MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tguvot | 2025-09-12 20:24:40+00:00
one thing that wikipedia article dedicates 1 sentence and only in order to dismiss, it's that there was significant arab immigration into area when it got economic boost after the arrival of the jews.

there are estimates of 100k - 300k migrants in 20s and 30s as border with jordan and egypt was unsupervised.

somewhat indirect confirmation of this, will be for example hamas minister of interior and security claiming that most of them have either egyptian or saudi origins: https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-minister-interior-and-nationa...

a good chunk of actual palestinians are probably descendants of jews that got "culturally colonized" . but it's not known how much of them.

i looked in a past through a bunch of genetic studies that were made that establish that palestinians are genetically native/related to jews. what i didn't find is how they collected data and if they discarded data that was "inconvenient" for purpose of analysis
by hvb2 | 2025-09-12 20:25:07+00:00
> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter.

Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little.

Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with potentially huge transmission losses from distance
by 6r17 | 2025-09-12 20:25:27+00:00
I was about to ask if there is any way we can bridge the mathematics the same way we did with programming ; I love going-on with an LLM to learn math and apply them directly to problems I'm facing ; and to be honest I often feel like a musician who never actually learned his tuning lately ; especially in topics correlated to balancing, monitoring, and even simply in projection of cost ; It's like I have been over-focused on complexity of algorithms without actually realizing that it's only one part of the problem - so I have a huge potential usage of mathematics and one can really easily leverage them thanks to AI - especially considering tests ; but that's where my road ends without a more sophisticated approach - and even then it's a very dark place to wonder by (eg: lot of time spent for seemingly unknown appliance) it does however start to feel even more attracting for these exact reasons - I feel like having problems to solve with just makes this a lot easier - but I'd love to be able to ground-up things even more - and especially be able to take shortcuts.

I mean a lot of people just run a database but don't know wtf it does - but it still useful to them - maths however need to be understood to be really useful -

Is there not a way to make this lot more navigable ? Are there bridge concepts that are important enough that we can spend some time to learn them ? (there are ofc) - and how deep shall we go ?
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-12 20:25:33+00:00
> What is Mpc style swing?

You can get an explanation directly from the MPC 3000 manual [0].

> Does that mean you can push the swing beats all the way to the next time slice?

At least the original MPC series couldn't move the note to the next time slice. The maximum setting was 75%. That made the first note of each pair of 1/8 or 1/16 notes three times the length of the second note.

[0]: <https://www.manualslib.com/manual/207365/Akai-Mpc-3000.html?...>
by feoren | 2025-09-12 20:26:18+00:00
Okay, so reply with your credit card numbers, links to all your cell phone photos, your DNA test results, your passwords, and your medical history. What do you have to hide?

You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"

So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?

Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.
by uejfiweun | 2025-09-12 20:26:22+00:00
Completely agree with Cal but this just isn't going to happen. People's livelihoods depend on these platforms. They're extremely addictive. If one side retreats it only amplifies the voice of the other side. The only way something like a mass exodus from these platforms is possible is through legislation. But the platforms are so powerful and well funded and well lobbied that this is next to impossible. Expect things to get worse before they get better (if they do in fact eventually get better).
by coldtea | 2025-09-12 20:26:37+00:00
>But ... nobody should have faith in air defense for an area bigger than a few square kilometers. If anybody promises that, their only option is a separate air defense system for every few square kilometers.

It's not about their faith in air defense from the US. It's about their faith in the US defending them (not through air defense, through deterence, diplomacy, and so on), since it colluded with Israel to let it bomb their territory.

That said, not sure how much is the faith of their leaders "shaken". They probably already knew at the top level.
by mort96 | 2025-09-12 20:26:37+00:00
Who is "they"? Nintendo doesn't want it, sure. But why should we let Nintendo decide whether or not they want competitors? Why should the patent office not want a pokemon-like genre to exist?

It's not surprising that Nintendo wants to patent "summon creatures to fight for you" as a game mechanic, the surprising part is that the patent was granted.
by saghm | 2025-09-12 20:27:09+00:00
For sure! I've honestly never written Perl, but I still often end up sharing the "three virtues" with junior engineers I work with. There's a certain timeless quality to a lot of the stuff he's come up with. (Plus, those of us who don't write Perl still owe him a debt of gratitude even just for the `patch` utility!)
by nartho | 2025-09-12 20:27:43+00:00
Two things :

> The median IQ for mathematics PhD students probably hovers somewhere around 145

Does that mean the 145 figure is only a guess on your end ?

Second, as far as I know, an individual's IQ is not something set in stone, and can absolutely be improved with training. I remember reading (that's an anecdote so correct me if I'm wrong) that rewarding a good score with money was able to improve the outcome by up to 20 points. It doesn't sound absurd to me that someone with a slightly above average IQ could get close to 140 after 6, 7 years of high level math training.
by sockbot | 2025-09-12 20:28:02+00:00
This shit is infecting every news source. Even CBC yesterday put out this garbage headline "Charlie Kirk shot dead at university event, Trump says".

Who cares what Trump says. Responsible reporting would be getting the information from primary sources, not fettering responsibility for determining newsworthiness to whatever Trump says.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6897816
by beeflet | 2025-09-12 20:28:03+00:00
Primary heat on this scale isn't nessisarially a bad thing. It has a very small impact on the global power balance with respect to the effect global warming.

There are also lots of uses for waste heat. Nuclear plants tend to be paired with some sort of massive hydraulic engineering project, it turns out that a lot of animals like warm water.

I am pretty sure we can figure out how to store nuclear waste if given the opportunity.

>If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful

It's not very finite. There is a ton of it. Even the vast majority of the "waste" we produce could be recycled to produce more fuel.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-12 20:28:10+00:00
> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky.

None of this happens to be true.

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.

Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electricity, transmission (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

Making the more expensive part of a system several times more expensive to at best save a little bit on the cheaper part seems...foolish. It's like the old Murphy's law "a $300 picture tube will blow to protect a 3¢ fuse" translated into energy policy.

And whether LCOE is actually cheaper with intermittent renewables is at best debatable. Factor in system costs and it is no contest. Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment, with preferential treatment that allows them to pass on the costs of intermittency to the reliable producers and last not least fairly low grid penetration.

What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain. Since the #Spainout, the grid operator put the grid in "safe mode", which means no more than 60% intermittent renewables. Quick quiz: if that is "safe mode", what does that make >60% intermittent renewables?

Here the Finnish environment minister:

""If we consider the [consumption] growth figures, the question isn't whether it's wind or nuclear power. We need both," Mykkänen said at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

He added that Finland's newest nuclear reactor, Olkiluoto 3, enabled the expansion of the country's wind power infrastructure. Nuclear power, he said, is needed to counterbalance output fluctuations of wind turbines."

https://yle.fi/a/74-20136905

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.

While no energy source is completely safe, nuclear happens to be safest one we have.
by gnulinux | 2025-09-12 20:28:35+00:00
> "How Rust Won"

I love Rust, I'm a fan of writing it and I love the tooling. And I love to see it's (hopefully) getting more popular. Despite this, I'm not sure if "won" is the right word because to my very uneducated eyes there is still considerable amount of Rust not succeeding. Admittedly I don't write so much Rust (I should do more!) but when I do it always baffles me how tons of the libraries recommended online are ghost town. There are some really useful Rust libraries out there that weren't maintained for many years. It still feels like Rust ecosystem is not quite there to be called a "successful" language. Am I wrong? This is really not a criticism of Rust per se, I'm curious about the answer myself. I want to dedicate so much more time and resources on Rust, but I'm worries 5 to 10 years from now everything will be unmaintained. E.g. Haskell had a much more vibrant community before Rust came and decent amount of Haskellers moved to Rust.
by Matticus_Rex | 2025-09-12 20:28:53+00:00
You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time.

Under ALARA, nuclear literally isn't allowed to reduce market electric costs, because the requirements for reducing exposure scale to what keeps it competitive with other forms of production! If all other electric costs doubled tomorrow, the NRC would respond by raising the requirements for plants to reduce radiation exposure.

If that sounds insane, it's because it's insane. Our nuclear regulations are insane.
by daneel_w | 2025-09-12 20:29:29+00:00
I entirely agree that we could've cared better for the leading 16 bit space. But protocol-wise adding a second component (images) to the concept of textual strings would've been a terrible choice.

The grande crime was that we squandered the space we were given by placing emojis outside the UTF-8 specification, where we already had a whooping 1.1 million code points at our disposal.
by hyperman1 | 2025-09-12 20:29:34+00:00
Oops yeah. One of my bit sequences is of course wrong and seems to have derailed this discussion. Sorry for that. Your interpretation is correct.

I've seen the first part of that mail, but your version is a lot longer. It is indeed quite convincing in declaring b) moot. And security was not that big of a thing then as it is now, so you're probalbly right
by kbolino | 2025-09-12 20:29:35+00:00
Notably, it is mentioned that the 7-bit code is developed "in anticipation of" ISO requesting such a code, and we see in the addenda attached at the end of the document that ISO began to develop 8-bit codes extending the base 7-bit code shortly after it was published.

So, it seems that ASCII was kept to 7 bits primarily so "extended ASCII" sets could exist, with additional characters for various purposes (such as other languages, but also for things like mathematical symbols).
by markstos | 2025-09-12 20:29:46+00:00
I taught myself QGIS for spatial analysis of map data-- coming at it from a coding perspective. It has great Python integration. It's also surprisingly useful as a spreadsheet alternative for certain tasks because it supports a SQL-like interface into CSV data, so you can join CSVs with spatial data or with each other, create views and virtual fields, and so on. Overall, very impressed with the depth, breadth, and ease of use considering how powerful it is.
by lossolo | 2025-09-12 20:30:07+00:00
That will not happen. Even the southern branch of the Druzhba pipeline is still carrying some Russian crude through Ukraine to Hungary and Slovakia. This is all mirage. Russian oil gets mixed in India and then gets back to EU. Only U.S., Canada, the EU, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and a few others sanctioned Russia. So over 140 countries did not sanction Russia and can buy oil from them without any mixing and outside the Western price cap system. Cutting Russia off completely from the global oil market would send prices through the roof, and most countries don’t want that. That’s why Ukraine has reportedly been reminded behind closed doors not to hit Russian oil exports too hard.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 20:30:40+00:00
>they will figure out pretty quickly if they have the aptitude or will to do it just by being exposed

We disagree here, most people are not very good at figuring this out for themselves at all ime. It's always wise to compare yourself to known or semi-known metrics before you take the plunge into any given career, to make sure it really does seem like a good fit for you, or to make sure you can justify why you want to do it anyway even if the metrics paint an unflattering story.
by floatrock | 2025-09-12 20:31:38+00:00
> coming up with an efficient solution is a large part of the challenge

More of my work tends to be "rapidly adopting solution to additional and changing requirements" than "come up with most efficient solution", so why are we interviewing for something where in practice we just throw a couple extra instances at it? (Your specific job role may vary, of course, but I usually just increase the scaling factor)

Author's point is that coming up with the most efficient solution might not actually be a good measure of your real-world performance.

And that's been a longrunning critique of leetcode, of course. However, this is a neat framing where you can still use the same problems but give solutions that perform better when measured by "how adaptable is this to new requirements?"
by pfdietz | 2025-09-12 20:32:22+00:00
> It was Fukushima and fracking that killed that Renaissance, not regulations.

It was mostly fracking. Most plans for new builds had already been put on hold by the time Fukushima occurred. New nuclear in the US made zero sense when gas is cheap and combined cycle power plants are 10% of the capex/power.

And since then, renewables and storage have crashed in price, nailing shut nuclear's coffin lid.
by atoav | 2025-09-12 20:33:09+00:00
My brother is a GIS expert and does this for a living. At his workplace (trans-european electrical project) they use ArcGIS and privately he uses QGIS. He said he'd pick QGIS over ArcGIS every single day.

ArcGIS is very polished, but everything costs extra. QGIS has less polish but is supremely hackable and there are plugins for nearly everything.

Having used QGIS as a non-expert to extract mountain heightmaps from a border region between two datasets from different national bodies and looking up some property borders I can really recommend it. Took me less than an afternoon to get started
by feoren | 2025-09-12 20:33:15+00:00
This is a great list. I would add:

- Megacorporations cozying up to government in exchange for access to this information, for a competitive advantage, targeted advertising, etc. Lawmakers will bend over backward for corporations if they are promised "job creation" in their districts, or it could be lobbying or even straight-up bribery. We have a sitting supreme court member who openly takes bribes and he's suffered no consequences for it. It's not hard to imagine data the government collected in a giant dragnet being shared with generous campaign contributors.

- Laws changing to target an out-group. Remember how the government was keenly interested in people's period-tracking apps so they could imprison people who they suspected had an abortion? It doesn't matter whether your private data could incriminate you now, it's dangerous if it could incriminate you from any future government that is hostile to you.
by bayindirh | 2025-09-12 20:33:39+00:00
You can use a honest user string denoting that it's your bot. Some AI companies label their bots transparently, they show up on the logs I keep.

While I understand that you may need a personal bot to crawl or mirror a site, I can't guarantee that I'll grant you access.

I don't like to be that heavy-handed in the first place, but capitalism is making it harder to trust entities which you can't see and talk face to face.
by mmastrac | 2025-09-12 20:33:41+00:00
Social media is 90% outrage farming by nation states and individuals with agendas. I think the experiment failed. Humans in large groups are so trivially manipulated by algorithms.

Our ape brains at large just can't deal with a firehose of manipulation. We're just giving bad actors a key to our subconscious to destroy the fabric of our civilization, and those bad actors are using it as much as they can.

This article is really missing the discussion on the fact that social media is far, far more inauthentic than real humans these days.
by diggan | 2025-09-12 20:34:03+00:00
> There are lots of providers where I can buy a VPS somewhere and be in charge of configuring and patching it, but if I just want to hand someone a set of HTML files and some money in exchange for hosting, not many hosts fit the bill.

Yeah, that's true, there isn't a lot of "I give you money and HTML, you host it" services out there, surprisingly. Probably the most mature, cheapest and most reliable one today would be good ol' neocities.org (run by HN user kyledrake) which basically gives you 3TB/month for $5, pretty good deal :)

Sometimes when I miss StumbleUpon I go to https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random which gives a fun little glimpse of the hobby/curiosity/creative web.
by why_at | 2025-09-12 20:34:56+00:00
I wonder if we need something like Anti-SLAPP[1] laws but for patents. If someone sues for infringing on an obviously BS patent there should be a way for the defendant to quickly resolve the case and recover any costs they incurred from the plaintiff. I'm not a lawyer or anything though so idk how or even if this would work.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
by rizpanjwani | 2025-09-12 20:35:26+00:00
The whole identity of Arabs as Palestinians is a very recent fabrication a la Arafat the mass murderer. Jews were the Palestinians for 2000 years. Vast number of Arabs migrated to the British mandated Palestine from surrounding regions due to economical reasons. It is purely due to religious reasons that Arabs have refused time and again to have their own state even after Israel left gaza by electing hamas. Their intention is and always has been to wipe out the Jews or at the very least keep them under their thumb as second class citizens like in the good old days.
by j45 | 2025-09-12 20:35:51+00:00
Background javascript processes can really seem to add up across a lot of browser tabs firing up to stay "smart" or "current" like they're the only tab in existence in their user's life.

I'm not sure if many people struggle with browser tabs gone wild. Limiting Javascript can have varying degrees of success since it's relative to how the page/site/app is built to begin with.
by kgeist | 2025-09-12 20:35:56+00:00
Here, 800 km east of Moscow, we've been experiencing mobile internet outages for about a month now. It disappears and reappears in a pattern I cannot understand. Sometimes it goes down across the entire city, and sometimes it works in certain spots without any problems. Some mobile providers work, others don't. GPS alternates between showing the correct position and placing me at a random spot 5 km away every few minutes. We receive 'drones incoming' alerts via SMS, but the outages don't seem to correlate with them at all. Maybe the idea is that if we confuse ourselves first, the enemy will surely be confused as well.

Needless to say, Wi-Fi and Ethernet work without issue. Many people flock to cafes for connectivity.
by mpweiher | 2025-09-12 20:35:57+00:00
> Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized.

That is also not true. For example in Germany, nuclear production was never subsidized at all. Even Greenpeace and the Green's chief anti-nuclear Lobbyist, Jürgen Trittin, called nuclear power plants "money printing machines".

> Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France)

Those are minute compared to subsidies intermittent renewables get in Germany. In particular as there is the ARENH program, which is effectively a negative subsidy (it takes money away from the nuclear company EDF), and of course EDF is profitable and gives money to the government.

When you add it all up, France has a negative subsidy of € 0.1 - 7 billion yearly, whereas Germany subsidizes intermittent renewables to the tune of around €20 billion a year.

> System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend

That is also not true. System costs are actually rising, because yields are dropping, the share of renewables has risen and the (fairly cheap) coal backup is to be eliminated. Total costs are now estimated at several trillion euros. For comparison, France's nuclear program cost a total of €228 billion through 2011.
by bbanyc | 2025-09-12 20:35:59+00:00
You very much can with board and card games. Monopoly was patented and so was Magic: the Gathering.

My question is whether this patent only covers specific game mechanics introduced in the most recent Pokemon game or whether it's broad enough to monopolize the entire genre. Because if a clone of the original Pokemon from 30 years ago (has it really been that long? I feel old) is infringing, then the patent is clearly invalid due to Nintendo's own prior art.
by croes | 2025-09-12 20:36:05+00:00
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.

Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?

The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.