MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-09-12 21:25:49+00:00
I love the SteamDeck, but I don't consider it a mobile phone. It can be a decent Linux Desktop, I think, and it's great for games.

But that is a very different use-case than a mobile phone. Android/iOS are very much optimised to behave like smartphones, e.g. in terms of battery usage and security model. People complain about not having root access, while installing read-only Linux systems on their desktop.

Really, the best shot we have at an alternative OS is to build on top of AOSP. And there you could actually convince OEMs to support you. At least I hope GrapheneOS eventually gets there.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-12 21:26:10+00:00
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it.

You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel.

https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836...

That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor.

You're right about nuclear fuel refinement, packaging, and so on being non-trivial, but the amount of it that you need is so miniscule that if you don't talk about volume you paint a misleading picture.

> small modular reactors are only making heat they don’t actually drive costs down meaningfully.

Mass production makes anything cheaper. Ask the French about their efficient reactor program.
by jancsika | 2025-09-12 21:26:14+00:00
> Having the continuation bytes always start with the bits `10` also make it possible to seek to any random byte, and trivially know if you're at the beginning of a character or at a continuation byte like you mentioned, so you can easily find the beginning of the next or previous character.

Given four byte maximum, it's a similarly trivial algo for the other case you mention.

The main difference I see is that UTF8 increases the chance of catching and flagging an error in the stream. E.g., any non-ASCII byte that is missing from the stream is highly likely to cause an invalid sequence. Whereas with the other case you mention the continuation bytes would cause silent errors (since an ASCII character would be indecipherable from continuation bytes).

Encoding gurus-- am I right?
by alephnerd | 2025-09-12 21:26:24+00:00
> if OSHA raided Hyundai's plant

They have - multiple times, both under Biden and Trump, as the sources I gave have mentioned. Heck, The Guardian in strongly opposed to the Trump admin and pointed this out too.

> But that's not what happened

That is what happened. The issue was Hyundai would spin up yet another contracting firm when an OSHA incident arose, thus keeping business as usual.
by jaggederest | 2025-09-12 21:26:45+00:00
> Unless you're special and the company wants you in particular, it costs them nothing to turn you down in favor of the other 10000 perfect applicants, while you must find a job to survive.

This is not what you see in practice. Trying to hire, the view is very much different, in my experience. Every candidate has strengths and flaws, it's much more of a... constraint problem!

The idea that there even exists a perfect candidate is one of the biggest issues with hiring practices in tech these days.

I, for one, would be extremely impressed by a candidate breaking out J or Prolog for a constraint problem. But I'm also not a typical hiring manager for sure.
by tstrimple | 2025-09-12 21:27:05+00:00
Ah. The brilliant argument that nuclear power is perfectly safe and if we just eliminate all these pesky safety regulations it will be cheaper too! I often wonder what it would take for me to maintain a belief against literally all published evidence. Nuclear power evangelicals are basically trying to spread a religion at this point. Right along side flat earthers and antivaxxers. We just have to take on faith all of these things that they claim and ignore decades of actual evidence about the economics of power generation.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 21:27:16+00:00
You're right in a sense, but I took the context we're working in as somewhat of a given based on the title of the post. Our goal is to work, full time, as a professional pure mathematician; that naturally puts us in the labor market for pure mathematicians. We can't know that market exactly, of course, but it's far from arbitrary. We are in competition with other market participants, and we can study their properties and use that knowledge to guide our actions productively - including making the decision to exit the market if that's what makes sense to us.
by Sesse__ | 2025-09-12 21:27:21+00:00
> Of course when the interviewer asks me to use "any language", I'll assume they want Python or Java or C++ or Rust, not Bash or ALGOL 68.

When I did interviews, I used to ask for “any imperative language”. Most people chose C or Java, some chose e.g. Python and the best solutions looked very different from the C/Java ones. I did not deduct points for either; a good solution is a good solution.

I once had a candidate that chose Oberon, because it was the only language they felt comfortable with (by their own account). They fell through on the interview for other reasons, but this seriously made me consider to what degree they had any programming experience at all outside a few select school assignments.

Independent of that, if someone came with a solution in a constraint solver, my next question would be (as it usually was, regardless of approach) “and what is the runtime complexity of your solution?” and I'd be impressed if they had any nonobvious thoughts about that!
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-12 21:28:04+00:00
I zoomed into the photo to check that out after you pointed it out. I initially assumed it would've been placeholders that were labeled, since writing `DISPLAY` on your screen doesn't make sense, but the buttons and MicroSD slot are obviously there. The text for the MicroSD slot extends past the edge of the front surface, though, so it's not actually physically labeled-- just labeled in the image with a perspective effect. I assume it's because the buttons are a bit hard to see (and it's not obvious the display is a display without it being turned on).
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-12 21:28:17+00:00
All websites are private (excepting maybe government sites). In most places the internet infrastructure itself is private.

You're conflating a legal concept that applies to areas that are shared, government owned, paid for by taxes, and the government feels like people should be able to access them.

The web is closer to a shopping mall. You're on one persons property to access other people's stuff who pay to be there. They set their own rules. If you don't follow those rules you get kicked out, charged with trespassing, and possibly banned from the mall entire.

AI bots have been asked to leave. But, since they own the mall too, the store owners are more than a little screwed.
by intalentive | 2025-09-12 21:28:24+00:00
Ok, the song exists on a playlist with a few hundred saves. I don’t think it’s a widespread groyper meme though. I’ve never seen them reference it on Twitter.

Maybe the arrows are a video game reference? I still don’t see a groyper tie there.

Meanwhile mainstream sources are reporting that the shooter appeared to be motivated by left political ideology.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/12/charlie...
by godelski | 2025-09-12 21:28:40+00:00
> you can't ask clarifying questions

Which isn't that the main skill actually being tested? How the candidate goes about solving problems? I mean if all we did was measure peoples' skills at making sweeping assumptions we'd likely end up with people who oversimplify problems and all of software would go to shit and get insanely complex... Is the hard part writing the lines of code or solving the problem?
by lovich | 2025-09-12 21:29:13+00:00
Any rational group of people would look at the government demanding investment but not making the process the same government administers for visas viable for the time frames the government is demanding, and be pissed at the government in question.

This wasn’t in a vacuum done solely for Hyundais profit. The government that did this raid is currently threatening every other country that doesn’t invest in the US _now_ with tariffs and sanctions.

I’m actually trying to understand your point here because what you’re describing to me seems as crazy as a seeing a mugger be pissed that the muggee wasn’t polite enough during the encounter
by billforsternz | 2025-09-12 21:29:13+00:00
A little off topic but amidst a lot of discussion of UTF-8 and its ASCII compatibility property I'm going to mention my one gripe with ASCII, something I never see anyone talking about, something I've never talked about before: The damn 0x7f character. Such an annoying anomaly in every conceivable way. It would be much better if it was some other proper printable punctuation or punctuation adjacent character. A copyright character. Or a pi character or just about anything other than what it already is. I have been programming and studying packet dumps long enough that I can basically convert hex to ASCII and vice versa in my head but I still recoil at this anomalous character (DELETE? is that what I should call it?) every time.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-12 21:29:29+00:00
"While cheaper than CZT detectors, NaI detectors are bulky and produce blurrier images — like taking a photo through a foggy window."

I'm constantly amazed at what these articles do not show. Like if we have an example of a foggy window image and one from CZT and now one from this new sensor, why not show an example of each? A picture is worth a 1,000 words after all, so not including them really does the reader a disservice when reading these articles.
by arcbyte | 2025-09-12 21:29:34+00:00
> the general feeling among my peers is that I must bend to the interviewer's whims

This is just conflict avoidance and naivety. After a while you start to realize that there's a whole world of people just like on HN and *we hire people too*. No matter what you do, youll end up in the place you deserve. If you try to be sneaky, you will end up working for people who are either easily fooled or see right through how to exploit you. If you let your nerd shine you'll end up with people who love your nerdiness.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-12 21:30:04+00:00
I interviewed at an investment bank in London and they asked me pretty hard questions. One was to implement some multithreaded producer consumer thing in C++. I can't remember the details but it was... well you know how writing multithreaded C++ is. I was allowed to look up references at least. Took me maybe 20 minutes and the whole time the interviewer was just sitting on his phone while I wrote it.

Weird experience. Didn't get that job (probably for the best tbf).
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 21:30:10+00:00
It is under regulation that is the problem here. PG&E has caused multiple huge disasters through negligence that have caused deaths and billions in damages that they pass on to rate payers. And this is after they redirected funds for maintenance directly to executive compensation.

The regulators should have thrown the hammer down on PG&E then, but after the disaster happens the money has to come from somewhere. Even if PG&E declares bankruptcy, the grid must run, and people must be able to rebuild their destroyed homes.

A public utility would be better than this sort of parasitic investor owned utility. Or, lots more regulation, and lots more jail time.
by pritambaral | 2025-09-12 21:30:28+00:00
Here's what you did, paraphrased:

"It was the Hyundai Corpo that broke the law! They're stealing American jobs! That's why ICE targeted them! No, I have no evidence, only blind belief. Why are you even asking me for evidence?! What about when Hyundai did bad things in the past???!!?1?"

----

If it:

1. Repeats the arguments of fascists.

2. Defends fascists.

3. Attacks the victims of fascists.

What do you think it is? A duck?!
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-12 21:31:01+00:00
"It's probably not X, but we should consider X as we look at this." and "I feel like this might be X but I'm 50:50 on it." are not anywhere near defamation. You have to get a lot closer to certainty before it's an issue.

And listing out "a possibility but you don't want to dig deeper" is often a good contribution to a conversation.

In this case they worded it badly, but the basic idea of the comment isn't awful.
by vunderba | 2025-09-12 21:31:03+00:00
As a user who has submitted the occasional Show HN and felt the sting of indifference as they gathered tumbleweeds, once a week I'll spend a few minutes going through the "New" posts and upvote anything that catches my eye.

It's a bit like donating to a charity for a illness that you or your relatives have been personally impacted by - equal parts altruism and selfishness.
by Fwirt | 2025-09-12 21:31:09+00:00
As a hacker, a really fun thing to do with QGIS is locate your local government’s GIS data portal. At least in the US, most data is freely available and can be pulled into QGIS as layers. Fun things like lidar surveys, flood zones, property boundaries. If you’re at all interested in geography and want to explore your locality it can be great fun.
by amarant | 2025-09-12 21:31:12+00:00
This statistic is very relevant here, and surprising to many! Deaths per kWh produced for all energy sources.

Solar and nuclear both really stand out immensely as the safer alternatives.

People tend to think of nuclear as dangerous, but that's just propaganda. There has been a lot of anti-nuclear propaganda over the years. But the numbers speak truth:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-12 21:32:08+00:00
Different content absolutely has different risk profiles.

However, the payment networks do not care. As long as you aren't literally a front for laundering stolen credit cards, they are happy to take your money and very happy to charge you for every single chargeback.

There has NEVER been any evidence presented to support this "porn has high chargeback rates" claim, and other fields that DO have high chargeback rates have no problems taking credit cards.
by tstrimple | 2025-09-12 21:32:11+00:00
If you look at the total cost of an employee and not just an annual salary, then the fact that they have far less mobility makes them cheaper. Why hire the person who will bail when you mistreat them so you have to spend all that time and money finding someone new when you can have someone who risks deportation if they decide they are done with your bullshit.

I could afford to spend the next six months out of work looking for a replacement job. No one on an H1B can because they would be in violation of their visa. They will tolerate far more nonsense than I will.
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-12 21:32:26+00:00
This is a pretty common mechanism in several markets. I worked in the big paint store chain in the US and the local setup was a lot like this. Every store had as much stock as they can physically hold, and no two have the same capacity. It was a daily occurrence to shuttle stock to and from nearby locations, and very common for a small store to have a nearby large store order and hold stock for a job too big for the origin store to handle.

We also had commercial stores spread out which were in essence local warehouses. Those stores spent a large part of their time handling stock transfers. They held specialty products small stores rarely need and couldn't justify the minimum order quantity.

It's a lot more efficient and much faster than having product shipped across the country.
by trjordan | 2025-09-12 21:34:04+00:00
I feel like the main missing point of every "coding will go away" articles (which this mostly, but not fully, is) misses that applications of any reasonable complexity are not fully defined anywhere but their code. That drives everything about modern software.

We've always had the ability to tie the code extremely directly to user experiences. The first problem is that it creates massive code duplication. The second (related) problem is that it creates an enormous, unsquashable number of bugs. There's no internal consistency.

Modern apps are COMPLEX. The abstractions and internal, non-user structure is the only reason they're maintainable at all. I'm working an a 6-month-old, 4-person codebase, and LLM-driven refactors, with me in the drivers seat, miss stuff all the time. If I forget that feature exists in this tiny codebase, how do organizations of any size function? Abstraction, interfaces, etc. -- software design.

The future is probably closer to "LLMs help clean up codebases" than "LLMs own the codebase," because the 2nd statement is effectively equal to "I will rewrite my code in English." English is a _bad_ language for describing complex systems. We could do better than Python, sure, but it's already _far_ better than English for the kind of cross-cutting behavior-and-dependency description software requires. It's valuable to have tools that translate intent into compact, high-quality code, but you still end up working with code as the fundamental artifact.
by ryao | 2025-09-12 21:34:56+00:00
I have had minimal problems with KDE 6 and Wayland, but I dislike the idea that both cannot co-exist. There is no reason to force people to Wayland. There are applications that benefit from Wayland’s tighter security model while there are applications that benefit from X11’s looser security model. If I make an appliance and I want to remotely debug, X11 is great since I can use X11vnc. If I want to run malicious software in a sandbox environment, Wayland is great since it can be properly isolated. They both have their uses. X11 is far more mature too and thus has fewer problems.

That said, I am probably preaching to the choir, as I think we are both moderates as far as the X11 vs Wayland debate is concerned.
by thr0waway001 | 2025-09-12 21:35:27+00:00
> one where hard work, practical solving problems and a large knowledge base is less of a substitute.

I have seen this first hand. I remember when I was in university doing my math major. This one older adult lady (she seemed 40yrs old, and very attractive too), she had decided for some reason or other she wanted to do a major in mathematics. Not for a job or anything but just to do it.

Whereas the rest of us, let’s face it, we just wanted a good job in STEM.

Bless this lady, she was so determined and hard working. She would show up to every lecture, first in, last out, and she would show up to every study session and give it her all.

But unfortunately, she was not good at grasping the concepts nor solving the problems. It was shocking how little she grokked the introductory concepts for the amount of effort she put in. She worked harder than anyone in our group.

I don’t think any of us had the heart to tell her that maybe a math major was not in the cards.

I never saw her on campus in my 3rd year and on so imagine she dropped off.

But I was rooting for her.
by everforward | 2025-09-12 21:35:36+00:00
The death rates might be a difference in units; the Forbes article is using deaths per trillion kWh, the other might be deaths per thousand/million kWh.

The difference in ranking might be down to how they model deaths from nuclear power accidents. One may be using the linear no threshold model, and the other may be using something else. We don't have an agreed upon model for how likely someone is to die as a result of exposure to X amount of radiation, which causes wide gaps in death estimates.

E.g. Chernobyl non-acute radiation death estimates range from 4,000 to 16,000, with some outliers claiming over 60,000. That's a wild swing depending on which model you use.
by kbolino | 2025-09-12 21:35:37+00:00
Thanks to UTF-16, which came out after UTF-8, there are 2048 wasted 3-byte sequences in UTF-8.

And unlike the short-sighted authors of the first version of Unicode, who thought the whole world's writing systems could fit in just 65,536 distinct values, the authors of UTF-8 made it possible to encode up to 2 billion distinct values in the original design.
by delichon | 2025-09-12 21:36:38+00:00
Iryna Zaruska is why I'll keep an eye on alt media. I don't trust conventional media not to curate away content for my own good. You can mock it as FOMO, or racism, but I want to know where in the subway not to sit. This is news I can use. I can't be convinced to go back to Walter Cronkite for my daily memes.
by kragen | 2025-09-12 21:36:46+00:00
What if we just really enjoy clever algorithms?

I've probably implemented first-order Markov-chain text generation more than a dozen times in different languages, and earlier this week I implemented Newton–Cotes adaptive quadrature just because it sounded awesome (although I missed a standard trick because I didn't know about Richardson extrapolation). I've also recently implemented the Fast Hadamard Transform, roman numerals, Wellons–NRK hash tries, a few different variants of Quicksort (which I was super excited to get down to 17 ARM instructions for the integer case), an arena allocator with an inlined fast path, etc. Recently I wrote a dumb constrained-search optimizer to see if I could get a simpler expression of a word-wrap problem. I learned about the range-minimum-query algorithm during a job interview many years ago and ad-libbed a logarithmic-time solution, and since then I've found a lot of fascinating variants on the problem.

I've never had a job doing this kind of thing, and I don't expect to get one, just like I don't expect to get a job playing go, rendering fractals, reading science fiction, or playing video games. But I think there's a certain amount of transferable skill there. Even if what I need to do this week is figure out how to configure Apache to reverse proxy to the MediaWiki Docker container.

(I know there are people who have jobs hacking out clever algorithms on different platforms. I even know some of them personally. But there are also people who play video games for a living.)

I guess I'd fail your interview process?
by Tagbert | 2025-09-12 21:36:48+00:00
Made it thin for no good reason that appeals to YOU. Doesn’t mean that others don’t appreciate the design. We don’t all value and need massive battery capacity. I’d be glad to trade a little battery capacity for a slimmer device. As it turns out, if you are upgrading, there is no reduction in battery. It only looks lesser compared to the new 17 and 17 Pro which also got battery tech upgrades.
by ryao | 2025-09-12 21:36:53+00:00
Nvidia likely will back port Debian 13 support to their driver if you ask nicely in an email to their Linux bugs email address, although you would probably wait 3 to 6 months for it. They periodically back port support for newer systems to older drivers that they maintain.

Alternatively, it is theoretically possible to forward port their driver yourself since their kernel compatibility shims are open source and you can see what changes they made in newer versions to support newer kernels. This is likely a masochistic exercise however.
Show HN: Cardog Reports
by samsullivan | 2025-09-12 21:36:57+00:00
Hi everyone, we built a vehicle history report offering that I wanted to share and get some feedback on.

It collects data from over 1,200 sources across North America and compiles to a single clean report like Carfax and Autocheck.

We would really value any feedback from anyone currently in the researching/buying/selling phase - what pieces of information are / were essential in your recent purchases?

Thank you!