MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by linguae | 2025-09-12 19:07:49+00:00
I remember learning Japanese in the early 2000s and the fun of dealing with multiple encodings for the same language: JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC. As late as 2011 I had to deal with processing a dataset encoded under EUC in Python 2 for a graduate-level machine learning course where I worked on a project for segmenting Japanese sentences (typically there are no spaces in Japanese sentences).

UTF-8 made processing Japanese text much easier! No more needing to manually change encoding options in my browser! No more mojibake!
by ta1243 | 2025-09-12 19:07:50+00:00
Employ someone, have them meet with the team they work with, either in person or at a controlled office, and have team meetings with them.

That proves the person you know was in the country you expect them to be, and eliminates the whole "local person pretends but the work is done by remote". The meetings mean they are available when you expect them to be.

Now sure they could have somehow got to the expected country to do that original laptop pickup, but you've got bigger problems if they are a spy and living where you expect them to be, and things like turning up to office every day for 8-6 isn't going to stop them.
by vetrom | 2025-09-12 19:08:03+00:00
It doesn't, but platforms basically do everything they can to claim the various common-carrier liability shields in DMCA-like laws. In the U.S. that means they forward the takedown request to whomever generated the content, and in theory should allow that generator to comply, or publish a counterclaim.

The whole system falls on the floor though when the common carriers aren't, and have low quality processes that don't actually enable the counterclaim half of this process.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 19:08:09+00:00
People decide what is like. I know some people who would never work with some group, but they have no problem with some other group.

In this case the group is people good at leetcode - the people I know of in that group are perfectly fine with any race so long as they can solve leetcode. There are people who care about race, but I've never had much to do with them so I can't guess how they think.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 19:08:25+00:00
True. I think that's something many are ok with - but the transportation is a service, not much different than Uber. Which arguably is a more correct mental model of car-having vs. being fooled to any degree into viewing the car as an investment.

The need is "transportation" -- you have a number of ways to rent that transportation (bus, train, cab, Uber, rent-a-car, lease) or you can buy a depreciating asset (car) that cuts your per-mile cost slightly from the renting options.

And in the case of my Apple Music subscription I have to make peace with it being an entertainment service that I don't get to keep any physical or digital manifestations of after I stop paying. Like a movie ticket.
by Polizeiposaune | 2025-09-12 19:08:29+00:00
Natural uranium on earth is currently about 0.7% U-235; civilian power reactors typically need low-enriched uranium which is 3% to 5% U-235.

The critical mass required for a weapon shrinks as enrichment increases; implosion designs would require an infinite mass at or below 5.4% enrichment (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium).

Weapons-grade uranium is more like 85%+ U-235. Enrichment above around 20% is what really raises red flags.
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-12 19:08:45+00:00
This would crush fields that can't afford to pay so much, but also have a very small global pool of highly skilled talent to pull from. Certain areas of academia for example (specializations that are very close to tech, such that anyone in that specialization could get a much higher paying job in tech but not vice versa).

Though, it isn't like the US actually wants to fix its immigration system. It benefits from the resulting submissive population and takes great sadistic joy in having a group of people they can harass and blame for everything, while those outsiders pay into the system, often arriving in the US through an educational visa, thus helping to prop up universities.

The H1B system has been a wreck for decades, the lottery system encourages abuse and doesn't make any sense if your goal is for immigration to be for skilled people (compared to most other places, which just directly look at your skills compared to what they need). Politicians talk a lot about how if elected, they will fix it, only to never actually do so.
by cyberax | 2025-09-12 19:08:55+00:00
UTF-8 is simply genius. It entirely obviated the need for clunky 2-byte encodings (and all the associated nonsense about byte order marks).

The only problem with UTF-8 is that Windows and Java were developed without knowledge about UTF-8 and ended up with 16-bit characters.

Oh yes, and Python 3 should have known better when it went through the string-bytes split.
by rleigh | 2025-09-12 19:09:40+00:00
Yes, this is a prime example of completely gratuitous breakage.

The change adds zero value. It's a deliberate API break. And it could have been made a non-breaking change all for the sake of a single one-line macro or inline function.

This isn't unintentional. It's a deliberate choice they have made. And not just this one, it's happened repeatedly over the years.

The thing that really gets me, as an end-user/developer, is that it forces incompatible changes not only in my codebases, but in every other application developer's codebases worldwide. A small change in GTK+ imposes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of maintenance work upon every application developer. And this burdensome work not only takes time, effort and money, it doesn't improve our applications one iota, and on top of that, it breaks backward compatibility so our code will not longer build with older GTK+ versions. Most of us won't be chasing the latest development release, applications might need to target a wide range of distributions with a wide range of GTK+ versions. So it's a logistical nightmare as well.

The lack of concern for the needs of actual application developers is why I eventually had to give up on it entirely. At some point it doesn't make any sense either commercially or for free software development, it's just masochism.
by danaris | 2025-09-12 19:09:47+00:00
...when the truth is that no news source is unbiased. Period.

Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!

In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".
by daemonologist | 2025-09-12 19:10:07+00:00
Okay, not all of this is accurate. I am not against nuclear (although in recent years it has not been very cost effective), but here are some figures with citations:

- The U.S. generates about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year (from 94 reactors/97 GW) : https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... . For the whole world it's 7,000 tons (375-400 GW) : https://www.iaea.org/publications/14739/status-and-trends-in...

- Storing it is easy in the short term, but unfortunately any leaks are a big deal and you have to store it basically forever, which is a challenge. If Yucca Mountain were to be restarted it's estimated storing existing and new waste through 2031 there would cost in the neighborhood of $100 billion : (warning: large PDF) https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf

- It's possible to recycle the fuel, but currently an order of magnitude more expensive than digging up more : https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/economics-reprocess...
by tavavex | 2025-09-12 19:10:27+00:00
People don't miss that about interviews, they just know that the balance of power is so skewed that the interests of the employer become the only relevant part. The employer can keep going through hundreds of applicants until they find someone who's literally perfect in every single way, they have nearly unlimited time. Meanwhile, the applicants need a job now, any job at all, they're on a hard time limit until their money runs out.

I feel like in practice, unless you're an established, senior professional in a high-paying, in-demand field with a network to rely on, this would go something like:

> What is it really like to work there. How much notice do you need to give before taking vacation? Do they really give pay raises? How often do they lay people off? What is the dress code? Do they let you take time for your kids school activities?

"Candidate ABC seems too demanding and picky, constantly inquiring about irrelevant specifics. They would be a bad fit for our company culture. I advise going with candidate XYZ instead."
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-09-12 19:10:33+00:00
You should look more closely at your PG&E bill. There are some hidden CA taxes in there.

Also PG&E was forced to divest most of their generation assets, so I believe that much of the grid power down there is not under PG&E's control

Edit: Finally, any Western US utility needs to bear the cost of wildfire liability. Whether that is a state-owned utility or private, the cost is still there.
by viccis | 2025-09-12 19:10:41+00:00
The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other than a party trick of philosophical philistinism. He showed that a journal that "covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture" doesn't perform adequate peer review of theoretical physics papers.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-12 19:10:49+00:00
At least in the US, lawyers, surgeons, & civil engineers all have accredited testing to even enter the profession, in the form of the bar exam, boards, and FE & PE tests respectively. So they do have such theoretical tests, but only when they want to gain their license to practice in a given state. Software doesn't have any such centralized testing accreditation, so we end up with a mess.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-12 19:11:38+00:00
I agree that doing that without asking if they really mean "any" would in fact demonstrate traits that might be bad for a co-worker.

If the candidate reads that this may be the case, asks for, obviously, that reason, and the interviewer confirms that they mean "any", then it's a red flag for that interviewer, at least, as a co-worker, if they go on to get upset over your choice, unless it's something where you're obviously taking the piss, like Brainfuck (the later suggestion of assembly probably counts as this, but at that point the interviewer[s] had already failed the interviewee's test of them, so, whatever)

But yes, if you're desperate for a job you should indeed just ignore any red flags and do your best to fit the perfect-cog mold and do whatever emotional labor is required to seem the way you think they want you to be, and take whatever abuse they offer with a smile. That's true.
by Gormo | 2025-09-12 19:12:16+00:00
> The problem of how you organize content in desktop user interfaces is far from solved.

Strong disagree. Mature conventions have been established for decades, and while there are always edge cases and new incremental features that need to be worked into desktop UIs, the core desktop UI paradigm has been stable since at least the mid-'90s, and modern deviations away from it have almost invariably reduced usability and discoverability.

The modern trend of trying to shoehorn web or mobile UI design tropes into desktop applications has resulted in little but regression.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-12 19:12:43+00:00
I see your point but it's not really that simple in this particular case. Nuclear energy production is clean under assumption:

1. You can operate the facility with a zero critical accident over the whole lifespan of the power plant.

2. You know what to do with a nuclear waste (like keep it safely deeply buried for 10'000 years).

However, point 2) is almost irrelevant now because we already have enough depleted nuclear fuel to deal with it.
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-12 19:12:56+00:00
The answer is simple, but not easy - you own the ground they launch from. Range is limited, so you need to add more of it between you and them. Otherwise the problem is inherently an asymmetric one - drones cost 100k. Solutions cost much more than that. You can't win on a cost basis. You have to win on a strategic basis.
by godelski | 2025-09-12 19:13:19+00:00
> that's cash

Exactly! I want digital cash. We have the technology to do that, so why not? The tech crowd hyped up Bitcoin, but why never privacy coins? Any single flaw becomes killer, even if the flaw is unrelated to privacy or even petty. Hell, I'd even take a US ZKP-based stable coin that was pre-mined (but had strong privacy guarantees) and had even a small (like 0.1-0.5%) gas fee that ended up acting as some form of consumption tax. At least then there's some guarantee of tax revenue while maintaining the notion that Big Brother doesn't need to know I gave my friend some beer money.

Our world worked with cash before. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but are those imperfections worse than the mass invasion of our privacy? There's no perfect system, so the only question is how we weight certain issues, not that flaws exist. If we purity test then the only winners are the immoral people who are willing to lie and deceive so that their choice appears to pass said purity tests. They love us to spend our time infighting because that's less time working against them.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-09-12 19:13:46+00:00
This is said a lot but I don't think regs as written are necessarily the major cost driver. I did a nuclear industry survey to ask what specific regulations people would want changed recently. The one where using commercial grade QA instead of nuclear grade is very interesting.

I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-05-23-regulatory-reforms...
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-12 19:14:02+00:00
It's unfortunate that Reddit and HN just downvote these proposals away. I guess discourse is dying on these platforms huh.

Mark Cuban had an interesting proposal to this effect. https://x.com/mcuban/status/1934834421225672999 . A combination of tax subsidies and debt forgiveness that cuts out insurance companies altogether.
by tbmbob | 2025-09-12 19:14:14+00:00
> Now if I actually brought these questions to an interview the interviewee could ruin my day by asking "what's the runtime complexity?"

This completely undermines the author's main point. Constraint solvers don't solve hard leetcode problems if they can't solve large instances quickly enough.

Many hard leetcode problems can be solved fairly simply with more lax runtime requirements -- coming up with an efficient solution is a large part of the challenge.
by nielsbot | 2025-09-12 19:14:25+00:00
I remember reading that high precision timers can be used for browser fingerprinting and/or for timing attacks, but I didn't anything specifically about setTimeout()/setInterval() after searching a bit.

Also--loosening the accuracy of timers allows the system to optimize CPU power states and save battery. Again, not sure if that's related here.

Maybe someone else here can add more detail.
by saqadri | 2025-09-12 19:14:48+00:00
Haha, I didn't have control on the blog website, just the content. The readme and code is the ultimate source of truth (and easier to read):https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent/blob/main/src/mcp_a...

So the core idea is the Deep Orchestrator is pretty unopinionated on what to use for searching, as long as it is exposed over MCP. I tried with a basic fetch server that's one of the reference MCP servers (with a single tool called `fetch`), and also tried with Brave.

I think the folks at Jina wrote some really good stuff on the actual search part: https://jina.ai/news/a-practical-guide-to-implementing-deeps... -- and how to do page/url ranking over the course of the flow. My recommendation would be to do all that in an MCP server itself. That keeps the "deep orchestrator" architecture fairly clean, and you can plug in increasingly sophisticated search techniques over time.
by akurilin | 2025-09-12 19:14:57+00:00
I recently tried using Qwen VL or Moondream to see if off-the-shelf they would be able to accurately detect most of the interesting UI elements on the screen, either in the browser or your average desktop app.

It was a somewhat naive attempt, but it didn't look like they performed well without perhaps much additional work. I wonder if there are models that do much better, maybe whatever OpenAI uses internally for operator, but I'm not clear how bulletproof that one is either.

These models weren't trained specifically for UI object detection and grounding, so, it's plausible that if they were trained on just UI long enough, they would actually be quite good. Curious if others have insight into this.
by V__ | 2025-09-12 19:15:00+00:00
I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away.

The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology will be able to compete on price in the foreseeable future.
by pydry | 2025-09-12 19:15:07+00:00
There's a fun game you can play with countries that build nuclear power plants: "guess the existential threat".

In each case it's pretty obvious. Either they have nuclear weapons that share a supply chain and skills base or there is an existential threat out there.

In Poland's case you can tell when they started seeing an existential threat from when they suddenly got interested in building a plant.
by luckydata | 2025-09-12 19:15:42+00:00
I put together a small harness to keep AI-assisted coding under control. It’s basically a set of git hooks and scripts that enforce simple things AIs tend to skip—running tests, checking basic metrics, that sort of guardrail.

I think it’s useful for projects that started quickly, grew messy, and are now slowing down because the AI (and humans) can’t manage the complexity anymore. Take it for a spin and let me know what you think: https://github.com/CaliLuke/quality-workflow-meta
by Fischgericht | 2025-09-12 19:16:25+00:00
Copyright and patents are very different beasts.

For example there a lot of ways to use the so-called priority of the US patent to file other patents, including elsewhere in the world.

US Americans sadly often forget that the majority of the planet is not the USA. Here in Thailand, US and EU pharma companies have managed to get patents on 15 year old basic stuff like anti-histaminic meds. "Oh, but the system of limited monopoly in the US worked for us?". Yeah. But in Europe, the cost per pill is somewhere around $0.08. In Europe it's about $0.02. In Thailand it's $0.80 because Zyrtec managed to file a patent here re-using the priority of the US patent. And wage-adjusted in Thailand the cost per pill is about $15 per pill. You better don't have an allergy over here. So: Patents can have long-term consequences.

Back to IT: Have a look at the whole patent troll industry. The biggest chunk of junk patents that they bought are coming from "we will not do any harm" owners/filers. A lot can happen in 20 years.
by timhh | 2025-09-12 19:16:54+00:00
I asked about this a few years ago on SO and there is some good info: https://stackoverflow.com/q/61338780/265521

E.g. Chrome has this comment:

// Chromium uses a minimum timer interval of 4ms. We'd like to go // lower; however, there are poorly coded websites out there which do // create CPU-spinning loops. Using 4ms prevents the CPU from // spinning too busily and provides a balance between CPU spinning and // the smallest possible interval timer.

At the time at least the 4ms only kicks in after 5 levels of nesting, as mentioned in the article, but there was still a 1ms limit before that.

Seems like it has been removed though based on jayflux's comment.
by hyperman1 | 2025-09-12 19:16:56+00:00
One thing I always wonder: It is possible to encode a unicode codepoint with too much bytes. UTF-8 forbids these, only the shortest one is valid. E.g 00000001 is the same as 11000000 10000001.

So why not make the alternatives impossible by adding the start of the last valid option? So 11000000 10000001 would give codepoint 128+1 as values 0 to 127 are already covered by a 1 byte sequence.

The advantages are clear: No illegal codes, and a slightly shorter string for edge cases. I presume the designers thought about this, so what were the disadvantages? The required addition being an unacceptable hardware cost at the time?

UPDATE: Last bitsequence should of course be 10000001 and not 00000001. Sorry for that. Fixed it.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-12 19:17:00+00:00
Yes.

prob(training_process(data)(Work account 2 has a serious medical condition called) = anaemia) <= e^epsilon * prob(training_process(data without that piece of information)(Work account 2 has a serious medical condition called) = anaemia)) + delta

Here epsilon = 2, and delta is small. Basically, there is a theoretical guarantee that if it had trained on that sentence, it would be no more than 7x as likely to output that in response to any prompt, compared to when it hadn't trained on that sentence at all. Sentence here is defined to be 1024 tokens long[1].

You might think 7x is not that big of a deal, but note that this is a theoretical guarantee( and with some mathematics it's possible to get an even tighter bound(see: Renyi DP)). In practice, actually getting private data out of a DP-trained model is difficult even for epsilon=8 (corresponds to 2000x likely!).

Edit: [1] this can be problematic, if a piece of information greater than 1024 tokens long gets split into two sentences, then there is no theoretical guarantee across sequences. However this is an implementation detail of this model, I've yet to see the effect of increasing this number to a more reasonable value.
by lukan | 2025-09-12 19:17:05+00:00
"Creating highly enriched uranium or plutonium are completely different processes."

Not an expert, but isn't all you basically need to do is running the centrifuges a bit longer?

Breeding plutonium is a different process than enriching uranium, sure, but with enough enriched uran you will have a nuclear bomb.

And a dirty bomb is bad enough and simple to construct as well.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 19:17:06+00:00
I used AI for the Docker setup which I've already done before. I'm not wasting time on that. Yeah you can vibe code basic backend and frontend and whatnot, but you're not going to vibe code your way to a full inverse kinematics solution.

I'm not a math/university educated guy so this was truly "from the ground up" for me despite the math being simple. I was quite proud of that.
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 19:17:50+00:00
Be careful of the goal. Sanctions are unlikely to directly bring someone to the bargaining table. Sanctions make is harder to get the things Russia needs to fight way. It will take years to catch up, but Russia has a smaller economy. Russia has mostly stopped using tanks because they can only make a few of them (1-3 per day depending on what source you ask), and they have no ability to make more, sanctions are part of this.

The real question is what if there were none - Russia would have more money and thus have done a lot more damage to Ukraine - but there is no way to measure damage they could have done.