MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JackSlateur | 2025-09-13 14:07:15+00:00
And some of those data seems sane: the cost of solar panels reduces due to tech improvements: ok

The cost of coal increases a bit, maybe due to geopolicital issues: ok, seems legit

The cost of nuclear increases .. why ? Why the step between 2016 and 2017 ? Does tech "de-improved" ?

More insights would be interesting
by randomNumber7 | 2025-09-13 14:07:47+00:00
I think you have a misunderstanding of undefined behavior.

> So, all the languages where you can just inadvertently "say" Undefined Behaviour aren't meaningfully achieving this goal.

This is absolute nonsense.

You should generally avoid writing programs with undefined behavior.

C and Java can be used to write programs with defined behavior (even if you can't) that are used by billions of users every day.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-13 14:07:58+00:00
You do not need a BOM for UTF-8. Ever. Byte order issues are not a problem for UTF-8 because UTF-8 is manipulated as a string of _bytes_, not as a string of 16-bit or 32-bit code units.

You _do_ need a BOM for UTF-16 and UTF-32.
by kiba | 2025-09-13 14:08:12+00:00
Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.

You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
by techpineapple | 2025-09-13 14:08:26+00:00
> he shot someone on the right, which are both strong evidence of left-wing motivation on their own.

I think the idea that there are two sides is one of the most toxic ideas in our politics. We associate with teams and anyone on our side must be good, and ignore things like the tyranny of small differences - the far left hates the center left more than they do the right. And there are similar dynamics on the right. Especially in obscure conspiracy filled corners of the internet.

This doesn’t mean all people on the right are bad, or the right is inherently violent! But to ignore the complex breakdown of political ideologies is to ignore the crazy ways things actually happen, not to mention the fact that generally speaking, people who commit random acts of violence like this are not coming from a politically rational place.
by Zagreus2142 | 2025-09-13 14:08:43+00:00
My thinking was that both of these large investors specifically want openAI to produce something like agi or failing that, something so popular and useful they make enough money not to care. And they want results this year/early next year. Softbank's latest investment round is partially tied up in openAI resolving their non-profit status by the end of this year. Training random founding engineers with no expectations of even using GPT-5 instead of traditional hiring feels either like a lack of focus or niave during this critical juncture.

But having said that, I do see the wisdom in the comments that the costs in running a 5 week course/workshop are low and the value in having a view into what people are making outside of the openAI bubble is a decent return all its own.
by conradludgate | 2025-09-13 14:08:58+00:00
Since I'm not actually looking at images, instead I'm looking at text, I love my 4k 32" 16:9 curved display. I typically have 2 vertical windows open on it, so since I do more work on the edge rather than the center, the curve does help me see my work just a bit clearer than otherwise.

It's subtle, but it feels weird when I look at a flat display now
by esperent | 2025-09-13 14:09:00+00:00
> The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code

For any small to medium sized projects with zero external contributors, it's highly unlikely that anyone would pursue legal action so the person who owns the project does de facto have this right whether or not it's legal according to the license.

> Things get more complicated if there are external contributors

I don't think this is complicated - unless there's a contributor agreement that people have signed that says otherwise, people have copyright on the code they have contributed so the original creator doesn't have a right to relicense their code.

However, again it comes down to whether anyone would bring a legal fight and the answer is almost certainly no. Forking the code is much more likely at that point.
by back2dafucha | 2025-09-13 14:09:28+00:00
This is similar to the "rare earths" myths floating around. Its a prepper story for sure.

"Rare Earths" are literally everywhere but require large open mines which are not environmentally acceptable and cost effective in the US (depending). The existing mines are still here but shut down decades ago.

Ask Apple how it feels about paying a pretty big chunk of money to reopen one. That guys mine was worth more closed than open.

Like so many things we sent that task to China a long time ago.
by scelerat | 2025-09-13 14:09:47+00:00
I think group moderation/points emerged as a remedy for trolling and the flame wars which would ensue. And not only flame wars but also simply low-quality, substance-free posts.

In certain unmoderated Usenet forums, and later web forums (e.g. Slashdot), there were often huge chunks of threads you'd have to scroll past and read between to find nuggets of value. Points systems emerged to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in many ways ushered an improved reading/discussion experience.
by bradrn | 2025-09-13 14:09:55+00:00
IIRC Navajo has a pretty robust noun-verb distinction. However there definitely are other languages where nouns and verbs behave very similarly, e.g. most famously Salishan languages. That said, there don’t seem to be any natural languages in which nouns and verbs are completely indistinguishable — there’s always some minor difference in how they behave.
by olooney | 2025-09-13 14:11:33+00:00
This is very good! Word of advice, though: I saw a bunch of stuff that was in poor taste scrolling through the "Useless" tab, such as this product:

https://anycrap.shop/product/charlie-kirk-bulletproof-neck-g...

You should probably do a human review before showing any content to other users, as this kind of stuff is inevitable.
by pqtyw | 2025-09-13 14:12:02+00:00
There are nuclear plants in much warmer places than France. And well.. in hindsight climate change probably wouldn't be as bad as it is if nuclear continued growing at the same pace as in the 60s and 70s.

> Hint: it is because they are completely uneconomically

Yes, natural gas and fossil fuels were cheaper than nuclear too. That and the irrational panic is what killed it. At this point its probably too late (and renewables are more feasible option unless there are some significant technological advancements), but if you add up all the long-term costs and externalities nuclear would have turned out to be much cheaper in the 80s and 90s than it seemed on paper.

Just coal alone used to kill (probably still does worldwide) more people every year than Chernobyl ever did... What is the cost of that?
by bob1029 | 2025-09-13 14:12:31+00:00
I've learned that no home is perfect but some of these are a total nightmare. I've been through a number of homes over the years in the Texas market. Anything built after 2012 or so drops off like a rock in quality.

I intentionally bought one with minor foundation and drainage issues because the trade off was that everything else is perfect. You can fix landscaping, concrete, insulation, plumbing, etc. with incremental expenses. You cannot fix your location. That requires starting all over again each time.
by evanelias | 2025-09-13 14:12:41+00:00
> You can change it, but only going forward.

I don't believe this is correct in this case; realistically, I don't think they can change it at all. As far as I can tell, the WordPress contribution process doesn't involve a CLA or CAA.

That means any license change for WordPress would require getting agreement from every single third-party contributor whose code is still present in the codebase; and/or, removing or rewriting code where the contributor (copyright holder) does not agree. In practical terms, that isn't going to be possible.

WordPress itself is also a fork, which further impacts the situation if any ancient b2/cafelog code is still present in the codebase.

The key point here is that without a CAA, third-party contributors still own the copyright to their code contributions; and without a CLA, the project owner has no legal authority to re-license that third-party code in ways which violate the contributors' license.

The "change it going forwards" thing generally only applies if a CLA or CAA was used; or if the previous license was a permissive one and the new license terms don't violate the old license terms in any way.
by tim333 | 2025-09-13 14:13:11+00:00
I don't know if was western hubris so much as gullibility. Putin was saying he wouldn't invade right up until the day before and western politicians have the choice of whether to put money into shell production or schools and hospitals and went for the latter.

I'm not sure the bet paid off much either - Russia is way down in money, human lives, global reputation, military equipment and so forth. And I doubt the war will develop much in Russia's favour going forward. You can get so far by say we're your friend, we won't attack to peaceful people and then hitting them when their guard is down but they wise up.
by kiba | 2025-09-13 14:13:18+00:00
What do you mean by monenization scheme?

Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.

The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.

So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
by amirhirsch | 2025-09-13 14:13:31+00:00
That METR study gets a lot of traction for its headline; and I doubt many people read the whole thing—it was long—but the data showed a 50% speed up for the one dev with the most experience with Cursor/AI, suggesting a learning curve and also wild statistical variation on a small sample set. An errata later suggested another dev who did not have a speedup had not represented their experience correctly, but still strongly draws into question the significance of the findings.

The specific time sucks measured in the study are addressable with improved technology like faster LLMs and improved methodology like running parallel agents—the study was done in March running Claude 3.7 and before Claude Code.

We also should value the perception of having worked 20% less even if you actually spent more time. Time flies when you’re having fun!
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-13 14:14:24+00:00
The difference between agents and LLMs is that agents are easy to tune online, because unlike LLMs they're 95% systems software. The prompts, the tools, the retrieval system, the information curation/annotation, context injection, etc. I have a project that's still in early stages that can monitor queries in clickhouse for agent failures, group/aggregate into post mortem classes, then do system paramter optimization on retrieval /document annotation system and invoke DSPy on low efficacy prompts.
by naasking | 2025-09-13 14:14:51+00:00
> Total death count is a straw man argument, what matters here is the economic costs.

Paying out lawsuits is an economic cost. Regardless, disposing of low level radioactive components of the reactor had to happen at some point, and the cases where it's not offset by decades of recouping on that investment is are incredibly rare. Regardless, this is mostly moot in new designs because they are considerably safer, as I said. What's left is really the regulatory burden. In France and China, they build reactors in less than a decade. Can't happen here in America.

> Mining isn’t the major cost, nuclear fuel is expensive for other reasons.

Which is besides the point, as I said, you get a lot more energy per gram of fuel with modern designs or fast reactors, which mostly mitigates the objection about fuel cost, regardless of what stage the highest cost to obtain fuel is incurred.

Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk, which leaves the modern designs on the table where this risk is even lower than LWR.
by Zagreus2142 | 2025-09-13 14:15:45+00:00
Thanks! I think these are strong points, especially about the reaction to deepseek. I did have an assumption I didn't put in my original message, that they would probably be making investment offers to founders who walked into this with something like deepseek and that would balloon the costs well beyond office space and engineer time. But even having advanced knowledge of a next big idea from this would be worth the cost of entry yep.
by andsoitis | 2025-09-13 14:16:01+00:00
"if attention is a resource, it is not one covered by property rights. Cunning design might be able to take it from us, and do so with no hope of restitution. The spread of smartphones and social media has created a world in which it is very easy to steal. Can anything return attention to its owners? Social norms might help: libraries, for instance, have long insisted on silence in order to preserve focus. In time, regulation might, too. For the moment, however, the best hope is to take matters into your own hands and, when you are trying to read a column, put your phone far, far away."
by back2dafucha | 2025-09-13 14:16:21+00:00
The only languages Im interested in are future proof AI resistant languages. Since LLMs need alot of training (because they cant read language ASTs and write code correctly), a language that either isnt possible to express using fonts and character sets on the Internet, can only live in a private cloud, and is known to only verified practitioners runs on everything, and yet cant be decompiled.

You can launch a nuclear war in 5 lines of Visual Basic. I want a language AI doesnt know and cannot ever know.
by Nebasuke | 2025-09-13 14:16:53+00:00
I don't think this a fair interpretation of the parent comment as it's not about ownership of language. The website literally says "The next generation of ANTLR" and says "It's the successor of ANTLR4".

It's about a tool claiming to be the successor without seeming to be part of the ANTLR organisation. Are they completely different people, did the ANTLR4 owners stop writing it? There seems to be deliberately no clarification on this.
by chatmasta | 2025-09-13 14:16:57+00:00
It’s a pretty good solution for creating live mockups. A designer on my team came back eight hours after a meeting with a fully vibe coded, multi-page interface. I was honestly blown away. I had no idea this was the state of what’s possible with these tools.

Was it a real website? No, but it’s a live mockup way better than any Figma mock or rigid demo-ware.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-09-13 14:17:16+00:00
he does not give a shit about your bus ride.

As I pointed out earlier streetcar, not a bus ride.

but i'm not seeing it

Look harder.

Pre-pandemic the L and N were the two busiest rail routes (and the busiest lines systemwide) even considering they share most of the underground portion with four other lines. Somewhere around 75,000 daily trips.
by michaelt | 2025-09-13 14:19:36+00:00
> Are all of the LLMs trained using human labor that is sometimes exposed to extreme content?

The business process outsourcing companies labelling things for AI training are often the same outsourcing companies providing moderation services to facebook and other social media companies.

I need 100k images labelled by the type of flower shown, for my flower-identifying AI, so I contract a business that does that sort of thing.

Facebook need 100k flagged images labelled by is-it-an-isis-beheading-video to keep on top of human reviews for their moderation queues. They contract with the same business.

The outsourcing company rotates workers between tasks, so nobody has to be on isis beheading videos for a whole shift.
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-09-13 14:21:03+00:00
I also used to use vim and liked it, was running emacs with evil and it was ok… Then I started to write my config from scratch and got used to chords.

Later I tried boon, devil mode and meow but I just can’t get comfortable with mental overhead anymore. From those I’ve tried boon was the most interesting - some surprising QoL features, ergonomic layout.

What made chords bearable for me is a homerow mode on my Glove80.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-13 14:21:03+00:00
Here's a random selection when the French grid would collapse without 35 GW of their own and neighbors fossil based electricity:

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...

You need to differentiate beteween exporting when the grid is strained and facing a grid collapse when a cold spell hits.

Click around the weeks and you will find enormous exports happening the week before. Those are the averages you mention. But as we can now both see the French nuclear grid is incredible inflexible when dealing with the demand curve.

> No they can't, you have to understand how the EU consumption works, surplus are in summer and max demand is in winter. Nobody is going to store electricity in summer in their car to use it in winter, this is nonsense.

Please, this is getting ridiculous. I presume you are smarter than thinking that when I put forth people with hourly contracts for their BEVs I am doing it suggesting seasonal storage.

Have you heard of this thing called wind power? Have you heard of the demand curve not being flat throughout the day?

You know, delay the full charge of the car by a day, two or five if you didn't need to go anywhere and simply worked at home this week.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-13 14:21:06+00:00
It doesn't appear to me as a nostalgia for wintel at all. The author very aptly points out that standardization known from the PC platform is severely lacking in the ARM ecosystem. This makes ARM a good choice for digital "appliances," but not for general-purpose computers. Just the argument about kernel security updates is serious enough:

Imagine if you were buying x86 hardware. You might have to manage AcerOS, Dellbian, HPian, etc. Most of them have no security support (particularly for the kernel). Some are based on Debian 11 (released in 2021), some Debian 12 (released in 2023), and none on Debian 13 (released a month ago).

I wouldn't like to beg for kernel upgrades from my laptop manufacturer. (Apple is an exception here, because it's also an OS vendor)
by bdcravens | 2025-09-13 14:21:15+00:00
If you're not able to review what it generates, you shouldn't be using it (and arguably are the wrong person to be doing the boilerplate work to begin with)

Put differently, I go back to my original comment, where AI is essentially a junior/mid dev that you can express what needs to be done with enough detail. In either case, AI or dev, you'd review and/or verify it.

> Or is it a refusal to do actual software engineering, letting the machine taking care of it (deterministically) and moving up the ladder in terms of abstraction.

One could say the same of installing packages in most modern programming languages instead of writing the code from first principles.
by _fat_santa | 2025-09-13 14:21:18+00:00
I don't usually recommend Instagram accounts but I've been following CyFy Home Inspections[1][2] for quite some time now and you get a real first hand glimpse at what this sort of shoddy construction looks like.

[1]: https://www.instagram.com/cyfyhomeinspections/

[2]: https://www.cyfyhi.com/
by esperent | 2025-09-13 14:21:25+00:00
I read this a few years ago.

Time Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Beyond that, I think the reason you haven't heard more about it is that it happens in developing countries, so western media doesn't care much, and also because big AI companies work hard to distance themselves from it. They'll never be the ones directly employing these AI sweatshop works, it's all contracted out.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-13 14:22:16+00:00
I think that people whose English is bad, and who probably do need AI (or any help) to help them be understood, might be better suited with an initializing prompt that will get AI to strip this shit out and sound professional instead of like a telemarketer or a kindergarten teacher.

Can anyone write a good prompt that will do this?

> Your English is fine as it is.

You do not know this. This level of technical explanation is a lot harder than a few simple sentences.
by haolez | 2025-09-13 14:22:56+00:00
I know of a company that is huge in laser for physics and started like this in the 80s (through magazine catalogs).

They would list all kinds of lasers. When they got some offers for one of them, they'd sell it and schedule the delivery in 90 days. Then, they started the project from scratch. Crazy stuff and borderline legal :D
Show HN: CLAVIER-36 – A programming environment for generative music
by river_dillon | 2025-09-13 14:22:59+00:00
CLAVIER-36 is a programming environment for generative music. Programs are laid out in a two-dimensional grid, and evolve over time according to a fixed set of rules. The system is much like a cellular automaton, in that most of the rules governing the evolution of the system are local.

C36 programs describe sequences of discrete events in time. The environment includes a primitive sampler, as a self-contained means of interpreting these events as sound. For full expressivity, though, the system is best used as a generator of data for interpretation by an external musical instrument, such as a synthesizer.

The project was very directly inspired by Orca (https://100r.co/site/orca.html). It began as my own from-scratch implementation of Orca and diverged over time.

It's written in C, and compiled to WASM for the browser.

See the following pages for more info:

about page: https://clavier36.com/about

user manual: https://clavier36.com/manual

tutorial video: https://youtu.be/rIpQmJVMjCA
by pqtyw | 2025-09-13 14:23:12+00:00
> because they want to preserve the nature as it is.

In Norway? Or by nature as it is you mean managed nature "parks" or reindeer herding areas?

Don't Scandinavians generally vehemently support the eradication of native species like wolves (despite much bigger number of them doing just fine in much denser areas like Italy or Poland).
by theluketaylor | 2025-09-13 14:23:12+00:00
It costs a lot less to build transit infrastructure before or at the same time as everything else compared with adding it later, even if the line is underused as density is added.

The best alternative is a well-planned phased line with carefully protected right-of-way and a dedicated source of long term funding. Bonus points for it being a combination of value capture taxes and the transit agency being a property developer in their own right around stations. The early phase can be inside the boundary of current development so there are people to ride right away. Developers can build and market using the upcoming line, and prospective residents can be confident it will happen with funding secured.