MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creer | 2025-05-31 18:05:25+00:00
Good questions. The ideas of "limits to growth" (small l) are fascinating and important. And the initial report and book "Limits to growth" should of course not be the end of the discussion (and it's not). Even if (as is likely - it seems to me - just because it's too easy to get this wrong) that research was completely wrong, it's still an interesting research direction.

In the case of Peak Oil, the root idea is obviously correct: "finite reservoir means finite oil, means peaky exploitation curve - nothing earth-shattering there". But "peak oil" - the meme - completely mis-estimates where we were on the curve of how large the reservoir is. That the next oil is technically more difficult to reach than the previous oil is not even true (see fracking - once understood, fracking was not exactly difficult.)

There are more aspects like that:

GDP: GDP is itself an evolving measure, and not necessarily the right measure.

Population: population trends have changed at dramatic rates. Not necessarily a great thing, but it seems to me more dramatic changes than anyone expected. When mankind wants to change population trends, it can.

Solar, wind, batteries: I personally feel that lots of money was put into solar too early - before the engineering was really there - wastefully then. But there is no avoiding the dramatic change in the energy landscape in a ridiculously short period. Same here then: when mankind wants to change its energy mix, it can. without shutting down, it goes without saying.

Population again: It used to be that growth of a country was equated to population growth (bounded by population growth), plus a little productivity. Globalisation threw a wrench in there. And current developments (ex-hype AI) may be about the entire relevance of population (with of course lots of space to agree or disagree - that's not the point, the point is that the question is raised.)

And all these changes were not exactly happening in a rational manner. Lots of random ideas get thrown at the wall, by one government or another, at taxpayer expense (the one lasting aspect), and the next ones by the next shift. And yet, dramatic change is achieved. It would be nice if it was more rational.
by fny | 2025-05-31 18:05:41+00:00
I think you're under the impression that I am not a software engineer. I already know C, and I've even shipped a very small, popular, security sensitive open source library in C, so I am certainly proficient enough to rewrite Python into Rust for performance purposes without hiring a Rust engineer or write shaders to help debug models in Blender.

My point is that LLMs make it 10x easier to adapt and transition to new languages, so whatever moat someone had by being a "Rust developer" is now significantly erased. Anyone with solid systems programming experience could switch from C/C++ to Rust with the help of an LLM and be proficient in a week or two's time. By proficient, I mean able to ship valuable features. Sure they'll have to leveraging an LLM to help smooth out understanding new features like borrow checking, but they'll surely be able to deliver given how already circumspect the Rust compiler is.

I agree fundamentals matter and good mentorship matters! However, good developers will be able to do a lot more diverse tasks which means more supply of talent across every language ecosystem.

For example, I don't feel compelled at all to hire a Svelte/Vue/React developer specifically anymore: any decent frontend developer can race forward with the help of an LLM.
by Candoa | 2025-05-31 18:06:01+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm a solo developer and just launched an open-source, headless React chatbot widget. It lets developers fully control their chatbot UI using TailwindCSS, TypeScript, and React Hooks.

No forced UI, no bloated dependencies. Just hooks, clean logic, and complete flexibility.

GitHub:https://github.com/aamancio/candoa-chatbot Docs: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@candoa/chatbot

Would love your feedback!
by kulahan | 2025-05-31 18:07:13+00:00
Does astroscience not deserve a spokesperson? We aren’t allowed to be passionate about this if other things are “more important”?

Those issues have their cheerleaders, so I see no reason to start with “that’s good, BUT”.

I really hate this trend of pretending people are supposed to care about A more than B and that, more than C. Let people champion the things they’re passionate about. Everyone is already suffering from compassion fatigue.
by tgma | 2025-05-31 18:08:22+00:00
Not really familiar with their internal affairs but as a retailer they have been nothing but great in my experience as the customer. In the end, any large company will at some point be accused of certain things, rightly or wrongly, and I am willing to bet larger retailers simply have an easier time paying off the complaints before we hear about them. I mean, the primary alternative for me would be Amazon, which won’t win any prizes from me in employee affairs dimension, I can tell you that.
by charcircuit | 2025-05-31 18:10:44+00:00
It sounds impossible to be paretooptimal for complicated problems. How do you know GPT-4o-mini would be optimal. I feel like there is always room on the table for a potential GPT-5o-mini to be more optimal. The solution space of possible gen ai models is gigantic, so we can only improve our solution over time and never find the most optimal one.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-31 18:10:48+00:00
Many years ago I committed to setting everything to 24hr clocks. Even when I still had a standalone digital alarm clock that plugged into the wall; in fact that was the impetus to change.

Because it was very easy to miss a little "PM" pip in the corner, when reading or setting the time; and setting an alarm depended on getting the pip correct, so eliminating the pip for me meant eliminating ambiguity in the digits.

It's been a fairly successful transition, although sometimes I look at "16:15" and think it's 6pm so the "mentally subtracting 12" needs practice. And there are still special snowflake UI widgets that ignore my i18n settings, and constrain how I enter or specify a time.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:11:28+00:00
Yeah, absolutely - this is a big one for sure.

I was lucky that I picked up during school so that it wasn't as much of a sacrifice of productivity.

What is your current typing habit? Do you pick-peck or is it some variation of the standard touch typing technique.

One thing I tried when I started touch typing as well was to progressively learn it. e.g.: "I'm just going to focus on using the correct finger for this one symbol/character for now" and just do that until it became natural. Can integrate that into your work potentially?
by anthk | 2025-05-31 18:11:38+00:00
Oddly, tcl prints 0.30000000000000004 while jimtcl prints 0.3, while with 1/7 both crap out and round it to a simple 0.

Edit: Now it does it fine after inputting floats:

puts [ expr { 1.0/7.0 } ]

Eforth on top of Subleq, a very small and dumb virtual machine:

1 f 7 f f/ f. 0.143 ok

Still, using rationals where possible (and mod operations otherwise) gives a great 'precision', except for irrationals.
by pif | 2025-05-31 18:12:17+00:00
> As a programmer, I’ve always been annoyed by the concept of administrative time zones.

That's because you committed one of the capital sins for a programmer: you tried working with time. The old mantra "use a library" still rules.

> I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time. Why care if the sun rises at 8 or 21?

You seriously need to go out more often.
by pydry | 2025-05-31 18:12:29+00:00
I indirectly an anticipated a comment like yours when I wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143833

Intermittency is not "solved" with nuclear power. When French nuclear plants get shut down for months at a time for maintenance what happens? Lots and lots and lots of peaker gas.

When you combine the extreme cost, the non negligible risks of it going boom and the fact its a horrible peaker (no substitute for gas), and its only slightly lower reliance on peakers it becomes apparent that it's a terrible deal.

The reason why batteries and pumped storage and syngas arent popular is because they cant beat the economics of gas for peaking capacity. However, they can easily beat the economics of nuclear power+gas when combined with solar and wind.

So yeah, exorcising nuclear seems like a pretty fantastic idea, for cost, environmental and pacifist reasons.
by emn13 | 2025-05-31 18:13:43+00:00
If you care about absolute accuracy, I'm skeptical you want floats at all. I'm sure it depends on the use case.

Whether it's the standards fault or the languages fault for following the standard in terms of preventing auto-vectorization is splitting hairs; the whole point of the standard is to have predictable and usually fairly low-error ways of performing these operations, which only works when the order of operations is defined. That very aim is the problem; to the extent the stardard is harmless when ordering guarrantees don't exist you're essentially applying some of those tricky -ffast-math suboptimizations.

But to be clear in any case: there are obviously cases whereby order-of-operations is relevant enough and accuracy altering reorderings are not valid. It's just that those are rare enough that for many of these features I'd much prefer that to be the opt-in behavior, not opt-out. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a classic IEEE 754 mode and I expect it's an essentialy feature in some niche corner cases.

However, given the obviously huge application of massively parallel processors and algorithms that accept rounding errors (or sometimes conversely overly precise results!), clearly most software is willing to generally accept rounding errors to be able to run efficiently on modern chips. It just so happens that none of the computer languages that rely on mapping floats to IEEE 754 floats in a straitforward fashion are any good at that, which is seems like its a bad trade off.

There could be multiple types of floats instead; or code-local flags that delineate special sections that need precise ordering; or perhaps even expressions that clarify how much error the user is willing to accept and then just let the compiler do some but not all transformations; and perhaps even other solutions.
by tgma | 2025-05-31 18:14:25+00:00
I don’t buy it at all. If you are that used to conversions, you probably remember the direct offsets by heart. I know I do for the three or four time zones I care about.

That said the whole conversion thing is not an immaterial burden unless you’re really up in the sky longer than walking on earth.

The whole point of UTC is to have a shared reference baseline to communicate with the world; however the author is obviously not concerned about that, I don’t think, as they have to do the conversion into the third party’s local time in their head if they want to have any friends, so that point is moot.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:14:57+00:00
> I repeatedly cheated by lifting the paper obscuring my hands and never learned how to type

Haha, this is how I feel towards a second language. In Canada, French classes are mandantory to a certain grade - I wish I put in more effort - it's so fun knowing other languages even a bit

> It's a notable lifetime regret!

Change that ;).

Never to late - I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice (I'd welcome the feedback as well!) for this reason.

I learned touch typing in my mid twenties - took me a while to get to my current speed (partially also because I explored various split keyboards and layouts and such) but it's just a few minutes every few days
by danenania | 2025-05-31 18:15:36+00:00
Yeah, and I think it’s also simply that inference with strong models is expensive.

OpenAI is lighting boatloads of money on fire to provide the ChatGPT free version. Same with Google for their search results AI, and perplexity which has also raised a lot. Unless you can raise a billion and find a unique wedge, it’s hard to even be in the game.

You can try to use small cheap models, but people will notice that free ChatGPT is 10x better.
by scruple | 2025-05-31 18:15:49+00:00
I don't really have anything to add but I also recently spun up a Sinatra app for my personal use and I really had a lot of fun doing it. It was my first time using Ruby since 2022 when I left a Rails job, after having spent more than the previous decade primarily writing Ruby. I love the language and community so much but I don't have a professional use-case for it at my employer today, and I don't have a lot of free time in my personal life, so I just don't end up using it much. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here, I resonate with them a lot!
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:16:57+00:00
That's commitment - I love it!

I'm learning a bit more about various layouts that people use - I'm considering adding a feature to my https://www.typequicker.com/practice where folks can build any layout (and have the hand+keyboard visualization of that layout they built).

Do you think this would be appealing to folks who try alternative layouts? It would involve a bit of work from my end so I want to prioritize accordingly on my TODOs
by IshKebab | 2025-05-31 18:17:33+00:00
No that doesn't help. The problem with winter isn't really that there isn't enough sun, it's that there are too many cloudy days. For example in January there were like 10 sunny days when I generated about 20 kWh (plenty) but also 12 cloudy days when I generated under 2 kWh (not remotely enough).

If it was sunny all winter I could easily go off-grid.
by stackedinserter | 2025-05-31 18:18:48+00:00
That's great to have an alarm to 11am which is 7am at your timezone and be woken up at 3am after cross-atlantic flight next day.

Some people just like to add complexity to their lives and keep convincing themselves that it's better.

Anecdotally, I worked on a military facility where all clocks were in "master timezone" of the country without daylight saving offset. 6 months a year we put "+1" sign made of electric tape to not forget about that it's summer and 0400 is actually 0400+TZ+1. I worked there for 5 years and never got used to it.
by quantadev | 2025-05-31 18:18:53+00:00
The 5min example is like a maximum/extreme case, yes. My average time spent writing each prompt is probably 30 seconds or less, and coding time saved per prompt like 25 to 60 minutes.

When I do spend minutes (not seconds) writing prompts, it's because I'm actually typing a "Context File" which describes with full clarity certain aspects of my architecture that are relevant to an Agent task set. This context file might have constraints and rules I want the Agent to follow; so I type it once and reference it from like 10 to 20 prompts perhaps. I also keep the prompt files as an archive for the future, so I can always go back and see what my original thoughts were. Also the context files help me do system documentation later.
by yibg | 2025-05-31 18:19:06+00:00
When dealing with anything across timezones the reality is you ARE dealing with 2 time contexts.

1) global time. i.e. UTC

2) local “sun” time. i.e. local timezone

When scheduling a meeting you are trying to find an intersection of global and local time that works.

It’s messy but also our physical reality. The conversion still needs to be done, just in the article the person is living in global time and having to convert to local time when needed. Vs living in local time and converting to another different local time.
by rglover | 2025-05-31 18:19:07+00:00
Social media. Especially in SV, the embarrassment of failing publicly having been given so much money is far too painful psychologically.

Spinning that to say you're a "visionary" for replacing expensive employees with AI (even when it's clear we're not there yet) is risky, but a good enough smoke screen to distract the average bear from poking holes in your financials.
by nulld3v | 2025-05-31 18:19:20+00:00
:facepalm: my bad, I completely missed the more rational intepretation of OP's comment...

I interpreted "directly representable" as "uniquely representable", all < 15 digit decimals are uniquely represented in fp64 so it is always safe to roundtrip between those decimals <-> f64, though indeed this guarantee is lost once you perform any math.
by jjmarr | 2025-05-31 18:20:09+00:00
This is the whole point of the "banana taped to wall" art that everyone mocks.

Part of the work is a certificate of authenticity and a detailed guide for taping a fresh banana to a wall (it must be exactly 1.6 meters above the ground). Because the banana rots, this gives you permission to recreate the banana taped to a wall as needed for display.

It's brilliant because it makes you question what the "essence" of a work of art is. Literally anyone can tape a banana to a wall. But you don't have the artist's intent allowing you to do so.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-31 18:20:14+00:00
To get the right answers for accounting, all you have to do is pay attention to how you're doing rounding, which is no harder for floating-point than it is for fixed-point. Actually, it might be slightly easier for floating-point, since you're probably not as likely to skip over the part of the contract that tells you what the rounding rules you have to follow are.
Ask HN: GEtting a Remote Job in the US
by gsablewskinunes | 2025-05-31 18:20:54+00:00
Hi guys, I am from Brazil and got the entry level cybersecurity certifications, Google Cybersecurity, SOC lvl 1 TryHackme and last week CompTIA Security+, i just started applying for jobs in the US this weeek, any tips? Having a good english and these certs, do you think is possible getting a job. I am changing carrer to IT, 0 exp in cybersecurity so far but the hands-on pratice labs from the certs. Thx!!
by calmbonsai | 2025-05-31 18:21:36+00:00
Nope, no. I appreciate the experiment and I did do this myself for about 4 months when doing some intense cross-Atlantic business consulting traveling.

Unlike DST today, time zones do still have economic utility in the modern world since there are many more personal and industrial activities that exclusively happen during day or night in a single locale and far fewer that happen 24x7 and routinely traverse multiple locales.
by pqtyw | 2025-05-31 18:21:47+00:00
> This one didn't break 25 years ago with the Y2K bug and it won't break in 2038 either.

Well yes but it had to be manually wound and adjusted by someone on a very regular basis to continue functioning.

It's much more efficient than a human having to look at a sundial every 15 minutes and ring the bells manually but effectively the same thing, not an automated system.

> clock will break going back and forth adjusted for DST)

So you just fix it manually twice a year? Seems like a significant improvement : D
by brianbelljr | 2025-05-31 18:21:58+00:00
Yes, maybe theoretically. Practically though you will have to ship your agent with the LLMs that are available today and you will need to pick one. I don’t think the authors were trying to solve for like “best forever”,probably wasn’t their intent. For that I think you would need some kind of proof which sort of says that some kind of theoretical maximum is reached, and a proof like that is not a thing in most applied computer science fields.
by mrkramer | 2025-05-31 18:22:22+00:00
>A lot of things were going on in the early 2020s that at least anecdotally seem to have disproportionately affected software jobs so I’m skeptical it’s purely an interest rate phenomenon.

Software industry was over hiring probably ever since dot-com bubble because after the bubble burst revenue and profits were rapidly growing and it never really stopped. I would rather blame the managers who constantly pushed for more workers instead of increasing the productivity of the existing workforce.
by jt2190 | 2025-05-31 18:23:26+00:00
It’s a shame that this is the top comment because it’s backward looking (“here’s why white-collar workers lost their jobs in the last year”) instead of looking forward and noticing that even if interest rates are reduced back to zero these jobs will not be performed by humans ever again. THAT is the message here. These workers need to retrain and move on.
by nextos | 2025-05-31 18:23:50+00:00
It's nice to see theorem proving gain some momentum in a mainstream mathematics topic such as analysis.

In PLT, we already had a flagship book (The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages by Winskel) formally verified (kind of, it's not a 1-to-1 transcription) using Isabelle (http://concrete-semantics.org) back in the mid 2010s, when tools began to be very polished.

IMHO, if someone is interested in theorem proving, that's a much simpler starting point. Theorems in analysis are already pretty hard on their own.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-31 18:24:26+00:00
> I get pretty bad wrist/finger pain (rsi I guess?)

First of all, I'm really sorry. Persistent rsi/hand pain was brutal and terrifying for me. I went through a heavy phase where I even considered having to quit my dream job at the time at a financial tech start-up.

I had a mentor (software dev) at this company who shared his story - and he had rsi and it flared up so bad at one point he said he took ~6months sabbatical to recover.

Treat it seriously and look for ways to improve if it's bothersome and gets worse.

Things that helped me:

- rest, breaks, stretching, drink water, frequently - less gaming (I played a lot of league of legends) - learning to type with correct force (often overlooked topic). Practice typing slowly and gently so that you're pressing keys just hard enough to trigger the switch. Mindful, typing practice. Don't focus on speed or accuracy - just the force - switching keyboards; I went through a huge phase of various keybaord (corne/crknbd, various other mechanical keyboards, different layouts) and finally settled on a QMK-modded Kinesis Advantage 2. It's expensive but worth it. My mentor that I mentioned had it too and he recommend it a lot. - breathing; something I'm still working on. I learned that as most people type, they don't breathe and tense up. This has negative effects on your muscles/tissues and leads to unnecessary strain. - posture (split, ergo, ortho keyboards help with posture naturally).

Good luck - wrist pain is scary but it's really improved for me. I typed a lot every day - programming, prompting, messages, emails, etc and no pain. (It's fucking magical)
by Kirby64 | 2025-05-31 18:25:18+00:00
> I think my own minor issue is the use of a micro-USB port instead of USB-C - I wonder why, I don't see it mentioned in the article. Maybe adding a PD controller would have complicated the already complex dance of components on the board. Standard USB can supply 5V at 1A (5.0W) no problem, so maybe that was just a simpler way to go.

You don’t need a PD controller. You need two resistors of a set value to be able to have USB-C supply 5V at up to 3A. No ICs needed on the input side.
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-05-31 18:26:21+00:00
I didn't say it's a syntax error. I said it is not specified in the standard. You can put the slash there but it has no meaning, it does nothing, and browsers ignore it. If anything, it can cause problems: https://github.com/validator/validator/wiki/Markup-%C2%BB-Vo...

So it's best to not do it altogether. If one thinks they need to be compliant with both HTML and XHTML, I'd bet they have far more problems with the rest of their markup that would fail at such an effort.
by geraneum | 2025-05-31 18:26:35+00:00
Since I can’t reply under you answer for some reason I put it here.

We can have a constructive discussion instead. My problem was not actually parsing what you said. I’m questioning the assumption if populace collectively modeling exponential change is really meaningful. You can, for example, describe how does it look like when populace can model change exponentially. Is there any relevant literature on this subject that I can look into? Does this phenomenon have a name?