MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RossBencina | 2025-05-31 22:58:21+00:00
> jitter of about a few hundreds nanoseconds

The 1PPS output may have that much jitter (due to it being clocked synchronously with the module's system clock) but I believe there is usually a way to query the device for the error between the 1PPS signal and the actual idealised pulse time.

Sylvain Munaut made a project using a high resolution TDC/time of flight converter to discipline another clock against the GPS idealised pusle time. I can't find a link right now unfortunately.
by neilv | 2025-05-31 22:58:44+00:00
Sorry to hear about the cheating.

Do you know, as cheating increased, was there peer pushback against the cheaters, such as overt disapproval that lowers the cheater's social status?

Or, were cheaters secretive from fellow students, so mostly only profs and TAs could tell?

If cheaters were secretive from fellow students, was it out of fear of hurting their peer social status, or fear of being ratted out and facing school disciplinary action?
by jjk166 | 2025-05-31 22:59:34+00:00
> Throughout human history, starting with the spread of agriculture, increased labor efficiency has always led to people consuming more, not to them working less.

Can you give a single example where that happened?

During the industrial revolution it was definitely not what happened. In the late 1700s laborers typically averaged around 80 hours per week. In the 1880s this had decreased to around 60 hours per week. In the 1920s the average was closer to 48 hours per week. By the time Keynes was writing, the 40 hour work week had become standard. Average workweek bottomed out in the mid 1980s in the US and UK at about 37 hours before starting to increase again.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-05-31 23:01:07+00:00
Yes, my confidence that I'm talking to a human on Reddit (or here) has dropped rapidly in the last 18 months. I'm only glad its happened at a time when I've begun to emerge from isolation that began with lockdowns.

At the same time, the number of user names commenting on posts I wrote long ago in an effort to karma farm has grown rapidly.
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-31 23:02:56+00:00
Programming languages (and many other programs) should not insist on using Unicode. Unicode string types (especially as the main string types and character types of the programming language) are harmful more than GOTO is, because GOTO won't affect API calls to libraries, while data types do affect API calls to libraries.

Although many programming languages try to avoid the problems of C programming language, some of these things that they try to avoid are not really so bad, and they often make it worse in other ways, anyways.

Computer programs should not have too many dependencies.

You should not use one character set for everything.

You should not use computers for everything, either.

ASN.1 DER is not a bad file format (and is often better than using other formats; I think DER is generally better than BER and CER, and is also generaly better than JSON and CBOR and others).

I also think that systemd is no good, but many people believe that (although also many people think that systemd is good).

Furthermore, HDMI is no good, and USB is no good, and UEFI is no good, and Unicode is no good.

X.509 client authentication would handle authentication better than 2FA, WebAuthn, OpenID, etc. (It can also be used for authorization as well as authentication, and this authorization can be partially delegated to yourself and/or others, therefore making fine grained personal access tokens unnecessary.)

TLS should not be mandatory for connections that do not require authentication (e.g. read-only access to public data), but TLS should still be allowed for any connections whether or not they require authentication. If you are only using the connection to download a file, and the contents of the file is not changing, then knowing the cryptographic hash of the data will be better than using TLS, although you can do both at once if you want to (these are not mutually exclusive).

For security within a computer, capability based security with proxy capabilities is a good way to do it, at the level of the operating system (rather than within a programming language or in a single program).

Programmers should not only program in modern computers, but should also program in old computers too.
by Ray20 | 2025-05-31 23:03:11+00:00
>Think 3D-printing that was supposed to take over manufacturing

This was never the case, and this is obvious to anyone who has ever been to factories that doing mass-produced plastic

>Or self-driving, that is "just around the corner" for a decade now.

But it is really around the corner, all that remains is to accept it. That is, to start building and modifying the road infrastructure and changing the traffic rules to enable effective integration self-driving cars into road traffic.
by Izkata | 2025-05-31 23:03:27+00:00
> and I also can type fine without looking at the keyboard.

You are touch typing. You're just not home-row touch-typing.

I don't do it that way either, developed my own style playing multiplayer StarCraft in the late 90s/early 2000s. Home row has always felt awkward, I have small hands and have to twist my wrists to reach keys when trying it. Instead my hands mostly hover with fingertips constantly in contact, and I'm using my elbows and shoulders for coarse movements across the keyboard. I have occasionally gotten comments about how weird it looks, from people who only know home-row touch-typing.

It's just that home-row is usually the only thing taught so most people think it's the only style of touch typing.
by kaibee | 2025-05-31 23:06:13+00:00
Has the amount of 95%+ reviews games-released increased though? And how much of that is due to the pandemic? Its anecdotal, but the game-dev discord I'm in has had a decent reduction in # of regulars since the tail end of the pandemic 24-25. And ironically, I was one of them until recently. I think people actually just had more time.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-31 23:09:05+00:00
Stack Overflow is a fantastic concept: Q&A to build a knowledge base.

To really round out the Stack Overflow project the next step is to turn the knowledge into a wiki - the world’s biggest “missing manual” of community curated knowledge of how things really work.

That’d reduce the pressure to close duplicate questions. Mods who want to curate can work on the wiki instead!
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-31 23:09:40+00:00
It seems that this has every 5x5 nonogram. And that none of them require guesswork. Ie. You can derive the answer by following an algorithm without ever having to undo a step.

That means that no 5x5 requires guesswork.

Surely there’s got to be a maths video about this. It seems like an incredible little quirk…
Show HN: Open-source P2P file transfer
by goodpanda | 2025-05-31 23:09:56+00:00
I have decided to open source this project to increase trust even further.

In case you have seen my previous posts, this is an update for berb.app, a WebRTC file sharing app. My goal is simple: send files between devices in real-time without installing crap or uploading to any servers.
by trod1234 | 2025-05-31 23:10:48+00:00
Its like predicting avalanches in avalanche prone areas.

You may not know the individual particle interactions and forces that will inevitably set the next avalanche off, but you know it will happen based on factors that increase the likelihood dramatically.

For example the event of an avalanche increases the more snowpack there is, and it goes to zero when snowpack is gone. The same could be said of LLMs.

You know corporations will do absolutely anything even destroy their business model, so long as they make more money in the short term. John Deere is a perfect example of this, and Mexico just finally took action because we couldn't, that culminated in ~14bn drop in capex on Wall Street for the the stock. It was over 10 years in the making, but it happened.

The more concentrated the marketshare to decisionmaking, the greater the damage, and the more impact bad decisions have compared to good decisions. You tread water until you drown.
by bitpush | 2025-05-31 23:12:10+00:00
https://archive.ph/G3BXl

The title is clickbaity, but the article talks about AI overviews. So while the title is meant to say that "OMG, Google Search is withering away" it is mostly that it has a new AI Mode. And looks like author is a fan.

> It’s unnerving for me to admit that I like the new Google. And I expect to see a lot more of it.
by b112 | 2025-05-31 23:13:47+00:00
You can take a flatworm, cut it in half, subject it to an electric field so it grows two heads.

Later, without the external field, you can cut it in half and both halfs will grow a second head.

It's not genetic expression, but the electric field of the flatworm that has changed permanently and is directing cell growth.

So if your entire body has its own field, that retains its uniqueness, and can even cause cell specialization what then?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2132148-bioelectric-twe...

“A totally normal-looking worm with a normal gene expression and stem cell distribution can in fact be harbouring a [body plan] that’s quite different,” says Levin. “That information is stored in a bioelectric pattern – it’s not in the distribution of tissues or stem cells, it’s electrical.”
by nntwozz | 2025-05-31 23:13:56+00:00
I live off-grid in the deep woods of Sweden with no neighbors; I heat my 125 year old timber house with firewood.

For two decades I lived in a fancy flat with all the amenities in a large city.

Now I do it in two 100L plastic barrels in my stables that also have an outhouse, each barrel corresponds to one of my needs.

I neutralize number 1 with Corega tabs in the warmer months, I neutralize number 2 with a scoop of peat or sawdust.

I also wash myself (in number 1) after number 2 using soap and a 10L-bidon with a shower hose attachment that I carry with me like a briefcase from the house during the colder months.

The barrels are emptied regularly in a hole in the woods, in summer the dung beetles take care of everything. There's virtually no smell, actually less than in a modern bathroom with mechanical ventilation. It's always drafty in the outhouse and I usually leave the door open anyway.

I can wax poetic about sitting in the outhouse on a sunny day with the door open watching the blue sky and hearing the wind in the trees with the birds chirping vis-à-vis doing it a concrete box surrounded by high-tech plumbing and equipment, but ironically it just feels better not having any nastiness inside or anywhere near the house I sleep and eat in.

Just think about that for a second.

I've been to Japan and I actually prefer my way.

I think technical (smart?) toilets are nasty, nasty to clean and even nastier to repair if they break.

Less is more, if given the choice I'd much prefer a simple (dumb?) toilet with a shower hose next to it.

This is pretty common in most bathrooms in Sweden.

P.S.

Rimfree toilets are the shit.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-05-31 23:16:50+00:00
For context, the 0.1 rem yearly dose to the patient is about 1/6th of the average background dose we all get every year.

This Pu-238 is the same stuff that's powering the Voyager probes and a few Mars rovers.

Note that it's not Pu-239, which is fissile nuclear fuel for chain reactions (power plants, bombs, etc.)
by tonyarkles | 2025-05-31 23:17:03+00:00
I'll throw a bit more flavour in with the sibling comment talking about transposing x and y.

The system I work on every day has:

- multiple GPS receivers that report latitude, longitude, altitude (MSL) and altitude (HAE)

- an interface to some GeoJSON data where coordinates are stored as longitude, latitude

- a geographically-local Cartesian coordinate frame that is an AEP (Azimuthal Equidistance Projection) with a latitude/longitude origin. The "XYZ" axes of this frame are a NED frame (north, east, down)

- an aircraft-local Cartesian frame with FRD (forward, right, down) axes

- an interface that provides map tiles with zoom/x/y coordinates

- a bunch of other sensors mounted on the aircraft that have their own FRD frames, except the camera which has an RDF (right, down, forward) frame because... reasons.

- terrain RADAR units mounted on the aircraft at specific FRD locations that provide AGL (above ground level) measurements independent of their rotation (the aircraft can be 20 degrees nose-up and we still get a measurement straight down to the ground)

- terrain LIDAR units mounted on the aircraft at specific FRD locations and orientations that provide a straight-line measurement to the ground - if we're over flat ground and the aircraft is 20 degrees nose-up, these report AGL/cos(20 deg)

Keeping track of what frame everything is in is... a daunting task and we've definitely had bugs due to accidentally using a coordinate from the wrong frame. I've been deep into a bunch of this code this week and have been strongly considering doing a zero-cost abstraction similar to what Sguaba is doing, but for C++. I'm pretty sure that we could do it using templates and type tags without really changing any of the underlying math and without implementing a bunch of custom operators but I'm not 100% convinced of that yet.

Another related issue that I don't think is addressed by Sguaba is time. We're hopefully going to get everything standardized to PTP timestamps everywhere but currently all of these sensors are running on unsynchronized clocks and we also have to be careful about keeping track of the origin of a given timestamp and making sure to convert it into the right scale before using it.
by layer8 | 2025-05-31 23:22:32+00:00
That link talks about plastic items, but the wet wipes I’m familiar with are 100% plant-based and biodegradable, and dissolve in water.

Edit, to clarify: The wipes in question have been certified according to the EDANA Flushability Guidelines, which have been adopted into law in some countries, and there is also a related Spanish standard UNE 149002:2019 (“Acceptance criteria for disposable products via toilet”). The producer (Essity) claims that they dissolve similarly quickly to regular toiled paper.

It might very well be that the wipes still cause problems, but it’s not like these are plastic items that are flushed down the toilet in an unregulated way.
by DavidVoid | 2025-05-31 23:22:41+00:00
Yeah it's pretty useful to enable every once in a while just to see if anything complains.

Be very careful with it in production code though [1]. If you're in a dll then changing the FPU exception flags is a big no-no (unless you're really really careful to restore them when your code goes out of scope).

[1]: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/everything-old-...
by theshackleford | 2025-05-31 23:23:02+00:00
> They see that (e.g. with Notion-like-tools) if you enable the "AI", that thing can save _a lot_ of time on "Confluence-like" tasks.

If only it worked like this in reality. I used actual notion features literally this week and watched it fail so hard it was hilarious. It continually told me there was no documentation on X despite an entire page worth of documentation existing on it, had to be told this; at which point it apologised and regurgitated it.

Wow! What a time saver! I feel more productive already!
by ajmurmann | 2025-05-31 23:23:03+00:00
I think that all statistics show us that the economy was very strong, especially compared to other countries. We did the impossible and had a soft landing. However, we also learned that the public prefers unemployment over inflation, even if real wages go up. People see their wage increases as earned even if it's just a market adjustment.

Further, I'm very disappointed that the median voter doesn't seem to understand or care about the policies they vote for. Tariffs and deportations are recipes to cause more inflation, yet here we are.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-31 23:23:52+00:00
I don’t think Americans are using wet wipes on their toilet business, at least in any meaningful numbers, maybe parent was talking about some other region of the world? There are plenty of regions of the world where TP is the norm, eg in China you aren’t going to find sprayers or Japanese style toilet seats, and many toilets are still squats.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-31 23:25:30+00:00
Perhaps the terminology differs between companies, but in my experience TPM means technical program manager. For large projects they were responsible for creating project Gantt charts, identify blockers early, and essentially "greasing the wheels" between disparate teams.

Again, IMO the good ones added a lot of value by making sure no balls got dropped, which is easy to do with large, multi-team projects. Most of them, though, did a lot of just "status checks" and meeting updates.
by lubujackson | 2025-05-31 23:26:34+00:00
Oh man, reminded of my cousin's wedding where I woke up in my hotel bed next to my wife, as expected... reached over for my glasses and I couldn't find them.

Over the next few minutes, slowly realized I also couldn't find my wallet, my tie, my rental car keys (leaving today!), even my shoes.

Slowly, I began to piece together the night with Hangover-like flashbacks. And eventually, I pieced all my things back together, too.

Except my tie. No idea where that ended up.
by kevindamm | 2025-05-31 23:28:35+00:00
If your robots.txt has a line specifying, for example

Disallow: /private/beware.zip

and you have no links to that file from elsewhere on the site, then if you get a request for that URL it was because someone/something read the robots.txt and explicitly violated it, then you can send it a zipbomb or ban the source IP or whatever.

But in my experience it isn't the robots.txt violations being so flagrant (half the requests are probably humans who were curious what you're hiding, and most bots written specifically for LLMs don't even check the robots.txt). The real abuse is the crawler that hits an expensive and frequently-changing URL more often than reasonable, and the card-testers hitting payment endpoints, sometimes with excessive chargebacks. And port-scanners, but those are a minor annoyance if your network setup is decent. And email spoofers who bring your server's reputation down if you don't set things up correctly early on and whenever changing hosts.
by MangoToupe | 2025-05-31 23:29:06+00:00
> Why would anyone pick items off a list for minimum wage when they could make six figures in the trades?

Because there aren't enough high-paying jobs, and who gets which job often comes down to luck (in the best case), and favoritism (in the worst case). Sometimes jobs require expensive prerequisites that reflect access to finance rather than just skill or merit

It's obviously more complicated than that—the situation involves the whole pipeline from child to working adult—but not by a whole lot.
by Izkata | 2025-05-31 23:29:42+00:00
Stenography is very different and limited - it's something like, you hit all the keys for a word at once and it's interpreted from left to right on the keyboard when you release them. So you're typing in a phonetic shorthand instead of full words, and stenography keyboards have some duplicate letters to support the left-to-right ordering when multiple are needed in a word.

It can definitely be faster when typing English (court reporters do this to keep up with everyone's speaking speed), but I expect you'd need something new for other domains like programming.
by sanjayparekh | 2025-05-31 23:30:16+00:00
The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after.

The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.

Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.

Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.
Ask HN: Magic wand to fix one thing about cloud software development?
by uptownhr | 2025-05-31 23:31:06+00:00
If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about how you/your team builds, deploys, and maintains cloud-hosted software, what would it be?

I'm curious about the biggest pain points and wishlist items across different roles and company sizes.

If you're willing to share, please include: - Your role (e.g., developer, DevOps, CTO, etc.) - Company/team size (rough range is fine)

What would make the biggest difference in your day-to-day work?
by kirillzubovsky | 2025-05-31 23:31:19+00:00
While I can see how these agentic systems could improve accuracy and scalability (I've dabbled into the space before), I also cannot help but to wonder if LLM providers will soon roll these features into their native offerings. There's no way Grok/OpenAI...etc won't be doing everything in their power to one-up each other, and this is one of the areas. Smart RAG might become a way to augment providers that don't have the power to compete with the biggest players.
by indiosmo | 2025-05-31 23:33:23+00:00
bpftrace was instrumental in helping me diagnose a latency spike on a hot path.

I call into a vendor library that eventually calls into Solarflare's TCPDirect API to send packets to the network.

This call usually stays under 5us and has very little variance, but I was seeing the occasional 30ms or 60ms outlier.

I attached probes to track the latency of each call down the stack and it became quite easy to pin down the specific function.

Eventually tracking it down to a single assignment to a variable that was mmapped to a file, and getting spikes due to page cache writeback.

After figuring it out I found these two articles that go into more detail on the problem.

https://rigtorp.se/virtual-memory/

https://tungdam.medium.com/our-lessons-on-linux-writeback-do...

Here's one of the probes producing a histogram of the latency of the call to the TCPDirect function, which was surprising in how simple it was.

sudo bpftrace -p "$PID" -e ' // —— TCPDirect —— uprobe:/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libonload_zf.so.1:zft_send_single { @zf_start[tid] = nsecs; } uretprobe:/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libonload_zf.so.1:zft_send_single /@zf_start[tid]/ { $lat = nsecs - @zf_start[tid]; @h_zft = hist($lat / 1000); delete(@zf_start[tid]); } '
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-31 23:33:26+00:00
These are quite good, IM(non-dev)O. Perhaps this shows shows that popularity, e.g., of opinions, is not necessarily an indicator of quality.

Popularity matters in the case of advertising. Advertising happens to be Silicon Valley's only "business model". Silicon Valley and software developers in general seem obsessed with popularity.

This is one of the better questions for "Ask HN". Commenters who try to argue against the opinions only serve to support the notion that the opinions are unpopular.