire territory that burn down.

In the meantime we make it more expensive to live in the safe places. We should stop doing that
It does feel liberating to me after you get through security and you have nothing to do except just chill and wait for boarding. There's no sense of guilt, no sense that you should be doing something that you're not.
We are rightfully called skanzen for a reason.
The name is probably too similar to Clippy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant
Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)
Not even a hint of impropriety here, move along.
> The original Carolingian lowercase "l" from 1200 years ago had a small right hook at the inferior end, which made it easily distinguishable from other similar letters, like uppercase "I".

It might help a little. "Easily distinguishable" is dramatically overselling things.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Minuscul...

I, capital and lowercase, also has a serif hooking to the right at the bottom of the stroke. Look at the first line beginning with a big red I.

It says "Iterum autem pilatus locutus ẽ. ad illos volens".

The line above it says "Et homicidium missus In carcerem;".

How much difference do you see between the capital I in "In carcerem" and the lowercase L in "pilatus"?

It's easy to distinguish lowercase L from lowercase i because L is taller. Capital I is only slightly different.

(I should note that wikipedia's page on Carolingian minuscule also includes an image of a page of written Slovene. I couldn't really use that as an example, because without any knowledge of Slovene I can't reliably identify the letters. But I think that goes to show that the alphabet by itself doesn't reach the level of perfect unambiguity.)

I'm interested to see that all Ses look the same. At some point we got word-final "s", but this was clearly not that point.
> You can't really do a moon program without a super heavy rocket.

Use two parts like Apollo but launch them separately?
The anthropocentric are quite egocentric, you've just demonstrated, yes? Because everything you said is based on either the assumption or the incorrect sincere belief that I am a human being. What if I was not a human being and instead an artificial intelligence? Or at least a cyborg or a mutant?

And what if I derived pleasure from mastering quantum mechanics, like some sort of strange alien that, for some, foreign, reason, had a huge fancy for physics that touches deep down into interesting rabbit holes? Not only that alternative preference, but what if I had a situation where comprehensive knowledge was a requirement, rather than an optional leisure in a sea of other freedoms? Surely, then, holisticism or completeness would be a priority for the alternative scientist and engineer.

We can only conclude from our social interaction something like a physical difference between the anthropocentric and the transhumanist, at the least. Which leads to questions of what are the properties of this division. And why it exists. To get the ball rolling in some neo-globalist societal engineering that is going to be very awesome.
Jesus, what the hell did I just read? I would have expected more from someone who went to Rolla, but I find myself disappointed.
Optimizing AI Inference at Character.ai (Part Deux) (2024)
I have a gf in Goias brazil . She told me that she was mugged 7 times for her cell phone years ago . Then a new governor came along and began a policy of. allowing police to execute dangerous criminal gang members rather than arrest them. Now the area is considered one of the safest regions. He's rummored to have presidential ambitions. Guess there is a breaking point when crime and corruption gets to a point where people just have had enough and only want results Justice be dammed.
It doesn't have to come from the free market, FOSS is hardly exempt of awfully slow/unstable software. Nobody figured out yet how to make writing good software the default/path-of-least-resistance.
Oops, that's Starliner. Still...It would be perhaps better for Boeing to get out of rockets entirely and focus on fixing their commercial airline business.
So do “thin places” include cabin isles? It’s 2025 and boarders are still blocking the isles playing with their bags. Could you possibly think of doing that before boarding?

Isle Rage needs to become a thing.
The stuff you first mention is held to a much higher standard and regulatory process.
You're confusing things. The mission you are referring to was flown using the Boeing Starliner capsule, launched atop a Atlas V N22 rocket. Not the SLS or Orion.
People that have a poor understanding of the stack under them almost invariably produce very poor software.

Video games are an area where in fact good software is still produced, mostly because the people working on the cores of games DO know (at least how to read) assembly language.

Modern web applications on the other hand so basically the same things we were doing with computers 20 years ago but consume 100x the resources to do so.

No "modern web application" comes anywhere near the quality of Word or Excel 2003.
> Look at recent developments with Dragon Age Inquisition. Reviewers gave it great scores, but it flopped hard enough that Bioware had huge layoffs [0]

First off, it's Dragon Age: Veilguard, not Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Second off, it's had a better release (in terms of sales X days from launch) than literally every other Dragon Age came to date.

While it's true that it underperformed expectations, that's more because the expectations were ludicrous to begin with, and the actual performance can hardly be called a flop.
Can someone help me? I can't get to the main page, but it draws what looks like a toddlers art work when I try and use it.

Firefox on Linux.
I installed 386BSD for my university admin in 1991 I think. They paid my to do it but it was otherwise free.
Are they though? They’ve been shown to generalize poorly to tasks where you switch up some of the content.
Long division is taught to 8 year olds. That is not "academic maths" it is primary school arithmetic.

When I was taught long division I was told how it worked, although it is fairly obvious if you think about it for a few seconds anyway.
I wouldn’t call Microsoft’s success in the 90s unlikely. They had a decent product at a low price for commodity hardware when nothing else was as good for as cheap. They also had decent marketing. The company worked hard and delivered. That’s not unlikely, it’s good execution. The unlikely part was something more like OSX taking Microsoft developer market monopoly away.
Mind you, I’m a former x86 asm and C guy who avoids writing HTML. Web 1 state transfers never made sense to me. It just doesn’t click, I don’t think this way and refuse to do so in the name of not sure what.

And while I despise react for its architectural delusions, I still use a js framework to render my webapps. I also don’t see any bloat or something, they all render instantly on both my pc and my phone.
> unless you have a front row seat, everything you know is because someone else already parsed that info for you.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, it is pointless for us to discuss anything we're not actively doing.
Californians blame it all on Enron, but that can't be the only reason, right?
Is this basically debriefing (psychology/therapy thing)?
Neither has SpaceX; we have two contracts that have missed deadlines.
Aren't you agreeing with Casey by saying this is an effort/cultural problem? He also does say that fast software can sell better.
Brazil seems like a wild place. I mean that in several senses of the word.
Working on a Swift project which is integrating an irreplaceable C++ library, this is really interesting.

My immediate thoughts are: would it be possible to interface with Carbon from Swift, delegating things like memory management of C++ objects to Carbon?
Testing Browser Agents
I joined loop11 and am proud of the teams launch of an AI browser agent testing platform I had tried to deploy a browser use agent and testing was been a pain. Does any one know any tools to test browser agents? We’d like to collaborate and maybe open source some tools to benefit the ecosystem.
> they can't be bothered to write more than 1 character

You try handwriting all of your code and let's see how long until you start abbreviating everything.

Mathematical notation is all abbreviations. We used to write mathematics without abbreviations. It was absolutely horrid. Try reading some 13th century mathematics, translated to your language (e.g. Fibonacci https://archive.org/details/laurence-sigler-fibonaccis-liber... ), and see how much of it you understand without the benefit of symbolic notation. We would even write aaa instead of a^3.

The point with mathematical notation is that it can all be sounded out and it's extremely general and abstract. Generally, x is not a measurement, a quantity with a unit, a meaningful anything. It's just a number, and x is a better name than front_server_count or whatever thing you're programming about.
I personally think getting into organised crime kind of mirrors the process where corps pick up fresh grads. Someone who fits the profile of being suitable for organised crime is someone without legal opportunities due to a lack of education, illegal immigration status, prior convictions, etc. In similar ways they are "headhunted" in a process that is more about convenience than key skills in a resume. If you're one of these people you'll end up floating around spaces where the "headhunting" happens.

I remember when I was young and unemployed being plucked from the street when I was looking at job cards in the window of a job centre by members of an MLM. They tried to rope me into their ugly embrace selling door to door on commission only deals that were dubious in nature.

What's kind of spooky to me is how thin those lines can be, it only takes one mistake, lapse in judgement in youth or rolling your birth into an unstable family to end up on the wrong side of that line. This is why I personally find it quite distasteful when people who travelled the happy path turn up their nose at people who fell off onto the darker one. In some cases some kids excel in their black market roles and would have applied the same gusto to a white market profession if they'd had that opportunity.
Yes, definitely better to have a lid with an airlock
Very cool! :D
Thanks. That is a good point. The RLHF phase indeed might "force" the LLM to adopt con artist tricks and probably does.
Apologies, I was not clear. Obviously in MacOS an app can be open without a window. My question is why?

What is the point of having for example Word or Safari running without a window? If they want to run a background task that requires some user interaction (eg outlook checking email and calendar), the menubar is the perfect place for it.

In the past the argument was that people want their apps warm started so that they open faster. But this is a moot point in 2025 with SSDs of pulling 5gb/s and tons of ram that allow for ample intelligent caching.
We did try it. We tried it for a couple of millenia. It was much harder to understand and our collective mathematical output as a human species was much slower than it is now.

Shorthand is better.
There are many critical legacy systems running on institutional knowledge that no one under 40 knows or cares to know.

Nobody under 40 is writing anything that will have that lifespan.
But how can one survive without a daily dose of Utterly Brain Damaged Abstractions?
Why do we need a moon program?
Such is the nature of science.
Is there a similar app for Windows? I work at Microsoft and while I'm allowed to use other OSes it's not really practical.
Maybe look at how terrible Siri and gemni are.
To clarify, I don't mean having no concern for the business or customer, but rather having that as a priority and the primary way to determine contribution. Engineers should care about the engineering first, which implicitly has value if done correctly.

That said, AI is about to change all this... but ironically this justifies my position. If software can be so powerful such that you can have a general intelligence that can do almost any cognitive task... then it follows that all this time engineers can also engineer clever systems that can add a lot of value to the company if engineered correctly.

There is no ceiling of how much performance and value can be squeezed out of a software system, but this never happens because businesses are not investing in actual engineering but rather in technical entrepreneurs that can bring something to market quickly enough.
Agreed, I think the focus here is that typically schools are Public entities, they should be more transparent than the usual corporation.
A moon program requires a super heavy booster or on orbit rendezvous, not both. The reports from the sixties determined that on orbit rendezvous would be easier and cheaper, but take longer, making it more likely to miss their deadline of 1969.
C'mon, les œufs faire.
Not for speed (that was only allowed in past versions of macos) but even now, you can go Accessibilty -> Reduce motion blur and it at least won't do the horrible slide animation, just fade in and out. The other one made me nauseous if I was doing it so often
TikTok is now distributing its Android app via side loading
good points here. appreciate it!
Grow the economy through the advancement of technology.

A good way to be poor is to not advance technology.
On what hardware are you running it?
The Jane Street page explains the (a?) number theory approach.
I can't find it anymore but someone made a site overlaying all of Elon Musk's outrageous project timeline goals as if they were serious
To me this reads like someone praising the exquisite quality of the invisible Egyptian cotton forming the emperor's clothes
Why should the government pay for it? If there’s an economically viable reason to have a moon program, let private enterprise take that on.
Ask HN: Books about lifelong engineering/technology career
I am looking for books/blogs that cover a lifelong career in technology (or engineering). Most of the materials typically focus on singular engineering achievement (building Apple I/II (like iWoz) or sending a rocket to the moon (any books about Von Braun) rather than focusing how one builds a life-long career.

The closest I ever found was a post by Will Larson: https://lethain.com/forty-year-career/
"Creating a Government That Works Better and Costs Less" by VP Al Gore [pdf] (1993)
On the other hand, when brick and mortar stores of the same kind are located near each other they all sell more.

And we often see two of the same topics thriving on the HN front page.
> When two different flu viruses infect a cell at the same time, they can swap whole segments of their genomes to create hybrid viruses that may have dramatically different properties.

Wow, that’s pretty neat. Haven’t heard of this before. Is this typical of viruses or somewhat special to influenza?
More importantly they saying use the web app for iOS. They should probably promote that idea more.
I found this a few years ago and was quite inspired by it. I then more recently found https://xcfile.dev/ which is a great way to implement these sort of scripts directly in the project's README.
99.8%+ on first pass

Even with the best OCR, and high resolution scans, you might not get this due to:

- the quality of the original paper documents, and

- the language

I have non-English documents for which I'd love to have 99% accuracy!