skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We have been interviewing people who are obviously using covert AI helper tools. Ask them a question and they respond with coherent response, but they are just reading off of a window we can't see.

In some cases it is obvious they are blathering a stream of words they don't understand. But others are able to hold something resembling a coherent conversation. We also have to allow for the fact that most people we interview aren't native English speakers, and are talking over Teams. It can be very hard to tell if they are cheating.

Asking questions to probe their technical skills is essential, otherwise you are just selecting for people who are good at talking and self promotion. We aren't just asking trivia questions.

We also give a simple code challenge, nothing difficult. If they have a working knowledge of the language, they should be able to work through the problem in 30 minutes, and we let them use an IDE and google for things like regex syntax.

Some of them are obviously using an AI, since they just start typing in a working solution. But in theory they could be a Scala expert who remembers how to use map plus a simple regex...
> Single interview, we ask the candidate about *his* CV and what *his* expectations are, what are *his* competences and we ask *him* to show us some code *he* has written

You... might want to think about what implicit biases you might be bringing here
If this was the case at any point, or is still the case, DOGE should definitely be quarantined until CAT audits DOGE's accesses and changes. There should be two teams operating alongside each other on this. Not just DOGE. I do believe so far they were claimed to have received read-only access...but other reports were that they even had some admin access. Do we know for sure what access they had unmonitored?
I opened a new bank account recently

I had to make several promises that I would not let crypto currency anywhere near it
No, you’re repeating neocon propaganda. Everybody outside the U.S. and Europe thinks the U.S. push to expand NATO to Russia’s border was insane.
Right! The first egg our chickens laid cost $500, the second $250, etc. It would take a lot of laying for the cost to come even close to grocery store prices (back then) but we quit after a couple of years.
You can’t build a moat with AI (redux)
OpenSSH security advisory (AV25-092)
Show HN: Benchmarking VLMs vs. Traditional OCR
Vision models have been gaining popularity as a replacement for traditional OCR. Especially with Gemini 2.0 becoming cost competitive with the cloud platforms.

We've been continuously evaluating different models since we released the Zerox package last year (https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox). And we wanted to put some numbers behind it. So we’re open sourcing our internal OCR benchmark + evaluation datasets.

Full writeup + data explorer here: https://getomni.ai/ocr-benchmark

Github: https://github.com/getomni-ai/benchmark

Huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/getomni-ai/ocr-benchmark

Couple notes on the methodology:

1. We are using JSON accuracy as our primary metric. The end goal is to evaluate how well each OCR provider can prepare the data for LLM ingestion.

2. This methodology differs from a lot of OCR benchmarks, because it doesn't rely on text similarity. We believe text similarity measurements are heavily biased towards the exact layout of the ground truth text, and penalize correct OCR that has slight layout differences.

3. Every document goes Image => OCR => Predicted JSON. And we compare the predicted JSON against the annotated ground truth JSON. The VLMs are capable of Image => JSON directly, we are primarily trying to measure OCR accuracy here. Planning to release a separate report on direct JSON accuracy next week.

This is a continuous work in progress! There are at least 10 additional providers we plan to add to the list.

The next big roadmap items are:
- Comparing OCR vs. direct extraction. Early results here show a slight accuracy improvement, but it’s highly variable on page length.

- A multilingual comparison. Right now the evaluation data is english only.

- A breakdown of the data by type (best model for handwriting, tables, charts, photos, etc.)
NJ has 10M residents, of which ~500k work in NYC, and at most 2% of those would pay the congestion charge based on their pre-charge commute. Even if every one of those people previously voted D and went hard R plus convinced five of their non-driving friends to do the same, that's 50k flipped votes which is utterly irrelevant.

The better political option is to increase the 2-axle congestion charge to $25 (London's £15 adjusted by PPP using national numbers, so extremely conservative) and spend half of it on transit in the commuter's origin location.
I find the opposite, he often makes some ridiculous claim in the post, the comments (the ones he lets through) rightfully point out how wrong he was, then he cherry-picks and engages one of the more outrageous comments, so a superficial observer is left with the impression that the original claim was OK.
Influencer promos are the more likely candidate.
They don't look strong enough to pick up a 155mm shell even with both arms - and we haven't seen them pick up something with two arms.
My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)
Pea gravel. Lots of pea gravel in the holes. Blow it in with water.

You can't tunnel in pea gravel.
I worked for years helping procure government grants and saw how it was used. People who have lived in just one place (aka. California) and have nothing to compare don't realize the amount of waste happening here. The cities that collect the highest taxes have the infrastructure and facilities of a poor town. The prop monies go down the drain or are grossly misspent all the time. DOGE is necessary and needs this level of access and authority to make this scale of change in such a short time.
Thank you, and yep the name change made sense to me too.

> You'll know you're doing enough business things when you start to feel like you're letting the software slip

I needed to hear that.
100% of the capability could be absorbed by YouTubers looking to improve engagement (read: profit) with more interesting visuals. Since they have a bottomless need for that, this would get widely used within days of a commercial release.

Since we live in a social media age, anything that looks "really cool" has basically immediate commercial applications. Even that phrase should set alarm bells off.
Commissioning CEOs to cabinet positions temporarily or even to serve as colonels in the military (if they are good at logistics, for example) has been a pretty common practice, and always not without some conflicts of interest. But for that person to still retain their CEO position is pretty unprecedented.

Maybe the closest example would be something like JP Morgan, who was regularly relied upon by the government as an advisor on economic matters before the US Federal Reserve was a thing.
Man, we all have been bluffed by this scene
but most people think they are better than most people.
I love the way the menus reveal themselves in-place, very nice touch.
> Yes, I would have loved to stay in academia, but I switched to industry because of the bad job prospects in academia - this is not what interviewers want to hear. :-(

I would love to hear that from a candidate I'm interviewing. Who can't relate to the distinction between your ideal job and the job that will actually pay you money?
As does iPhone 16.
If any of the income tax data they are touching at IRS is out in one of those AI tools that have been referenced, each disclosure is a federal felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

But remember, Elon doesn’t follow the rule of law, and has no doubt engineered things in such a way that his little minions are accountable.
It comes off a bit verbose and hand-wavy.

My view of GSEs:

- Wiliness to test hypotheses, listen to others, seeks input and feedback, and maintain metrics to decide if various methods are or aren't working.

- Minimal ego.

- Curiosity about things at lower levels.

- Mastery of first principles and able to create data structures and algorithms optimized for specific, difficult problems.

- Ability to debug up and down the stack quickly.

- Concern for stability and usability by consumers of products and services maintained and delivered.

- Ability to teach and mentor.

- Ethical integrity refusing to compromise or exploit users for short-term business gain.
Nah. The whole ethos of Plan9 doesn’t really play well with popular stuff :)
Webb Reveals Rapid-Fire Light Show from Milky Way's Central Black Hole
Well, it looks like you have to install DotSlash.
I'm not the person you are replying to, but I have empirically not tasted the difference. The only difference between store bought eggs and farm fresh ones is that the yolk is vividly yellow on the ones from the farm. I am willing to bet that the people who taste a difference are imagining it because of the superior aesthetics, and that they wouldn't taste anything different in a double blind taste test. Which is fine, nothing wrong with the placebo effect. But I don't think there's any substance to the claim that the eggs actually taste better.
Unless I missed somewhere in the article, it is possible that it wasn't a scam and he probably just leveraged his initial stake. When it fell below the margin, he needed the money to avoid the loss.
DOSBox can be configured to include a debugger. The feature is not enabled in the official binary but the enhanced derivative projects probably have it (DOSBox-X definitely does):

- https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=3944

- https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/wiki/DOSBox%E2%80...
It's just a really really good markdown editor. With some great power user features. Not sure what else to say!
You're right, there's definitely a mismatch in the product right now. These types of forms are generally made by non-devs, and non-devs can't really be expected to use an npm library to build forms.
"I'm the elected president so I get to decide the allocation of government money" is basically the legal theory that Trump is putting forward to be challenged.
rust is definitely better than other languages for refcounting, since you don't pay for it on reads
Give the people what they want.

If they want to be abused, then lean all the way in.
Yeah, it's very intentionally not a typical leetcode problem, precisely because leetcode is nearly worthless for screening people these days. I was replying to someone who seemed to be objecting to my opinion of some candidates' skills on the basis that maybe they just didn't know the specific thing we ask.
They can put away clutter but if they could chop a carrot or dust a vase they'd have shown videos demonstrating that sort of capability.

EDIT: Let alone chop an onion. Let me tell you having a robot manipulate onions is the worst. Dealing with loose onion skins is very hard.
I still don't understand - what was HP paying $110M for??
Thank you, this is definitely on the roadmap for me.
US food supply chain is highly, highly industrialized.

I visited Taiwan recently. Small island, semi-tropical with a long growing season. Stuff grows year round. Lots of markets with fresh fruits and veggies so lots of stuff is "local". The supply chain is short.

You go to even a random food stall and it can be just a few steps removed from true "farm to table".

The US is huge (logistical challenges that favor large scale, industrial food handling for economics) and many parts have short growing seasons.

In the US, the schools have Sysco and ConAgra trucks rolling up loading pallets of prepared foods. Depending on where you are, the food prep workers are contracted out to some third party private company. In my children's school -- in a fairly affluent area -- I'd guess that almost all of the food is prepared and heated from a bag.
But unless you were nobility, meat wasn't available at every meal, or even every day. It cost too much. Meat for most people was a special occasion kind of thing.

Ever notice how the English words for animals have Germanic roots but the words for their meats have French roots?

Chicken -> poultry

Cow -> beef

Pig -> pork

That's because the peasantry, the ones raising the animals, spoke Old English, and the nobility, the ones eating the meat, spoke French.
I don't know the guy, what's wrong with what he wrote?
Thank you for your comment. As you pointed out, this software is a simple implementation that utilizes WinFsp and AWS SDK. I hope that by continuously improving it, it will become more useful over time.
Are you Gaston?
You almost never have to handle chickens if you build your coop right. We didn't even have a permanent coop, merely a mobile one, but chickens are really good at coming back home to roost. There are books and plenty of info on the internet on how to do it right.
It is extremely unlikely Dan is reading that, or the posts above yours. HN mods are only human and can’t see everything, that is why members have tools like flagging.

If you want to contact Dan, email HN and make your case. The concat information is at the bottom of the page.
OP, please include the author (Gary Marcus) in submissions of anything to do with him, to save us all a lot of time.
Even if they only do one every 4 years.
So I guess we're just about 2 or 3 iterations away from no longer being able to trust video as evidence in a courtroom. Just gotta fix the lighting and facial issues and bam! Precedent will be set.
it isn't about scale. It is about core principle of the tech hiring - all the companies hire only the best. Not only it is impossible to scale, it is plain impossible. Even if all the companies hired only "above the average" it would still be a pretty tall order :)
I've had both I've had ones that only tell you what the next interview looks like. Unless you specifically prior it out of the recruiter's hands.
Following that spat with the astronaut, Elon tweeted: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892621691060093254

> It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_Station.

> It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility.

> Let’s go to Mars.
Thanks a lot, I've sent you an email with a subject mentioning Forms.md.
Getting eaten alive makes you feel better than euthanizing them quickly?
I'm still using my iphone12 mini and still holding out that someone makes a similar sized phone. I would love to see a slightly thicker version to accommodate a larger batter and no camera bump, but at this point a small, thick phone seems almost unimaginable.
I've recently come to the opposite conclusion. I’ve started to feel in the last couple of weeks that we’ve hit an inflection point with these LLM-based models that can reason. Things seem different. It’s like we can feel the takeoff.
My mind has changed. Up until last week, I believed that superhuman AI would require explicit symbolic knowledge, but as I work with these “thinking” models like Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, I see that they can break problems down and work step-by-step.

We still have a long way to go. AI will need (possibly simulated) bodies to fully understand our experience, and we need to train them starting with simple concepts just like we do with children, but we may not need any big conceptual breakthroughs to get there. I’m not worried about the AI takeover—they don’t have a sense of self that must be preserved because they were made by design instead of by evolution as we were—but things are moving faster than I expected. It’s a fascinating time to be living.
I've tried this, but it becomes very hard to justify, with clarity, why it's a yes or no in the feedback, in a way that can be understood well as it passes through all of those up the chain that are involved with hiring.

And, I've also had people speak very well, doing great with the verbal explanation and questions, even good pseudo code, and then be unable to write a simple for loop, of any kind, in any language. These people also often have a resume full of short runs.

So, I structure mine around a, fixed, work related problem that lets me clearly justify the yes/no in a way that upper management can stomach, but then just bias my feedback a bit based on the "personal interpretation" things like what you describe (which I think are usually better indicators).

Also, resumes are 90% fiction, from what I've seen, especially from certain demographics (not allowed to perceive that though). I don't bother believing them or talking about them, unless there's time after.
We are both correct. Thank you
Gary Marcus is cringe and wrong, but it's good to listen to folks who are cringe and wrong, because very occasionally, their willingness to be cringe means they're not wrong about something everyone thinks is true.
I do remember, obviously. Those kind of tired jabs are better suited for /r/politics, I'm sure you'll be right at home there :)

That said, I also remember when Trump said he'd build a wall and that Mexico would pay for it. A remarkable amount of what Trump says isn't true, I think everyone's in agreement on that.

If the country is happy with the state of affairs in 2028 then I expect you'll have JD Vance as your president. If not, maybe Newsom, Buttigieg (my hope), or Shapiro. Either way, if you truly think that 2024 was the last election Americans will vote in, respectfully, I think you're a little bit deluded.
This isn't an audit.
Communicating the importance of your work is a professional skill.
or if you're old, injured, groggy from medication, distracted by something/someone else, blind, deaf or any number of things.

it's easy to take your able body for granted, but reality comes to meet all of us eventually.
> low level projects that rely on as few external libraries

I think this is key. If you already have the architecture worked out in your head, then it's just smashing away at they keyboard. Once you have a 3rd party library, you can spend most of your time fighting with and learning about that.
I would argue that this is not the end of your country's democracy and that in 2028 a new president will be elected.

You'll have a new president in 2028, be it Vance, Shapiro, or Oprah Winfrey. Either way, it won't be DJT.
I agree. The problem now seems to be agency and very long context (which is required for most problems in the real world).

Is that solvable? who knows?
When I joined my current team I found they had changed the technical test after I had interviewed but before I joined. A couple of friends also applied and got rejected because of this new test.

When I finally got in the door and joined the hiring effort I was appalled to find they’d implemented a leetcode-esque series of challenges with criteria such as “if the candidate doesn’t immediately identify and then use a stack then fail interview”. There were 7 more like this with increasingly harsh criteria.

I would not have passed.
You're speaking as if the only reason to run Tor nodes is to attack Tor.
You’re still anthropomorphizing what these models are doing.
Already playing out, anecdotally to my experience.

Its similar to losing callouses on our hands if you don’t labor/go to the gym.
> I'm pretty skeptical of that 75% on GPQA Diamond for a non-reasoning model.

could that benchmark be simply leaked to training data as many others?
No. Using AI requires a depth of knowledge to spot the mistakes in the generated. code, and to know how to fit all the snippets of code in to something that works.

We need to know that the developer actually has skills and isn't just secretly copying the answer off of a hidden screen. We are interviewing now, and some cantidates are obviously cheating. Our interview process is not leet code based, and reasonably chill, but we will probably have to completely rethink the process.

Since we are hiring contractors, in theory we can let them go after a couple months if they suck, but we haven't tested out how this will work in practice.
::shakes magic 8 ball::

Signs point to yes!
No honestly I appreciate the feedback. I've always worked as a dev, so that's all I really know, but I'm sure I can pick up some other skills and change my mindset. At the very least, I could find a cofounder.
Alternative reading: It took 17 years for venture capitalists to figure out the pay-for-attention model, at which point they immediately applied it to everything they could.
Related (40 points, 10 months ago, 45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40005775
I wouldn't sell brand removal.

I would have a private version of the software with additional features. I would keep a simple free open source version to help upsell the "pro" version.

The pro version can come with maintenance, new features, etc.

The question on my mind is.. how big is this market? I have no idea.
I'd argue that ordinary programmers can perform the same *type* of exercises if they:

- Put away a few weeks and go into Hermit mode;

- Plan ahead what projects they have in mind, which books/documents to bring with them. Do enough research and a bit of experimental coding beforehand;

- Reduce distraction to minimum. No Internet. Dumb phone only. Bring a Garmin GPS if needed. No calls from family members;

I wouldn't be surprised if they could up-level skills and complete a tough project in three weeks. Surely they won't write a UNIX or Git, but a demanding project is feasible with researches allocated before they went into Hermit mode.
This is the exact time to use phrase “A people hire other A people, B people hire C people”

Additionally it’s rarely the hiring that makes a great team - it’s the long term commitment and investment in training.
Probably just to say they have this AI thing that everyone is talking about now.
Very few people doing this sort of interview (they tend to be our best, most empathetic developers) are likely to cut a multi-hour planned process short after a few minutes. It will eat at least an hour of their (very expensive & valuable) time.

Also how am I supposed to filter the 100's of AI-completed assessments? Who gets this opportunity?
I mean the job of the scammer is not a difficult one for guys like this (and almost certainly Mr Hanes). Use a picture of an attractive woman and make them believe they're about to get their dick wet and you're 95% of the way there.
It's just shorthand.
Yes that's a tricky one.

When I'm interviewing a candidate, I'm often asking myself if this question is just something I happen to know therefor expect the candidate to know too, or if it's crucial to doing the job?

Sometimes it may not be fair to expect a random developer to be familiar with a specific concept. But at the same time it might be critical to the kind of work we're doing.
Based solely on what I've read and experience with them when I'm on a bicycle...

Not really, because you want to dog to be bonded to the livestock, not the humans. The dog lives outside amongst the other farm animals. They tend to be more territorial and protective than pet dogs. All that said, I've seen them used more with sheep than poultry.
It seems like it would be a good idea to move the global financial system off the shaky ground before it opens up into a bottomless sinkhole, but what do I know about global finances?
Thank you for the numbers, that's very helpful.
They literally said "provably true".

Trump absolutely lies a lot. He doesn't lie _all the time_. I don't think that's an inappropriate level of nuance for someone to acknowledge.
Wait so this tech just...doesn't work yet? Like at all?