They'll ban Chinese models, or do something like calling them security risks without proof.
Enterprise customers will gladly pay 10x to 20x for American models. Of course this means American tech companies will start to fall behind, combined with our recent Xenophobia.
Almost all the top AI researchers are either Chinese nationals or recent immigrants. With the way we've been treating immigrants lately ( plenty of people with status have been detained, often for weeks), I can't imagine the world's best talent continuing to come here.
> Even if you can argue the British didn't deliberately cause famine over their subjects, they almost never took active steps to alleviate them.
They sent Protestant missionaries with free food for kids (souperism). Private charities, but the government used them as an excuse to not provide more government aid.
And a lot of Catholic parents decided they’d rather their children be dead than risk them becoming Protestant.
Everything should remain absolutely private until after conviction.
And only released if it's in the public interest. I'd be very very strict here.
I'm a bit weird here though. I basically think the criminal justice system is very harsh.
Except when it comes to driving. With driving, at least in America, our laws are a joke. You can have multiple at fault accidents and keep your license.
DUI, keep your license.
Run into someone because watching Football is more important than operating a giant vehicle, whatever you might get a ticket.
I'd be quick to strip licenses over accidents and if you drive without a license and hit someone it's mandatory jail time. No exceptions.
By far the most dangerous thing in most American cities is driving. One clown on fan duel while he should be focusing on driving can instantly ruin dozens of lives.
But we treat driving as this sacred right. Why are car immobilizers even a thing?
No, you can not safely operate a vehicle. Go buy a bike.
You can have custody information be open for query without exposing all of the circumstances, and without releasing mugshots to private sites that will extort people to have them taken down.
You can do something very simple like having a system that just lists if a person is - at that moment - in government custody. After release, there need not be an open record since the need to show if that person is currently in custody is over.
As an aside, the past few months have proven that the US government very much does not respect that reasoning. There are countless stories of people being taken and driven around for hours and questioned with no public paper trail at all.
There is an entire world where arrests are not a matter of the public record and where people don't get disappeared by the government. And then there is US where it is a matter of public record and (waves hand at the things happening).
They call em Jump Outs. Historically the so called constitution has been worth less than craft paper. From FDRs executive order 9066 to today, you have no rights.
So here in the U.S., the Karen Read trial recently occupied two years of news cycles— convicted of a lesser crime on retrial.
Is the position that everyone who experienced that coverage, wrote about it in any forum, or attended, must wipe all trace of it clean, for “reasons”? The defendant has sole ownership of public facts? Really!? Would the ends of justice have been better served by sealed records and a closed courtroom? Would have been a very different event.
Courts are accustomed to balancing interests, but since the public usually is not a direct participant they get short shrift. Judges may find it inconvenient to be scrutinized, but that’s the ultimate and only true source of their legitimacy in a democratic system.
Let's say a cop kills somebody in your neighborhood. Some witnesses say it looked like murder to them, but per your wishes the government doesn't say who the cop was and publishes no details about the crime.. for two years, when they then say they cop was found not guilty. And as per your wishes again, even then they won't say anything about the alleged crime, and never will. Is this a recipe for public trust in their government?
It is also possible to apply a higher standard to the government employees and force greater transparency on them, up to treating them as de-facto slaves of the society.
Yeah okay, different standard just for government employees... So consider the same scenario above except instead of a cop its the son of a politician or the nephew of a billionaire. Not government employees. Are you comfortable with the government running secret trials for them too? Are you confident that the system can provide fair and impartial judgments for such people when nobody is allowed to check their work?
Do you see a lot of billionaries and their nephews in the public trials right now? The one which definitely didn't kill the insurance ceo is going pretty good, judging from all the paid shilling on *grams and such.
Now for a serious answer, what happens in practice in Europe is not secret trials, because trials are very much public. Since there is only so many billionaries, their nephews, actual mafiosi and people with political exposure prosecution, the journalists would monitor them closely, but will not be there on a hearing about your co-workers (alleged) wife-beating activities.
It's all reported, surname redacted (or not, it depends), but we all know who this is about anyways. "Court records says that a head of department at a government institution REDACTED1 was detained Monday, according to the public information, the arrests happened at the Fiscal service and the position of the department head is occupied by Evhen Sraka".
What matters when this is happens is not the exact PII of the person anyways. I don't care which exact nephew of which billionarie managed to bribe the cops in the end, but the fact that it happened or not.
Rank and file cops aren't that interesting by the way, unless it's a systemic issue, because the violence threshold is tuned down anyway -- nobody does a routine traffic stop geared for occupational army activities.
Like everything, privacy is not an absolute right and is balanced against all other rights and what you describe fits the definition of a legitimate public interest, which reduces the privacy of certain people (due to their position) by default and can be applied ad-hoc as well.
To be a modern and sane C++ that C++ could have been, (rather than a complex collection of tacked on languages that C++ is), with modules instead of the the mess of C++'s headers, with instant compilation times that does not need a compilation server farm.
One good case for it that I see is a viable basis for cross-platform desktop apps. Today, cross-platform desktop GUI apps are either just a snapshot of the website contained inside Electron, or a C/C++ code base with manual memory management. D can serve as a nice middle ground in that space.
Where is the extensive tooling support for this use case if that is where you think it fits?
Apple is all in on Swift, so you will not be writing native MacOS or iOS code for UI in D, best case you put your business logic in D but you can do that in any language which has bindings to swift/Obj-C.
Android is all in on Kotlin/Java, not D again
Microsoft is all in on C#, again not D.
Linux your two best options for UI is GTK and Qt, C and C++ respectively.
So the only place where you could bave seemless integration is Linux through FFI.
Here's the thing though, for building a core layer that you can wrap a UI around, Rust has insanely good ergonomics, with very good third-party libraries to automatically generate safe bindings to a decent amount of languages, at least all those listed above and WASM for web.
It's true that there is no off the shelf tool that you can use right now to write your app, but it certainly doesn't prove that making such a tool is impossible or even complicated.
It makes sense for a complex productivity app (e.g. an office suite editor) to implement the UI from scratch anyway, and for that they may choose D. If Jane Street didn't pick OCaml, it would've died long ago -- in the same manner, some company might pick D to do UI or anything else really.
Handling energy efficiency/a11y/i8n is non trivial in any language, using the paved road of the system's native implementation solves for many of those problems out of the box.
You would need to reimplement all of that in D lang for your UI layer, and all you wanted to do was build an application to solve a problem, you weren't in the business of building a UI library to begin with.
I had a similar, admitted poorly thought out idea a few months back.
I wanted to more or less build Jira for agents and track the context there.
If I had to guess 60 million is just enough to build the POC out. I don't see how this can compete though, Open AI or Anthro could easily spin up a competitor internally.
You don't need to build anything. Just tell the agent to write tickets into .md files in a folder and move them to a closed foler as you go along. I've been using Claude Code with the Max plan nonstop essentially every day since last July and since then I've come to realize that the newer people are the more things they think they need to add to CC to get it work well.
Eventually you'll find a way that works for you that needs none of it, and if any piece of all the extras IS ever helpful, Anthropic adds it themselves within a month or two.
I'm thinking a customized LLM would write notes in its own hyper compressed language which would allow it to be much much more efficient.
For debugging you could translate it out to English, but if these agents can do stuff without humans in the loop, why do they need to take notes in English?
I can't imagine creating this without hundreds of millions if not billions. I think the future is specialized models
They're literally trained on natural language to output natural language. You would need to create the hyper compressed language first, convert all of your training data to that, and then train the models with that. But token efficiency per word already does vary between different languages, with Chinese being like 30%-40% more efficient than English last I heard
I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon hours, and for what a generic rejection email.
This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay employed.
Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.
Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I need to pay my rent.
If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes. If it’s any comfort that means you did pretty well.
The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.
Okay, but if my resume is a concern let's talk about in the first interview. I can't exactly rest and vest for 2 years when the company is running out of money. I had the bad luck of this happening 3 times in a row.
Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.
I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.
After my dates of employment I will parethetically add (bankrupt) or (shutdown) to indicate that it wasn't related to me personally. My best job was 18 months.
Yeah I had a manager grill me like crazy about short stints on my resume while I was interviewing for DigitalOcean. He told me it looked like I wasn't dedicated or trustworthy.
He wasn't my manager so I brushed over it and 6 months into working at DO they started 3 rounds of enormous layoffs that were handled so poorly even the executives doing the layoffs got removed by the board.
So I left and got to add another short stint at a company run by craven morons to my resume :)
I was laid off at my last 3 positions and can really relate to this. If it’s any consolation: how a company handles this is a good indication of the maturity of their management and recruiting function. I also strongly disagree with any assertion that would state “short stints = unreliable employee”. Nobody can make that assertion without confirmation of what caused those stints and the tech market from 2020 - today has been notoriously volatile.
There are plenty of great orgs out there that will soak with you before making assumptions, but as a rule most startups have fairly inexperienced management unless they are founded by a team that’s been through the rodeo a few times.
It probably doesn't work like that tho - they don't know how much of a concern it is. And maybe CEO doesn't see resume until later in process, raises an objection.
That said, the general lack of emapthy from recruiting towards time invested and rejections is astonishing and seemingly cruel or emotionally negligent.
US corps are constrained I think by what they can reveal about denial reasons because they don't want to get sued for discrimination.
That said, it can often feel like, you were kept in the pool as an alt/negotiating foil if they didn't get their first pick, or needed to say "we have another candidate willing to take $YOUR_ASK-$BIG_DELTA.
I think we should approach the hiring gauntlet not as "workshop to see what it's like to work with these folks" but as "battle where we can divine the worst about the people we might choose to work with", but still remain sunny and positive while cannily noting any weirdness.
If they heard from the CEO specifically, it was probably based on the CEO vibe checking the resume as a last step after passing the entire interview process. The CEO may have spent 15 minutes on it.
I would take that very positively actually. At least you got feedback, and from the CEO! It seems to be you performed pretty well! Maybe the 'hopping' was the only distinguishing thing between you and the one that succeeded.
Please take this in the spirit in which I’m writing it (i.e. please recognize the occupational disease of “bugs everywhere” and only mock it in moderation; I do appreciate the post itself):
- The Firefox browser on my Android tablet is close enough to a desktop one that I have no problem reading your blog post. The nag feels unnecessary, especially given it obscures part of the header. For what it’s worth, the tablet’s screen is 1600 real pixels wide @ 260 ppi, and Firefox for Android tells the CSS that the viewport is 800 “pixels” wide—if “pixels” were 1/96", then it would be somewhat below 600 “pixels”, so I don’t know where it’s getting that value from.
(And now I can’t stop thinking if I could make a thing in CSS that would look like a plain-text RFC on a desktop screen but gracefully reflow on a narrower screen.)
- The lightweight-markup parser seems to have gotten confused around the phrases “tests and whiteboarding” and “why I wasn’t a fit”.
- The HN link at the end doesn’t work (404) because you’re adding &ref=blog.webb.page to every external link and HN doesn’t appreciate extra parameters (from my earlier encounters with this kind of thing, neither does e.g. Wikipedia).
Alright, fixed the issues! The link handler didn't check for existing "?" in links but now it does and uses "&" instead for my referrer.
I made the screen size nag flush with the header. It's set to appear at 800px and below because that's when the design starts breaking. I don't have any Android devices to test what you're seeing unfortunately. A graceful reflow would be ideal! I'm sure it's possible but I don't have the energy to figure that out.
Because of the manual nature of the RFC-style formatting, Markdown doesn't wrap lines so I have to make those checks...I have a lot of posts so some fell through the cracks.
You’re welcome :) If you’re not afraid of making your HN addiction worse (and can tolerate some amount of jank), it’s not hard to set those up using https://hnrss.org/replies?id=NetOpWibby and an RSS-to-notifications mechanism of your choice (in my case, https://t.me/el_monitorro_bot; there are a few RSS-to-ntfy.sh daemons around as well if that’s more your thing).
> If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes.
Sure, but one would think then the rejection email would have specifics around the interview and where the candidate did not perform well. Not nit picking on the job hops. If job hops were a deal breaker then why waste the candidate's time putting them through full rounds of interviews?
if you were an experienced/mature tech employee you should probably know that there are real HR reasons why companies are strongly advised not to give too much information in a rejection email. there is only ever downside. your reaction here is a potential red flag.
i'm sympathetic to you, it sucks, why cant we all be nice to each other, and my answer to that all is lawyers.
A friend of mine (in an entirely different industry) went through five rounds of interviews with a company and got passed over for someone internal.
A little while later, the same company reached out and encouraged him to apply again. Five rounds later, and he got passed over a second time.
Fast forward two years and they reached out to him a third time. He's basically convinced that because he's black he's their token DEI interview candidate to make them feel better about themselves while internally promoting the people they actually want, but of course they wouldn't actually say that.
It’s not about feeling better but likely that the company had a Rooney rule. Your friend was how they got around that while on paper complying to avoid internal political issues.
Excessive amounts of interviews is more likely they were not enthusiastic about him but didnt have anybody else better and were stringing him along until they found somebody else.
I don't buy it. Seems like a waste of everyone's time. Even if you don't respect the candidate's time, it's still a waste of the employee's time, which is valuable to the company.
Certainly we have lots of horrible inefficiencies in my team, but stringing along hiring was not one of them. I understand this is not universal even at our company.
Yeah, I've seen someone get strung along and then finally hired. What happened was that it was a bit of a downturn so there was a limit to the hiring. Another dept somehow convinced the division head that their role was more urgent, so our department was left without approval even though we wanted the guy. It was a poor job market so he didn't land anywhere else even though it was a few months before the approval finally arrived. Everyone felt kind of shit about it. The guy was quite jittery to start with.
That sounds like it was a terrible place, but it was a good department in a somewhat hard nosed company. He ended up staying there 10 years.
I don’t disagree, nor do I have any solution but man, 1-2 years is a LONG time when you start a new gig and can tell within 1-2 weeks that it’s not a good fit.
This is my favorite response in the thread. We aren't talking about getting a job at doctors across borders or something, we just want to manipulate bits of silicon to increase our networth.
When you say "we aren't" I hope you realize you aren't speaking for everyone. Even doctors across borders probably needs an IT person. There are jobs available for less pay that are fulfilling in other ways. I know I have taken them and am better off for it.
Yea agree, I worked at a bank during covid and helped do some work that tangentially helped relief/social security payments go through. Warmed me heart it did
A generic rejection is more than I got for feedback; I never heard back. Still, I thought the process of writing the materials was great. I don’t usually take the time to think about the arc of my experience in a holistic way. Do it for yourself if you do it at all; don’t go into it with high expectations for feedback and you won’t be disappointed.
Don't underestimate the importance of timing, for both the company you're applying at and the industry/economy as a whole.
As they say, you can't get blood from a turnip.
Writing this comment reminded me of a personal experience, story time:
Many moons ago I interviewed at a mature startup in silicon valley, they shipped a tiered storage appliance and were in the process of pivoting to a new storage medium (think transitioning from spinning rust to SSDs, something like that).
This was in-person, and everything went swimmingly well, before departing they stated an intention to make an offer and I should expect an email w/offer attached within a week. I got an offer letter, and accepted immediately, as I was super excited about the stack I'd be playing with.
A week before the start date I get a call from a founder, they said I couldn't start because their funding round didn't come through. The economy was going through some sort of financial crisis and it was one of the many blood baths where silicon valley startups shuttered by the hundreds overnight. So in essence, this was a job I got fired from before I could even start, wee!
What followed was a pretty frustrating few months of interviewing and not getting anywhere.
But there is a silver lining to this story, that founder who called me sat on the board of other storage startups. One of them managed to get some water in this funding desert, and its founders reached out to me at his recommendation. I ended up building some great stuff over 4-5 years at that company.
Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.
It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not "purpose" or anything else.
Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job that time either, but at least it was straight up.
> Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.
In previous HN threads they said something to the effect that they expect their applicants to have read what’s online about their equal base salary. Equity is not equally applied though.
Eh. I've been on a bunch of hiring committees. It hasn't been personality or looks. But a combination of things that we probably didn't all agree on and that may not have been able to fully articulate in a short message.
Hiring is incredibly complicated when done well. If 'limited fuzzy Boolean windows' over 'complex interpersonal dynamics' is vibes, then we will need to accept vibes.
They aren't explicitly, but, if you ever find yourself in a position where you're part of the hiring decision, it's best to categorize vibes as protected for anything written or otherwise recorded.
SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
For some people, the 'wrong vibes' are often proxies for cultural things - all kinds of body language contribute to vibes and it's easy to accidentally (or on purpose...) discriminate against a whole categories based on vibes. If you tell a candidate "Hey we just didn't like your vibes as much as this other guy", it could affect your exposure to claims that you discriminated against them based on their race.
Do "vibes" really matter all that much when you're going to be working 100% remotely? Maybe we should be moving to fully blind auditions for such jobs, where the interview might still be proctored in some way to prevent outright cheating, but the people who make the hiring decision aren't even put in a position where they might "vibe" with the candidate.
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
This was probably wrong, both in terms of interpreting the existing law and as a statement of what the law should be. Sometimes bad facts correlate with race; that should not be a reason to deny using the measure for e.g. hiring or lending.
> SCOTUS has found non-protected categories can still be protected because they are "proxies" for protected categories. One of the classic examples of this are zip codes[0], which was found to be a proxy for race, because it has a "disparate impact" on people of particular races.
I realise it may be somewhat beside your point, but that was a Kennedy+liberals vs conservatives ruling in 2015 - so the current SCOTUS would likely have ruled the other way, and decent odds they overrule it sooner or later. Scalia’s dissent was objecting to the entire idea of disparate impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act, so more likely that gets overruled than this specific application of that idea.
This was a statutory interpretation case though, so if SCOTUS overturns the decision, Congress could reverse that with ordinary legislation, no constitutional amendment required. But who knows whether that will turn out to be politically feasible.
Enterprise customers will gladly pay 10x to 20x for American models. Of course this means American tech companies will start to fall behind, combined with our recent Xenophobia.
Almost all the top AI researchers are either Chinese nationals or recent immigrants. With the way we've been treating immigrants lately ( plenty of people with status have been detained, often for weeks), I can't imagine the world's best talent continuing to come here.
It's going to be an interesting decade y'all.
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