MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-09-13 00:38:37+00:00
> 1.) a set of World Book encyclopedias now costs $1,200, and 2.) many print resources aren’t as good as they used to be, if they are even still in print, since the market changed.

I bet you can get sufficient reference materials to cover the basics for much less than $1200 - used books exist and my 1987 Britannica covers a large chunk of human knowledge as long as you’re aware it’s a couple of decades old.
by Taek | 2025-09-13 00:38:49+00:00
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.

The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-13 00:39:41+00:00
> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.

Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.
by zenmac | 2025-09-13 00:40:09+00:00
well would being good if they specifically say thorium nuclear energy is clean energy!

Seems like the Chinese are picking up where US left off:

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/thorium-molten-salt-r...

Maybe the EU can pick that up too.

In context of that really makes one think if Nazis was on to something other than toothpaste?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thorium-toothpaste-als...
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-13 00:40:12+00:00
It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)

> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.

Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.

Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)

Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
by coredog64 | 2025-09-13 00:40:49+00:00
At Amazon how I saw this work out was that we hired African immigrants rather than ADOS African-Americans.

Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.

It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.
by erxam | 2025-09-13 00:41:14+00:00
Ok, so let me get this straight.

Some foreigner came into their country and tried to 'illuminate' the 'unwashed' masses via tearing down propaganda and was promptly thrown into some hellhole of a jail.

Seems to me like a normal thing to have happened. By the standards of the Global North, that is.

Doesn't seem meaningfully different from today's USA.
by ipaddr | 2025-09-13 00:41:37+00:00
Donating in public associates you with that charity. If that charity happens to be politically different from people in power it can use it against you.

We have to decide what kind of society we want. One with locks on doors or a world where that is illegal. Bad guys use locks and so do regular people. Taking away everyone's freedom and safety because it makes it easier to catch "bad guys" is not worth the tradeoffs in terms of safety / privacy or creating a society worth living in.
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 00:41:56+00:00
I'm in my 40s and I remember it very clearly. I'm not even American, but belief in freedom of speech was the norm both inside and outside of the USA.

If you don't, I would say it's because you've forgotten that the word "liberal" in American political discourse used to actually correspond at least vaguely to what traditional dictionaries, historically recognized classical liberal authors, encyclopedias of political thought, and basic logic and reason all used to agree on. As opposed to what it appears to mean now, which seems to be something approximately like "everything that's closer to what the DNC proposes than what the RNC proposes, at any given moment".
by tomhow | 2025-09-13 00:42:12+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I understand where you're coming from.

Our role is not to moderate for or against any "side" in a debate. Our role is to uphold the guidelines, so that anyone with a reasonable position on any topic has fair opportunity to express it.

My perception from moderating HN for years is that there is generally much more criticism toward companies (including/especially Silicon Valley companies) for exploiting H1Bs than there has been towards holders of those visas.

But if you see evidence that contradicts that (i.e., comments that are unkind towards visa-holders or that discuss them in any way that breaks the guidelines), you can certainly flag them and email us so we can take a look. We can only moderate what we see and there's a lot of stuff that we don't see.

If there are patterns or trends of these kinds of comments, then the more you can show us, the better, so we can develop approaches to identifying and dealing with them.
by const_cast | 2025-09-13 00:43:32+00:00
The main argument for privacy is that a lack of privacy is the primary vehicle of crimes against humanity.

When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.

Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.

The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.

What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?

What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?

Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.

You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"

Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.

You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"

As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.
by cryo28 | 2025-09-13 00:43:48+00:00
And what percentage of H-1Bs are these PhDs with groundbreaking research backgrounds? The vast majority of the H-1Bs are hired by a handful of consulting firms (mostly indian) to do mundate SWE/IT jobs that don't require any special skills but a few months of bootcamp.

Also, don't forget that truly exceptional researchers can self-file for green-card using national interest waiver categories: EB1NIW, EB2NIW don't require employee sponsorship.

So, I think your point is moot.
by strawhatguy | 2025-09-13 00:44:22+00:00
I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.

So what’s the total supply?

LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.

I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.
by mjevans | 2025-09-13 00:45:04+00:00
They can happen to _be_ Unicode. Composition operations (for fully terminated Unicode strings) should work, but require eventual normalization.

That's the other part of the resume UTF8 strings mid way, even combining broken strings still results in all the good characters present.

Substring operations are more dicey; those should be operating with known strings. In pathological cases they might operate against portions of Unicode bits... but that's as silly as using raw pointers and directly mangling the bytes without any protection or design plans.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-09-13 00:45:16+00:00
Read that a few times back then as well, but that and other pieces of the day never told you how to actually write a program that supported Unicode. Just facts about it.

So I went around fixing UnicodeErrors in Python at random, for years, despite knowing all that stuff. It wasn't until I read Batchelder's piece on the "Unicode Sandwich," about a decade later that I finally learned how to write a program to support it properly, rather than playing whack-a-mole.
by eek2121 | 2025-09-13 00:45:48+00:00
Proton does not require a shred of proof that you are a real human being either, fyi. I'm not actually attacking them for this specifically, because I feel that we need privacy focused tools, however the fact that I was able to create a few hundred proton email addresses in seconds by injecting usernames/passwords was scary, even to me. I'm surprised they aren't on spam block lists worldwide. Their captcha is child's play that a script can defeat with simple image examination. i encourage them to buff up their spam controls, just a bit, and decrease moderation by a lot unless they can promptly deal with cases such as this.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-09-13 00:46:17+00:00
> At this point, I feel like I can protect the latter from being exploited better than the former.

I expect that your future CVEs will say otherwise. People outside your organization have seen those library dependencies, and can update them when they discover bugs or security issues, and you can automatically audit a codebase to make sure it's using a secure version of each dependency.

Bespoke AI-generated code will have bespoke bugs and bespoke security issues.
by Stratus3D | 2025-09-13 00:46:35+00:00
I recently participated in a hackathon, and our project was centered around PostGIS. We wanted to work with our queries in a more interactive way without having to fiddle with frontend stuff, so I did a very cursory search and found QGIS. It allowed us to iterate faster and instantly became an invaluable tool. The ability to run SQL queries and see and compare queries results visually saved us days of work.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-13 00:46:43+00:00
> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.

At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 00:46:47+00:00
> Fundamentally, government is violence.

Is this like how libertarians say that taxation is theft?

> One common formulation is that the government has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Sure. Your conclusion doesn't follow from this, however.

> but we've shown that there is such a thing as a legitimate use of violence in response to speech.

Even taking all the rest of your reasoning for granted, this doesn't seem relevant. TFA is explicitly about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk did not make threats, certainly not per the definition of "threat" that your argument relies upon.
by frotaur | 2025-09-13 00:48:29+00:00
I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.

So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-13 00:48:53+00:00
> A retained mode GUI looks like a hierarchy to me, how do you say it isn't?

The problem with retained mode GUIs is that, while the widget tree is, well, a a nice hierarchical tree, the widgets and the data model often need mutable references to each other, and it's these cross-references that break the tree-based ownership model of Rust.
by stavros | 2025-09-13 00:50:16+00:00
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We'll invest in your baby even before it's born! Simply accept our $10,000 now, and we'll own 30% of what your child makes in its lifetime. The womb is a hostile environment where the fetus needs to fight for survival, and a baby that actually manages to be born has the kind of can-do attitude and fierce determination and grit we're looking for in a founder.
by safercplusplus | 2025-09-13 00:50:31+00:00
> From what I'm aware of, Rust has poor ergonomics for programs that have non-hierarchical ownership model (ie. not representable by trees)

Yeah, non-hierarchical references don't really lend themselves to static safety enforcement, so the question is what kind of run-time support the language has for non-hierarchical references. But here Rust has a disadvantage in that its moves are (necessarily) trivial and destructive.

For example, the scpptool-enforced memory-safe subset of C++ has non-owning smart pointers that safely support non-hierarchical (and even cyclical) referencing.

They work by wrapping the target object's type in a transparent wrapper that adds a destructor that informs any targeting smart pointers that the object is about to become invalid (or, optionally, any other action that can ensure memory safety). (You can avoid needing to wrap the target object's type by using a "proxy" object.)

Since they're non-owning, these smart pointers don't impose any restrictions on when/where/how they, or their target objects, are allocated, and can be used more-or-less as drop-in replacements for raw pointers.

Unfortunately, this technique can't be duplicated in Rust. One reason being that in Rust, if an object is moved, its original memory location becomes invalid without any destructor/drop function being called. So there's no opportunity to inform any targeting (smart) pointers of the invalidation. So, as you noted, the options in Rust are less optimal. (Not just "ergonomically", but in terms of performance, memory efficiency, and/or correctness checking.) And they're intrusive. They require that the target objects be allocated in certain ways.

Rust's policy of moves being (necessarily) trivial and destructive has some advantages, but it is not required (or arguably even helpful) for achieving "minimal-overhead" memory safety. And it comes with this significant cost in terms of non-hierarchical references.

So it seems to me that, at least in theory, an enforced memory-safe subset of C++, that does not add any requirements regarding moves being trivial or destructive, would be a more natural progression from traditional C++.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-13 00:50:54+00:00
Post that stuff with a content warning, would you?

> The base EBCDIC characters and control characters in UTF-EBCDIC are the same single byte codepoint as EBCDIC CCSID 1047 while all other characters are represented by multiple bytes where each byte is not one of the invariant EBCDIC characters. Therefore, legacy applications could simply ignore codepoints that are not recognized.

Dear god.
by erxam | 2025-09-13 00:53:42+00:00
It's funny seeing how the same people who scream and whine about the media being 'biased' whenever they report on some awful shit that Trump did (even when it actually indirectly paints him positively) will unquestionably believe absolutely everything the media reports about North Korea.

Oh, sure, they're not directly state-owned news (except NPR and the BBC etc. etc.).

They're just owned by the owners of the state.
by remarkEon | 2025-09-13 00:53:44+00:00
No it isn’t.

There are two instances on this website where supply and demand seemingly do not apply. Wages in tech engineering, and housing costs. Specific carve outs are always made to make the conclusion that, for some reason, this positive supply (workers) and demand (housing) shock has no or marginal impact on wages and housing respectively. It’s very odd since most here work in roles where supply and demand of course apply so it’s not like people are unfamiliar with the math here.
by wrp | 2025-09-13 00:53:45+00:00
I need to call out a myth about UTF-8. Tools built to assume UTF-8 are not backwards compatible with ASCII. An encoding INCLUDES but also EXCLUDES. When a tool is set to use UTF-8, it will process an ASCII stream, but it will not filter out non-ASCII.

I still use some tools that assume ASCII input. For many years now, Linux tools have been removing the ability to specify default ASCII, leaving UTF-8 as the only relevant choice. This has caused me extra work, because if the data processing chain goes through these tools, I have to manually inspect the data for non-ASCII noise that has been introduced. I mostly use those older tools on Windows now, because most Windows tools still allow you to set default ASCII.
by pgustafs | 2025-09-13 00:53:55+00:00
Nah, just study linear algebra (Shilov or Hoffman & Kunze) and baby Rudin. Then read the most famous books in geometry, analysis, and algebra (do proofs + get a mentor). All these roadmap things are meaningless. It’s like “how to join the NBA.” Lift weight, condition, and practice fundamentals. Nothing else matters.
by fakedang | 2025-09-13 00:54:42+00:00
> Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.

Europe actually has had more direct export of the jobs. No need of specialist visas when the jobs were already exported away to EE. The EU allowed for companies to arbitrage away tech jobs to relatively poorer countries in the EU. And there's very little need for native top talent as there's very little native innovation happening within the EU in software - it's only a fraction of the amount happening in the US. And that's why those who can often tend to work for American companies in the EU, or migrate if they can.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-13 00:55:19+00:00
I literally think he explicitly said that because I have seen him explicitly saying that, vert clearly, while contrasting it with something else. There was nothing off the cuff about it; agree with it or not, it was obviously a position into which thought had beten put and which had a clear rationale and important place in his world-view.

Now, there’s probably an argument that could be made that at least some of what people are trying to suggest by pointing to his rejection of empathy is contradicted by his support of sympathy in the same statement. But to make that argument, you’d have to not be doing the same kind of shallow tribal reaction posting that ignores facts and substance that you are accusing others of.
by lumost | 2025-09-13 00:56:02+00:00
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.

The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
by elwebmaster | 2025-09-13 00:56:10+00:00
TLDR the chat.tools.autoApprove VSCode setting which enables autonomous agent behavior is now moved to chat.tools.global.autoApprove and is behind a scary warning a la Mac's "I can't run this program" for unsigned binaries. For those who don't know, this setting, AKA "YOLO mode", enables the agent to use its tools without asking for permission every step of the way. It changes your role from "LLM babysitter" to a pilot with auto-pilot on who can sit back and enjoy the flight. Now VSCode will also repeat "Auto approved by setting chat.tools.global.autoApprove" after every tool use in the chat like a parrot that just won't shut the f up.
by jpctan | 2025-09-13 00:56:20+00:00
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by eek2121 | 2025-09-13 00:56:44+00:00
leetcode just shows why interviews are broken. As a former senior dev (retired now, thanks to almost dying) I can tell you that the ability to write code is like 5% of the job. Every interview I've ever attended has wasted gazillions of dollars and has robbed the company of 10X that amount.

Until companies can focus on things like problem solving, brainstorming, working as a team, etc. the situation won't improve. If I am wrong, why is it that the vast majority of my senior dev and dev management career involved the things I just mentioned?

(I had to leave the field, sadly, due to disability)

Oh and HR needs to stop using software to filter. Maybe ask for ID or something, however, the filters are flagging everyone and the software is sinking the ship, with you all with it.
by silver_silver | 2025-09-13 00:57:13+00:00
“Works on my machine” actually isn’t a good enough response in this case, or to the comment about the video of the man being shot. LLMs are infamously easy to jailbreak and children are very good at getting around guardrails. You should at the very least be doing intense adversarial prompt testing but honestly this idea is just inherently poorly thought out. I guarantee you it’s going to expose children to harmful content
by kstrauser | 2025-09-13 00:57:20+00:00
I get all that, I really do. And I know America/LA is a reasonable pick: it’s a large, well known city nearby that’s always going to be at the same time I am when I’m at home.

Still feels weird, though. What if LA specifically passes a time zone law so that now it’s sometimes wrong for everyone else in California. Do we add an America/Cali_except_LA zone?

That’s probably hypothetical. It seems unlikely. But what a major pain in the ass if it did happen?