MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-09-12 21:59:14+00:00
My advice is to use a LLM for that - they are often surprisingly good at producing decent elisp. Maybe not in "publish on ELPA/MELPA" quality, but it can absolutely cover user needs. I know the ecosystem and can read elisp as a coincidence of playing with common lisp - it is enough for glueing things together. The most complicated code I have is around org agenda and export of org tasks - there I needed some LLM help, but I was able to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in some packages and write a config from scratch on my own.

Prot has an intro book on elisp[1] which I want to go through, because some specifics of text processing and buffer usage are a bit unique - it is a lisp for a text editor, after all! But it is still just a lisp, and it even has a lot of common lisp functions in cl-* namespace!

[1] https://protesilaos.com/emacs/emacs-lisp-elements
by const_cast | 2025-09-12 21:59:50+00:00
That's because health insurance in the US sucks major ass. It's just bad, period. More expensive for comparatively much worse care and worse outcomes on Average.

Americans (I'm an American) sometimes have a preconceived notion that, if something is really expensive, it must be good. No... no that's not necessarily the case.

The insurance companies would love for you to believe that, but in actuality, we're just getting fucked. It's just a worse system overall, in pretty much every metric you could possibly choose.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-12 21:59:57+00:00
> "We've spent $5 trillion as a planet pursuing the wind-solar-battery approach," Burgum said while deferring to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright for evidence of that $5T figure

Does anyone know if this is true? It doesn’t sound true to me. A new modern nuclear plant, even in America, costs like $20 billion. For $5 trillion we could build hundreds of nuclear plants. Natural gas turbines sounds like a really backwards way to increase power generation.
by johanyc | 2025-09-12 21:59:59+00:00
You need a reliable source for energy. Pumped storage is not. They are mostly good for dealing with the fluctuations of energy supply and demand. It crucially requires water to operate. You can't do much when there's a drought. Also, did some googling. The world’s largest pumped‑hydro storage plant (Fengning, China) stores nearly 40 GWh, delivering 3.6 GW for about 10.8 hours when full. Thats not even a day.

There are really three options for reliable baseload: coal, gas, nuclear. Pick your poison.
by javcasas | 2025-09-12 22:00:07+00:00
The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents.

And then you have bad faith actors.

No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they?

No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they?

No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they?

Finally, no CxO would cheapen out in maintenance for short term gains then jump ship leaving a mess behind, right?

None of that has never ever happened, right?
by freehorse | 2025-09-12 22:00:08+00:00
Unless you are really desperate to find a job, there are definitely workplaces you would want to avoid. While a power imbalance does in principle exist, that doesn’t mean you usually have no choice at all. Of course that is less of a case when you just start, but in general pp can go around doing interviews and negotiating positions rather than just accept the first offer.
by the__alchemist | 2025-09-12 22:00:13+00:00
It's such a surprising dichotomy! Rust tooling, language and low-level capability makes it my top choice in several domains. It strikes me as the best tool available in high-performance and low-level domains. I contrast this with your observation: most of the open-source software (libraries generally) I see in rust are of poor quality.

I'm building a structural biology ecosystem in rust, split out into several libs, and a GUI program. Molecular dynamics, file format interop, API interaction, 3D viewer/dashboard/manipulation etc. I also do embedded in rust for work and personal projects. In both of these domains (High-performance scientific programming/GUI+3D, and embedded), I have had to write my own tooling. Nascent tools exist, but they are of too poor quality to use; e.g. easier to rewrite than attempt to work around the limitations of.

I'm at a loss. When I talk to people online about embedded rust, I find people discussing design patterns I think are high-friction (Async and typestates), and few people describe projects.

I think part of the problem is that it has acquired a group of people who design APIs and write libs without applying these libs to practical problems, which would expose their shortcomings.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 22:00:59+00:00
Oh, hold on, I may have gotten my numbers mixed up slightly. 145 might actually be for working, full time pure mathematicians - sorry about that, I'm double checking now.

EDIT: My massive bad, it looks like I accidentally bumped everything up a standard deviation in my head somewhere. Jesus. I should update the numbers in the original post. Maybe I should also consider getting a math PhD after all, apparently I'd be ahead of the pack in that case.
by Calavar | 2025-09-12 22:01:01+00:00
> Hence Leetcode is a reasonably good test for the job. If it didn't actually work, it would've been discarded by companies long ago.

I see it differently. I wouldn't say it's reasonably good, I'd say it's a terrible metric that's very tenuously correlated with on the job success, but most of the other metrics for evaluating fresh grads are even worse. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.

> If you can show that you can become excellent at one thing, there's a good chance you can become excellent at another thing.

Eh. As someone who did tech and then medicine, a lot great doctors would make terrible software engineers and vice versa. Some things, like work ethic and organization, are going to increase your odds of success at nearly any task, but there's plenty other skills that are not nearly as transferable. For example, being good at memorizing long lists of obscure facts is a great skill for a doctor, not so much for a software engineer. Strong spatial reasoning is helpful for a software developer specializing in algorithms, but largely useless for, say, an oncologist.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-12 22:01:04+00:00
> I assume you're referring to the Catherine McCoid decolonizing gender stuff from the 90s?

Amongst others.

> That is still talked about, but I'm not aware of it being taken seriously as a theory.

I'm not sure what to say to this because you're essentially arguing that your own ignorance is representative of the reality in the field. You recognise that these questions have been part of the discourse now for a third of a century but at the same time suggest it's all done in jest? I really don't know how to read this.

> We also have a whole lineage of art from the prehistoric age to today

We very much do not. There are many gaps, especially significant ones in pre-history and you're skipping multiple millennia to stretch a connection to temple prostitution, as well as ignoring the very clearly evident variation in the representations of women more recently across geographies.

> Even among the competing hypotheses...

Well we can end it here because the salient point is that pornographic representations of women is no longer the dominant theory and you seem to accept that.
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-12 22:01:08+00:00
I read the "New" feed to read and upvote interesting posts or posts which could lead to interesting discussions if more people saw them. There's always something good there, even if signal to noise ratio is low.

Every time I have to use the "vouch" feature to save posts on new, because some psychotic users here or perhaps a psychotic auto-moderator, insists on marking perfectly good submissions as [flagged] or [dead].

More people should check out the "New" tab.
by irl_zebra | 2025-09-12 22:01:20+00:00
Hiii not sure who you are, so not sure how much weight your endorsement carries. That being said, the shooter has been identified as a very right wing person. I’m not trying to silence anyone, but they did, of their own accord and apropos of nothing, commit to deleting their account if their ridiculously early conclusion was wrong.

Really I’d like it to be a learning opportunity, even though people like this seem to be incapable of learning lessons (will update here when they jump to conclusions without evidence on the next one) or of following principles (I don’t need to update, there’s no way they will follow with their commitment to delete their account). The lesson is to wait for some facts to come in before jumping to extreme conclusions.
by sigbottle | 2025-09-12 22:01:20+00:00
> Your best bet using them is when you have a large collection of smaller unstructured problems, most of which align with the heuristics.

Agreed. An algorithm right now in our company turns a directed graph problem, which to most people would seem crazy, into roughly ~m - n (m edges, n nodes) SAT checks that are relatively small. Stuffing all the constraints into an ILP solver would be super inefficient (and honestly undefined). Instead, by defining the problem statement properly and carving out the right invariants, you can decompose the problem to smaller NP-complete problems.

Definitely a balancing act of design.
by preisschild | 2025-09-12 22:02:11+00:00
> but no: there is no Endlager (permanent nuclear waste site) in sight

The Problem in Germany is that by law the state has to build a repository, while the operators have to pay for it. The operators did pay (~24 bln EUR), but politically either NIMBY parties (such as CDU/CSU/SPD) block it, or the Greens (under Habeck) block progress so they can continue to shout "what about the waste???"

In Finland the operators can build their own repository and they did it cheap and relatively fast.

Also from an even more anti-nuclear country (austria): Kernenergie? Ja bitte!
by mallowdram | 2025-09-12 22:02:30+00:00
If you had any grasp of what signaling is vs. communication, you'd be asking questions rather than characterizing, which is the refuge of the inhibited and the limited.

You and most industries live under the domain of the conduit metaphor paradox: That meaning can be extracted from anything other than an action-reaction specific. This eliminates words as meaning bearing, and reiterates that an arbitrary system has little certain effect as evolutionary. They're handicaps.

Language is meaningless, except as a status, domination, manipulation, or control factor.

“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024

What is hypothesized by Aristotle about non-contradiction, and then theorized by Cassirer in language, is revealed in Systemic Functional, and Western functional linguistics, and then proven in aphasia studies beginning in 2016.

Language is done, it serves no purpose except either to wither us in disinformation dark matter biases, or to replace itself.

If you know humanity would anthropomorphize AI, you already knew the basics of the worthlessness of language.
by hyperpape | 2025-09-12 22:02:43+00:00
This assumes that the number of jobs in the US is magically fixed.

The thing is that all these mega-corporations have offices across the world, but currently want to hire in the US. You and I want our personal jobs to be expensive, but we don't want the prospect of hiring us where we live to be too expensive. And even aside from cost, you also don't want them to say "there's not enough employees there, it's not worth hiring."[0]

[0] I'm technically no longer living in the US, but I was until recently.
by guywithahat | 2025-09-12 22:03:10+00:00
You can disable an account without knowing who owns it, although they do have credit card/payment information now, and I don't think new accounts get encryption services unless they pay.

That said, if your inbox is encrypted, protonmail does so on the client side with a second password. They can maybe delete the account, but proton mail doesn't know what the encrypted data is. What happens to new emails sent to a disabled address is anyone's guess though. Honestly I think they're doing the best they can given the circumstances
by skydhash | 2025-09-12 22:03:18+00:00
The model of computer use that appeals to me are the one that in theory have a simple system, but the real goal is for you to have a tool that fits your needs. So far it includes the BSDs (Unix), Emacs, and Smalltalk. I've not tried Plan 9 yet.

The more I'm learning more about the above, the more I'm believing that most computer problems has been solved since a long time and the focus should be on improving and creating new tools, not reinventing them.

PS: Spreadsheets are nice too, but they're still lacking the surrounding helpers that would make them great. There's VBA in excel, but I'm thinking about more like dynamic table that's linked to an endpoint or some commands (Unix's ps). I haven't explored tools like Airbase to see if they fit that vision.
by nxobject | 2025-09-12 22:03:35+00:00
> 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[...]

For what it's worth, my classmates from college who have completed PhDs, based their postgrad career decisions on completely different factors – mostly their families and partners, and whether they're willing to move around (especially to rural areas) to target an extremely shrinking academic job pool.

EDIT: example that came to mind – I had a classmate who postdoc'd at Chicago, who decided to stay in town and work in finance rather than pursue some tenure-track offers at R1s, because his young one went to a prestigious UChicago Lab School and didn't want to uproot her.
by jacobgkau | 2025-09-12 22:04:03+00:00
You got me on language at least, but it's not that simple. It was overturned for specific "private" spaces-- e.g. the Oval Office-- but the most recent Court of Appeals panel from June 6th did find that the East Room is not private like that and kept in place the prior ruling that the AP's allowed in the East Room. (The NYT article you linked doesn't mention this, but it's really only talking about a July 22nd denial of the AP's emergency petition challenging the partial overturning, not any change to the situation on the ground.)

Regarding the East Room, according to the White House Correspondents' Association website (https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/), reporters either need to have a hard pass or a temporary pass from the White House Press Office to enter. The Press Office generally only gives press passes to the press. That's why even if we restrict the conversation to the East Room, it's still a "special right" (or special privilege).

Regarding the Oval Office et al. (which admittedly is what the term "press pool" actually refers to), the Trump administration's entire argument was that press access to those spaces is a "privilege, not a right." So keeping in mind the courts affirmed an actual right to the East Room, the White House itself still grants other journalists a special privilege (because they're journalists).

You can make an argument if you'd like that the guy earlier in the thread should've said, "The press has special privileges because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job." (This ignores that it's still a "right" in other cases, like the East Room.) Squabbling over that word choice doesn't do a lot for the topic of this thread, which was journalists no longer serving the interest that justified giving them those privileges/rights.
by fleebee | 2025-09-12 22:04:14+00:00
If you want to delve deeper into this topic and like the Advent of Code format, you're in luck: i18n-puzzles[1] has a bunch of puzzles related to text encoding that drill how UTF-8 (and other variants such as UTF-16) work into your brain.

[1]: https://i18n-puzzles.com/
by const_cast | 2025-09-12 22:04:20+00:00
Because of how risk pooling works.

The reason you have health insurance, and you don't just pay for healthcare, is because pooling together a lot of people and paying for all of them is cheaper than paying for each individually.

You've probably noticed that, the bigger the company, the better the health insurance plans. Why is that? Their risk pool is bigger.

Follow the logic. What's the biggest risk pool you can use? The entire US population. What would then provide the lowest per-capita cost? Spreading the cost across the entire US population. It's economies of scale.

Bonus: we can also eliminate much of the administrative aspect of healthcare because we are no longer coordinating thousands of separate insurance entities. You mentioned make-work - yes, we have that. Why does a hospital need 500 billing specialists? You tell me.
by kiitos | 2025-09-12 22:05:02+00:00
what a just totally bizarre perspective

all of the stuff that's being complained-about is absolute 100% table-stakes stuff that every http server on the public internet has needed to deal with since, man, i dunno, minimum 15 years now?

as a result literally nobody self-hosts their own HTTP content any more, unless they enjoy the challenge in like a problem-solving sense

if you are even self-hosting some kind of captcha system you've already make a mistake, but apparently this guy is not just hosting but building a bespoke one? which is like, my dude, respect, but this is light years off of the beaten path

the author whinges about google not doing their own internal rate limiting in some presumed distributed system, before any node in that system makes any http request over the open internet. that's fair and not doing so is maybe bad user behavior but on the open internet it's the responsibility of the server to protect itself as it needs to, it's not the other way around

everything this dude is yelling about is immediately solved by hosting thru a hosting provider, like everyone else does, and has done, since like 2005
by mpweiher | 2025-09-12 22:06:18+00:00
> Until 2016, nuclear energy received more subsidize than renewables in Germany.

That's not true. That report is based on a completely ridiculous paper by the FÖS, the "Forum Ökologisch-Soziale Marktwirtschaft". Calling the numbers it uses "completely made up" is putting it kindly.

One of the many debunking is here:

https://kernd.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Artikel_atw_D_20...

Summary:

"The disregard for scientific methodology, for basic knowledge of economics and business administration, environmental economics, energy economics, and nuclear technology, the biased selection of sources, even the use of newspaper articles as supposedly scientific sources, and the denial of the positive effects of nuclear energy, which far outweigh its social costs, are unworthy of the FÖS. Either they are a sign of insufficient economic expertise at the institute, as well as a lack of knowledge of scientific methodology, or the FÖS is deliberately misleading readers with the aim of being able to cite the highest possible fictitious costs for nuclear energy on behalf of its NGO clients. Both discredit the study and its client."

The debt that EDF carries is completely normal for a company this size, especially one that does infrastructure. It would be unusual for a company not to use the capital markets to finance such projects. EDF has been highly profitable for decades, recently while being used to subsidize other parts of the economy via ARENH as well as being used to buffer the effects of the energy crisis, not just via ARENH, but through massive expansion of ARENH.

ARENH is not "ending", it is being replaced by a comparable scheme that is structured slightly differently.

EDF was not "nationalized" in 2022. It was always a state company, with the state never holding less than 85%. The period where the state held less than 100% was relatively short, from 2005 to 2022. The state bought out the minority shareholders in order to streamline the planned nuclear expansion.

The "subsidies" for EDF (cheaper loans etc.) amount to around € 2.7 - 3 billion a year. By itself, that's obviously not "minute". However, these sums are dwarfed by the ARENH program and the profits that EDF pays to the state, which turn the subsidies into "negative subsidies" in sum. That is, the state gets more money from EDF than it gives it, by a good amount.

Even if that weren't the case, the sums are dwarfed by the German subsidies for renewable, which are an order of magnitude higher than the gross subsidies in France (and infinitely higher than the net-negative subsidies).
by paulcole | 2025-09-12 22:06:40+00:00
The further your use case strays from, “This is going to be a digital replacement for a paper notebook” the less satisfied you will be with your purchase of a Remarkable product.

Check out /r/remarkableTablet for everyone who convinced themselves they were buying an ebook reader or a device running standard Linux under the hood — essentially of them regret the purchase to varying degrees.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-12 22:06:54+00:00
The Korean government does the exact same thing as ICE, and continues to ignore the Korean constitutional court's ruling on indefinite detention [0][1][2], and immigrant abuse is even worse in Korea than the US [3]

[0] - https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/ngos-urge-un-human-ri...

[1] - https://www.newskorea.ne.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=7205

[2] - https://www.banmuang.co.th/mobile/news/region/424336

[3] - https://www.bbc.com/thai/articles/ckklk4w9w3po
by fivefives55555 | 2025-09-12 22:07:57+00:00
I've been following this on X/Twitter and I think one of the most egregious things that's important to point out is that folks from Phrack reached out to Proton in private multiple times, and Proton ghosted them. Proton only engaged with them and then reinstated the accounts after Phrack went public and their X/Twitter post went viral.

It also looks like one of the writers filed an appeal with Proton and Proton denied the appeal, so they manually investigated the incident and refused to reinstate the account and then only did after this got attention on X/Twitter.

So make no mistake about it: Proton didn't just disable the accounts after whatever CERT complained, which would have been bad enough - they also didn't do anything about it until this started getting lots of eyes on social media.
by chatmasta | 2025-09-12 22:08:03+00:00
I would like to see a “DataFusion for Vector databases,” i.e. an embeddable library that Does One Thing Well – fast embedding generation, index builds, retrieval, etc. – so that different systems can glue it into their engines without reinventing the core vector capabilities every time. Call it a generic “vector engine” (or maybe “embedding engine” to avoid confusion with “vectorized query engine.”)

Currently, every new solution is either baked into an existing database (Elastic, pgvector, Mongo, etc) or an entirely separate system (Milvus, now Vectroid, etc.)

There is a clear argument in favor of the pgvector approach, since it simply brings new capabilities to 30 years of battle-tested database tech. That’s more compelling than something like Milvus that has to re-invent “the rest of the database.” And Milvus is also a second system that needs to be kept in sync with the source database.

But pgvector is still _just for Postgres_. It’s nice that it’s an extension, but in the same way Milvus has to reinvent the database, pgvector needs to reinvent the vector engine. I can’t load pgvector into DuckDB as an extension.

Is there any effort to make a pure, Unix-style, batteries not included, “vector engine?” A library with best-in-class index building, retrieval, storage… that can be glued into a Postgres extension just as easily as it can be glued into a DuckDB extension?