MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onlypassingthru | 2025-09-13 19:46:13+00:00
NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, has a bunch of programs that highlight small businesses across the country with owner/operators, many of whom who work well beyond the traditional retirement age. It's pretty common to see people in their 70's & 80's running a family business or working at one. These small business owners often have had entire careers elsewhere then come back to the family business for a second career in retirement age. Being the third/fourth/fifth generation owner of a small business is very common in these shows and not one has ever said it's the Omega 3's in their diet keeping them going.
by martin-t | 2025-09-13 19:46:31+00:00
And this is why I say that people are not and can not be equal, despite how uncomfortable it makes everyone.

Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.

The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.

Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.

I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.

And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-13 19:46:44+00:00
Germany didn't build any.

France built hardly any.

And that's the complete answer: we know how to build nuclear reactors quickly and cheaply.

Building only very few of different novel designs while slowly (or quickly) losing the industrial base to do so, for example by making it illegal to build more (or at all) is exactly how you don't do it.
by jama211 | 2025-09-13 19:47:22+00:00
Thank you for this, this along with many other comments have really helped me understand.

This isn’t a simple issue, and I think your basic common sense take now mostly aligns with mine (though correct me if I’m wrong) which is something along the lines of that we don’t have to be anti-nuclear specifically but we do have to be bearish because it has downsides that mean if we are going to use it for some specific use case we’d better be sure that the pros are significant to outweigh the natural cons it brings with it.
by Krisando | 2025-09-13 19:48:50+00:00
> I can tell you're not a parent, because if you were, you would know that basically none of the digital solutions provided by tech companies to facilitate gating adult material from children actually work or are in any way thoughtfully designed.

I can tell you Nintendo's parental controls work correctly. Even the eShop doesn't display any content not suitable for younger ages for accounts under the parental control restrictions if configured correctly.
by ojosilva | 2025-09-13 19:50:02+00:00
I've been on both ends of this workflow. Sales always wins.

"Wow. Well, I sure hope you don't get fired over this. Good luck. We'll scope it out and let you know how much time we'll need."

"We'll see."

The big-screen TV in the modern glass conference room showed the final slide: “Questions?”.

"I.. I'd like to add that this feature we sold is not in the product and we can't just go around adding features that Sales makes up out of the blue just... just to close a deal. I mean, we gotta plan these things, there's a procedure, we should get product involved..."

Head of Sales, interrupting: "Can't we, Jeff?"

Jeff, the middle-manager, shuffled his feet: "Uh. Yeah. Right. I think we shouldn't. Hey! Haste makes waste, that's what they say, right?"

Head of Sales: "Can't we Barbara?"

Barbara, the boss: "I don't know. Let me call Pradeep"

(Barbara presses the "huddle" button in Slack on her big iPhone. A few rings and a bored voice replies)

"Yeah?"

"Sorry to jump on you like this, Pradeep. Would you mind coming to meeting room seven for a second?"

Less than a minute later Pradeep walks in, his thick glasses casting a green hue over his eyes, his arrogant demeanor preceded him like a shadow.

"Pradeep, did you read the feature request I messaged you?"

"Yes."

"How fast can you do it"

"Just merged it this morning."
by enraged_camel | 2025-09-13 19:50:03+00:00
>> Geohot is easily a 99.999 percentile developer

Really?

"The best model of a programming AI is a compiler... You give it a prompt, which is “the code”, and it outputs a compiled version of that code. Sometimes you’ll use it interactively, giving updates to the prompt after it has returned code, but you find that, like most IDEs, this doesn’t work all that well and you are often better off adjusting the original prompt and “recompiling”."

Really?
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-13 19:50:18+00:00
I am something of a professional gatecrasher, which is a skill I picked up from a friend many years ago.

Interesting event happening as you’re walking past? Just walk on in, look like you belong, see where it goes. That or carry around a hi vis vest - they fold up tiny and can live in a jacket pocket unnoticeably, and they will allow you access anywhere. Occasionally I’ve had to doodle “STEWARD” or similar on the back. Back in the pocket once you’re in, or you’ll be rigging lighting or serving drinks.

Through this I have ended up with friends, work, and anecdotes galore.

I’ve also been chucked out of a few things but that’s definitely the minority - most of the time when people are like “so are you with the royal brigadiers…?” I’ll just say “no, I’m gatecrashing”, and they assume I’m joking until they realise I’m not, but by that point we’re already on our fourth round.
by OutOfHere | 2025-09-13 19:51:23+00:00
Even if he believed that himself, anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats. Read the audience. He knew what he was doing.

Let me document five very serious lies from him:

1. On Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble, Kirk repeatedly promoted the false claim that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy declared Floyd had died of an overdose.

2. Ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Kirk spread falsehoods about voter fraud, and immediately after Trump lost the 2020 election, Kirk promoted false and disproven claims of fraud in the election.

3. Kirk called the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches a "Democratic plot against Christianity".

4. In the 2020s, Kirk was a Christian nationalist who called the separation of Church and state in the United States a "fabrication".

5. Appearing at a Trump campaign rally in 2024, he said: "This is a Christian state. I'd like to see it stay that way."

There are innumerable more. For the record, the February 2023 Brookings Institution study found Kirk's podcast contained the second-highest proportion of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements among 36,603 episodes produced by 79 prominent political podcasters. [1]

Contrast it with the way in which truth is actually spread; it is by citing good-quality references.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/technology/podcasts-steve...
by breppp | 2025-09-13 19:51:40+00:00
Your post prompted me to reread everything after perviously reading social media processed information, and you are right, it's not clear cut. Especially once they redacted/not-redacted (actually read both in the same article) the bullet engravings story. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/charlie...)

However from what did seem credible I think this still looks left-wing motivated
by logicalmind | 2025-09-13 19:52:25+00:00
Let's not kid ourselves here. The arguments being made were often opinions on whether one set of people should be killed and another side being saved. For example, by stating the opinion that we should cut funding for Ukraine means that Ukrainian will die as a result. Saying thousands of people should be fired from their lifelong jobs in the federal government means you have had major and long-standing impacts to entire families (and there have been many suicides as a result. You can go on and on like this (Israel/Palestine for example).

Yes, these are just opinions and debate. But these are opinions and debates about the lives and deaths of real people. That doesn't justify him being killed, I don't support his killing in any way. But you can't just debate who lives and dies and push policy one way or another and then be shocked that the people being impacted by those opinions or decisions are going to want to cause violence towards you.
by comex | 2025-09-13 19:52:48+00:00
pthread_cancel is not a good design because it operates entirely separately from normal mechanisms of error handling and unwinding. (That is, if you’re using C. If you’re using C++ it can integrate with exception handling.)

A better approach would have been to mimic how kernels internally handle signals received during syscalls. Receiving a signal is supposed to cancel the syscall. But from the kernel’s perspective, a syscall implementation is just some code. It can call other functions, acquire locks, wait for conditions, and do anything else you would expect code to do. All of that needs to be cleanly cancelled and unwound to avoid breaking the rest of the system.

So it works like this: when a signal is sent to a thread, a persistent “interrupted” flag is set for that thread. Like with pthread_cancel, this doesn’t immediately interrupt the thread, but only has an effect once the thread calls one of a specific set of functions. For pthread_cancel, that set consists of a bunch of syscalls and other “cancellation points”. For kernel-internal code, it consists of most functions that wait for a condition. The difference is in what happens afterwards. In pthread_cancel’s case, the thread is immediately aborted with only designated cleanups running. In the kernel, the condition-waiting function simply returns an error code. The caller is expected to handle this like any other error code, i.e. by performing any necessary cleanup and then returning the same error code itself. This continues until the entire chain of calls has been unwound. Classic C manual error handling. It’s nothing special, but because interruption works the same way as regular error handling, it‘s more likely to “just work”. Once everything is unwound, the “interrupted” flag is cleared and the original signal can be handled.

(The error code for interruption is usually EINTR, but don’t confuse this with EINTR handling in userspace, which is a mess. The difference is because userspace generally doesn’t want to abort operations upon receiving EINTR, and because from userspace’s perspective there’s no persistent flag.)

pthread_cancel could have been designed the same way: cancellation points return an error code rather than forcibly unwinding. Admittedly, this system might not work quite as well in userspace as it does in kernels. Kernel code already needs to be scrupulous about proper error handling, whereas userspace code often just aborts if a syscall fails. Still, the system would work fine for well-written userspace code, which is more than can be said for pthread_cancel.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-13 19:52:56+00:00
Yeah, it was an escalating suggestion from what another host had put on the table, which was the once-far-right “if they refuse help, lock them up” (the missing step here that someone from the left-leaning-middle would want to perform, is being curious about why homeless people refuse help and seeing if that’s something we can address without the very-expensive and sharply illiberal [classical sense] step of imprisoning them) but I guess now we have to call that moderate right because even the part of the far right that’s within Fox News’ window is saying “do Nazi stuff”.

Granted, you’ve been hearing little suggestions like this for a long time from ordinary republican voters, if you’ve been in their spaces much, but hearing it from a host on the most popular “news” station in the country, with neither of his co-hosts even pausing to go “uh, haha, wait now” is… something else.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 19:54:37+00:00
Which for western construction creates a dataset weighted around ~1980. Not sure why that is relevant half a century later?

Instead taking the average of all modern western construction and we get close to 15 years.

With the recent insanely subsidies european projects being proposed even the initial timeline calls for a ~10 years build time. Assuming everything goes to plan.
by opo | 2025-09-13 19:55:07+00:00
>The great thing is that coal is not the alternative in 2025.

Unfortunately, there is a country that shut down nuclear power plants while they still have operating coal plants. Over time, coal use is declining in Germany, but that isn't the story so far in 2025:

>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office

>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...

Shutting nuclear power plants down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable... I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
by b112 | 2025-09-13 19:55:46+00:00
Improved manufacturing capability reduces the likelihood of early part failure, and better precision reduces wear on parts which interact. It's one piece of the puzzle. The more precise, the more consistent, the longer lasting. Material strength is inline with this, it's why I showed you the example of a ball point pen ball, which is about precision but also about material strength and material manufacturing purity.

What I've also shown is the past, until now. I've shown a culture still catching up to where we were in the 60s. And from that, I'm extrapolating that materials science makes improvements, and how.

And I'm saying that something like a fridge used to last longer, and it's been 65 years, and now they appear to fail more often. From that, I deduce that fridges should be lasting at least as long, if not longer, and that this is suspicious and indicative of a negative incentive for longevity.

Some materials may need to be replaced, quite assuredly. You seem stuck on the fact that "Wait, we don't have this now, therefore, there's no proof it ever could be". Show me, you say. Prove it. But this is of course unreasonable, for this is not my field, and I am clearly giving my opinion. However, what's happening is that there just isn't much research into longevity. Instead, the research is into short-term suitability, and warranty issues.

You cite that there are incentives in other areas. And indeed there are! But only to a point. There is low incentive to make cars last longer beyond a point, and the same holds true for products for the military. We've abated oxidization to a point, but further research, or more importantly implementation of that research, would only hinder sales on any front.

All that said, I don't think we're going to persuade each other of much beyond what we've said. You want proof, but all I'm willing to give you is deduced proof predicated upon my life experiences. Nothing will emerge beyond that.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 19:56:03+00:00
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

But nuclear is fast to build, if we ignore all modern western examples!
by ch_sm | 2025-09-13 19:56:10+00:00
their site says it’s 90% efficient [0], which is impressive, but I agree, still sub-optimal for large scale installations.

The other thing is that it needs to be perfectly aligned. If you can’t be bothered to plug in a cable, can you be bothered to align your SUV in your garage perfectly with a charge pad?

[0] https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2025/products/porsche-wirele...
by pfdietz | 2025-09-13 19:56:59+00:00
That's an alternative for the seasonal storage problem, and currently the cheapest one. That doesn't mean other alternatives don't exist, just that those alternatives are not currently competitive with fossil fuels.

One should not use this situation that those alternatives can't exist or be reasonably expected to exist, or that a system using them would be more expensive than a system using nuclear. If that were a valid argument, one could equally argue that because new nuclear cannot compete with natural gas combined cycle for baseload, new nuclear is not an option.
by roarcher | 2025-09-13 19:57:24+00:00
> Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am.

It's the size of the deal that matters. Most of the consumer goods you buy are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No individual sale is worth the vendor forming a "relationship" with that customer or promising bespoke features. B2B sales are often large deals that require months of negotiation and may be worth millions. Bullshitting in order to land the deal is incentivized on both sides, to the point where both only have a fuzzy idea of what exactly is being bought and sold.

But consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases. When I buy a car, maybe I fail to mention the unreported fender bender my trade-in was in, and maybe the salesman tries to charge me $1200 to etch "anti-theft tracking numbers" on the new car's windows, citing some dubious statistics about vehicle recovery rates.
by nataliste | 2025-09-13 19:57:25+00:00
They're just showing them the door: https://xkcd.com/1357/

The people getting fired have shown themselves to be exactly the types of people Popper warned about in his Paradox of Tolerance: they "begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."

These vigilantes are just socially (and constitutionally!) doing what Popper said to do when faced with those that teach people to answer arguments with bullets: "We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. It's called being a decent human being. As we say in America, if there’s a terrorist at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 terrorists.
by epistasis | 2025-09-13 19:57:41+00:00
Take all the land area that we currently devote to oil extraction, refining, delivery, etc.

Just that tiny amount of land is enough to supply the entire world's energy needs, if covered with solar panels.

Power line transmission losses are negligible. We don't need to put solar directly at the site, just as we don't need to put nuclear directly at the site of energy use. The round trip efficiency of energy storage is accounted for in the cost of the storage, whether that storage is hydro, battery, or hydrogen.

Solar really is the holy grail of energy: super cheap, super scalable big, super scalable small, and highly distributable or centralized. Pair that with the incredible cheapness of current batteries, and their falling prices in future years, and we are looking at a future of incredible energy abundance. As long as we are willing to accept it.
by rwmj | 2025-09-13 19:57:42+00:00
Sometimes. To give one counterexample, golang doesn't have a way to restart the threads it uses for I/O (apparently a decision the golang developers made), so if you're embedding golang code in another binary, it better not call fork. (The reason for this warning: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/2589e6da40939af9ae...)
by yardstick | 2025-09-13 19:58:10+00:00
It’s been decades, why doesn’t getaddrinfo have a standardised way to specify a timeout? Set a timeout to 10 seconds and life becomes a lot easier.

Yes I know in Linux you can set the timeout in a config file.

But really the dns setting should be configurable by the calling code. Some code requires fast lookups and doesn’t mind failing which, while others won’t mind waiting longer. It’s not a one size fits all thing.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-13 19:58:20+00:00
Gerrymandering has no effect on votes for president or senate, and ranked choice/range voting has no impact on gerrymandering. To eliminate gerrymandering you'd need to have an at-large/seat based voting system instead of district based. In other words - instead of voting for a representative, you'd vote for a party - and the party would then fill the seats they won at their discretion. Another option is multi-member districts which is a 'softer' version of the same idea.
by emergie | 2025-09-13 19:59:14+00:00
It would be nice if the site had an explanation why the decimal 0.1 has no finite representation in base-2 system. In short it's about factorization of the base of the system - base-2 lacks 5 that is present in base-10. It is analogous to 1/3 or 1/7 not having a finite representation in base-10 dot notation of a fraction.
by logicalmind | 2025-09-13 19:59:47+00:00
Having strongly held opinion on who lives and who dies are petty heavy opinions one might say, correct? Like just pushing the opinion on whether Palestine should or should not be wiped out means that you are advocating for the lives/deaths of one group of people or another?

I'm not saying people should necessarily die for their opinions. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that if your opinion, and the political policies you push for, literally result in the life or death of someone's family members, then those people may have very strong reactions to that.

Like if there was an entire town of purple people and I went around saying I want all people purple people to be killed, should I be surprised if purple people might want to cause violence towards me? I mean, I'm just debating and using words, right? But those words an debates are literally about the lives and deaths of other people.