Hacker News: programjames

New comment by programjames in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

programjames — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:53:06 +0000

Optimizing for the metric involves:

1. Optimizing for generally applicable skills that the metric is trying to measure.

2. Optimizing adversarially to hill-climb the metric.

You want candidates to do (1) and not (2). You can make them agnostic to the second by setting

    d(expected gain)/d(opportunity cost) = 0
      ==>
    expected gain \propto opportunity cost

It is the case that most metrics are logarithmic: it takes just as much effort to decrease one bit of error as the next bit. So

    log(score) \propto (opportunity cost) \propto expected gain

Thus, for them to be agnostic, you should filter candidates proportional to their log-score on the metric (where 0 is a perfect score). Because generally applicable skills are generally applicable, they will still benefit from improving those, they just no longer benefit from adversarial optimization, unless your score function looks very similar to others who have not adopted this filtering process.

The issue with a hard cutoff is that people near the boundary are extremely incentivized to adversarially optimize, as it is usually cheaper than working on generally applicable skills and actually pays off for them. You see this phenomenon on AoPS where (esp. Californian) students talk about grinding for MATHCOUNTS instead of learning calculus.

New comment by programjames in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

programjames — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:16:47 +0000

Nondeterminism is also a feature, not a bug. If you don't want people to optimize against your filtering process, you have to make it somewhat nondeterministic. For example, better candidates are exponentially more likely to pass the filter, instead of a hard cut-off at the top-100. Then it becomes no longer worthwhile to Goodhart the filtering process, because it barely increases your chances and there are so many more places you can use your time better.

New comment by programjames in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

programjames — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:29:44 +0000

1.0 is "natural units". If your energy corresponds to nats, you should be using temperature 1.0. If your energy corresponds to bits, you should be using temperature ln(2) ~= 0.7. The optimization pressure is

     max nats = max entropy + energy / temperature

Why might energy correspond to bits or nats? Imagine your goal is to play as many interesting games of chess as possible in a tournament. This implies you have to keep winning. If you look at the RL environment from the right perspective, you can turn it into optimizing bits or nats.

New comment by programjames in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

programjames — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:14:36 +0000

You should include the error correction code length in the description length. This means Newtonian mechanics was a much longer theory to describe Mercury's orbit than general relativity. It was only the shorter theory before they had the data showing a discrepancy. Which is the correct approach to describing your reality, because until you see a discrepancy, the extensional properties all follow the shorter rules.

I guess the argument from OP would look like: "Yes, now imagine we poke and extend our universe as far as we can. How much bigger do you think our final 'shortest description' would be? I imagine it may be orders of magnitude more complex."

Well, I can imagine a squared circle... doesn't mean the math checks out. I would reply that you do not have to imagine, you can go about looking at different mathematically possible universes in Tegmark IV and find the expected number of bits for the one you actually exist in. Which is ~0 bits more complex than the shortest description based on the data you currently have.

Also, note that Newtonian mechanics is not actually a very short theory for building a universe, because you have to instantiate every object in the universe. You actually get a lot more of the structure for free with general relativity (re: Wigner's classification of the particles). An observer in a presumed-Newtonian universe calling it a simple theory would be like saying, "I compressed Wikipedia to one byte, just by putting it all in the decompiler!"

New comment by programjames in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

programjames — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:43:49 +0000

That is very unlikely due to Solomonoff induction...

New comment by programjames in "AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design"

programjames — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 22:43:00 +0000

You should look into Solomonoff induction. Nature and physics, absolutely, tautologically, have to follow the "shortest explanation is more likely principle".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...

New comment by programjames in "The disappearance of Japan's animators"

programjames — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:15:22 +0000

They're likely talking about style transfer from a decade ago: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004

New comment by programjames in "Jobs and Software Is Fucked"

programjames — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:21:23 +0000

My perspective is it is impossible to cut through the three layers of bullshit between you and anyone who knows what they are talking about. The only way to do this is with brand-name qualifications, like "MIT graduate", not things that are actually impressive. This is also why you see senior developers saying, "the offers I'm getting are bigger and bigger," meanwhile skilled younger developers need to become a marketing professional just to get an interview.

Recruiters have utterly given up on being efficient in the market. I do not know why, but there is something very wrong given "spamming the same brand-name fish all the other recruiters are spamming" is their only strategy. My guess is there is a combination of bad (or an entire lack of) hygienic data filtering and a disconnect between compensation and terminal goals (hiring the best candidates).

New comment by programjames in "U.S. science is in chaos"

programjames — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:29:45 +0000

"A handful of years"? This is like the trend in K–12 education of blaming all issues on the COVID-19 pandemic. No, education was in a visible decline for five years before COVID, which means it had probably been declining for another decade or two before that.

New comment by programjames in "πFS"

programjames — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:17:31 +0000

If you click the website's name to the right of the title, it pulls up all the submissions from the same site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/philipl

New comment by programjames in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

programjames — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:59:30 +0000

My experience was pretty contrary to points (1) and (4). My best teachers/professors directly conveyed information or skills. I found most students did the bare minimum to pass their classes (where "pass" = "not get their parents mad"). I tried to get a CS club started at my highschool and basically no one was interested, not even my friends.

Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense.

And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.

New comment by programjames in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

programjames — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:41:58 +0000

Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.

New comment by programjames in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

programjames — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:35:16 +0000

People have more wildly different definitions for "fair" than "equity".

New comment by programjames in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

programjames — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:25:08 +0000

Not only is that implication rude, it's just not true. I am at least in the 95th percentile of amount of reading. I just think the article is poorly written. Not everyone is a good writer these days (or any days).

New comment by programjames in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

programjames — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:47:59 +0000

I clicked on the article to learn, "why Japanese companies do so many different things," and then got hit with pages of low-bitrate context, such that my eyes started glazing over and it was difficult to find the answer to the question. So I appreciate their compression, or at least pointing to where the answer is found.

New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"

programjames — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:31:42 +0000

The primary objective of the United States, at least according to their leaders, is suspiciously absent from their comment. If we're being charitable, it is clear they disagree with their leaders:

> All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.

But that deal also ended nearly a decade ago, and the United States has been in talks for more than a year to strike a new deal. It is facetious to say they gain nothing by starting a war, if your excuse is they could have just not blundered a decade ago. Unfortunately, the United States does not yet have access to time travel.

To clarify, in case that was not clear:

"Yes, the leaders say they gain something, but I disagree because they wouldn't have anything to gain if we could just go back in time and fix their blunders."

New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"

programjames — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:22:47 +0000

So, to clarify, you were just trying to spread the meme that Iran giving up its HEU was equivalent or inferior to just holding to Obama's deal, in spite of your belief the commenter you were replying to would not agree with this, nor the instigators of this war?

Maybe don't troll. Or sealion. Or shill. Or propagandize. Not sure which of these is the best description, but it's one of them.

New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"

programjames — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:32:33 +0000

> Long comment before yours

"So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?"

Where in that long comment before yours did you see an implication that anyone was thinking a return to Obama's Iran deal was a win? Why did you use the word "so"?

New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"

programjames — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:23:21 +0000

Maybe not this year. The next cycle though will better pander to Chase Oliver voters.

New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"

programjames — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:07:14 +0000

When the war is fought over literal nuclear weapons, you should not be so tongue-in-cheek about calling a war nuclear.