MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-09-13 01:53:57+00:00
> No emojis and any effort to be comprehensive? Everyone complains "what is this wall of text", or "this is industry not grad school so cut it out with the fancy stuff" or "no one spends that much time on anything and it must be AI generated". (Frequently just a way of saying that they hate to read, and naively believe that even irreducibly complex stuff is actually simple).

> Stuff that's got emojis, a friendly casual tone and isn't information dense? Well that's very chatty and cute, it also has to be AI and can't be valuable.

As a counterpoint, I can confidently say that I've never once had anyone give any feedback to me on the presence or absence of emojis in code I've written, whether for an interview, work, or personal projects, and I've never had anyone accuse my documentation of being AI generated or gotten feedback in an interview that my code didn't have enough documentation. There's a pretty wide spectrum between "indistinguishable from what I get when I give an LLM the same assignment as my interviewee" and "lacking any sort of human-readable documentation whatsoever".
by simpaticoder | 2025-09-13 01:54:30+00:00
I see lots of good ideas about changing the selection process. Another option is to change is to change the new hire process and require employers to advertise every recent H1B hiring decision for 60 days, including job description and resume. Then a native with an equal or better resume, and a willingness to fill the role, can raise their hand and offer to replace that person. If a native with a better resume is denied, then it is a cause for action against the employer (ideally a fine paid to the applicant that would at least fund further search time). Repeated violations would result in wholesale revocation of H1B access.
by chrishare | 2025-09-13 01:54:50+00:00
Their contribution to opensouurce and open research is far behind other organisations like Meta and Mistral, as welcome as their recent model release is. Former security researchers like Jan Leike commonly cite a lack of organisational focus on security as a reason for leaving.

Not sure specifically what the commenter is referring to re: scammy, but things like the Scarlett Johansson / Her voice imitation and copyright infringement come to mind for me.
by dmbche | 2025-09-13 01:56:22+00:00
If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources.

10/10 couldn't recommend more.

I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-13 01:58:22+00:00
> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power.

But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed.

> It’s a lot more than that, and far from the only cost mentioned. It’s pumps, control systems, safety systems

These things should all costs thousands of dollars, not billions of dollars.

> loss of thermal efficiency, slower startup times, loss of more energy on shutdown, etc.

These are operating costs rather than construction costs and are already accounted for in the comparison of fuel costs.

> Highways don’t use expensive materials yet they end up costing quite a lot to build. Scale matters.

5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant. We both know which one costs more -- and highways themselves cost more than they should because the government overpays for everything.

> Contamination with newly spent nuclear fuel = not something you want to move on a highway.

Is this actually a problem? It's not a truck full of gamma emitters, it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source. Isn't this solvable with a lead-lined box?

> Taxpayers are stuck with the bill, but that bill doesn’t go away it’s just an implied subsidy.

Have taxpayers actually paid anything here at all? The power plants have paid more in premiums than they've ever filed in claims, haven't they?

> You could hypothetically spend 5 billion building a cheap power plant rather than 20+ billion seen in some boondoggles but then get stuck with cleanup costs after a week.

You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day. You could hypothetically build a single wind turbine that shorts out and starts a massive wildfire.
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-09-13 01:59:37+00:00
Unfortunately, I have heard logic like this throughout my life, leading me to decide that because I struggled with (some subset of) math, I am not an intelligent person, which led to forcing myself to do pure math in college to prove my intelligence. This led to many significant and awful mental health issues. While this is a bit of a fallacious logical leap, it's not impossible that other people have went through this because of this sort of information being hammered into their head.

I choose to believe succeeding at anything is mostly about persistence and interest, barring other immense structural factors. I have zero interest after doing difficult pure math classes, so I stopped. I now think I am good at what I do, but everyone's intelligence and interests are different.

I think this sort of quantification of intelligence is really harmful to people. I don't want to exclude people from pursuing their interest because their SAT score wasn't high enough. I have met math PhD students with bad GPAs and poor math class grades in their undergrad.

On a tangent, CS undergraduate programs are insanely competitive and filter in crazy ways, and most of my friends who were passionate about CS (especially systems CS and SWE) did ECE just to avoid the competition and dispassionate culture. Your GPA and SAT scores had to be insane to get into almost any undergrad school for CS.
by em-bee | 2025-09-13 01:59:58+00:00
not being distracted is the whole point. if i have everything in a window, then i would have 20 windows. that would be distracting. with tmux i only have one visible window and all other windows are hidden, and i switch to the window i want to use. (ok, i could do that with gui windows too, i am just making a point)

these things are open because otherwise i would have to open them and close them every time i want to use them. by keeping them open i can switch back and forth faster. but, while i am not using them they are invisible. and i don't notice that they are there.
by johnklos | 2025-09-13 02:00:38+00:00
The true value of a company can be measured by our ability to communicate with them. If we can't communicate except after public outrage, then what does that say about the company?

Here's a genuine question: is Proton Mail the least shitty of companies that provide email services?

I self-host email and will continue until I die. But for others who need a company to do this for them, is Proton Mail the least shitty of options? Does this change the evaluation? I'm genuinely curious about the opinion of others here.
by maxlin | 2025-09-13 02:00:53+00:00
The problem with all kinds of "green" movements and such is that they only _demand_ solutions without being involved. That also means they might have very little idea if their premise is even valid, they just put all their energy towards organization, making signs n stuff and are very emotion-driven.

People thinking fission reactors might randomly explode like nuclear bombs Simpsons-style and so many green parties in Europe being anti-nuclear has held progress back too much. Minimal climate activism isn't bad, but they really bit hard in to the fork on this one.
by Reason077 | 2025-09-13 02:02:34+00:00
The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:

~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.

~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100

~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100

~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.

It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".

Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...
by roenxi | 2025-09-13 02:03:35+00:00
Authoritarian overreach is itself a routine and widely accepted aspect of democratic governments. Authoritarians get 1 vote/person, same as everyone else. They're allowed to advocate for policies and score the occasional outrageous political win, just like everyone else. There are a lot of them out there and they are a significant political force.

Something being routine and done democratically is no defence at all of it being liberal or in line with the principle of property rights. Or even of it being legal in a lot of instances, democratic governments lose legal challenges quite regularly.

And in this case, attacks on private transactions are absolutely unreasonable authoritarian overreach. The government doesn't need to surveil people when they have no reason to suspect those people of wrongdoing.
by komali2 | 2025-09-13 02:04:50+00:00
I'm not clear what you mean when you say "he identified as antifa" because it sounds like you're saying he identified as some member of some club called antifa. I've noticed that USA politicians often use this mythical "antifa" entity as a scapegoat and I fear you might have fallen into this usage pattern inadvertently?

As an anti fascist that uses to run black lives matter protests, whoever these antifa folks are they never invited me to their club!
by geoka9 | 2025-09-13 02:05:04+00:00
It just goes to show how skewed the power balance is right now. People are probably afraid to make an extra move that can deduct points for any obscure reason.

When I interview people I encourage them to ask any question they want and I make damned sure it doesn't reflect in my report to the higher-ups! Just imagine being in their shoes, you could be in the same position tomorrow!
by derangedHorse | 2025-09-13 02:06:44+00:00
> what the thing is worth

This is subjective. Value is subjective. This is taught in many introductory economics classes.

> an orange has some minimum price, because if nothing else it's composed of matter and so can weight things down

You talk as if "minimum price" is objective. The "minimum price" you're referring to here is the most useless, but valued, property of the object for you. For other people, having weight can be a burden.

> If bitcoin is useless to transact, then its intrinsic worth is zero, so its price is 100% speculative

Again you speak as if as if everyone assumes the same value system as you, but differ only in a penchant for gambling in the form of price speculation.
by shit_game | 2025-09-13 02:07:12+00:00
Plenty of incredible works of art and story telling use glitch art to evoke feelings and notions of "brokenness" or surreality. Some pieces that come to mind are Adventure Time S5E15: A Glitch is a Glitch, created by artist David OReilly[0] and the music video for A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High made by editor Uncle Luc[1].

This of course doesnt even begin to touch on the influences glitch art has had on music and audio - it's arguable that glitch art has its origins in printing, photography/film, and in electronic music, but most deliberate uses of "glitches" as artistic vehicles tended to arise during the early eras of electronic music production. Rosa Menkman speaks in depth about the origins of glitch art in the music scene in her paper The Glitch Moment(um)[2].

0. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/25/datamoshing-land-o...

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7gP_IW-1w

2. https://mediarep.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b16c898a-c6b...
by necovek | 2025-09-13 02:08:21+00:00
That says roughly the following when applied to UTF-8:

"The base ASCII characters and control characters in UTF-8 are the same single byte codepoint as ISO-8859-1 while all other characters are represented by multiple bytes where each byte is not one of the invariant ASCII characters. Therefore, legacy applications could simply ignore codepoints that are not recognized."

(I know nothing of EBCDIC, but this seems to mirror UTF-8 design)
by atonse | 2025-09-13 02:09:03+00:00
Without getting bogged down in rigid definitions of phrases, do we both agree that this is about the application of deeper technical concepts and algorithms (usually taught as part of a computer science curriculum) towards real world problems than the normal “build this login form” or “write these 5 queries to generate this report that shows up in an html table” that 75% of devs do daily?
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-09-13 02:09:53+00:00
Or just require H1B workers to be paid above average (by some factor) for the position. Average pay for <workplace> is 50k? If you want a foreign worker, you must pay them at least (eg.) 1.2x the average, so 60k. This solves the problem of abuse (since they'll probably find a local for 55k), and solve the genuine need for foreign workers in areas where there are not enough locals (eg. touristy areas needing tourist workers) ... at a bit higher price of course.
by Spivak | 2025-09-13 02:10:20+00:00
Well yeah, because when you have a much larger working population you have to actually establish rights at the government level or with unions rather than relying on your individual bargaining power.

The two philosophies are not only not incompatible but are necessary to maintain our standard of living. Closed borders, protectionism, and relying on individual bargaining power is another path to a similar end so long as you can keep the US on top.
by overfeed | 2025-09-13 02:11:22+00:00
I'll go out on a limb and say it: it's an American cybersecurity agency. Proton's CEO/Proton[1] loves the current US admin. I wouldn't be surprised if they comply now and ask questions later, if at all.

1. According to the now-deleted Reddit comment from the official Proton account glazing Republicans, so I assume they were speaking on behalf of all of Proton. https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru.... I have zero evidence except for the CEOs questionable public statements, but I wouldn't be surprised if Proton turned out to be the 21st century Crypto AG.
by stubish | 2025-09-13 02:12:37+00:00
Even if you stored the timezone, the values are technically ambiguous. Even when you are using globally unique timezone identifiers like 'America/New_York' instead of 'EST' and its several meanings. A timestamp such as '2025-09-13 13:00 America/New_York' could end up referring to a different instant next week due to a correction in the timezone database. Unlikely for this sort of problem to happen and need correcting in major timezones, but it has happened for less popular and historical timezones. The way for them to be non-ambiguous, representing an unchangable instant in time, is to store the timestamp converted to a timezone that will never have retroactive changes and has no daylight savings time transitions, such as UTC. At which point, storing the timezone identifier is redundant (and violates the principle of not allowing illegal values to be represented if you follow that).
by STARTUPDoD | 2025-09-13 02:12:58+00:00
Hey everyone. I wanted to submit a post letting everyone know I’ve been writing a weekly analysis to help early stage startups looking to enter the defense space and may need some insights regarding frameworks for navigating the procurement process.

I’ve kept it open and free and the feedback has been great and would like to invite everyone here to take a look if you are innovating in the national security space or plan to. Feedback is always welcome and would love to know what I can add based on your current challenges.

I’m also open to contributing and helping those who need it.

Also feel free to connect on LI as well and DM with questions

Thank you for the support

Ross https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossfacione?utm_source=share&utm...
by raincole | 2025-09-13 02:13:26+00:00
> memorizing fastest algos

I don't think most LC problems require you to do that. Actually most of them I've seen only require basic concepts taught in Introduction to Algorithms like shortest path, dynamic programming, binary search, etc. I think the only reason LC problems stress people out is time limit.

I've never seen a leetcode problem that requires you to know how to hand code an ever so slightly exotic algorithm / data structure like Fibonacci heap or Strassen matrix multiplication. The benefit of these "fastest algos" is too small to be measured by LC's automatic system anyway. Has that changed?

My personal issue with LC is that it has a very narrow view of what "fast" programs look like, like most competitive programming problem sets. In real world fast programs are fast usually because we distribute the workload across machines, across GPU and CPU, have cache-friendly memory alignment or sometimes just design clever UI tricks that make slow parts less noticeable.
by tomhow | 2025-09-13 02:15:38+00:00
You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by rancar2 | 2025-09-13 02:15:56+00:00
The thesis was dated prior to the hard tech wave, and it is a perfect time to update it as Boston has a lot of the talent. Plus, Link Ventures is based in Boston with $1B AUM focused on AI. We have the talent here in Boston. That said I’m biased though as a cofounder one of our lovely local AI groups, and I used to have board meetings every two weeks with the Link Ventures executive team at my last startup.
by shit_game | 2025-09-13 02:16:25+00:00
The best way I've come to describe glitch art in my papers or talks with peers is that a "glitch" in the context of glitch art is the deliberate abuse of a format of media, taking advantage of either noise, compression schemes, or undefined behavior to produce media that would otherwise not exist (due to contraints of, say, a compression algorithm and a binary format like JPEG), or to reproduce media that is discarded by these (and other) mechanisms of the format (The Ghost in the MP3[0] is a fantastic, and arguably the pioneering work in this regard).

Formats such as circuitbending are alien to me, as I primarily work with digital and occasionally analog photos and videos, but generally follow the same principles of breaking away from intended use of some set of rules to express illegal states.

0. https://www.theghostinthemp3.com/theghostinthemp3.html
by necovek | 2025-09-13 02:18:35+00:00
Most languages are well representable with 128 characters (7-bits) if you do not include English characters among those (eg. replace those 52 characters and some control/punctuation/symbols).

This is easily proven by the success of all the ISO-8859-*, Windows and IBM CP-* encodings, and all the *SCII (ISCII, YUSCII...) extensions — they fit one or more languages in the upper 128 characters.

It's mostly CJK out of large languages that fail to fit within 128 characters as a whole (though there are smaller languages too).
by foobar10000 | 2025-09-13 02:19:12+00:00
From what I understand, it is the STT engine that is the issue - and is in fact not a solved problem at all. Specifically, in a conversation where the microphones hear 3 people talking, 1 of them talking _at_ us, we need to pick out _that_ person only to translate.

If we were using Whisper in that pipeline, we could for example generate speaker embeddings for each segment whisper generates, then group by matching the speaker embeddings - and in reality, this doesn't really work all that well.

But we are still left with the question of _WHO_ to feed to the translation model - so, ideally, the person facing us or talking at us - so we'd have to classify the 3 people all talking to each other given their angle in relation to the listener's head, etc.. This is what the diarization model would have to do - and the more sophisticated diarization models certainly could use the precise angle input can only be computed if you have super-close timings.
by mjevans | 2025-09-13 02:19:53+00:00
TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team.

~

I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.

Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.

That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
by komali2 | 2025-09-13 02:21:16+00:00
What didn't you like about that part, just the depiction of violence while everyone watched and did nothing?

I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.

But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.

The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."

This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.

Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.
by pornel | 2025-09-13 02:28:15+00:00
Unicode wanted ability to losslessly roundtrip every other encoding, in order to be easy to partially adopt in a world where other encodings were still in use. It merged a bunch of different incomplete encodings that used competing approaches. That's why there are multiple ways of encoding the same characters, and there's no overall consistency to it. It's hard to say whether that was a mistake. This level of interoperability may have been necessary for Unicode to actually win, and not be another episode of https://xkcd.com/927