MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jfengel | 2025-09-12 19:28:20+00:00
What if that speech is calling for violence?

Fundamentally, government is violence. One common formulation is that the government has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. When a person commits a crime, the government is authorized to use violence to punish it.

Practically every government considers a threat to be a crime. A threat is speech, and the government responds with violence.

An assassination by a citizen is not a legitimate use of violence, by that definition, but we've shown that there is such a thing as a legitimate use of violence in response to speech.

And conversely, any government action is ultimately backed by the threat of violence. Ideally, that's restricted just to acts generally considered abhorrent, but in a democracy it only takes a bare majority to legitimate government violence. Speech that influences government can be tantamount to a threat, authorizing violence for acts that you don't consider to merit it.

I'm not trying to justify the recent assassination. I'm trying to show that a simplistic "violence is never a response to speech" is not a sufficient argument. Speech and violence are not as distinct as we'd like to think. There are many ways that speech can lead very directly to violence.
by rhdunn | 2025-09-12 19:28:36+00:00
I'm not advocating that the verification should be on the maintainer. It should definitely be on the contributor/submitter to verify that what they are submitting is correct to the best of their abilities.

This applies if the reporter found the bug themselves, used a static analysis tool like Coverity, used a fuzzing tool, used valgrind or similar, used an LLM, or some other mechanism to identify the issue.

In each case the reporter needs to at a minimum check if what they found is actually an issue and ideally provide a reproducible test case ("this file causes the application to crash", etc.), logs if relevant, etc.
by kingstnap | 2025-09-12 19:29:02+00:00
Runs of spaces of many different lengths are encoded as a single token. Its not actually inefficient.

In fact everything from ' ' to ' '79 all have a single token assigned to them on the OpenAI GPT4 tokenizer. Sometimes ' 'x + '\n' is also assigned a single token.

You might ask why they do this but its to make it so programming work better by reducing token counts. All whitespace before the code gets jammed into a single token and entire empty lines also get turned into a single token.

There are actually lots of interesting hand crafted token features added which don't get discussed much.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-12 19:29:25+00:00
I assume you mean "11000000 10000001" to preserve the property that all continuation bytes start with "10"? [Edit: looks like you edited that in]. Without that property, UTF-8 loses self-synchronicity, the property that given a truncated UTF-8 stream, you can always find the codepoint boundaries, and will lose at most codepoint worth rather than having the whole stream be garbled.

In theory you could do it that way, but it comes at the cost of decoder performance. With UTF-8, you can reassemble a codepoint from a stream using only fast bitwise operations (&, |, and <<). If you declared that you had to subtract the legal codepoints represented by shorter sequences, you'd have to introduce additional arithmetic operations in encoding and decoding.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-09-12 19:29:33+00:00
If Germany invested all their renewable money into nuclear, they would be carbon-neutral today. Not by 2050 but today.

Instead the CO2 per capita in Germany is 2x the one in France. And France had built their reactors in the 70s for a modest price.

The "whole load more renewable energy" idea is peak wishful thinking and it's incredible people still buy it today.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-09-12 19:29:41+00:00
Source instead of 404:

Comcast Execs Criticize Fired MSNBC Contributor Matthew Dowd’s Comments About Charlie Kirk Following Shooting as ‘Unacceptable and Insensitive’: ‘We Need to Do Better’

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/comcast-execs-criticize-msn...
by al2o3cr | 2025-09-12 19:29:58+00:00
I just got back from a trip with the Mudita Kompakt - not quite what you're describing, but close:

* 4.3" monochrome e-Ink display

* no web browser, no email client

* de-Googled Android; only way to load apps is via APK from a computer

* hardware switch to turn off all radios, for the privacy-concerned

The built-in software is still a work-in-progress (eg the music player hasn't got FOLDER support yet!) but you can find e-Ink-friendly apps on repos like F-Droid.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-12 19:30:17+00:00
If you consider the complexity of running a whole grid out of intermittent sources of energy and the long term vulnerability of the logistic chain required to produce PVs, the long term costs and risks are not so clear cut.

For China which has the mineral it probably doesn’t make sense but for Europe, nuclear is a solid alternative especially when you consider that you can probably significantly extend the life time of the already existing power plants. Even if we ultimately transition to something else, it’s better than coal and gas in the meantime.
by timr | 2025-09-12 19:30:49+00:00
> I'm not sure why you think there is no price transparency in the US. I know exactly how much I was billed and how much my insurance paid.

Go to the grocery store. There are no prices posted, you just take your cart to the register, and the cashier charges you $20, then sends you a bill in the mail for a random amount -- trust us, we'll figure it out! Oh, that can of tomatoes really was $50. Sorry. At least you know for next time, right? (Unless the price changes.)

Do you see the problem now? Would you really call this system price transparency?
by yepitwas | 2025-09-12 19:31:12+00:00
The total count of e.g. newspaper owners, and especially radio and TV owners (because there used to be laws against that being too concentrated, for one thing), has plummeted, though. Lots and lots of consolidation, lots of small outlets surviving only as barely-staffed zombies under big owners.

Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
by throw0101d | 2025-09-12 19:31:19+00:00
> It sacrifices the ability to encode more than 21 bits, which I believe was done for compatibility with UTF-16: UTF-16’s awful “surrogate” mechanism can only express code units up to 2^21-1z

Yes, it is 'truncated' to the "UTF-16 accessible range":

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3629#section-3

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#History

Thompson's original design could handle up to six octets for each letter/symbol, with 31 bits of space:

* https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt
by mpweiher | 2025-09-12 19:31:42+00:00
And even then it's not actually true.

First, solar and wind are massively subsidized pretty much everywhere they are deployed, in addition to the indirect subsidies they get from China subsidizing production (and internal deployments).

Second, and more importantly, LCOE is not the full cost, as you rightly point out. It leaves out system costs, and these are huge for intermittent renewables, and not constant. They rise disproportionately as the percentage of intern mitten renewables in a particular grid rises towards 100%.

Third, and related, in most countries where renewables are deployed, intermittent renewables not just do not have to carry the burden of their intermittency, they are actually allowed to pass these burdens and costs onto their reliable competitors. Which is even more insane than not accounting for intermittency.
by the_af | 2025-09-12 19:31:53+00:00
What a bizarre objection.

> Modeling is concerned only with attaining the necessary accuracy. Not conforming to a methodology.

Maybe to you. More in general, your claim is simply wrong.

This is actually answered in TFA:

> Constraints: Let's set some constraints for how we're allowed to model our creation. These are self-imposed limitations that fit my preferred-style for model design:

> Why constraints? It may feel weird to impose constraints on an art. However, I find that these constraints encourage a better designed model that can be assembled easily and predictably, including by others.

It's ok if you disagree with this because you enjoy your model-making in a different way. The author explained why they chose this path, and it makes sense: a lot of art is about constrains ("don't do digital", "use only 2 colors", "origami without any cuts", etc).
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-12 19:31:54+00:00
It's not uncommon when you want variable length encodings to write the number of extension bytes used in unary encoding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

and also use whatever bits are left over encoding the length (which could be in 8 bit blocks so you write 1111/1111 10xx/xxxx to code 8 extension bytes) to encode the number. This is covered in this CS classic

https://archive.org/details/managinggigabyte0000witt

together with other methods that let you compress a text + a full text index for the text into less room than text and not even have to use a stopword list. As you say, UTF-8 does something similar in spirit but ASCII compatible and capable of fast synchronization if data is corrupted or truncated.
by ryao | 2025-09-12 19:32:11+00:00
Why mine uranium? Only about 4% of nuclear fuel is actually used before the fuel rods need replacement, which makes uranium highly recyclable. Given all of the “spent” fuel rods in storage, mining operations for additional uranium are unnecessary. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for millennia, provided we are willing to begin a recycling program.

Interestingly, the 4% actual “waste” is also quite valuable for industrial, scientific and medical purposes too. Radiation treatments for cancer, X-ray machines, etcetera all can use isotopes from it. This is not mentioning smoke detectors, betavoltaics and the numerous other useful things that can be made out of them. Deep space missions by NASA rely on betavoltaic power sources. Currently, there is a shortage, which has resulted in various missions being cancelled. Our failure to recycle “spent” nuclear fuel rods is a wasted opportunity.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-12 19:32:32+00:00
> Or any cardinal voting, such ask approval, ends up being a huge win.

I kind of dislike approval voting because it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode where the ballot looks like a first past the post ballot and then some non-trivial percentage of people don't realize they can vote for more than one candidate and you're back to being stuck with a two-party system. Whereas score makes it clear something's different but still only takes ten seconds to explain ("rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10").

> What I don't understand is how a lot of people will state both parties are corrupt and then also be party loyal.

Tribalism. People convince themselves that both options are bad but one is worse and then fight their own brothers who picked the other one.

But the lesser of evils is still evil and the ability to change your vote to the other team is the only leverage you have against either of them, so what happens if you relinquish it?

Given a decision between the devil you know and the devil you don't, choose the one that you have not tried.
by blueflow | 2025-09-12 19:33:02+00:00
So about the containers for radioactive waste: to use Germany as an example, there are mutliple(!) issues with the simple containers used in the interim storage site Asse, where they simply corroded and started leaking radioactive material. So "normal" containers just don't cut it. To effectively seal and shield so-called "High-level radioactive waste" (which is basically the used fuel rods from a nuclear power plant) the CASTOR containers are used. Those reduce the radiation to some extent - but still not enough for a human to be able to stand next to them without issue. And that is not taking into account that the fuel rods are HOT. As in thermally. (This is btw how you generate heat in a nuclear power plant - you just use the heat from the fuel rods to boil water.) To sum up: you have insanely thick steel (or copper) containers which are super hot. And big. And made from metal, which enjoys corroding in salt water. And like in Tschornobyl, used fuel rods can kill you with their radiation in a couple of minutes if you just stand close enough. Diluting something like this would obviously reduce the immediate danger, but then secondary radiation effects kick in which basically means an increase in cancer rate. So if you throw something like this in the sea, you would probably kill any sea life around (not to mention you would also boil the water probably) it and give cancer to the rest. And since the radioactive particles are now in the fish, which humans tend to eat a lot of, now pretty much all humans have it too.
by sailingparrot | 2025-09-12 19:33:14+00:00
Did you mean to type 25? 5 years ago LC challenge were as, if not more, prevalent than they are today. And a single interview for a job is not something I have seen ever after 15 years in the space (and a bunch of successful OSS projects I can showcase).

I actually have the feeling it’s not as hardcore as it used to be on average. E.g. OpenAI doesn’t have a straight up LC interview even though they probably are the most sought after company. Google and MS and others still do it, but it feel like it has less weight in the final feedback than it did before. Most en-vogue startup have also ditched it for real world coding excercices.

Probably due to the fact that LC has been thoroughly gamed and is even less a useful signal than it was before.

Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.
by Eric_WVGG | 2025-09-12 19:33:37+00:00
(just based on a little googling, don't shoot me if I'm wrong)

1 nuclear plant: 8 billion kilowatt hours/year

1 avg. wind turbine: 6 million kwh/yr, so 1300 turbines to match one nuke. It's obviously silly to bring up the Simpsons, but picturing 1300 turbines surrounding Springfield would be a funny visual gag.

Difficult to get numbers for solar plants because they vary wildly in size, but they seem to be commonly measured in tens of thousands, so napkin math suggest ~800,000 solar plants to match one nuclear plant.

Solar is awesome for reinforcing the grid and consumers; wind is neat but those turbines are only good for like twenty years. Nothing beats a nuke.
by simion314 | 2025-09-12 19:33:44+00:00
>one might reasonably assume that X-rated games fall into the "frequently fraudulent" category

There was no such evidence presented, all the evidence was that some christian extremists complained.

Sure your wife might see that you have a payment to pornhub and might not like it but you will not get on your credit card report the name of the game you bought from Steam or GOG so this fake excuse does not work like it would have worked with adult sites subscriptions.

But if there is evidence for Steam and GOG let me know, if somehow I missed the news and the chritian extemists were not the one that pressured VISA then also let me know.
by edbaskerville | 2025-09-12 19:34:03+00:00
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.

Check out:

https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
by nostrademons | 2025-09-12 19:34:06+00:00
For more on UTF-8's design, see Russ Cox's one-pager on it:

https://research.swtch.com/utf8

And Rob Pike's description of the history of how it was designed:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-12 19:34:17+00:00
What an idiotic whataboutism that has nothing to do with my main point. Because people who work for morally ambiguous projects might also be proud of their professional work, nobody working on anything else should be? Or what are you saying, because it seems a bit muddled.

Also, to answer specifically to these folks, maybe they shouldn't be morally, but if it made them personally proud, as far as quality of life FOR THEM personally goes, it's still a valid example. Morality and personal happiness aren't always directly connected in some people.
by HelloUsername | 2025-09-12 19:34:29+00:00
(you included a double link)

and yes the censorship is slowly showing its effects:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/valve-appear-to-be-blocking...

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-is-no-longer-allowin...

https://www.eurogamer.net/queer-developers-speak-out-as-adul...
by tastyfreeze | 2025-09-12 19:34:43+00:00
As a statement of how things should be, I agree. But it is not true in most states. When servers are paid the same as the minimum wage there is no separate tipped wage. The words you are looking for in a particular state's labor laws are "tipped wage" or "tip credit". There are many states where the employer can count the expected tips as part of the wage they pay. So, they pay the employee something like $2.13.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
by justin_justin62 | 2025-09-12 19:34:51+00:00
Summing up, a company that has no more ideas about how to innovate and resorting to tactics like "we improved last year's model by x (with x not so big or relevant to you, user), and if x is not good enough, we have also made it thinner".

Truly boring. But you can't pretend more from a boat manned by a boring captain, focused exclusively on money/market/stocks.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 19:34:54+00:00
> Russia is probably at its weakest relative to NATO

What NATO? The one that included the US? Have you not been paying attention to Trump directly stating that he might not honor Article 4 if he doesn't feel like it?

And let's be completely honest, I'd be willing to bet any amount of money that European governments would for their part completely decline to send any significant manpower to intervene if the US were attacked by China or North Korea. In spite of Article 4, public opinion would be that the US "deserves it" for its poor diplomacy and for electing Trump.

NATO is no longer relevant, sadly, unless the US makes a huge turnaround in its commitment to it. NATO is in 2 parts: America, and everybody else, and neither side any longer has a firm commitment to actually go to war for the other. So the relevant part of NATO is "all NATO countries except the US":

https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1cud48e/nato_...
by Tenemo | 2025-09-12 19:35:19+00:00
There's even a rocket emoji in server console.logs... There are memes with ChatGPT and rocket emojis as a sign of AI use. The whole repo looks super vibe-coded, emojis, abundance of redundant comments, all in perfect English and grammar, and the readme also has that "chatty" feel to it.

I'm not saying that using AI for take-home assignments is bad/unethical overall, but you need to be honest about it. If he was lying to them about not using any AI assistance to write all those emojis and folder structure map in the repo, then the CTO had a good nose and rightfully caught him.
by Animats | 2025-09-12 19:35:23+00:00
Right. That's one of the great features of UTF-8. You can move forwards and backwards through a UTF-8 string without having to start from the beginning.

Python has had troubles in this area. Because Python strings are indexable by character, CPython used wide characters. At one point you could pick 2-byte or 4-byte characters when building CPython. Then that switch was made automatic at run time. But it's still wide characters, not UTF-8. One emoji and your string size quadruples.

I would have been tempted to use UTF-8 internally. Indices into a string would be an opaque index type which behaved like an integer to the extent that you could add or subtract small integers, and that would move you through the string. If you actually converted the opaque type to a real integer, or tried to subscript the string directly, an index to the string would be generated. That's an unusual case. All the standard operations, including regular expressions, can work on a UTF-8 representation with opaque index objects.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-09-12 19:35:27+00:00
> If anything, the city TZ always felt off, like I was opting in to that specific city’s strange legal decisions or something.

that is exactly what time zones are for :) not being snarky (wasn't before either, i really love that blog!). but the whole reason for tz is to join the ever changing oddities of political bodies from one very specific region.
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-12 19:35:44+00:00
Can't reference a leak or incident specifically, but when Foxconn (a massive company with 3/4 million employees) had workers jumping from their dormitories and installed "suicide nets" the headlines were always "Apple factory..." - and I checked multiple sites at the time.

Even though quite literally every single piece of major western technology is assembled in Foxconn factories.

It's purely because dissing Apple brings clicks and people arguing on comment sections and social media posts.

--

And about 3rd party translation AI systems. Of course _I_ won't install suspicious ones, but how do you make sure Auntie Liz won't? If you provide an option to do so, grifters will get less tech literate folks to install any kind of crapware.
by luckylion | 2025-09-12 19:35:53+00:00
> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce

The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).

It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.
by AnEro | 2025-09-12 19:35:53+00:00
AI coding is mid(okay) yes, my main point is people use it and it's a good line of business right now for them. They expected bigger break throughs like gpt-2 to 3 to 4, and that's not happening so they have to lean on the other aspects of the business more.

The fact it is mid is why they are really needing all the other lines of business to work. AKA selling tokens to AI apps the specialize in other mid products, and limit the snakeoil AI products that are littering the market ruining AI's image of being the new catch all solution.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-09-12 19:36:43+00:00
If that's true and if today's frontier models are around 120 IQ (who knows if that is true, but let's run with it, source: https://www.trackingai.org/home) then we'll have an enormous number of ~135 IQ bots with nearly unlimited conscientiousness.

I can't even begin to understand what that would mean.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 19:37:04+00:00
There's an entire planet of jobs that have nothing to do with leetcode. I was talking about those, not FAANG stuff. Unfortunately I am not FAANG royalty.

>Of course some still do, like Anthropic were you have to have a perfect score to 4 leetcode questions, automatically judged with no human contact, the worst kind of interview.

Should be illegal honestly.