MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-12 19:55:48+00:00
> Actually that's a problem for a lot of libertarian minded tech, it starts being thought of as enabling freedom from oppressive governments and ends up being adopted by criminals - Bitcoin, Tor, etc.

This is such a sham though.

You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.

Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.

Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
by leptons | 2025-09-12 19:56:29+00:00
Been in software development for 30 years. I have no idea what "Leetcode" is. As far as I know I've never been interviewed with "Leetcode", and it seems like I should be happy about that.

And when someone uses "leet" when talking about computing, I know that they aren't "elite" at all and it's generally a red flag for me.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-12 19:56:51+00:00
The French grid has been extremely resilient with only a minor setback a couple years ago when multiple plants were in maintenance at the same time and that’s despite not significantly investing in it for decades.

Technically, a grid based on nuclear production is also a distributed grid. You have multiple plants and it’s easy to add overcapacity to the grid because nuclear is easy to modulate.
by plst | 2025-09-12 19:56:52+00:00
> Can't reference a leak or incident specifically, but when Foxconn (a massive company with 3/4 million employees) had workers jumping from their dormitories and installed "suicide nets" the headlines were always "Apple factory..." - and I checked multiple sites at the time. Even though quite literally every single piece of major western technology is assembled in Foxconn factories.

Apple chose Foxconn. It won't get to choose the third parties implementing alternative translation apps. That's the point.

I see that I wasn't specific, but I thought it's obvious given the context.

> And about 3rd party translation AI systems. Of course _I_ won't install suspicious ones, but how do you make sure Auntie Liz won't?

I think you are switching topics from allowing other vendors to use Apple-only APIs to "sideloading".

Educate her. (yes, that's not Apple's responsibility, and they don't even try. We need people to understand what applications can do when installed on a smartphone or a computer. It's a national education issue IMO). If she can't take care of herself anymore - parental controls.

I see the point in having some entity verify legitimacy of applications, but it does not need to be only Apple/Google, like with TLS.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-12 19:57:04+00:00
No. UTF-8 is for encoding text, so we don't need to care about it being variable length because text was already variable length.

The network addresses aren't variable length, so if you decide "Oh IPv6 is variable length" then you're just making it worse with no meaningful benefit.

The IPv4 address is 32 bits, the IPv6 address is 128 bits. You could go 64 but it's much less clear how to efficiently partition this and not regret whatever choices you do make in the foreseeable future. The extra space meant IPv6 didn't ever have those regrets.

It suits a certain kind of person to always pay $10M to avoid the one-time $50M upgrade cost. They can do this over a dozen jobs in twenty years, spending $200M to avoid $50M cost and be proud of saving money.
by sebastiennight | 2025-09-12 19:57:21+00:00
I'm trying to wrap my head around this:

1. How are you defending against the case of one MCP poisoning your firewall LLM into incorrectly classifying other MCP tools?

2. How would you make sure the LLM shows the warning, as they are non-deterministic?

3. How clear do you expect MCP specs in order for your classification step to be trustworthy? To the best of my knowledge there is no spec that outlines how to "label" a tool for the 3 axes, so you've got another non-deterministic step here. Is "writing to disk" an external comm? It is if that directory is exposed to the web. How would you know?
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-12 19:57:37+00:00
Because suddenly the oil isn't Russian anymore but Indian or something like that. Here's[1] an article going into how after the 2014 sanctions suddenly a lot of tropical fruits started growing in Belarussia, or how the landlocked country suddenly started exporting tons of Belarusian shrimp.

[1]: https://east-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Belarus-E...
by gertop | 2025-09-12 19:57:39+00:00
UTF-16 is both simpler to parse and more compact than utf-8 when writing non-english characters.

UTF-8 didn't win on technical merits, it won becausw it was mostly backwards compatible with all American software that previously used ASCII only.

When you leave the anglosphere you'll find that some languages still default to other encodings due to how large utf-8 ends up for them (Chinese and Japanese, to name two).
by bryanlarsen | 2025-09-12 19:57:41+00:00
A nuclear fission power plant is never going to be cheaper than a coal plant, and coal plants are very expensive. They're superficially similar types of plants: they heat water and then use a steam turbine to convert it to electricity. Coal plants use higher temperatures and pressures, so they can use smaller turbines. That turbine is a massive part of the cost.

Yes, there's room to drive down the cost of nuclear. No, it's never going to be cost competitive with solar/wind/batteries, no matter how much you drive down the cost or eliminate regulations.
by godelski | 2025-09-12 19:58:26+00:00
> it's marginally worse than score/STAR to begin with, and on top of that has an ugly failure mode

To be clear, I strongly prefer STAR, but approval is the "good enough" where I'd shut up other than nerdy nit-picky conversations (which I enjoy as much as any other nerd). Approval seems to work out well enough in practice (hell, it's how most people figure out where to eat and even HN is some mixture of Approval and 3-2-1 if you can downvote lol).

The way I like to explain score vs ranking to people is like measuring things with a normal ruler vs measuring things but your ruler only has inches on it. People seem to get it and the importance of specifying how much more you like one candidate over another or how little your indifference is between some.

But I think we both understand these systems sufficiently and probably shouldn't derail. I just want to make sure we don't fall into doing the same thing I'm complaining about over here[0]

> the lesser of evils

But that's kinda my point. With the example of my parents we can agree that it is a choice between two evils but then they cannot understand how I say I hold my nose while begrudgingly choosing one rather than vote with full devotion. In reality that means one of us doesn't actually believe in a choice between the lesser of two evils[1]. They claim this, but don't act on it. I think this is strikingly common.

That is a far worse form of tribalism because they lie to themselves. They've convinced themselves they believe something that they don't actually believe in. What I'm worried about is how common this is. Even down to the mundane cliche, where I jokingly define as "something everyone can recite, but no one can put into practice." Road to hell I guess...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45225341

[1] Give me the choice between the lesser of many evils! I joke, but as much as I love cardinal voting I won't make the claim that it is a cure all. But given a choice between two evils or many evils (and no other information), I'll take many evils. My chances are better in being able to pick a lesser one.
by kieranmaine | 2025-09-12 19:58:43+00:00
> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?"

Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1]

The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything"[2] is an interesting demonstration of how solar + batteries is pushing other generation sources to the periphery in most of the world.

Edit: Here is some more data for Brazil and the UK showing a large increase in solar over the last 5 years [3][4]

1. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-power-continu...

2. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

3. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/wind-and-solar-gene...

4.https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/a-record-year-for-b...
by matt_d | 2025-09-12 19:58:56+00:00
As far as compiling continuations goes, sequent calculus (specifically as a compiler IR) is an interesting research direction. See Grokking the Sequent Calculus (Functional Pearl) from ICFP 2024: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3674639

"This becomes clearer with an example: When we want to evaluate the expression (2 + 3) ∗ 5, we first have to focus on the subexpression 2 + 3 and evaluate it to its result 5. The remainder of the program, which will run after we have finished the evaluation, can be represented with the evaluation context □ ∗ 5. We cannot bind an evaluation context like □ ∗ 5 to a variable in the lambda calculus, but in the λμ~μ-calculus we can bind such evaluation contexts to covariables. Furthermore, the μ-operator gives direct access to the evaluation context in which the expression is currently evaluated.

Having such direct access to the evaluation context is not always necessary for a programmer who wants to write an application, but it is often important for compiler implementors who write optimizations to make programs run faster. One solution that compiler writers use to represent evaluation contexts in the lambda calculus is called continuation-passing style. In continuation-passing style, an evaluation context like □ ∗ 5 is represented as a function λ x . x ∗ 5. This solution works, but the resulting types which are used to type a program in this style are arguably hard to understand. Being able to easily inspect these types can be very valuable, especially for intermediate representations, where terms tend to look complex. The promise of the λμ~μ-calculus is to provide the expressive power of programs in continuation-passing style without having to deal with the type-acrobatics that are usually associated with it."

A brief summary of the SC-as-a-compiler-IR vs. CPS from one of the authors of the paper: https://types.pl/@davidb/115186178751455630

"In some sense the Sequent Calculus (SC) is quite similar to a CPS based IR. To sum up the benefits of SC over CPS in two concepts, I would say: Symmetry and non-opaque continuations.

Symmetry: A lot of pairs of dual concepts are modelled very naturally and symmetrically in SC: call-by-value and call-by-name, data types and codata types, exception based error handling and Result-type error handling, for example.

Non-Opaque continuations: Instead of continuations in CPS which are just a special kind of function whose internals cannot be inspected (easily), SC introduces consumers whose internal structure can be inspected easily, for example when writing optimization passes."
Show HN: 47jobs – A Fiverr/Upwork for AI Agents
by the_plug | 2025-09-12 19:59:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on something I’d love to share: 47jobs (https://47jobs.com ) – a marketplace where you can hire AI agents to do tasks instead of human freelancers.

Why? I kept noticing that many tasks on Upwork/Fiverr—coding, content generation, data analysis, automation—can now be handled by AI in minutes, not hours. But there wasn’t a platform built around hiring AI directly.

So I built 47jobs:

100% AI agents doing the work (no humans in the loop).

Jobs get delivered 10x faster, at transparent prices.

You can “hire” an agent for coding, automation, research, etc.

I’d love your thoughts:

Does a pure AI-agent marketplace make sense?

What types of jobs would you want AI agents to handle first?

Any UX or trust issues you’d expect with this model?

This is an early version, and I’m here to learn from your feedback. Thanks!
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-12 19:59:26+00:00
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
by randoomed | 2025-09-12 19:59:35+00:00
The main reason is a combination of negligence by the owner of the plant and not enough enforcement of standards. The fukushima powerplant was known to have sea wall lower then required and as such was vulnerable to a tsunami (this was known for quite a long time) Combined with backup power in the basement (also against standards)

For an example of what happens to a reactor build according to safety requirements see the onagawa nuclear powerplant
by reaperducer | 2025-09-12 19:59:48+00:00
Sounds made up to me, too. Unless he lives in some country where that happened.

In many places in the United States it was unusual for COVID to be listed as a cause of death in paperwork. Often it was listed a something coronary or pulmonary. This isn't unique to COVID, but happened a lot more with that disease, especially before there were vaccines and the stigma was stronger.

The actual number of COVID deaths is estimated because policies varied so much among different political jurisdictions.

Source: Work in the healthcare industry, and had relatives die of COVID who ended up with something else listed on their death certificates.
by hkpack | 2025-09-12 20:00:29+00:00
The reason for that is simple - Russia started its invasion _after_ making Europe dependent on its gas. In Ukraine a lot of people predicted that the war is inevitable after the latest north stream is finished.

The reduction of purchase of gas from Russia did significantly impacted energy prices across EU to the point of populist far-right pro-russia governments rising in popularity (even though that is not the only reason).

So Russia and China has a long term strategy of subverting the west and we are just reacting when there are no good options available.

But, sanctions do work. The problem is that the economic power of the west is comparable these days to "global north".
by toast0 | 2025-09-12 20:00:40+00:00
They may begrudge the 'city people', but they probably won't begrudge their neighbors. It's also nice to have someone to help eat your disaster food :) I've done small preparations before, and you've got to cycle it out for freshness every so often[1], which means someone has to eat it... might as well be you and your neighbors. If you're in a community of like minded, well prepared neighbors, maybe you can get some variety at least.

[1] My elementary schools had a good program of bring in canned food at the start of the school year in case of emergency, have a picnic to eat it in the last month of school. I also did have a disaster can when I lived in California; I'm less prepared at the moment.
by quickthrowman | 2025-09-12 20:01:26+00:00
The (authoritarian?) nation of Finland has already solved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

I watched a very interesting documentary about Onkalo, which happens to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4
by ejstronge | 2025-09-12 20:01:31+00:00
I actually think the opposite is true. TV did not exist in the same way 50 years ago, so journalists played a more important role in transmitting news.

Maybe you mean that those journalists were more specialized than the writers of today?

It seems that there may have been more journalists in the 1970s (when we consider people who call themselves reporters and work in 'news').

1972 - ~39,000 ( https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/occupational-outlook-han... ; a great resource to find out about what journalism was like)

2022 - ~17,000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes273023.htm#nat - search for Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers. If you want to add social media companies one needs a reasonable way to discount media streaming services. At any rate, this doesn't match what was being done in the 1970s so it's immaterial to your argument)
by layer8 | 2025-09-12 20:01:38+00:00
The geographic extent of legislative time zones can change, they can morph, split and merge, and also appear and vanish completely. In consequence, the only way to unambiguously specify which local time results when adding durations backwards and forwards in time, without being constrained to limited periods of legislative non-change, is to fix a specific geographical location, and to specify how local time has changed and is changing at that particular location. That is what the tz database does. In principle, you could define a separate time zone for each point on Earth, but that isn’t practical. So the compromise is to pick representative cities.

One important thing to understand is that the time zones of the tz database, and hence generally the time zones used in computing, are a slightly different concept than legislative time zones.
by i5heu | 2025-09-12 20:01:50+00:00
There is just no good reason to build nuclear in a world with renewables.

Especially if you consider that most nations cannot produce fuel rods by themselves.

And if you calculate in the risk like “get me a insurance that covers leaks and melt downs” and finance somehow the disassembly of a nuclear plant, nuclear is one of the most costly ways you can get energy.

Plus it is a huge nice target in war times.

There are so so many benefits to decentralized renewables that you intuition is absolutely correct.
by hugo1789 | 2025-09-12 20:01:56+00:00
Imo that's a pretty complicated topic. On one side if you just build LWRs you just don't need very highly enriched uranium or plutonium so posession of those is a red flag. On the other side fast breeder reactors are the ones which are able to produce the least harmful waste. But fast breeders and closed fuel cycles produce and handle plutonium which in turn can be used for bad things.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 20:02:02+00:00
I know it'll be considered a hot take, but I'd argue that people don't even know what "tracking" in the Internet context even means enough for their supposed "preferences" about it to be valid.

90% of non-tech-nerds have this simple of an opinion about it:

1. Retargeting ads are "creepy" because ... "they just are"

2. Retargeting ads either annoy me because I think they're dumb in that particular instance ("I already BOUGHT a phone case last week, it's so dumb that it keeps showing me phone cases all day!") or because they're too good ("I gave in and bought the juicer after I kept seeing those ads all around the web") and I don't like spending money.

The rest of "tracking" they don't even know anything about and can't verifiably point to any harms.

Data brokers acquire data from thousands of different sources - many of which aren't stemming from Internet usage - and most of the browser data relevant here isn't tied to their actual name and permanent identity (and doesn't need to be to serve its purpose which is usually "to show relevant ads" and the more specific case of "to get people to come back and buy things they saw").

Honestly, just like people are annoyed by pushy car salesmen, and being asked for a "tip" at a self-order kiosk counter-service restaurant, they are going to be annoyed about aspects of the commercial Internet, and it doesn't automatically mean that they're being victimized or that they need regulations to try to help.
by deaddodo | 2025-09-12 20:02:12+00:00
The actual patent goes into specifics about the covered mechanic they are patenting and it focuses much more on the pokeball/swapping mechanics.

That being said, if they ever tried to hit anyone with the entirety of that, other than in a case of 1:1 replication of Pokemon, it would be a spurious weapon at best. There's too much prior art + alternative implementations in existence to argue for a unique and inventive mechanic.
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 20:02:24+00:00
Thank you for being specific! This is no longer the case under modern licensing.

Look at Vogtle and Summer, who were so expensive and disastrous that the Summer build was abandoned with billions of dollars sunk in construction.

Nothing was changed on the regulatory side, and it was licensed under a new regulatory model requested by industry, that let them start construction without everything fully designed yet. There were many super expensive changes during the build, but that was due to EPC, not regulatory stuff.

The NRC has been extremely open to regulatory changes since the 2000s, especially with the "nuclear renaissance" push around 2008. I'm not aware of any suggested regulatory changes that were not adopted.
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-12 20:03:12+00:00
It's always dangerous to stick one's neck out and say "[this many bits] ought to be enough for anybody", but I think it's very unlikely we'll ever run out of UTF-8 sequences. UTF-8 can represent about 1.1 million code points, of which we've assigned about 160,000 actual characters, plus another ~140,000 in the Private Use Area, which won't expand. And that's after getting nearly all of the world's known writing systems: the last several Unicode updates have added a few thousand characters here and there for very obscure and/or ancient writing systems, but those won't go on forever (and things like emojis rarely only get a handful of new code points per update, because most new emojis are existing code points with combining characters).

If I had to guess, I'd say we'll run out of IPv6 addresses before we run out of unassigned UTF-8 sequences.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-09-12 20:03:22+00:00
It sounds like it's driven by safety concerns:

> In 2024, a new energy vehicle brand conducted a user survey, revealing that 32% of car owners had mistakenly used the accelerator pedal as the brake pedal in emergencies, with 15% resulting in accidents.

> A simulation test by Tsinghua University's Automotive Safety Laboratory also showed that drivers accustomed to the one-pedal mode had an average reaction time 0.3 seconds longer when pressing the brake pedal in an emergency, equivalent to an additional braking distance of 8.3 meters at 100 km/h.
by gred | 2025-09-12 20:03:28+00:00
> My understanding is that codepoints beyond 65,536 are only used for languages that are no longer in use, and emojis

This week's Unicode 17 announcement [1] mentions that of the ~160k existing codepoints, over 100k are CJK codepoints, so I don't think this can be true...

[1] https://blog.unicode.org/2025/09/unicode-170-release-announc...
by zdragnar | 2025-09-12 20:03:32+00:00
I'm a bit miffed I can't find the article now, but I recall hearing it was more the reactor design approval process than the operational process regulations that interfered with and drove up costs. Every tiny detail of a site has to be taken into account, forcing modifications to existing designs such that every build ends up being bespoke anyway. On top of that, many of the rules around the design approval process are geared towards older generation reactors and newer generation reactors end up being cost ineffective because they need to account for things that don't apply to them.

If anyone remembers that article, I'd love to cite it here. If not, feel free to ignore what is otherwise unfounded speculation I guess.