MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creer | 2025-05-31 18:27:29+00:00
> Peak Oil [...] Everything they said was true.

I feel even some of the premises were wrong: The root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite oil, means peaky exploitation curve" - nothing earth-shattering there. But it seems to be there was an assumption that the next oil is technically more difficult to reach than the previous oil. And that's not even true. In the case of fracking, once understood, fracking was not exactly difficult or expensive.

"Next oil is more difficult than previous oil" was, still is, an incorrect assumption. It feels obvious for current production simply because economically it makes sense to exploit cheaper oil first. But even that is not true because politically it makes sense to reserve safer oil for later. And longer term, unknown oil may be simpler: probably unknown-tech oil but maybe simply undiscovered oil.
Why is my comment hidden
by ajjahs | 2025-05-31 18:28:10+00:00
I made an account and wrote one comment. When i click on the thread without an account/ check my account without beeing logged in, the comment is not there. (neither under the post, nor in under account comments)

when i am logged in i see it as normal.

It does not say anything about it beeing flagged or something

Is this a bug? Or if not where can i find out why it is like this

(i am new to this website)
by Arainach | 2025-05-31 18:28:15+00:00
The article focuses a lot on how this reduces friction when working across time zones but glazes over how it makes interacting with everything local require a conversion.

5 days a week I am working with people in Seattle, NYC, Munich, and often London or India. I have to coordinate meetings across time zones a lot. I travel a lot.

And yet at home or on the road I have to process things like "this store closes at 18:00" or "this train is at 16:45" infinitely more. Putting my devices in UTC requires me to think for all of those interactions which is way worse.
by jjmarr | 2025-05-31 18:28:40+00:00
> which may be read after being moved-from (a valid behaviour in some systems code contexts)

std::move as applied to standard library types will leave the object in a "valid but unspecified state".[1] If you're leaving the object in an invalid state (one where the invariants are broken), you're not writing idiomatic C++.

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/move.html
by hinkley | 2025-05-31 18:29:00+00:00
My third job was medical telemetry and that was sufficient for me to not only put everything in utc but also correct for client server clock skew.

Problem is though with distributed offices and remote workers. “The servers started crashing at 10:31 can you look at it?” Doesn’t mean anything without more context. If it’s 10:50 local does that mean it started 20 minutes ago or 7:20 ago? 3:20 ago because they’re on the east coast?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-31 18:29:10+00:00
> As a programmer, I’ve always been annoyed by the concept of administrative time zones. > Five years ago, I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time.

This is called many things: utopianism, dogmatism, authoritarianism, absolutism. Seems common in programmers. I don't understand the mechanism for it, but it would be great if we could figure out a way to prevent it, and teach that in schools. Too many people like this in the world today.
by SR2Z | 2025-05-31 18:29:17+00:00
> even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will not be performed by humans ever again

It's not like companies laid off whole functions. These jobs will continue to be performed by humans - ZIRP just changes the number of humans and how much they get paid.

> These workers need to retrain and move on.

They only need to "retrain" insofar as they keep up with the current standards and practices. Software engineers are not going anywhere.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:29:34+00:00
Hey - see my reply to the top comment on this thread about my experience with hand pain.

> I wonder whether it is just a lack of getting used to it or whether people who do the full on touch typing a lot just fuck up their body regularly.

For me it was a matter of getting used it and building up that finger dexterity. Mind you, I now use an ortho, split keyboard (Kinesis adanvatage 2 ) and touch typing on it, hitting "c" feels natural for me.

I can see how on other keyboards it may not be the case.

Touch typing "best practice" is after all just a general guideline. These things vary so much because everyone has different keyboards, different sized hands (different finger length).

My suggestion is to focus on not tensing up and using just enough force to trigger the key when typing. Starting from touch typing and then adjusting the technique to your own preferences over time.

I've seen typist who do 200wpm+ by a technique that they came up on their own based on touch typing.
by matrix2596 | 2025-05-31 18:30:16+00:00
Really interesting to see the deep dive into PCB design and EMI considerations here. It's a great reminder how much thought goes into balancing cost, manufacturability, and compliance, even for hobbyist products. The point about using one layer as a near-continuous ground plane is especially practical, and it's fascinating how even seemingly minor layout choices can have big implications for signal integrity. Thanks to everyone for sharing their expertise—it's one of the things that makes this community so valuable.
by perihelions | 2025-05-31 18:30:35+00:00
What's the latency between being outraged at things being digital authoritarianism in North Korea, and, cheerleading the very same things as democratic policies here in the West? Surveillance policies that talkingheads will say are important to support, for reasons you're a major wrongthinker if you dissent from.

Like: that BBC presenter shocked-pikachus at the gadget periodically taking nonconsensual screenshots of the user's device ("...so, they can see when people are looking at or sharing things they're not supposed to...")—but, functionally and practically, that's the same thing as the EU's mandatory data-retention plan already being debated[0], the public comment period closing next month. Public comments which will certainly affect the totally-not-predetermined outcome—if you buy into the pretense that EU parliamentary process on security and mass surveillance is meaningfully different from its counterparts in the Supreme People's Assembly.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1kvmguc/eu_is_plann... ("EU is planning a new mass surveillance law that includes mandating data retention, built-in backdoors, sanctioning non-compliant services and is asking you for feedback (ec.europa.eu)" (1233 comments))
by tromp | 2025-05-31 18:30:36+00:00
Not only can I not play perfectly (unlike my Fhourstones program), but I really struggle with even the intermediate problems in the book.

A more limited form of perfect play is knowing how to win when playing first. I cannot do that either, but I suspect that I might be able to get close if I were to study hard on it for a year, trying to minimize the size of the opening book I need to keep in my head. The leaves of that book will then resemble the positions where Allis' rules apply so that you can work out further play on the fly.
by neom | 2025-05-31 18:31:09+00:00
the extraordinary claim would be that LLMs can only do things they've seen before exactly, given the compositional and emergent capabilities we observe. The evidence suggests they can generalize beyond their training in meaningful ways, even if imperfectly...if a human came out living but with a brain that had zero electrical activity, that would be extraordinary, we normally come out with a baseline of pre-programming. I sometimes think this debate happens because humans don't want to admit we're nothing more than LLMs programmed by nature and nurture, human seem to want to be especially special.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682

https://towardsdatascience.com/enhanced-large-language-model...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00304

(and if MoRA is moving the goal posts, fine: RL/RT)
Ask HN: People using AI daily to write – what's the biggest gap you feel?
by Danao | 2025-05-31 18:31:46+00:00
I’m looking for hands-on stories from people who write a lot (docs, specs, marketing copy, essays, anything) and already use AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, whatevr) or AI features built into editors like Notion.

Where does it break your flow? What keeps you from leaning on it harder? If you could torch your current tool-chain and build an “AI-first” editor from scratch, what has to be in there?

I want edge-cases, pain points, hacks you’ve built, and the one feature you wish existed

I believe most products are AI-enabled rather than AI-first. A lot of tools does not fit real context and constraints, we’re in a smoke-and-mirrors phase of AI. I’m trying to map the gaps so builders (myself included) can aim at the right problems rather than hyped stuff.
by satvikpendem | 2025-05-31 18:33:58+00:00
I'm using Loro as the CRDT as well as Iroh for byte transfer, works well. You can look at ElectricSQL as a Postgres sync engine but it won't do conflict resolution for you and it's hard doing CRDT operations on relational databases on general.

Look into these as well:

https://www.typeonce.dev/article/how-to-implement-a-sync-eng...

https://www.sandromaglione.com/newsletter/lessons-from-imple...

Same author, not necessarily sure why it's on two different domains with different content but they open sourced their sync engine. If you're interested in this topic, I'd follow. Their newsletter as they have great stuff.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-31 18:34:11+00:00
This is correct (and I am using “invalid” here in a semantic sense, it is still structurally valid). There are a number contexts in low-level systems code where a static proof is not possible even in theory, so there needs to be a way for code to inspect object validity at runtime. Process address space isn’t entirely private, external actors that your process doesn’t entirely control can modify it e.g. via DMA.

The C++ compiler largely assumes that such static proof is possible by default and has no way of knowing if it is not. To address this, the C++ language has added features for annotating objects to indicate that static proofs of state are not possible at compile-time (e.g. std::launder).

Database kernels are the most extreme example of this because most objects in the address space don’t own their memory address and the mechanism that temporarily puts an object at a particular memory address is not visible at compile-time. Consequently, object location and state has to be resolved dynamically at runtime.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-31 18:34:42+00:00
>> for that mechanism does not look like a 16th century one to me.

What parts dont look 16th century?

Many aspects look identical to this, albeit smaller, clock from the 16th century. Note the pin holding the frame together, an exact miniature of the town clock.

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co531/1...

It certainly does not look like the mechanisms seen on the streets of a 16th century farming village, but even today the most high tech devices are generally out of public view.
by djoldman | 2025-05-31 18:34:55+00:00
Given section A7 in your paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20266

...would it be accurate to say that syftr finds Pareto-optimal choices across cost, accuracy, and latency, where accuracy is decided by an LLM whose assessments are 90% correlated to that of human labelers?

Are there 3 objectives: cost, accuracy, and latency or 2: cost and accuracy?
by frankie_t | 2025-05-31 18:35:15+00:00
Sorry for writing something a bit tangential, I'm mostly replying to the heading not the content.

I keep seeing the same point that argues against how "not fun, depressing, worse a <thing> has gotten these days". The most recent incarnation of that is how programming with AI feels worse than programming on your own.

I don't think the problem is inability to find a way to derive fun, the way you could previously. The problem is deriving fun while still getting paid for it.

To reiterate on the web-dev, you probably can make it fun again, given that you were able to have fun with it previously. But it probably will have to be done in your spare time after job.
by masklinn | 2025-05-31 18:37:34+00:00
It's more between repeatable iterables and one-shot iterables (of which iterators are a subset, as iterators are iterable). For instance a file is an iterable, but (unless it's seekable and you rewind it) it'll only let you iterate once.

Basically what Go calls an iterator most other language call an iterable. Because it uses internal iteration, Go doesn't hand out iterators (save through iter.Pull).
by yusina | 2025-05-31 18:38:10+00:00
I would say the exact opposite. Let the machine do the easy/simple/boring stuff. Let the human peer reviewer do the big question. That's what the human is good at and excited about and it's what the machine will not be good at. The question is a philosophical one: Is this a good idea? Is it relevant? Is it important? This is highly subjective and needs folks in the field to build consensus about. Back in my PhD days, I'd have loved if a machine could have taken care of the simple stuff so humans could focus entirely on the big questions.

(A machine could point to similar work though.)
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:39:08+00:00
> I'm surprised that we are mentioning a paid site here and we are not mentioning tools like monkeytype and typeracer where you can do good practice for absolute free. In this particular space monkeytype is a super customizable tool that can fit tons of different people.

OP and site creator here.

Yeah I agree, monkeytype and typeracer are awesome! Huge fan and user of both.

I've just released this TypeQuicker app and I'm figuring out the best ways to monetize. I'm really hoping never run ads (I'm huge into anti-ad websites. I pay for things like Kagi for example, even though Google Search is free to use) which is why I'm settling for the freemium model (with some paid features).

For the record, everything the other sites you mentioned, I offer for free by the way :)

The paid features on https://www.typequicker.com/pricing are for AI powered, personalized learning. SmartPractice which analyses typing history and creates personalized, natural text focusing on user weakpoints, target practice to generate natural text based on certain sequences, etc.

Check out the video demo at the pricing page I added - I don't think any site offers this for free and that's all I'm charging for (I need to pay for the LLM API).

Let me know your thoughts! I'm really passionate about typing, keyboards, etc. I want to build the best typing platform and I want it to be valuable.
by MangoToupe | 2025-05-31 18:39:20+00:00
> unskilled labor

I really wish we would stop using this term. Not only is driving very obviously a skill, and one I'm grateful for everytime I get in a car, but jobs that are labeled as "unskilled" often emphasize skill to a higher degree.

Furthermore, as someone who has worked many "unskilled" jobs (picking crops, working in a kitchen, working front of house), the skill you have makes a massive difference to your happiness and, many times, your take-home pay. We're going to see many, many types of office work get automated long before we have automated crop pickers or cooks or (actually usable) waiters. It seems to me that office work has the highest concentration of the low-skill workers.

What people really mean with the term is "engages in physical labor", I think, but that should also expose how silly it is to expect these jobs to be automated anytime soon.

I now work as a software engineer, which obviously takes enormous experience aka "skill", and I'd estimate that i'm on the "thickest of ice" outside of HR and the executive suite. It's the customer service people, designers, PMs most at risk of being replaced, although I think the outsourcing trend will continue for a long time before this is successfully productized in a general case. People managers tend to be replaced (or rather, not rehired) as productivity per capita goes up. I worry far more about being forced into contract work than I do of layoffs.

I'n much less bullish on UBI than other people are because I see the demand for it coming from fueling the consumer economy rather than any sort of collectively-rational approach to divvying up resources and funding development of services and infrastructure. Sure, maybe there is a role for that—I'd love to rework SSDI (without pulling the rug out from under it, as neoliberals are bound to try to do) so my disabled friends don't live so vicariously, but delivering UBI before increasing democratic control of the economy that funds it feels an awful lot like putting the cart before the horse. But that's another story。

Edit: oh one last thought: I do think we are more likely to see people getting paid to play video games long before we "bring back manufacturing" or whatever. It's going to be much easier politically to directly subsidize the bottom of the economic pyramid than it will be to basically go through another economic revolution altering the pyramid structurally.
by mystraline | 2025-05-31 18:40:29+00:00
Deregulation is how we got into the mess of housing!

In fact, its the complete financial ideation of rentals and homes. That's what's even pushed 2 earner homes to even afford a house.

But those who have, can get a house loan, rent it out for 150% of the total mortgage and paracitize off the public. And nobody is the better, except for the paracite class (landlords).

Rent controls would also do a great deal. But we hear howls from the libertarian types over controls ala Adam Smith.

And progressive heavy taxation on more than 3 houses would also help the situation of houses being bought for rental or AirBNB purposes. Again, those are parasites on all of us.

Of course, all these mean housing number go down. And those who own a large stake will definitely complain. But these are steps that would help, alongside building more with a rent-controlled and reasonable cost.

And reforming how banks are required to provide loans (proof of X rent = proof of covering x mortgage). But really? This country is going the opposite way of the common person, and has been for decades. Now, that strategy has been ramped up to extremes.
by rjakob | 2025-05-31 18:41:05+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. That’s very helpful.

We didn’t think too deeply about the term “AI peer reviewer” and didn’t mean to imply it’s equivalent to human peer review. Based on your comments, we’ll stick to using “AI reviewer” going forward.

Regarding security: there is an open-source version for those who want full control. The free cloud version is mainly for convenience and faster iteration. We don’t store manuscript files longer than necessary to generate feedback (https://www.rigorous.company/privacy), and we have no intention of using manuscripts for anything beyond testing the AI reviewer.

On novelty. totally agree it’s a core part of good peer review. The current version actually includes agents evaluating originality, contribution, impact, and significance. It’s still v1 of course but we want to improve it. We'd actually love for critical thinkers like you to help shape it. If you're open to testing it with a preprint and sharing your thoughts on the feedback, that would be extremely valuable to us.

Thanks again for engaging, we really appreciate it.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:41:18+00:00
Hey!

Thanks a lot for checking out the site - OP and creator here.

> That makes it easier to follow and learn

Yeah, that was my goal. It's pretty much what I used to learn as well.

I started this site ages and slowly added more and more features. I wanted to improve my coding skills while improving typing.

Primagaen always said to build what you want and use, so that's what I did haha

I will be adding many more features - I have a massive list! Thanks for the support. Any feedback is welcome: issues@typequicker.com
by yusina | 2025-05-31 18:42:11+00:00
> a fair, merit-based AI reviewer

That's a dream which is unlikely to come true.

One reason being that the training data is not unbiased and it's very hard to make it less biased, let alone unbiased.

The other issue being that the AI companies behind the models are not interested in this. You can see the Grok saga playing out in plain sight, but the competitors are not much better. They patch a few things over, but don't solve it at the root. And they don't have incentives to do that.
by hinkley | 2025-05-31 18:43:33+00:00
Ah. I believe the “correct” solution is you record at high speed and down sample for the big screen in order to avoid the motion blur. There are a couple scenes before he gets to the real high speed where he’s showing the clock slowed to 1/10 speed at which point the 100ths place is only a little slow to update. I’m still seeing some alpha nerd room for making the LEDs tick over faster. Maybe the Mark V.
by masklinn | 2025-05-31 18:44:32+00:00
It's especially dumb for Java, because Iterator could just have been a subtype of Iterable. That's basically what Python does, the iterator protocol requires also being an iterable[0]. And Rust just blanket implements IntoIterator for every Iterator without asking.

At least it's pretty easy to wrap an iterator in JS:

{[Symbol.iterator]: () => it}

[0] which in the rare case you implement an iterator entirely by hand will be a trivial `return self`, so much so that `collection.abc.Iterator` just provides that)
by gregsadetsky | 2025-05-31 18:44:33+00:00
When I encourage/cheerlead my extremely technically talented friends to “monetize their hobbies”, I am picturing exactly this.

A hyper technical, perfectly executed, fun/whimsical/smart product. You can share all the source code and have build instructions! And sell assembled versions and make a buck! And hopefully make money / thrive/survive doing what… you love?

((The reality, ofc, is that in the hardware biz, getting more orders can just mean a ton of additional problems re logistics of making, assembling and shipping the thing. But I still naively think that’s a good problem..?))

Extraordinary Clock, truly. Cheers, congrats on launching and wishing you all the sales!
by ryao | 2025-05-31 18:44:38+00:00
Cerebras’ technology works by using an entire wafer as a chip and power draw is 23kW if I recall correctly. Their technology cannot be scaled down and only works when scaling up. They could not be more useless for Apple’s purposes. Acquiring them would only give them a bunch of chip design engineers that might or might not be able to make a decent NPU that uses DRAM.

That said, Apple has some talented people already and they likely just need to iterate to make their designs better. Bringing new people on board would just slow progress (see the mythical man month).
by dzaima | 2025-05-31 18:45:13+00:00
The precise requirements of IEEE-754 may not be important for any given program, but as long as you want your numbers to have any form of well-defined semantics beyond "numbers exist, and here's a list of functions that do Something™ that may or may not be related to their name", any number format that's capable of (approximately) storing both 10^20 and 10^-20 in 64 bits is gonna have those drawbacks.

AFAIK GPU code is basically always written as scalar code acting on each "thing" separately, that's, as a whole, semantically looped over by the hardware, same way as multithreading would (i.e. no order guaranteed at all), so you physically cannot write code that'd need operation reordering to vectorize. You just can't write an equivalent to "for (each element in list) accumulator += element;" (or, well, you can, by writing that and running just one thread of it, but that's gonna be slower than even the non-vectorized CPU equivalent (assuming the driver respects IEEE-754)).