skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best interview process I've ever been a part of involved pair programming with the person for a couple hours, after doing the tech screening having a phone call with a member of the team. You never failed to know within a few minutes whether the person could do the job, and be a good coworker. This process worked so well, it created the best team, most productive team I've worked on in 20+ years in the industry, despite that company's other dysfunctions.

The problem with it is the same curse that has rotted so much of software culture—the need for a scalable process with high throughput. "We need to run through hundreds of candidates per position, not a half dozen, are you crazy? It doesn't matter if the net result is better, it's the metrics along the way that matter!"
I love the styling of this blog post generally too - simple, attractive and pleasant to read - kudos
Long winded advertisement here. No thanks, I'll check out my hens in the morning.
Kekulé?
> whose job it should be to be accurate.

Surely the people doing an audit should be just as accurate no? If they can't keep track of (several) zeros how can you trust them to accurately work through all the documentation involved in figuring out what is waste, what is fraud, and what is legitimate spending?

I'd actually support this effort if there was evidence any care was being taken. Instead I see wild statements like this, 100 million spent on condoms, people in the SSA database being too old with no discussion of if they are actually receiving payments or not (oh look they aren't!)

A real audit take time, discipline and attention to detail. I see none of that.
I'd argue the bigger expense is on the team having to onboard what could potentially be a revolving door of temporary hires. Getting a new engineer to the point where they understand how things work and the specific weirdness of the company and its patterns is a pretty big effort at anywhere I've worked.
A second thought. It leads to lazy application development. Whenever you have production intervention that happens more than a few times, you should just make a feature that does it safely via application code.
New Travel Rules Snag Visitors to the U.K
I think the argument is that for a good chunk of business work, you don't need to use the "interesting"/"deep" concepts. Sure, you'll need time to adapt to the idioms of the language you're using, but following examples you can be just as productive as others in a relatively short time.
The thing is, Government already had access to its own data. It just was required to follow the law that was put in place by the voted in Legislature to prevent abusive situations that could arise from limitless unrestricted access without oversight. It was there, and even non-government citizens could get access to it by following the procedures; procedures put in place to prevent "selling the farm," voted on by elected officials, with the support of their constituents.
There’s nothing I want more than a robot that does house chores. That’s the real 10x multiplier for humans to do what they do best.
https://archive.ph/37byu
100%; I'm not blaming schools, just pointing out to non-parents how this happens. A lot of non-parents don't have the context.

The kids get used to eating it at schools and birthday parties where people go for "safe" choices like pizza.

I, too, remember in my elementary school days in the 80's, that we had real, cafeteria prepared lunches (shep's pie was my favorite). But it was also a small rural school.

> They don't help, but I'm not entirely sure they are to blame.

Well, I also believe that there is a biological/evolutionary reason from what I've read. Generally, when kids become mobile, their dietary preferences narrow (so the idea goes) because now that they are mobile, it is more dangerous if they are willing to put anything in their mouth!
Yes, I know people who raise chickens for dual purpose. There are entire breeds of chickens that are dedicated to dual production.
Very impressive

Why make such sinister-looking robots though...?
Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise
Rope-Making and Ring Entrance Practice for New Sumo Yokozuna.[video]
BBC Radiophonic Workshop on Spitfire Audio
I told my family that if they expect a refund and haven't already filed their taxes to do so ASAP.
So the idea is to torrent stuff at maybe 1 mb/s over Tor? I think I'll stick to VPNs
We typically don't ban IPs for the very reason mentioned here (CGNAT is a very real thing and we have many users who share IPs). However we do ban IP ranges associated with VPNs that we see an excessive amount of abuse from. I might be an outlier on the internet, but if you take the stance you have outlined above, that you will effectively do nothing to combat the level of abuse from your network, you inevitably hurt your honest users because some web services will be unavailable to them via your VPN.
Losing weight by clipping your toenails.
Science does not "tell us that" things are "all equally human beings" (the use of the term "human beings" here is already in the moral context). What it does do is allow use to draw inferences like "this thing will likely develop into a person" and "this thing likely won't". I do agree that the "science says" crowd is overstating the case in their own dogmatic way, but let's try not to lay the foundation to do the same thing just with the opposite conclusion.
> self-selects for people who already are unemployed then

You can say that about all forms of hiring process. If you're unemployed, you obviously have more time: to spend more time on the take-home assignments (which I hate, see another thread [1]), to add more stuff to your GitHub profile, to go to more interviews, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40200397
And, additionally, it encourages your candidates to still be interviewing while they're on their probationary period with you, since they may be back to unemployed after 4 weeks or whatever. Which creates even more potential issues if they get a much better offer while they're onboarding with you.
The government already had access to its data, including oversight and regular auditing. This was solely about removing the safeguards so they didn’t have to follow good security practices or have a plan, and given how intensely politicized it has been it’s hard not to think that’s because the plan is not something they’d want to document where the public could see.

As an example, Musk mislead the public with claims about Social Security fraud. None of that was unknown, and in fact the independent inspector general had a much better quality report years ago where they confirmed that the old records did not show signs of fraud and recommended paths for improvement. DOGE made a lot of noise but added nothing but risk.

https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
Show HN: TotalFlow – Focus Timer and Productivity Tracker (Chrome Extension)
Simple timer functionality to help you focus and a dashboard to keep track of it all.
Or is this slicing the dog in half?
I'm sure some local laws in EU countries will restrict what data can reside outside their country.

I think Germany is quite strict?
I read the scientist quote in a newspaper article first and the surprise seemed to hinge on his entire team working on the problem for a decade and not publishing anything in a way that AI could gobble it up (which seemed strange to me) and no other human researcher working on the problem over that decade-ish timespan publishing anything suggesting the same idea.

Which seems a hard thing to disprove.

In which case, if some rival of his had done the same search a month earlier, could he have claimed the priority? And would the question of whether the idea had leaked then been a bit more salient to him. (Though it seems the decade of work might be the important bit, not the general idea).
I did this once and it was obvious the interviewer wanted me to point out his pet "gotcha." Not a great experience.
Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat,
as is all of the DOGE team.
My non-tech company already uses LLMs where we used to contract software people (for 2 years now - no unresolveable issues). I myself also used LLMs to write an app which is used by people on the production floor now (I'm not a programmer and definitely don't know kotlin).

Maybe LLMs can't work on huge code bases yet, but for writing bespoke software for individuals who need a computer to do xyz but can't speak the language, it already is working wonders.

Being dismissive of LLMs while sitting above their current scope of capabilities gives strong Microsoft 2007 vibes; "The iPhone is a laughable device that presents no threat to windows mobile".
Yes but it wouldn't be ideal to have 100s of complex, specialized robots running around at home, if they behave like humans, they can complete tasks _optimally_.

You're not looking at hyper efficiency for most of the tasks anyway, see the robot vacuum for example, they are not quick and are slower than humans but absolutely useful.
This can be improved by using a better entropy source.

shuf -n 5 --random-source /dev/urandom /usr/share/dict/words | paste -sd ' '
There's certainly many dimensions along these lines that if you don't think about them in relation to the type of software development you are doing, and what you have done, you will take a long time to improve.. But this being the model for all software development (such that all others are bad) strikes me as a missing chapter from printf.

https://ferd.ca/the-little-printf.html
You’ve just described a nearly perfect cliche 80s dystopia.
Yeah, that's my point. Not even the president should have unrestricted access to that data. He's not a king or the head of a corporation. And government workers aren't his subjects or employees. In most places, at least honest government workers can stand their ground because they're backed by a law governing this access.
I like that Grok actually comes up with a ton of links when you ask it a question, but at the same time I think any ambitious LLM platform wouldn't have too much trouble scraping Twitter/X all the same.
Trump renamed USDS to DOGE via executive order. It's true that it's not an agency, but it was created during the Obama administration.

I'm not sure it'd be better as an agency because there are strict rules and hierarchies around agencies. The way DOGE is operating right now, seemingly, is:

- Agency directors are directed by executive order to work with DOGE and give them access to what they need

- DOGE team members are actually hired as employees of the agencies in which they are operating

- DOGE makes recommendations to agency directors on what things to cut

- Agency directors review recommendations and make cuts

This means that all cuts are being recommended and made within the scope of each individual agency. It is not the case that one agency is telling another what to do, and all decisions are ultimately being made by each agency's director. It simplifies the hierarchy and authority.
You have politicians in UK arguing first cousin marriage to be ok.

Welcome back to 14th century

The fact that politicians had to add law to ban it in the first place is ridiculous on its own. Everyone knows its an insets and it causes birth defects etc.

What next ban sticking fork in a socket. Ban drinking bleach?
My impression is that any allegation is considered false unless at least 19 women came forward and 3 of them have video evidence.
I'm not picky at all. If the font is legible, I'm good.
The creation of a model which is "co-state-of-the-art" (assuming it wasn't trained on the benchmarks directly) is not a win for scaling laws. I could just as easily claim out that xAI's failure to significantly outperform existing models despite "throwing more compute at Grok 3 than even OpenAI could" is further evidence that hyper-scaling is a dead end which will only yield incremental improvements.

Obviously more computing power makes the computer better. That is a completely banal observation. The rest of this 2000-word article is groping around for a way to take an insight based on the difference between '70s symbolic AI and the neural networks of the 2010s and apply it to the difference between GPT-4 and Grok 3 off the back of a single set of benchmarks. It's a bad article.
Spice86 – A PC emulator for real mode reverse engineering
correct, the "ground chicken" is much less wasteful and a more cost effective way to feed the masses with a reduced environmental impact
You're saying the same thing?
Funny timing, I just used softmax yesterday to turn a list of numbers (some of which could be negative) into a probability distribution (summing up to 1). So useful. It was the perfect tool for the job.
Hopefully in the next decade we’ll get there.

Vision+language multimodal models seem to solve some of the hard problems.
My ideal k8s dev env (I wonder if any of the tools do this):

- local on my machine.

- ingress with https + subdomains integrated with mDNS (so I can access the services easily from my phone when developing mobile apps). mDNS also makes sure that other devs can set it up locally for themselves.

- easily swap what I'm working on, if I have 3 services A, B, C, while I'm working on A locally, I want B and C to run in the cluster and to be able to interact with them, same if I'm working on B, A and C should run in the cluster.
Yeah, what's 3 orders of magnitude wrong between strong and stable geniuses.

They're claiming to cut $16b and actually only cut like $6b and none of it was actually fraudulent it just literally matched grep trans or something.

I know this is how I and my definitely not a bot liberal friend want our country to be governed, fellow humans. beep boop bzzzzzzt
Have a look at the post - it explains how it works. There are two models: a 7-9Hz 7B vision-language model, and a 200Hz 80M visuomotor model. The former produces a latent vector, which is then interpreted by the latter to drive the motors.
This blog has extensive writings on both the things you are looking for : https://simonwillison.net/
I blame the people who were bought as much as the buyer, and the Citizens United decision for facilitating the buying.

I'm OK with democratic elections and executive appointments. I'm OK with the "read access" part of the control, the "write access" should only go as far as the laws passed by Congress permit.
Elon wants to build the X everything app and nuked the CFPB to do it and now has access to the fed system… I think he’s just biding his time.
Aaaaand now that he has every American’s info he can dox anyone on Twitter. Makes you think twice about telling Elonia to go fuck himself on X … which is why I do it on Mastodon and BlueSky ;-)
My credit card gave me a free subscription to Walmart’s version of Prime. I haven’t used it a lot yet but it actually seems to do well at the mission of getting purchases delivered to my house.

It also lacks a dozen side services I don’t use. If you’re all in on Amazon Music, that’d be a con.
I have two geese as well—have you found they help against predators? Anecdotally, we've had no predators steal any chickens since we added them (though a coyote got some goose tail feathers at first), though our neighbors down the street have been decimated by foxes.

Never considered the ROI, but I built a big walk-in coop for maybe $200 in materials. Think that'd pay off with the current price of eggs, if we sold them.
Search re-ranking using Gemini embeddings
My sister has been keeping a coop in her backyard for over a decade now. She got the, because “I find the sound soothing.” (It really is quite nice)

One other advantage is that they will absolutely hoover up the ticks out of a yard. I’ve tried to talk my various friends who move upstate into getting some for this reason… but yeah it’s a couple grand up front and a new hobby.
When you say isn't closing business, that's precisely what they are doing. Amazon is an umbrella company with many business operating underneath it. Their app store is just another vertical like AWS is separate from the retail site. If they choose to stop offering a service, that's their prerogative.

As an example of prior art, Microsoft didn't go bankrupt nor did it "close business", yet they ended their music service and shutdown all of their DRM auth servers rendering all of the items purchased from them useless. This is the same thing.
A simpler option is to put a limit on the number of accounts one’s can follow. Who needs to follow more than 4k followers if not bots?
the 99/4A was my first real computer. I was 8 or 9 at the time. Programming ensued. Sprites were magic.
"My code is shit" – A behavioral experiment for code review anxiety
> but following examples you can be just as productive as others in a relatively short time.

This is not something nice to say about the colleagues. :-)
It probably gives them confidence that they can accurately see a thing even though they don't know what that thing is.

I could also imagine a lot of safety around leaving things outside of the current task alone so you might have to bend over backwards to get new objects worked on.
Interesting timing - same day MSFT releases https://microsoft.github.io/Magma/
Right. I actually meant what you said. What I said is a mistake.
I think you're projecting. You aren't posting this using your real name are you?!

Here's something to consider, Dennis. Instead of using any type of reasoning that maybe I'm interviewing for a language you aren't familiar with where functions and procedure differences matter, you decided to just go off the handle and call me inexperienced and/or an idiot. This is what we call in the hiring business a "huge red flag." I recommend maybe use some of that big brain you have and apply some deductive reasoning instead of just calling people names.
It's not so hard. One of the interview stages I did somewhere well known used this.

Here's the neural net model your colleague sent you. They say it's meant to do ABC, but they found limitation XYZ. What is going on? What changes would you suggest and why?

Was actually a decent combined knowledge + code question.
Laws come from norms with a few practices to make them seem "legit". It's too hard and expensive for the ruler to oppose the masses. It has a significant political cost. Successful rulers just ride the masses current trend. It's like a tamed down hysteria.
The cruelty is the point
Justice doesn't need the same access like Congress, it's enough if they can subpoena relevant data. Even personal data about government people shouldn't be exposed as this opens weakness the be exploited by social engineering.
> If they have to then spend more, tax rates will go up.

Speaking for Germany, which is also the biggest economy in the EU, this is not necessarily true. Germany has notoriously low, more or less no debt and a lot of room to shift the tax burden towards the very rich like wealth and inheritance taxes, which are pretty much absent right now. It's a "very rich country", but the median wealth is actually quite low, comparatively. Germany could easily mobilize many, many billions before touching income tax. Investing in military and tech will also create jobs and so on.

This whole tax comparison is tiresome, since the real question is about quality of life, not numbers. It's tradeoffs countries decided upon. Great if you can keep most of it, but also lose it all if you trip badly. And overall I am quite happy to get "robbed" by the government so people can afford a living without actually robbing/shooting me on the streets. Here is the stats on people shot dead by the police in all of Germany (~84M people): https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/706648/umfrag...

Not sure where you are going with the rest of the argument. Sounds like the US will suffer just about the same here. So, what's wrong with moving to Europe? By the way, there is a country speaking Spanish in Europe too ;)

Honestly, looking at the potential crisis ahead, I am very happy Europe isn't deeply dependent on the "service industry", but tangible products. And with ASML, Zeiss and the highly capable chemical industry in the EU, I feel like we are better set up, theoretically, to bring home chip fabs, than the US replacing all the highly specialized machine parts produced across Europe, which run power generation and research facilities. And If tomorrow FAANG would exit Europe, we may survive that too lol. But we do have to get our shit together, which isn't guaranteed.
IMO firing the people inside the agency wasn't enough. He needs to install anti-union replacements to destroy it from the inside.
Shows the making of ceremonial rope for the new Yokozuna (professional sumo grand champion).

The Yokozuna is Hoshoryu. https://sumo.or.jp/EnSumoDataRikishi/profile/3842/ He is the nephew of another Yokozuna whose name is Asashoryu.

The Caucasian is Shi Shi who is from Ukraine. The man showing Hoshoryu how to do the ceremony is Musashigawa a former Yokozuna from Hawaii and is currently an oyakata professional sumo stable master.
> Radio effect are rarely an issue with regular chips.

I'm an amateur, so welcome correction with this, but I'm also not convinced. For one example, ref this RFI mitigation with Intel's gen 12 processors: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/cn/zh/design/ipla/software...
What do humans do best?
It’s not settled.
Ultimately it's about trust.

And why would you trust Trump or Musk?
I'd want to be standing outside the error bounds, plus 5 miles.

I think that it's important we know these systems work. There's some freaking amazing technology built into them back when I was a kid. If even 50% of them actually work, we're way ahead of everyone else.

I'd be surprised if anything in Russia works at a rate of more than 1%.
So everyone lives in these idyllic places close to parks in all of the Netherlands or the EU or is that a choice people make just like in the US?

After my youngest graduated high school and we became empty nesters, we were in fact looking for that smaller place, walkable area, where we could easily get to gyms, restaurants, a park, etc.

We decided to change our entire city to a place in Florida with better weather and no state income taxes. Those places do exist in the US just like I am sure that most people who live in the EU don’t live in the idyllic places you describe.
Big Balls, man? Really? This dude is vetted to make this change? Come on.

The kid wouldn’t be an unpaid intern at most companies. He wouldn’t pass the HR screen.

Regardless of politics, they don’t have the credentials.
She can’t state her opinion? lol.
Yup, it was for a Delphi job in 1998.
> Naive people think that people are fundamentally good. We need military, weapons and surveillance to keep people safe.

These two are not mutually exclusive.

Being fundamentally good as a species doesn't mean that we would never do anything bad, or that psychopaths don't exist.
No, the comparison to natural languages is what is whack. If you understand the underlying concepts that programming languages pick and choose from as features, all you have to learn is what keywords map to those concepts and the language's syntax.

The comparison to natural languages would be if you could learn one language and then quickly pick up every other language of that "class" after learning how that single language works. That's not really how natural language works at all, but it does work with programming languages.
Older games used precompiled shaders. These are inaccessible to the game devs and usually handled by the hardware makers, so the platform OEM for consoles and the video card OEM on PCs. Game devs have begged for the ability to write their own shaders for years and finally got it with DX11 and Vulkan. And that's when things went to hell. Instead of the shaders being written and compiled for the specific hardware, they now have to be compiled for your GPU at run time. It's a messy and imperfect process. EA, Ubisoft or anyone else is never going to have the same level of understanding of a GPU that Nvidia or AMD will have. Often the stuttering is due to the shaders having to be recompiled in game, something that never happened before.