MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diordiderot | 2025-09-12 19:37:05+00:00
1. Only six reactors have had meltdowns, partial meltdowns, serious core damage, or fatalities.

Gen 4 reactors have gravity driven control rods, passive cooling systems, core catchers, safer fuel, and moderators.

If humans were raptured, they couldn't melt down.

2. The entire planets worth of spent nuclear fuel would fit into 15 Olympic swimming pools.

Fast breeder reactors can use almost all of the existing waste and on top of that reduce it's lifespan from 100k+ years to a few hundred.

You'd get more radiation exposure from living in Denver than you would sleeping on a cask in Miami
by kronicum2025 | 2025-09-12 19:37:08+00:00
As a young person growing up in India, enrolled in engineering in a small desolate city, when I wanted to be a mathematician, with no real path in sight, this blog post is actually what I followed, and learnt everything that is mandatory on this blog post during my undergraduate on my own, and then applied for entrance examinations for grad institutes in India, and now have successfully finished my PhD nicely in US.

So, in that sense, this blog post is for people like me, who had no exposure to research scientists in around 2012 in the places we are growing up. (I didn't yet have stable internet then, only once an hour every evening). They still have some years before they could actually come in contact with researchers who can give them good problems to work on. and the local universities are horribly out of whack in their skill/desire to teach the students properly.

And so, in the meantime, till you get access to good research problems, you prepare yourself to be ready for the problem when the day finally comes. And this blog post along with another one: https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html was what kept motivating me when I was studying.

The list of books is as important as anything else. To be fair, in 2012, math.stackexchange.com had grown up quite a bit, but I was not aware of it for various reasons.
by sigbottle | 2025-09-12 19:37:18+00:00
I think they're saying that the types of counter-examples are so pathological in most cases that if you're doing any kind of auto-generation of constraints - for example, a DSL backed by a solver - should have good enough heuristics.

Like it might even be the case that certain types of pretty powerful DSLs just never generate "bad structures". I don't know, I've not done research on circuits, but this kind of analysis shows up all the time in other adjacent fields.
by hungarianhc | 2025-09-12 19:37:20+00:00
Hey! It's a great question. Co-founder of Vectroid here.

Today, the differences are going to be performance, price, accuracy, flexibility, and some intangible UI elegance.

Performance: We actually INITIALLY built Vectroid for the use-case of billions of vectors and near single digit millisecond latency. During the process of building and talking to users, we found that there are just not that many use-cases (yet!) that are at that scale and require that latency. We still believe the market will get there, but it's not there today. So we re-focused on building a general purpose vector search platform, but we stayed close to our high performance roots, and we're seeing better query performance than the other serverless, object storage backed vector DBs. We think we can get way faster too.

Price: We optimized the heck out of this thing with object storage, pre-emptible virtual machines, etc. We've driven our cost down, and we're passing this to the user, starting with a free tier of 100GB. Actual pricing beyond that coming soon.

Accuracy: With our initial testing, we see recall greater or equal to competitors out there, all while being faster.

Flexibility: We are going to have a self managed version for users who want to run on their own infra, but admittedly, we don't have that today. Still working on it.

Other Product Elegance: My co-founder, Talip, made Hazelcast, and I've always been impressed by how easy it is to use and how the end to end experience is so elegant. As we continue to develop Vectroid, that same level of polish and focus on the UX will be there. As an example, one neat thing we rolled out is direct import of data from Hugging Face. We have lots of other cool ideas.

Apologies for the long winded answer. Feel free to ping us with any additional questions.
by HankStallone | 2025-09-12 19:37:30+00:00
It would feel socially rude of me to take the freshest item from the back, knowing I don't need it, leaving the older ones to someone who might not have time to cook as soon. Someone has to take take the one in front, or the store has to throw it out, creating waste and ultimately raising prices for everyone.

Seems kinda like farting in a crowded room and then slipping out the door.
by twoodfin | 2025-09-12 19:37:38+00:00
UTF-8 is indeed a genius design. But of course it’s crucially dependent on the decision for ASCII to use only 7 bits, which even in 1963 was kind of an odd choice.

Was this just historical luck? Is there a world where the designers of ASCII grabbed one more bit of code space for some nice-to-haves, or did they have code pages or other extensibility in mind from the start? I bet someone around here knows.
by Zetaphor | 2025-09-12 19:37:56+00:00
Self host an instance of SearXNG[1] either locally or on a remote server with a simple docker container and use its JSON API [2]. You have to enable the JSON API in the config manually [3].

[1] https://docs.searxng.org/admin/installation-docker.html#inst...

[2] https://docs.searxng.org/dev/search_api.html

[3] https://github.com/searxng/searxng/discussions/3542
by zamalek | 2025-09-12 19:38:09+00:00
Not much use in the modern world, but SQL Server has this and I've had too many projects to approach doing it for pgsql. In Visual Studio there was a SQL project, and in it you would write your SQL as though you were bringing up the DB from scratch; with directories and all for your convenience.

Internally it would materialize it all into a schema which could not only be used for things like go to def, but also for diffing against another schema - either a previous build, or your live db, and subsequently emitted as a migration. It was magical, but flew under the radar, and these days any individual stuck working with SQL Server deserves many condolences.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-12 19:38:28+00:00
If we were to separate all jobs into categories like most-preferable, least-preferable, and a few other buckets in the middle of those, would the H1Bs be evenly distributed among them?

What percentage are they of the top (preferable) quintile of jobs? Are they just 0.5% of those, or are they more like 4% of those? Is it higher still?
by dlubarov | 2025-09-12 19:38:50+00:00
> Arab countries did not ethnically cleanse Jews. That’s a complete fabrication.

This is just plainly wrong. Even if we ignore the various pogroms, asset seizures and other persecution (where one could perhaps argue that Jews weren't strictly required to leave), there were some pretty explicit expulsions of Jews as well, such as in Egypt in 1956.
by Bender | 2025-09-12 19:39:12+00:00
Anything is possible but unlikely we would find it unless there are buried megaliths signed by humans with graphic pictures. Even on Earth it would be hard to prove we were ever here after half a billion years after we destroy ourselves. It might not even take that long. Most things will rust, decompose, shatter into something resembling dust and many coastal regions will get recycled by plate techtonic movements. Mars has been a dead planet for a long time no magnetosphere, probably how this one will end up at some point.
by duckdriver | 2025-09-12 19:39:12+00:00
It seems like no one can disagree with you in good faith. This is a convenient scapegoat for you to ignore strong counterarguments, since all it takes to dismiss the speaker is their "lack of good faith." With your brilliant reasoning, after all, how could anyone of good faith disagree?

> His "conversations" were not about exchanging ideas but "owning the libs".

There are many counterexamples to this. If you're arguing in such good faith, you should explore those.

> lots of good that has done!

Even this is a good example of what I'm talking about. It sounds like you're giving up on dialogue, which is precisely my point. Don't give up on it. Commend those who seek it.

> fact checking

Get out of your bubble. The many failures of anything-but-neutral fact checking are patently obvious, if you have the good faith to look.

> Charlie Kirk never planned to be swayed by a better opinion

You may be correct, but that doesn't even matter. The proposition that no one was swayed by his dialogue would be outrageous, and I doubt you would make such an argument. So even if he would never change his mind, he's still contributing to dialogue.

I asked you before -- What is it that you propose be done about the tens of millions of Americans that agree with Charlie Kirk?
by hungarianhc | 2025-09-12 19:39:28+00:00
Not that locked in - you can just move your vectors to another platform, no?

Vectroid co-founder here. We're huge fans of open source. My co-founder, Talip, made Hazelcast, which is open source.

It might make sense to open source all or part of Vectroid at some point in the future, but at the moment, we feel that would slow us down.

I hate vendor lock-in just as much as the next person. I believe data portability is the ACTUAL counter to vendor lock-in. If we have clean APIs to get your data in, get your data out, and the ability to bulk export your data (which we need to implement soon!), then there's less of a concern, in my opinion.

I also totally understand and respect that some people only want open source software. I'm certainly like that w/ my homelab setup! Except for Plex... Love Plex... Usually.
by downrightmike | 2025-09-12 19:39:30+00:00
Outsourcing needs to be eliminated. If the company is doing 20% of their business in Ohio, 20% of their workforce needs to be in Ohio. 12% in NY State, 12% of the workers need to be in NY State etc.

To your point, the sense is that diploma mills exist and the corporations mostly want bodies to work 20 hours a day and indentured servitude is what they want most. That 25% tax on international workers is nothing. It will be gamed like the tax code.

If we want to fix things, the Double Dutch/Irish/ Shell companies need to be eliminated. Stock buy backs also need to be eliminated. There is no reason for it to be allowed, it is direct manipulation.

When Corps have to pay their fair share, they'll invest in people as a expense and write it off. Which is what they were doing before tax evasion, outsourcing, and the shell game.

Eliminate the tax evasion and punish corps with fines until they are above board.
by SCUSKU | 2025-09-12 19:39:53+00:00
True that SVP benefits from not serving a rural area, but we also need to consider again that PGE is a for-profit organization that in 2024 posted $2.5B in profits, which were distributed to shareholders[1]. If PGE were owned by the state with no such fiduciary duty, this money could instead be used to lower rates and/or invest in infrastructure.

[1] - https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/PCG/income-statement?icid=...
by tracker1 | 2025-09-12 19:39:59+00:00
I keep debating doing something similar for a web-based BBS, in the classic BBS sense in terms of messages, files, doors/games, etc. I remember some of the thick clients like WorldGroup/Wildcat offered in later versions, and I'm mixed.

I wouldn't use it for a general website, but something more akin to an app space, I can see it kind of working.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-12 19:40:00+00:00
Article from April.

Some other discussions since?

EPA to revoke endangerment finding, the basis for regulating greenhouse gases

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726832

EPA wants to eliminate regulation for greenhouse gases

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727786

A NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796597

And today's news:

EPA to Stop Collecting Emissions Data from Polluters

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225954
by mixdup | 2025-09-12 19:40:09+00:00
A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely

Every reactor and every plant is bespoke, even if they are based on a common "design" each instance is different enough that every project has to be managed from the ground up as a new thing, you get certified only on a single plant, operators can't move from plant to plant without recertification, etc

Part of that is because they are so big and massive, and take a long time to build. If we'd build smaller, modular reactors that are literally exactly the same every single time you would begin to get economies of scale, you'd be able to get by without having to build a complete replica for training every time, and by being smaller you'd get to value delivery much quicker reducing the finance costs, which would then let you plow the profits from Reactor A into Reactor B's construction
by viccis | 2025-09-12 19:40:10+00:00
The problem is that his motivation was to critique "science criticism", but nothing about what he did did anything of the sort. He went about it with the same scientific rigor that one would expect from Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.

Anyone can feel free to provide examples of this happening, but I don't think there has been significant impact on scientific rigor in top theoretical physics journals and conferences as a result of needling from postmodernists, either during Sokal's time or now. If anything, his identification of "the Left" as the biggest enemy of science was profoundly off base in retrospect.
by notatoad | 2025-09-12 19:40:21+00:00
ignoring the fact that we live in the real world where money isn't infinite: nuclear provides stable base power generation, and it does it without taking up a lot of space.

Renewables produce power intermittently, and require storage to match demand. Storage either requires non-renewable resources like lithium, or else large amounts of land. in theory yes, any amount of power could be produced by renewables, but in practice renewables require other non-infinite resources to turn the power they generate into actual usable electricity coming out of your wall socket.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-12 19:40:43+00:00
Seems like you've made profoundly questionable hosting or design choices for that to happen. Flat rate web hosting exists, and blogs (especially unsophisticated ones) do not require much bandwidth or processing power.

Misbehaving crawlers are a huge problem but bloggers are among the least affected by them. Something like a wiki or a forum is a better example, as they're in a category of websites where each page visit is almost unavoidably rendered on the fly using multiple expensive SQL queries due to the rapidly mutating nature of their datasets.

Git forges, like the one TFA is discussing, are also fairly expensive, especially as crawlers traverse historical states. When the crawler is poorly implemented they'll get stuck doing this basically forever. Detecting and dealing with git hosts is an absolute must for any web crawler due to this.
by alwillis | 2025-09-12 19:40:49+00:00
> don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us. I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases.

I disagree.

There's a lot of interest in local LLMs in the LLM community. My internet was down for a few days and did I wish I had a local LLM on my laptop!

There's a big push for privacy; people are using LLMs for personal medical issues for example and don't want that going into the cloud.

Is it necessary to talk to a server just to check out a letter I wrote?

Obviously with Apple's release of iOS 26 and macOS 26 and the rest of their operating systems, tens of millions of devices are getting a local LLM with 3rd party apps that can take advantage of them.
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 19:41:17+00:00
Which regulations?

What would change in the construction process?

China builds the same designs as the EU and US, yet faster. What is different?

I saw toooooooons of reports of construction mishaps in the US at Vogtle and Summer. I didn't see anything about "oh if we changed this sort of regulation it would have saved us money."

It's a very worthwhile to read the retrospectives on these builds. There are lots of plans of future builds of the AP1000 that would be cheaper, but none of the plans even indicate that a regulation change would help.

I beg of people who say regulations are in the way: which regulations? Concretely, what should change to make construction cheaper? Pun intended.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 19:42:02+00:00
Oh my god Becky, there's even a rocket emoji in the server console logs!

Should I also be "honest" about tab-completion? Where do you draw the line? Maybe I should be punished for having an internet connection too. Using AI for docker/readme's/simple scaffolding I would have done anyways? Oh the horror!

There was no lying because there was no discussion or mention of AI at all. Had they asked me, I'd have happily told them yes I obviously use AI to help me save time on grunt-work, I've been doing this stuff for like 15 years.

It's an unpaid take-home assignment. You'd have to be smoking crack to think that I would be rawdogging this. Imagine if I had a family or a wife or an existing job? I'd dump them after getting linked their assignment document.

Honestly at this point in the AI winter if you are a guy who has AI-inspired paranoia then I don't want to work for you because you are not "in the know".
by surgical_fire | 2025-09-12 19:42:07+00:00
> the wage suppression

Do immigrants earn less than locals?

My impression is that the salary is similar. I am not in the US, but I rejected job offers from across the pond in the past and the salary seemed to be on the level with what I know is paid in the US for that position.

My guess is that what they like in H1B workers is that they are sort of stuck with that employer, as changing jobs under such a Visa can be tricky no?
by jeffbee | 2025-09-12 19:42:24+00:00
If you have Spotify you can look for the years-old (so not invented today) playlist called Groyper Wars.

Actually you don't even need an account. TIL. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ais7KJXx8Gyd0hsrbakKW

ETA: And you have the wrong "three arrows" iconography.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-12 19:42:42+00:00
> i was trying to encourage you to use 0-based indexes so i failed

I'd say you never actually tried. Your argument was unserious.

It was simply: "1-based indexing confuses me". Even if people try to treat it as an actual argument, it's weak. Spanish confuses me, should Spanish speakers switch to English on my behalf? No. I should learn Spanish, get an interpreter, or use tools to help me converse with them. And 1-based indexing is much simpler than Spanish. If it actually confuses you then something else is going on. Every 5-year-old I know understands it, that's a low bar to beat for an adult.

Go see Dijkstra's argument for 0-based indexing, that's an actual argument. Yours was not.
by krisoft | 2025-09-12 19:42:50+00:00
> If regulations are the cost, name them and a solution.

That is a funny ask. Regulation doesnt have to be a single thing. It can very well be cost-overrun by a thousand paper cut. You can drown any project in endless paperwork, environmental and national security reviews. In fact unclear and contradictory requirements are much more conductive to drive costs up than a single Lets-make-nuclear-expensive-Act.

That being said if you need to pick a single thing (which is silly) then the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” principle of radiation protection is a prime candidate. When you have a safety limit you can design a system to remain under it. When you are designing a sytem for the ALARA principle that in itself will blow your costs up.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-12 19:42:50+00:00
The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large grid with huge swings in capacity and making it resilient is a massive challenge. That’s why you end up with Germany building 70-ish new gas-fired power plants next to their alleged push towards renewable.

It’s probably doable but when you look at it from this angle nuclear starts to look good as an alternative.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 19:42:58+00:00
I've implemented them. The sites hate them as well. They do it because there are whole law firms now who just troll for clients with ads that say "Did you shop at <BRAND>? Your privacy may have been violated!" and file suits under CCPA, etc. The "violation" was some technicality of a cookie banner. Then the site operator has to pay attorneys and pay a settlement, which pays the plaintiff attorneys. At the end of the day, the "plaintiffs" were never "harmed" at all -- some boring usage data of an ecommerce website or something was put into a Google Analytics dashboard so that some marketer could maybe analyze conversion rates.

I have seen a ton of these ads in the past few years.

All these laws have done is created a ton of wealth for lawyers.
by ejstronge | 2025-09-12 19:43:04+00:00
I likely have read at least one of the articles you were citing (or similar work) and my sense was that information was obtained later that was unclear at the time of the event. I see your point - especially when a journalist writes about an area where I have personal experience - but I guess I don't equate this to a decline in journalist quality given the confusion around an event like this.
by deepsun | 2025-09-12 19:43:22+00:00
That's assuming the text is not corrupted or maliciously modified. There were (are) _numerous_ vulnerabilities due to parsing/escaping of invalid UTF-8 sequences.

Quick googling (not all of them are on-topic tho):

https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2025/02/13/cve-2025-1094-po...

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=utf-8
by tialaramex | 2025-09-12 19:43:29+00:00
Wow. That seems... less useful. Like, the huge embossed numbers weren't really necessary because the machines those are for no longer are popularly used so who cares (I have used one, but it was last decade and it did not feel like they'd have turned me away if it didn't work). But a CVV must still actually be useful to some fraction of your real customers, and likewise the expiry date.
by mort96 | 2025-09-12 19:43:55+00:00
I don't know if this is the reason or if the causality goes the other way, but: it's worth noting that we didn't always have 8 general purpose bits. 7 bits + 1 parity bit or flag bit or something else was really common (enough so that e-mail to this day still uses quoted-printable [1] to encode octets with 7-bit bytes). A communication channel being able to transmit all 8 bits in a byte unchanged is called being 8-bit clean [2], and wasn't always a given.

In a way, UTF-8 is just one of many good uses for that spare 8th bit in an ASCII byte...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_clean
by rowls66 | 2025-09-12 19:44:30+00:00
I think more effort should have been made to live with 65,536 characters. My understanding is that codepoints beyond 65,536 are only used for languages that are no longer in use, and emojis. I think that adding emojis to unicode is going to be seen a big mistake. We already have enough network bandwith to just send raster graphics for images in most cases. Cluttering the unicode codespace with emojis is pointless.