MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Llamamoe | 2025-09-12 22:08:10+00:00
> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.

This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of energy than fossil fuels.

Meanwhile the amount of overregulation is extreme and often absurd. It's not a coincidence that most operational nuclear plants were built decades ago.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-12 22:08:59+00:00
> I'm not disagreeing with your general point but in the specific case of Bitcoin I can't think of any laws that have been passed which make it highly inconvenient to use relative to other financial assets.

The issue is that it's treated as a "financial asset" to begin with, which de facto inhibits its use as a currency. You want to pay for a sandwich with cash? Hand them bills, get sandwich. You want to pay with cryptocurrency? File securities paperwork. Who is going to do that?

By comparison, things like foreign currencies that float against the dollar aren't reported when the transaction amount is below a threshold.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 22:10:16+00:00
!!!! IMPORTANT COMMENT !!!!,

because the edit button is now gone:

I misspoke, 145 should have been my loose estimate for the median of actual working mathematicians and taken with many more grains of salt. Mathematics PhD students cluster around a much more attainable average of 128-130. Per [1] this would map to a much easier SAT score of only around 1280.

My general point still stands that you probably want to look at this and consider your potential career in math against this, but the skill curve is less punishing than I initially thought.

[1]: https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/satiq.aspx
by tannhaeuser | 2025-09-12 22:13:03+00:00
Here's an easy ad-hoc Prolog program for the first problem:

% Given a set of coin denominations, % find the minimum number of coins % required to make change. % IE for USA coinage and 37 cents, % the minimum number is four % (quarter, dime, 2 pennies). num(0). num(1). num(2). num(3). num(4). num(5). ?- num(Q), num(D), num(P), 37 is Q * 25 + D * 10 + P

You can just paste it into [1] to execute in the browser. Using 60 as target sum is more interesting as you can enumerate over two solutions.

(Posting again what I already posted two days ago [2] here)

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/browser-demo/browser-demo.htm...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45205030
by slt2021 | 2025-09-12 22:13:23+00:00
>>intentionally moved abroad for geopolitical reasons

not geopolitical, but economical. US corporations ran labor arbitrage by shipping $20/hr jobs to China that was paid ~$0.20/hr and pocketed profits (you can lookup S&P 500 chart)

USA got S&P500 chart going up

China got industrialization
by skydhash | 2025-09-12 22:13:26+00:00
The things is that languages that need intellisense that much are language that made it too easy to construct complex systems. For lisp and C, you can get autocompletion for free, and indexing to offer docs preview and signature can be done quite easily as well. There's also an incentive to keep things short and small.

Then you have Java and C# where you need a whole IDE if you're writing more than 10 lines. Because using anything brings the whole jungle with it.
by simianparrot | 2025-09-12 22:13:42+00:00
You’re literally visiting a service paid for by me. It’s open to the public, but it’s my domain and my server and I get to say “no thank you” to your visit if you don’t behave. You have no innate right to access the content I share.

Blocking misbehaving IP addresses isn’t new, and is another version of the same principle.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-09-12 22:14:24+00:00
Artificially increased is what's happening when you request a timeout of 0 and the browser always makes it 4 ms or more.

Imagine this code:

let value = 0; (function tick () { value += 1; console.log(value); setTimeout(tick, 1); })();

If you let `tick()` run for 1 second, what would you expect the `value` to be? Theoretically, it should be around 1,000, because all you're doing is running a function that increments the `value` and then puts itself back onto the execution queue after a 1 ms delay. But because of the 4 ms delay that browsers implement, you'll never see `value` go above 250, because the delay is being artificially increased.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-12 22:14:36+00:00
> It will take longer

Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?

Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.
by Yeul | 2025-09-12 22:14:36+00:00
After a high profile political assassination in the Netherlands (and this time it was a confirmed radical leftist) all mainstream politicians immediately banded together to keep democracy and the rule of law intact. Instinctively the media and politics knew that the nation was on a knife's edge. It was rally around the flag time.

When I compare that to how Trump and Fox behaves it doesn't bode well.
by apatheticonion | 2025-09-12 22:15:01+00:00
I've been writing Rust professionally for 3+ years and, to me, Rust has won.

These days I write almost everything in Rust and there are only two outlier situations;

- Environments where I can't use Rust effectively. Web (wasm is great but it's not there yet), Apple, Cloudflare workers/Cloudfront edge functions.

- Use cases where there aren't good tools for Rust (like web scraping, pdf manipulation, that sort of thing)
by pessimizer | 2025-09-12 22:15:10+00:00
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.

i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
by theptip | 2025-09-12 22:16:23+00:00
Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.

This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.

Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.
by sushisource | 2025-09-12 22:16:49+00:00
When I say "any language" when interviewing candidates, I mean it. I would be stoked if someone busted out J in an interview.

Of course, my team also writes SDKs in a bunch of different languages, so it makes sense. Even if that weren't the case though, I'd be stoked. To your point though, early in your career, I get your viewpoint. It's hard out there to get a foot in the door and you have to seize opportunities.
by arduanika | 2025-09-12 22:17:02+00:00
> If a podcaster (e.g. Sabine Hossenfelder) has a book, read the book (Lost in Math is pretty good) rather than watching the podcasts.

That's a good general takeaway, not just for physics drama. I can think of several people whose books are great or at least pretty good, but their social media presence is...Flanderized, would be a kind way of putting it.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-12 22:17:33+00:00
You have that you’re the founder of an AI company in your hacker news profile, and your take home looks completely vibe coded. Why in the world are you surprised that a hiring manager is a little suspicious about your coding skills?

Given what you’ve said in your other comments, it seems like you used AI in a way that I wouldn’t have a problem with but just briefly looking through I can see how it would look suspicious.
by lordnacho | 2025-09-12 22:17:53+00:00
I think what happens is, IQ is a sort of speed. They teach the class assuming they can get most people through it at whatever pace they are used to teaching at. If you're quick, you can keep up with a below average effort, and vice versa.

As you get higher and higher up in the stratosphere, the balance between "we need enough students" and "we need to go faster" ends up favouring the few super intelligent people, along with the people who can arrange their lives to put in the hours.

That's not to say you can't learn something if you are slow. You just can't learn it at the pace they are teaching, and you might not have the wherewithal to learn it at your own pace.

So to you it looks like this lady would never learn it, but I would guess if she had a personal tutor they would be able to pace it.
by V__ | 2025-09-12 22:18:27+00:00
> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.

It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.

> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.

True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.

> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.

> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment

Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.

> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.

The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.

> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.

Grid scale batteries solve this problem.
by jrk | 2025-09-12 22:18:44+00:00
Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.
by jcranmer | 2025-09-12 22:19:28+00:00
> UTF-16 is both simpler to parse and more compact than utf-8 when writing non-english characters.

UTF-8 and UTF-16 take the same number of characters to encode a non-BMP character or a character in the range U+0080-U+07FF (which includes most of the Latin supplements, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Thaana). For ASCII characters--which includes most whitespace and punctuation--UTF-8 takes half as much space as UTF-16, while characters in the range U+0800-U+FFFF, UTF-8 takes 50% more space than UTF-16. Thus, for most European languages, and even Arabic (which ain't European), UTF-8 is going to be more compact than UTF-16.

The Asian languages (CJK-based languages, Indic languages, and South-East Asian, largely) are the ones that are more compact in UTF-16 than UTF-8, but if you embed those languages in a context likely to have significant ASCII content--such as an HTML file--well, it turns out the UTF-8 still wins out!

> When you leave the anglosphere you'll find that some languages still default to other encodings due to how large utf-8 ends up for them (Chinese and Japanese, to name two).

You'll notice that the encodings that are used are not UTF-16 either. Also, my understanding is that China generally defaults to UTF-8 nowadays despite a government mandate to use GB18030 instead, so it's largely Japan that is the last redoubt of the anti-Unicode club.
by gpvos | 2025-09-12 22:19:54+00:00
You could even extend UTF-8 to make 0xFE and 0xFF valid starting bytes, with 6 and 7 following bytes each, and get 42 bits of space. I seem to remember Perl allowed that for a while in its v-strings notation.

Edit: just tested this, Perl still allows this, but with an extra twist: v-notation goes up to 2^63-1. From 2^31 to 2^36-1 is encoded as FE + 6 bytes, and everything above that is encoded as FF + 12 bytes; the largest value it allows is v9223372036854775807, which is encoded as FF 80 87 BF BF BF BF BF BF BF BF BF BF. It probably doesn't allow that one extra bit because v-notation doesn't work with negative integers.
by alain94040 | 2025-09-12 22:20:37+00:00
>This analysis would suggests a 2.7× speedup vs. hash tables: 128 bytes vs. 48 bytes of memory traffic per uint64

It's ok to waste bandwidth, it doesn't directly impact performance. However, the limitation you are hitting (which directly impacts performance) is the number of memory accesses you can do (per cycle for instance) and the latency of each memory access. With linear access, after some initial read, data is ready instantly for the CPU to consume. For scattered data (hash tables), you have to pay a penalty on every read.

So the bandwidth ratio is not the right factor to look at to estimate performance.
by philipkglass | 2025-09-12 22:21:38+00:00
Personally, I think that opening Steam's "New and Upcoming" and seeing nothing but low-quality porn games is bad.

Is this something that happens when you have a registered account? I don't have a Steam account. I opened https://store.steampowered.com/explore/upcoming/ in a private browser window and I see only one one game out of 20 tagged with "Nudity" / "Sexual content".
by j-bos | 2025-09-12 22:22:26+00:00
> Phrack reached out to Proton in private multiple times, and Proton ghosted them.

According to Proton's response in the linked reddit post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227356

They say: "Regarding Phrack’s claim on contacting our legal team 8 times: this is not true. We have only received two emails to our legal team inbox, last one on Sep 6 with a 48-hour deadline. This is unrealistic for a company the size of Proton, especially since the message was sent to our legal team inbox on a Saturday, rather than through the proper customer support channels."
by nsagent | 2025-09-12 22:22:28+00:00
I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings.

Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering).

Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin alias service. Any suggestions for easily porting all those accounts to a new provider? Manually changing each and every account to a new email seems painful.
by toss1 | 2025-09-12 22:23:27+00:00
It is not just racist, it also allows all kinds of exploitation and unethical practices.

I briefly worked for one such CEO in a major tech city. Core of Indian H1-B staff coders and about same amount of US white staff in both coding, customer-facing, and administrative roles. A lot of hiring was done rapidly. After less than six months the staff discovered the product being sold was basically a fraud (think summarization & classification of emails that could be handled by ChatGPT today, but back in early 2000s, the work was actually secretly being transmitted to staff in India every night, not the "AI" claimed). Of course, that was just one of the many layers of fractal dishonesty about that CEO and company.

So, within a few weeks the entire white staff quit. During the process of organizing to quit, we also found out we were at least the third wave of [all the white staff quitting]. Of course, through all of these waves of quitting all the H1-Bs stayed, because they had no choice.

Ironically, if it had been packaged honestly, it could have been a valuable and profitable service, but that wouldn't have been sellable to VCs (who were also being scammed).

So yes, cheaper, fully compliant with fraudulent practices, and racist to boot. A toxic brew.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-12 22:23:30+00:00
ARR only matters if your strategy isn't to add value by repeated returns to the VC trough. If you're on the hype train (blockchain, AI, VR, EVs, Rockets, cloud, RISC-V, etc.) your per-share price will be dominated by how much cash you can convince the next round's investors to throw down. In that case ARR is irrelevant because the (most likely) way your investors get cash is when you convince a liquid company to purchase your startup. Then your investors convert their share of your company into something else (most likely cash, but maybe also shares in a company that does care about ARR.)

It always seemed to me that ARR for a startup is anathema because it provides data about the company's eventual ability to drive revenue. If you get a lot of revenue, that's great. But if your revenue is weak, you have to spin a story about why the structure of the market is such that it's operations DON'T generate profit.

Not everyone shares this opinion.
by etblg | 2025-09-12 22:24:00+00:00
It's 60 days, not 2 weeks, and you can transfer an H1B over to a new job within that 60 days, or if you know you're going to be terminated (e.g. you're on a PIP) then you can transfer the H1B to a new employer anyway.

Wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to do so, but it's not an automatic deported from the country kind of deal.
by Razengan | 2025-09-12 22:24:21+00:00
A while ago I had caught up with the basics thanks to the legendary 3blue1brown and his playlist on Neural Networks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...

and other helpers like Artem Kirsanov:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmZmBKc7Lrs
by lazide | 2025-09-12 22:26:16+00:00
I’ve personally, repeatedly, and in writing seen HR actively discriminate against white men - as in refuse to hire them, and actively go out of their way to push them out due solely to their skin color and gender. At major fortune 50 companies. For years.

And I’m not the only one.

In fact, consent decrees with the DOL and at least one major fortune 50 (Google) explicitly required them to do so, to maintain ‘proportional representation with the population’ because of ‘over representation’. Meanwhile, Indian men got a free pass (for one example).

Trump is mostly bullshit, but he’s in power because of bullshit like this pissing people off. That is a threat to society.

Mostly because none of the things he’s doing are going to actually solve the problem but just get people angrier and angrier at each other. But the problem, at least at one point, was very real.
by nilslindemann | 2025-09-12 22:27:19+00:00
It does not account for a lot of things, for example insurance.

Quote from https://www.manager-magazin.de/finanzen/versicherungen/a-761... (Google translated):

Berlin – According to a study, comprehensive insurance against the risks of nuclear power would cause electricity prices to explode. According to calculations by actuaries, the premiums to be paid could cause electricity prices to rise more than forty-fold.

"Nuclear energy is ultimately uninsurable," said insurance expert Markus Rosenbaum on Wednesday in Berlin. If an insurance company wanted to build up sufficient premiums for a nuclear power plant within 50 years, for example, the remaining operating life of a reactor, it would have to charge 72 billion euros per year for liability insurance.

The German Renewable Energy Association (BEE) commissioned the "Leipzig Insurance Forums" to conduct the calculations even before the Fukushima reactor disaster. "The true costs of nuclear power are ignored and, in the event of a serious accident, are passed on to the public," said BEE Managing Director Björn Klusmann.
by j-bos | 2025-09-12 22:27:24+00:00
Trusting them is almost guaranteed, but it doesn't have to be, sort of. The clients are opensource so you literally clone, audit, and run the clients locally.

Full disclosure, I use Proton and overall trust them so unless I see strong evidence of abuse or lies on their part I'm inclined to post contextualizing comments on stuff like this, b/c well I don't wanna host my own mail server, at least not in prod.
by avianlyric | 2025-09-12 22:27:28+00:00
> This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Yeah the final outcome was pretty negligible, especially if we ignore to huge exclusion zone that can’t be occupied for a few hundred years.

But even in those disasters, we often got a lucky as we got unlucky. The worst of the disasters was often avoid by individuals taking extreme risks, or even losing their lives to prevent a greater disaster. Ultimately all of the disasters demonstrated that we’re not very good a reliably managing the risks associated with nuclear power.

Modern reactor designs are substantially safer and better than older reactors. But unfortunately we’ve not building reactors for a very long time, and we’ve lost a huge amount of knowledge and skill associated with building reactors. Which drives up the cost of nuclear reactors even further because of the huge cost of rediscovering all the lost knowledge and skill associated
by 76SlashDolphin | 2025-09-12 22:27:31+00:00
Really good questions, let's look at them one by one:

1. We are assuming that the user has done their due diligence verifying the authenticity of the MCP server, in the same way they need to verify them when adding an MCP server to Claude code or VSCode. The gateway protects against an attacker exploiting already installed standard MCP servers, not against malicious servers.

2. That's a very good question - while it is indeed non-deterministic, we have not seen a single case of it not showing the message. Sometimes the message gets mangled but it seems like most current LLMs take the MCP output quite seriously since that is their source of truth about the real world. Also, while the message could in theory not be shown, the offending tool call will still be blocked so the worst case is that the user is simply confused.

3. Currently we follow the trifecta very literally, as in every tool is classified into a subset of {reads private data, writes on behalf of user, reads publicly modifiable data}. We have an LLM classify each tool at MCP server load time and we cache these results based on whatever data the MCP server sends us. If there are any issues with the classification, you can go into the gateway dashboard and modify it however you like. We are planning on making a improvements to the classification down the line but we think it is currently solid enough and we would like to get it into users' hands to get some UX feedback before we add extra functionality.
by mhb | 2025-09-12 22:28:12+00:00
From this, it sounds like it hasn't been integrated into an imaging device yet:

"Record energy resolutions are achieved as 2.5% at 141 keV and 1.0% at 662 keV. Single photon imaging with single point and line 99mTc γ-ray sources showcases the high sensitivity of 0.13%~0.21% cps/Bq. Phantom imaging distinctly delineates individual column sources spaced 7 mm apart, indicative of an impressive spatial resolution of 3.2 mm. These findings lay the groundwork for integrating perovskite detectors into nuclear medicine γ-ray imaging systems, offering a balance of cost-effectiveness and superior performance."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63400-7