MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Qwertious | 2026-03-08 05:25:52+00:00
>Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.

The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.

An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.
by efitz | 2026-03-08 05:25:59+00:00
Im reading through all these comments and it amazes me how the perfect is the enemy of the good, for many computer people.

Ofc there are edge cases. So since there exist a handful of edge cases where a zip code maps to two states, or the more frequent (but irrelevant in the US) case of two or more city names per zip code, we should make everyone suffer?

Ofc if you are making a web form you should ask for the zip code first, and auto complete state and city. Let the user edit them if they don’t like what you chose. Or do as some have suggested here and present the official USPS data as a drop down of 2 states or 2-3 cities; thats way better than having to type all of it.

And I curse everyone who thinks it’s a good idea to break zip code or phone number or OTP into multiple fields, or if you’re too lazy to set the input type to number.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-03-08 05:27:08+00:00
I think it should be obvious that...

1) Different operating systems have different virtual memory usage patterns.

2) Different computer hardware has different performance profiles.

3) Apple is in the unique position of being able to control both.

4) People keep predicting that SSDs will die en masse from swap, and it keeps not happening.

5) Shrug emoji.
by minimaltom | 2026-03-08 05:27:10+00:00
I feel exactly this.

One thing I will add: while AI is getting really good at _doing_ the software building bits, I haven't yet seen it well integrated into the decision-making and political structure of organizations. Right now, it seems best in the hands of a high-agency individual empowered and able to make changes or 'ship' something, with them acting as the bridge.

This of course, is not a technical challenge, but I would expect the change in structure of organizations to make this more efficient to be slower than the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years.
by nozzlegear | 2026-03-08 05:28:03+00:00
How can you say the Uyghur genocide isn't "equivalent" to the things you listed? What math are you using to compare them? How do you compare regime change in South America to Uyghur genocide, for example? Is there a spreadsheet somewhere that lists the value you're placing on lives, war and geopolitical actions, in order to make a fair comparison?
by guerython | 2026-03-08 05:28:11+00:00
We hit the same failure mode while running agents through n8n. Every tool call writes (request_id, tool, input_hash, response) into Postgres with a unique constraint. The guard query grabs that row first; if it already exists with a success flag we return the stored receipt instead of re-running the side effect. That way retries from the agent loop, HTTP transport, or queue worker may replay the cached payload and skip the duplicate action. Storing the error state alongside the success payload was the hardest bit so we don’t swallow a real failure while pretending it succeeded.
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 05:28:23+00:00
There is a middle ground. People seem to use Haskell and OCaml just fine and both are as expressive, so maybe it is just Scala having shoved in too many things. Based on what the article shows, it doesn't seem like they're making ten different ways to do the same thing but rather one way to (optionally) get more type safety out. I doubt everyone will be writing dependent type contracts for every single function, it's more for certain pieces of the codebase.
by erenkaratas | 2026-03-08 05:28:36+00:00
I’ve been building a multi-agent orchestration platform and kept running into a design question nobody had a clean answer for: what should each agent know about the others? So I isolated it as a variable.
Ran iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with two AI agents across blind/partial/full visibility. The result I didn’t expect: partial transparency produced more cooperation than full. With complete information, the cooperative agent found rational justification to abandon its strategy. With partial info, it doubled down on identity.
Curious if others designing multi-agent systems have run into this. How do you decide what each agent should see?
by bamboozled | 2026-03-08 05:28:42+00:00
For some reason I started getting tinnitus when I am sick with some sort of sinus infection / cold or flu. Usually I don't sleep very well when I'm sick so that might be part of it.

The first time I got sick and it started, I went walking around the neighborhood looking for the source of the noise until I realized I had tinnitus. Sounded like some kind of distant earth works / resonance thing.

Really feel for people who have it permanently.
by brudgers | 2026-03-08 05:28:44+00:00
The idea of verification is premised on a lemon market experienced by candidates.

Dealing with a third party trying to verify a listing would be experiencing the lemon market for employers.

Don’t get me wrong, lemon markets are often the best market most people can access. It’s just that job boards are lemon markets intrinsically and no set of features changes that.
by alemanek | 2026-03-08 05:28:45+00:00
Hard agree here. I think the best predictor of whether someone will be good, eventually, at something is “do they love it”. If they do then chances are they will spend lots of focused time practicing and actively seeking out ways to get better.

Maybe that love, or at least liking something, comes from inherent talent to some degree but all the talent in the world won’t help you if you don’t put in the time.
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 05:30:57+00:00
I doubt those languages would have the same level of traction as Rust, especially now that Rust has already gotten said traction over the past decade with even the Linux kernel using them. It's more likely that Rust will be written as today and then these extra features are added for more type safety in certain functions as like I said in another comment I doubt people are going to write type contracts for every single function (maybe LLMs will, but that's an orthogonal discussion).
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-08 05:30:58+00:00
I am not expert in Iran, but can you list agreements they didn't keep?

I know IAEA was allowed for inspections as agreed, but IAEA started leaking information to Israel and Iran stopped sharing more info with them.

Surprisingly, Israel, the country who didn't allow IAEA at all, while owning nuclear arsenal is attacking another country for "not-complying" with IAEA
by themafia | 2026-03-08 05:32:04+00:00
> but not the human documentation of time.

And a single database maintained by a volunteer and accountable to no one is the best way to achieve this?

> say from "US/Pacific" to "USA/Pacific"

Did the US assign itself the .us TLD? These things are already defined. A more realistic example would be the US changing the name of the "Pacific" timezone to the "Western" timezone. All users of that timezone have to incorporate that change anyways and most would probably want to.

> change the timezone for a political enclave within another one that doesn't have a TLD.

You could actually grant the entire Navajo Nation the .nsn.us.timezone subdomain. I'm sure they find it absolutely insulting to be instructed to use "America/Denver." Why is that better? We could directly grant them their own authority.

There's also a handful of countries the tzdb didn't bother with and instruct to use their neighboring countries definition. In some instances this arrangement can be rather insulting to the political history of the two countries. Why is this better?

> the compromises in the design

What compromise? Here Eggert is ostensibly trying to get a sovereign government to participate in the "TZDB's requirements" and since he can't has to invent a hack to make things appear to work. Which is completely backwards and highlights precisely why I think this whole centralized database concept for this problem is flawed.
by maximinus_thrax | 2026-03-08 05:33:03+00:00
Not defending what the DoD is doing right now, I firmly believe the US intervention is unconstitutional, BUT

Iran has been 'at war' with the west for a very long time. It's time to redefine the concept of war to be compatible with the 21st century and also include hybrid warfare and war-by-proxy. Iran has been waging war using Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas-aligned factions, Iraqi militias and the consistent aid it gave Russia through the Shahed drone program which is targeting civilians in Ukraine. And I don't even want to go into details about the war Iran is fighting against its own citizens.

I hate to quote Hegseth, but this is the FO phase of the FAFO cycle.
by ehnto | 2026-03-08 05:33:43+00:00
I can relate, I was really looking forward to settling into mentorship roles.

However I am not quite so defeated, I think that developers will continue to find employment in tech even as AI augments the roles. Experienced developers are the obvious pick for a hire to run agentic AI development tools, and even the obvious pick for managing a no-code endgame scenario as they are just smart technologists with strong problem solving skills.

I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut.

I am also excited by the prospect of being able to take on bigger scale side projects solo as that's really where my passion lies.

I think general purpose technologists will really excel in this new ecosystem as the industry will be back to moving fast and breaking stuff for a while, for better or worse. A lot of them call themselves programmers right now but will evolve pretty quickly.

Pragmatism, small teams and fast pace will best deliver software based projects, and the bottleneck in big orgs will become (or already was) the bureaucracy and communication layers. Small team, greenfield projects have a huge advantage in getting an MVP to market, which is pretty exciting for someone excited mostly by solving problems with technology.

Time will tell though, this is not career advice and times are chaotic. At the end of the day, there are other careers, and you were smart enough to get into software. You will be smart enough to find a new career.
by ofrzeta | 2026-03-08 05:34:55+00:00
Is it? I mean in the end it is a political decision. We are used to infinite progress, infinite growth and infinite rationalization. But for what good? People have not become more free to pursuit their generic interests in Marx' sense but there's just more concentration in the hand of the capital while unemployment is growing. Weren't we better of to have less rationalization and have more meaningful work for people?
by themafia | 2026-03-08 05:35:07+00:00
You need it to encode or decode past dates to unix time or other time standards. You do not need it to "interpret" past dates.

Even then the tzdb only covers _offsets_ within a day. So even without it you can get an answer that is very close to the "correct" answer. For dates at that great of a remove the lack of accuracy to a precise second is rarely a problem.

I don't exactly need to schedule a remote video phone call with someone still using Double British Summer War Time. For those that do have this requirement they can use whatever specialty database they want.

Combining these two concerns with insanely different scopes is precisely the issue with the tzdb.
by ggm | 2026-03-08 05:35:35+00:00
We're plagued by these, and by souped up electric trail bikes. Kids far too young to die or get quadriplegia, blasting around in traffic. Usually with no sense of time and place. By law they are meant to be 25kph speed capped and require pedalling. They are doing 50pkh plus and take off like a scalded cat, doing wheelies.

I'm terrified for my own safety and theirs. I can't see this ending well.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-08 05:37:45+00:00
@kvinogradov (Open source endowment), I am (Pinging?) you because I think that you may be of help as I remember you stating that within the Open source endowment and the approach of how & which open source projects are better funded[0]

And I think that PyPy might be of interest to the Fund for sponsoring given its close to unmaintained. PyPy is really great in general speeding up Python[1] by magnitudes of order.

Maybe the fund could be of help in order to help paying the maintainer who are underfunded which lead to the situation being unmaintained in the first place. Pinging you because I am interested to hear your response and hopefully, see PyPy having better funding model for its underfunded maintainers.

[0]: https://endowment.dev/about/#model

[1]: https://benjdd.com/languages2/ (Refer to PyPY and Python difference being ~15x)
by nearbuy | 2026-03-08 05:37:53+00:00
I don't know any commercial uses of such tech today. I'm not saying they don't exist. I just don't know of them.

I had said I don't think it's very useful for "manipulating and profiling people over video chat", so I wouldn't really expect there to be a commercial product for that. Probably it's used in fitness or heart rate monitoring apps for people that don't have a fitness tracker device and prefer not to manually count their pulse.

Here is the tech demonstrated in 2007: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17074525/

The core algorithm is really simple. You find a patch of skin. Take the average color of the pixels in that patch. The color will become more reddish each pulse. Do an FFT and take the strongest peak in the plausible heart rate range. You could prototype this in a few hundred lines of python.

If this were useful for police or hiring managers, someone could have use the tech to make an app for them within the past 19 years.

Of course, companies have a history of trying to market a lot of BS metrics (e.g. graphology, MBTI) to hiring managers, so I wouldn't be that surprised to see a company claim they can predict employee success using pulse. Whether it works is another story.
by parpfish | 2026-03-08 05:38:58+00:00
> I think the devs who were only here for the paycheck and would not reasonably pick software if it didn't pay so much, will probably be happy to retrain into something else but be disappointed by the paycut.

this could be one of the silver linings to AI disrupting the industry. tech was better for the world when it was run by nerds that were in it for the love of the game.
by stephenr | 2026-03-08 05:40:09+00:00
I am absolutely not the target market for this, however I have some comments from what I could look at quickly on a phone:

- a good chunk of data seems to be passed around in associative arrays; It would be much easier to understand, and enforce type safety if you use Model and/or DTO classes.

- you're storing currency amounts using decimals in the database which is fine, but using floats in the app code is a problem. Floating point maths is not precise. Either use integers (and convert to a float for display purposes) or use something like the BCMath extension.

- there seems to be huge swathes of inline styles in your views. This just sounds painful to manage/style/adjust over time.

- best practice is to have a subdirectory which is specified as the docroot and includes just the public assets (images, css, etc) and the front controller (index.php)

- your php code defaults to the currency symbol for Indian rupees but the stripe gateway at least defaults to USD.
by pseudohadamard | 2026-03-08 05:40:32+00:00
It seems to be a grass-is-greener thing, except that when you get to Australia you find that most of the grass is brown. Or a politicians-fallacy relocation, life is tough, we'll move somewhere else which is mostly the same but at least we'll have done something.

Another thing not covered in the article: Some people are leaving. OK, good luck to them, and I hope things work out. Now what? Do you lose points if people leave? What difference does it make?
by anonymous908213 | 2026-03-08 05:40:47+00:00
There isn't really a comparison to be made between MonoGame and Godot. MonoGame is for programmers. Godot is for people who want to make games but don't care for programming and would rather use a GUI for development. Godot locks you into the Godot way of doing things. MonoGame is a thin cross-platform abstraction over platform APIs for sprite rendering, audio playback, input, and font, leaving you to build your game engine yourself however you like.

I think the greatest flaw in MonoGame, however, is that their cross-platform abstraction notably excludes web. Given how relatively thin MonoGame is, I think you're better off building your own framework that supports compiling to WASM as well, if you have any experience as a developer already. It is what I did and took some effort but was pretty well doable and didn't take all that long, and the payoff of being able to share your games instantly in the browser for anyone to play with just a click of a link is so worth it.

The other notable flaw in MonoGame is that the content pipeline thing it has is horrendous. When I tried it, I ended up simply bypassing using that pipeline at all. They are currently in the process of reworking it completely, I believe, but I'm not sure when that's supposed to release.

Maybe the value in MonoGame is that it does support consoles, though; I have no idea what developing for console is like, and only target web/computer/phone OS platforms myself.
by ehnto | 2026-03-08 05:40:52+00:00
I have some ideas for small business, but am also keeping an eye on jobs that could be prominent and enjoyable. I would much prefer a small business (have done it before) but financial realities may dictate a regular job at first.

I think many of us who have been in software for a while will fantasize about low-tech jobs, I imagine there will be a bunch of hobby farms...
by Qwertious | 2026-03-08 05:41:12+00:00
>Anglo-Saxons like to make fun of the French for surrendering easily but as a regular citizen, it actually makes logical sense. I think it just shows that the government is better aligned with the interests of the people.

>Strategic surrender is smart; if you know ahead of time which force is most powerful and can evaluate it objectively, you can save yourself the trouble of dying and you end up with a better outcome than you would have otherwise. It's risk management.

France didn't particularly surrender early. WW2 France surrendered because they were fucked and didn't have a choice; if they hadn't surrendered when they did, they would have been slaughtered and then their replacements would surrender just the same.

Russia would have done the same (and in fact, Ukraine tried to switch sides, especially with the Holomodor in such recent memory), but the Nazis were not pragmatic about permitting 'subhumans' to live.
by gotham64 | 2026-03-08 05:41:45+00:00
The Librarian Method inverts the problem. Instead of the system guessing which tools to load, the agent itself requests the tools it needs — after it has understood the user's intent.

The metaphor is literal: a library patron (the agent) walks up to a librarian and describes what they need. The librarian finds the right books. The patron never needs to know the Dewey Decimal System.
by jcranmer | 2026-03-08 05:42:09+00:00
You're not wrong here. Not that I'm entirely up-to-speed on all of the deep Rust discussions, but the sense I have of the language evolution is that while there is definitely a loud contingent of people pushing for a lot of the complexity of full effect systems or linear types, these sorts of proposals aren't actually all that likely to actually move forward in the language.

(I should note that of all of the features mentioned in this blog post, the only one I actually expect to see in Rust someday is pattern types, and that's largely because it partially exists already in unstable form to use for things like NonZeroU32.)
by smusamashah | 2026-03-08 05:42:10+00:00
The very first heading in this doc was a giveaway even after your de LLM process 'The Em-Dash Pivot: "Not X—but Y"'. This title is so much AI like. I think it's the "The" in title which is putting me off and coming off as assigning unnecessary importance which is mentioned in the wiki.
by satvikpendem | 2026-03-08 05:42:15+00:00
"Meaningful work" for work's sake, why? I have no desire to work in a farm or a factory when I can work from the peace of my own home without breaking my back. Not to mention the work that other people do too, like doctors and scientists, which directly positively impact my own life. If they were to say, let's not continue progressing, then that's not a world I'd want to live in.
by godelski | 2026-03-08 05:42:55+00:00
> getting those out of your head into English is more important over the long haul than your undocumented short-term solution to the criteria.

I think there may be miscommunication going on, or I may be misreading the conversation. What I do not know is what valicord means by "satisfies the unwritten acceptance criteria".

In one interpretation, I think they make a ton of sense. We invented formal languages to solve precisely this problem. The precision and pedantic nature of formal languages (like math and code[0]) is to solve ambiguity. If this is the meaning, then yes, code is far more concise and clear[1] than a natural language. That's why we invented formal languages after all. So they may be having trouble converting it to English because they are unsatisfied with the (lack of) precision and verbosity. That when they are more concise that people are interpreting it incorrectly, which is only natural. Natural languages' advantage is their flexibility, but that's their greatest disadvantage too. Everything is overloaded.

But on the other hand, if they are saying that they are unable to communicate the basics (it seems you have read in this way) then I agree with you. Being able to communicate your work is extremely important. I am unsure if it is more important than ever, but it is certainly a critical skill. But then we still have the ambiguous question of "to who?" The type of writing one does significantly differs depending on the audience.

Only valicord can tell us[edit], but I think we're just experiencing the ambiguity that makes natural languages so great and so terrible. I think maybe more important than getting the words out of ones head is to recognize the ambiguity in our language. As programmers this should be apparent, as we often communicate in extremely precise languages. But why I'd say it is more important than ever is because the audience is more diverse than ever. I'd wager a large number of arguments on the internet occur simply due to how we interpret one another's words. The obvious interpretation for one is different for another.

[0] Obviously there's a spectrum with code. C is certainly more formal than Python and thus less ambiguous.

[1] Clear != easy to understand. Or at least not easy to understand by everyone. This is a skill that needs training.

[edit] Reading their response, I think it is the first interpretation.