MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by x______________ | 2025-07-31 21:10:32+00:00
>The more powerful the tool, the more responsible its wielder should behave.

I will argue that this is a false pretense, in part that you say it's impossible to enforce, but also for the fact that it does not happen in reality.

Anyone with a will to an objective will utilize any tools at their disposal, only the observer from another perspective will judge that this is 'good or not'. To the beholder, this has become the only way to achieve their goals.

An anecdote goes by the lady who was using a ww2 era hand grenade to crush spices in her kitchen for decades without anything happening. Goals were met and nothing bad happened but general consensus states that this is bad for many reasons, to which nothing happened.

Maybe it's not only responsibility, but the capability for one to understand the situation one is in and what is at their disposal. ..and a hint of 'don't be evil' that leads to good outcomes despite what everyone thinks.
by daemonologist | 2025-07-31 21:10:41+00:00
It depends on where you're at, but for a sunny place yes; somewhere like London a panel can harvest ~100 W/m^2 (0.5 MW for a football field with 100% panel coverage) averaged over the whole year, while in Arizona it's more like 230 W/m^2 (1.2 MW for a football field). NREL has some great insolation maps here: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar-resource-maps

For a permanent installation I would agree that solar would usually make more sense, but the mini reactor might be better in scenarios where it's replacing a diesel generator - emergencies, temporary events, confined spaces, etc.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-31 21:11:02+00:00
And we're starting to have to decomission them! At absurd costs!

We just awarded $0.5B to decommission the USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the first nuclear aircraft carrier. More will follow! https://theaviationist.com/2025/06/03/uss-enterprise-dismant...

The DoE has been helping to decomission Los Angeles class attack subs for a while now. Here's a piece on that: https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/4...

It require enormous care & effort. It's fantastically costly. Do I think it was worth it? For a mission like this: I think yes. For the good of a nation. And a Nation that hopes to still be around to take care of the problem, the complex decomissioning decades latter. But I have so little faith that private interests will endure and bear their own responsibility for this awesome but deeply corrupting irradiating force.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-07-31 21:11:06+00:00
It'd be a much different field if we had kept it up. I spend a lot of time in nuclear archival material, and facilities like CANEL in Middletown CT absolutely blow my mind. They had hundreds of people working on crazy reactor technologies. They were flowing white-hot lithium metal at 100 mph. But yeah we gave all that up. My friend wrote a pretty good article about this not long ago https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-08/article-6961/hightempera...
by caseyohara | 2025-07-31 21:11:09+00:00
Also common in certain parts of the watch and jewelry markets.

If you go to the Rolex subreddit, it's full of people getting waitlisted for watches they want to buy and excitedly posting when they finally "get the call" from the dealer — sometimes years later — that they are now allowed to buy the watch. It's a common "strategy" to buy lesser watches to ingratiate oneself with the precious Authorized Dealer™ demigod so that one day you might be able to buy the watch you actually want.

Go search /r/rolex for the phrase "got the call" and prepare to cringe.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-31 21:11:15+00:00
No it's not.

There are a lot of stories that aren't worthy of flagging, but they're just low-quality.

And I've seen people abuse flagging because they treat it like downvoting. Flagging removes a story from the front page entirely, whereas ideally downvoting would simply deprioritize it, i.e. a bunch of downvotes would move it from #5 rank to #60 or something, not get rid of it entirely.

I've definitely had to e-mail the mods a number of times to restore a flagged story that was entirely appropriate, but which a few users simply didn't like. It would be much better to have a downvote button, and reserve flagging for actual spam and inappropriate content.
by yongjik | 2025-07-31 21:11:34+00:00
Considering that fossil fuels "solve" the problem by literally dumping its waste onto the atmosphere, endangering the global ecosystem, and we're still merrily using them...

I think it's a bit melodramatic to say microreactors offload nasty environmental problem to the future. Also, their environmental problem is literally at the scale of "Drop them in an abandoned mine somewhere, where they cause zero harm to the world, and we will have a few centuries to figure it out."
by Veserv | 2025-07-31 21:12:10+00:00
That is only a problem if you do one or more syscalls per packet which is a utterly bone-headed design.

The copy itself is going at 200-400 Gbps so writing out a standard 1,500 byte (12,000 bit) packet takes 30-60 ns (in steady state with caches being prefetched). Of course you get slaughtered if you stupidly do a syscall (~100 ns hardware overhead) per packet since that is like 300% overhead. You just batch like 32 packets so the write time is ~1,000-2,000 ns then your overhead goes from 300% to 10%.

At a 1 Gbps throughput, that is ~80,000 packets per second or one packet per ~12.5 us. So, waiting for a 32 packet batch only adds a additional 500 us to your end-to-end latency in return for 4x efficiency (assuming that was your bottleneck; which it is not for these implementations as they are nowhere near the actual limits). If you go up to 10 Gbps, that is only 50 us of added latency, and at 100 Gbps you are only looking at 5 us of added latency for a literal 4x efficiency improvement.
by morning-coffee | 2025-07-31 21:12:13+00:00
They are unrelated. Larger windows help achieve higher throughput over paths with high delay. You allude to selective acknowledgements as a way to repair loss before the window completely drains which is true, but my point is that no data can be delivered to the application until the loss is repaired (and that repair takes at least a round-trip time). (Then the follow-on effects from noticed loss on the congestion controller can limit subsequent in-flight data for a time, etc, etc.)
by jackcosgrove | 2025-07-31 21:12:23+00:00
I received both the worst and the best pieces of career advice when I was an undergraduate.

The worst advice was that writing software, after the dotcom bust, was dead as a career. This taught me a lot about the value of "conventional wisdom" vs looking at the underlying supply and demand dynamics of a career. Sort of adjacent to the theme of the essay, I think the best careers are those that you can tolerate and those that have favorable supply-demand curves.

The best advice was from a pre-med advisor, who asked me if I wanted to spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who were old, sick, dying, and - not in so many words - decrepit. At that moment I realized I was not a healer, I found most bodies to be gross, and I had no business considering a medical career.
by ddellacosta | 2025-07-31 21:13:03+00:00
I can't read this article due to the paywall, but here's my lukewarm take based on the title at least: "nobody" codes in Perl any more because the language lost a lot of mindshare in the transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6, a.k.a. Raku. And regardless it's always been a fairly idiosyncratic language in a lot of ways. Stuff like Ruby (which inherits DNA from Perl along with Lisp and Smalltalk), PHP (also takes some notes from Perl, perhaps more superficially), and Python ate a lot of its lunch.

It was the first language I wrote professionally and I always thought it was a lot of fun, but if I want to be humbled these days I reach for Haskell (like a lot of the Perl community it sounds like...).

EDIT: okay I read the article, thanks to welpo for the archive link. Yeah this is kind of a nostalgic piece so I think my original comment is still relevant. I do like Perl still, I will always have a spot in my heart for it. I appreciate especially how seriously Larry Wall tried to think about approaching things vis-a-vis linguistics even if I don't necessarily think that's the best approach for a language used by an engineering team these days.

I hope it sticks around in any case. It is truly unique.
by jmye | 2025-07-31 21:13:04+00:00
Not just residency. Fix the cost (and capacity) of the education system as a whole, especially for mid-levels. There’s no reason this country should have such a chronic NP shortage, and you don’t need MD/DOs for most of the healthcare gaps we have.

You also make rural care viable when you don’t have folks who need to pay off astronomical loans.
by hyperpape | 2025-07-31 21:13:34+00:00
It's wild how far off these predictions are, and yet there are still people to take them seriously.

No matter how impressive you find current LLMs, even if you're the sort of billionaire who predicts AGI before the end of 2025[0], the mechanism that Bostrom describes in this article is completely irrelevant.

We haven't figured out how to simulate human brains in a way that could create AI and we're not anywhere close, we've just done something entirely different.

[0] Yes, I too think most of this is cynical salesmanship, not honest foolishness.
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-31 21:14:04+00:00
Yeah I think TIMTOWTDI ended up being a net negative. Of course with experience and learning the idioms (perl is very idiomatic) it's not so bad but it really adds to the cognitive load for a beginner.

There is still a lot of perl around but I'd be a little surprised if any new projects would use it at least where it doesn't already have a big presence.
by devonbleak | 2025-07-31 21:14:17+00:00
Yeah, the graphs make some really big assumptions that don't seem to be backed up anywhere except AI maximalist head canon.

There's also a gap in addressing vibe coded "side projects" that get deployed online as a business. Is the code base super large and complex? No. Is AI capable of taking input from a novice and making something "good enough" in this space? Also no.
by toast0 | 2025-07-31 21:14:18+00:00
Most QUIC stacks are built upon in-kernel UDP. You get significant performance benefits if you can avoid your traffic going through kernel and userspace and the context switches involved.

You can work that angle by moving networking into user space... setting up the NIC queues so that user space can access them directly, without needed to context switch into the kernel.

Or you can work the angle by moving networking into kernel space ... things like sendfile which let a tcp application instruct the kernel to send a file to the peer without needing to copy the content into userspace and then back into kernel space and finally into the device memory, if you have in-kernel TLS with sendfile then you can continue to skip copying to userspace; if you have NIC based TLS, the kernel doesn't need to read the data from the disk; if you have NIC based TLS and the disk can DMA to the NIC buffers, the data doesn't need to even hit main memory. Etc

But most QUIC stacks don't get benefit from either side of that. They're reading and writing packets via syscalls, and they're doing all the packetization in user space. No chance to sendfile and skip a context switch and skip a copy. Batching io via io_uring or similar helps with context switches, but probably doesn't prevent copies.
by rao-v | 2025-07-31 21:14:55+00:00
The directly into working memory bit is nonsense of course, but it does point to a problem that is probably worth solving.

What would it take to make the KV cache more portable and cut/paste vs. highly specific to the query?

In theory today, I should be able to process <long quote from document> <specific query> and just stop after the long document and save the KV cache right? The next time around, I can just load it in, and continue from <new query>?

To keep going, you should be able to train the model to operate so that you can have discontinous KV cache segments that are unrelated, so you can drop in <cached KV from doc 1> <cached KV from doc 2> with <query related to both> and have it just work ... but I don't think you can do that today.

I seem remember seeing some papers that tried to "unRoPE" the KV and then "re-RoPE" it, so it can be reused ... but I have not seen the latest. Anybody know what the current state is?

Seems crazy to have to re-process the same context multiple times just to ask it a new query.
by benswerd | 2025-07-31 21:14:59+00:00
Our chatbot isn't trying to answer questions as much as it is to point people in the right direction.

People have made chats that are better at actually solving problems but the usecase we targetted was I have a question how do I get to the answer. This works better than search, because it allows for semantics to work, for example when someone asks about SvelteKit, even though our docs don't mention it, the ai points towards the Vite docs.
by cellularmitosis | 2025-07-31 21:15:01+00:00
This is a satisfying narrative but I feel like you are overestimating the technical competency and/or malice of these companies. The more likely explanation is that they have simply bitten off more complexity than they can chew.

Of the tech companies I've worked for, I can't even imagine how the web team would react if they were instructed to intentionally nerf their website.
by miohtama | 2025-07-31 21:15:12+00:00
> Everlaw, a platform providing verifiable RAG to help legal professionals analyze large volumes of discovery documents, requires precise semantic matching across millions of specialized texts. Through internal benchmarks, Everlaw found gemini-embedding-001 to be the best, achieving 87% accuracy in surfacing relevant answers from 1.4 million documents filled with industry-specific and complex legal terms, surpassing Voyage (84%) and OpenAI (73%) models. Furthermore, Gemini Embedding's Matryoshka property enables Everlaw to use compact representations, focusing essential information in fewer dimensions. This leads to minimal performance loss, reduced storage costs, and more efficient retrieval and search.

This will make a lot of junior lawyers or their work obsolete.

Here is a good podcast on the topic how will AI affect legal industry

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4IAHG68BeGZzr9uHXYvu5z?si=q...
by gruez | 2025-07-31 21:15:28+00:00
>All of the studies were done 2023-2024 and are not listed in order that they were conducted

Right, the reason why I pointed out "recent" is that it's new evidence that people might not be aware of, given that there were also earlier studies showing AI had the opposite effect on inequality. The "recent" studies also had varied methodology compared to the earlier studies.

>The studies showing reduced equality all apply to uncommon tasks like material discovery and debate points

"Debating points" is uncommon? Maybe not everyone was in the high school debate club, but "debating points" is something that anyone in a leadership position does on a daily basis. You're also conveniently omitting "investment decisions" and "profits and revenue", which basically everyone is trying to optimize. You might be tempted to think "Coding efficiency" represents a high complexity task, but the abstract says the test involved "Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible". The same is true of the task used in the "legal analysis" study, which involved drafting contracts or complaints. This seems exactly like the type of cookie cutter tasks that the article describes would become like cashiers and have their wages stagnate. Meanwhile the studies with negative results were far more realistic and measured actual results. Otis et al 2023 measured profits and revenue of actual Kenyan SMBs. Roldan-Mones measured debate performance as judged by humans.
Show HN: EIRA-KEM – a symbolic post-quantum KEM for academic testing
by CarSan99 | 2025-07-31 21:15:41+00:00
EIRA-KEM is a symbolic algebra-based key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) designed for post-quantum cryptographic applications.

It uses symbolic entropy matrices, SHA3-512 + HKDF, and AES-GCM encapsulation to achieve IND-CCA2 security without relying on LWE, factoring, or ECC.

Resources : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394065098_EIRA-KEM_...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394088076_EIRA-KEM_... GitHub: https://github.com/CarlosStx99/EIRA_KEM3 Google Colab Demo: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/YOUR_LINK_HERE

I'm looking for technical feedback, crypto analysis, and collaboration from the community. This system is patent-pending (WO/2025/057369) but free for academic testing.

Benchmarks (C + Python), whitepaper, and license included.
by Jzush | 2025-07-31 21:15:56+00:00
It’s not worth debating if you dissolve everything to a black and white argument. In your definition someone sending a cute sexy picture via text to their significant other is tantamount to rape and slavery.

The argument is ridiculous on the face of it and just not worth discussing at that point.

Payment processors aren’t taking a stance against slavery and human trafficking by blocking the sales of X rated games on Steam and itch.io and you know that.

And payment processors certainly have no right inserting themselves into any transaction period. They are not the money police. For any other issues between a person and a product there are other infrastructures in place that should have intervened before it ever got to the point of “supporting human trafficking”.

Ridiculous.
by altacc | 2025-07-31 21:15:59+00:00
> But perhaps the lesson of Perl is timeless. It asks us to be less precious—and more human—when it comes to programming languages and their design. Only then might we be able to bridge the gap between us and the machines.

I'm not clear which way the author thinks this works but having started coding in the 90s I feel that with Perl you had to try to understand the quirks of language and the language didn't try to reach out to programmers to make things easy. Whereas other coding languages aim to be intuitive, with clearer syntax, more logical naming and frameworks to obscure complexity, which to my mind is a better way to bridge the gap between us and "the machines".
by mgfist | 2025-07-31 21:16:02+00:00
0.2% of Americans are homeless.

Why is housing always about the homeless? Yes, getting people off the street is important. But there's few other topics where a solution that helps 99.8% of people is dismissed because it doesn't help 0.2% of people (I don't even agree that it doesn't help them, but I'll be charitable for the sake of making my point).
by hangonhn | 2025-07-31 21:16:10+00:00
You basically can’t or it won't have the same effects because medicine doesn’t really follow the same dynamics as most other markets: the supplier (doctor) has an information asymmetry and thus makes most of the decisions, while the buyer (patient) is not usually the payer (insurance) so aren’t really incentivized to save.

Kenneth Arrow famously analyzed the healthcare market and made the above insight: https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/9442.pdf

I know he was a Nobel Laureate but not sure if this is the work that won him the Nobel.

Updated: I should qualify my statement by pointing out this is for the US healthcare system.
by ranie93 | 2025-07-31 21:16:44+00:00
Could this be associated to a supposed recent State Department approval?

“I just approved a program to deploy small modular nuclear reactors built in the United States to an allied country to help with their sort of energy infrastructure.”

“Which allied country would that be?”

“I can't tell you. It's not public yet.”

From Interesting Times with Ross Douthat: The DOGE Alum Asking if Foreign Aid Is America’s Problem, Jul 31, 2025
by gmueckl | 2025-07-31 21:16:48+00:00
I'm not filled with optimism about this concept. Let's work backwards from crash safety (say a reactor on a truck getting t-boned by a freight train). The radioactive material needs to be held in an armored containment to avoid release. That would have to be roughly comparable to CASTOR containers in terms of its resilience. But these containers have limited capability of passive thermal energy dissipation (Google finds models that handle 10kW to 45kW thermal power generated in the interior). This would be approximately the ceiling for the direct thermal power output that is still reduced by limited efficiency of heat-to-power conversion.

This is admittedly napkin math, but it should be good enough to set expectations.
by next_xibalba | 2025-07-31 21:16:51+00:00
So you're telling me if an additional, say, 100k units came on the market in Denver in the next year, housing prices wouldn't fall dramatically such that all working people could afford housing?

Working people should be able to afford housing near where they work. So let's press the gas pedal on building. The mentally ill and drug addicted should be subject to mandatory treatment or jail until such time as their underlying condition is mitigated to the extent that they can work and afford housing. Free housing doesn't work. In fact, it exacerbates individual dysfunction. It is cruelty masquerading as kindness.
by stouset | 2025-07-31 21:17:08+00:00
I agree it was a combination of Raku and Ruby. As far as I'm concerned, Ruby deprecates Perl 5. It fills the same niche while avoiding a lot of the absolutely crazier parts of Perl (no shade; Perl was designed in a far different time and place). If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl. I have fond memories of the language, it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.

Raku being in such an indeterminate state for so long was an eternity for it to lose mindshare to Ruby.
by simonw | 2025-07-31 21:17:26+00:00
Huh, yeah you're right: that was January 25th 2024 https://openai.com/index/new-embedding-models-and-api-update...

Nomic 1.5 was February 14th 2024: https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/nomic-embed-matryoshka
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-31 21:17:57+00:00
> 20k apartments and the rent only lowers 3%?

20k is about 5% of Denver's housing stock [1]. Given the backlog of demand, you'd expect to see inelasticity at the entrance.

[1] http://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US0820000-denver-co/
by yapyap | 2025-07-31 21:17:58+00:00
communism? was there lead in the paint they painted your walls with?

no real argument was made for communism, however a housing / renting market controlled by the government with regulations instead of letting the “free market” (((oligopoly))) run it’s course screwing over the poor and middle class while the richest of the rich pool all these profits to build bunkers and do stupid shit.

yeah, a regulated market is better. especially when and if the government regulating the market is sane. thats a requirement for laws and or institutions relying on regulation
New budget financial API, based on EDGAR data
by jgfriedman1999 | 2025-07-31 21:17:59+00:00
Hey everyone,

I'm the developer of an open-source (MIT License) python package to convert SEC submissions into useful data. I've recently put a bunch of stuff in the cloud for a nominal convenience fee.

Cloud:

1. SEC Websocket - notifies you of new submissions as they come out. (Free)

2. SEC Archive - download SEC submissions without rate limits. ($1/100,000 downloads)

3. MySQL RDS ($1/million rows returned)

- XBRL

- Fundamentals

- Institutional Holdings

- Insider Transactions

- Proxy Voting Records

Posting here, in case someone finds it useful.

Links:

Datamule (Package) GitHub: https://github.com/john-friedman/datamule-python

Documentation: https://john-friedman.github.io/datamule-python/datamule-python/sheet/sheet/

Get an API Key: https://datamule.xyz/dashboard2.html
by dvrp | 2025-07-31 21:18:24+00:00
Yup... We have the following: https://www.krea.ai/pricing

Though we wanted to keep this technical blogpost free from marketing fluff, but maybe we over-did it.

However, sometimes it's hard to give an exact price per image, as it depends on resolution, number of steps, whether a LoRA is being used or not, etc.