Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

github.com

241–250 of 394 posts

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question isn't clearly written down anywhere, that's why. Presumably actual candidates would have been given more info over the phone or email. Part of the "challenge" is reverse engineering their Python; unclear if that's intentional. If you look at the top of perf_takehome.py then there is a brief comment saying the challenge is to optimize a kernel. Kernel in GPU land means a program that computes on data in p…

It does seem a bit of a strange challenge - a bit reminiscent of high school math problems where understanding the question was as much part of it as actually solving the problem when you understood it. Since the focus of the challenge appears(?) intended to be optimization, not reverse engineering, it's a bit odd that they don't give a clear statement of what the kernel is meant to be computing. Perhaps the challeng…

I just threw this prompt at Gemini, and it seems (I haven't analyzed the problem to see if it is correct), to be able to extract a clear understanding of the problem, and a specification for the kernel.

"Can you "reverse engineer" what the kernel in this optimization exercise is actually doing - write a specification for it?

https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome"

Gemini says it's doing inference on a random forest - taking a batch of inputs, running each one through each decision tree, and for each input outputting the sum of these decision tree outputs - the accumulated evidence.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#243
> If you optimize below 1487 cycles, beating Claude Opus 4.5's best performance at launch, email us at performance-recruiting@anthropic.com with your code (and ideally a resume) so we can be appropriately impressed and perhaps discuss interviewing.

This is an interesting way to recruit. Much better than standard 2 leetcode medium/hard questions in 45 mins.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately with Gemini CLI / Jules it doesn't seem like time spent is a good proxy for difficulty. It has a big problem with getting into loops of "I am preparing the response for the user. I am done. I will output the answer. I am confident. Etc etc". I see this directly in Gemini CLI as the harness detects loops and bails the reasoning. But I've also just occasionally seen it take 15m+ to do trivial stuff and I suspect…

I've noticed using antigravity and vscode, Gemini 3 pro often comes back with model too busy or something like that and basically 500s. Seems like capacity because it works a lot better late at night. I don't see the same with the claude models in antigravity.

I also noticed that and I also noticed that it starts to struggle when the workspace "tab" you're working in gets longer - it basically gets stuck at "Starting agent ...". I initially thought it must be a very big context that the model is struggling with but since since restarting the "app" and kill -9 fixes it, it suggests that it's a local issue. Strange.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#245
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the higher up the stack you go, tools become more declarative and literate. Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example.

> Calling sort is far easier than understanding the algorithm for example. This was one of my gripes in college, why am I implementing something if I just need to understand what it does? I'm going to use the built-in version anyway.

The problem is that a computer science degree isn't the right training for most software engineering jobs.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#246
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is a specialized problem. If you've never worked on anything similar previously, it is going to take time. Don't even need to interview for selective billion dollar companies like Anthropic to encounter these types of problems - after college I interviewed for various electronics/hardware companies where you'd get asked to optimize low-level code - which would have looked quite foreign, if you had never actua…

If you ask an EE to debug react state management code without prior exposure they won't do too well either. But on the other hand they can easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course while training a performance engineer who can optimize code for a specific architecture would take months.

> they can easily pick up most of it after a week long crash course

I have to disagree and question what you mean by "optimization". It's very easy to write web code that technically accomplishes a task, but does so poorly. This is the natural consequence of having so many options available.

The vast majority of web devs with less than 5 years of experience simply don't understand plain javascript well enough. It's a longstanding problem that devs will reach for the most ergonomic tools, not the best tools.

Lacking sufficient experience, they can't help it. This happens in all programming languages and in all layers of software. AI slop is even worse because it tends towards the mean.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#247
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 30 years in, and literally don't understand the question.

The question isn't clearly written down anywhere, that's why. Presumably actual candidates would have been given more info over the phone or email. Part of the "challenge" is reverse engineering their Python; unclear if that's intentional. If you look at the top of perf_takehome.py then there is a brief comment saying the challenge is to optimize a kernel. Kernel in GPU land means a program that computes on data in p…

I think calling VLIW "an adandoned design" is somewhat of an exaggeration, such architectures are pretty common for embedded audio processing.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It definitely bears all the LLM hallmarks we've come to know. emdash, the "this isn't X. it's Y" structure - and then, to cap it off, a single pithy sentence to end it.

Also bears all the hallmarks of an ordinary post (by someone fairly educated) on the Internet. This would make sense, because LLMs were trained on lots of ordinary posts on the Internet, plus a fair number of textbooks and scientific papers.

Re: Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It definitely bears all the LLM hallmarks we've come to know. emdash, the "this isn't X. it's Y" structure - and then, to cap it off, a single pithy sentence to end it.

I've noticed people who are using LLMs more, myself included, are starting to talk like that.

Oops I mean, you're absolutely right, those ARE hallmark signs of an LLM. Let me breakdown why this isn't just your imagination but actually...

Post reply on HN