MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by boringg | 2025-09-12 19:44:51+00:00
Its multifold.

1. Regulations are a big asterisk to any project. If you don't think you will get licensed or your project will get axed halfway through or there is a risk (Which has been very high in the past). Investors who would put money up for the project won't do it OR they require a significantly higher cost of capital. 2. There is very little muscle memory in the fabrication of reactors and reactor components in north America because we de facto shut down the industry from 80s until 20s. Therefore the first projects will cost more money as we recover our abilities to fab. 3. The licensing and regulatory costs are also incredibly high - and you cant make any adjustments if you kick off the project or you restart the process. This leads to massive cost over runs.

China and Korea are currently building reactors about 1/6 the costs of the US I believe.
by catapart | 2025-09-12 19:45:24+00:00
As someone who wrote an entire indexedDB wrapper library just to understand the "micro task" issues that are referenced in this blog post, and THEN dedicated a couple hundred words of my readme to explaining this footgun[0], I am so glad to hear about `scheduler.postTask`. That's new information to me!

Thanks for including that example!

[0] https://github.com/catapart/record-setter?tab=readme-ov-file...
by zdp7 | 2025-09-12 19:45:54+00:00
I am really surprised to read that American healthcare costs are not transparent. As I mentioned in another comment I know exactly how much everything costs to me and insurance. My HDHP is serviced by United Healthcare (largest Healthcare company in the US). For every visit to the doctor, I get an explanation of benefits. This tells me what the doctor charged, what insurance actually paid them and what I owe. I'm pretty sure that's pretty standard across the industry. Then comparing costs... It's pointless. I can't afford to go out of network, so I go with who my doctor recommends. They will then get paid the already negotiated rate (which is probably the same rate across the network).
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 19:45:55+00:00
We have one model for cheaper construction of nuclear, using exactly the same designs as in the US (AP1000) or EU (EPR), and that example is China.

I don't think China is building them any less safe. I don't think the regulations are significantly different.

I don't think any of the designers of the nuclear reactors want to build them any less safely, either, because they are not asking for that.

Many of the "safety" stuff is also about prolonging longevity of the reactor as long as possible. Like really inspecting the welds on tubing, etc. Any reduction in safety there also ultimately increases costs by reducing the lifetime of the plant or heavily increasing maintenance costs.

That's why I don't think this is a tradeoff between safety and cost. I think it's a tradeoff between construction/design competence and cost.
by arturventura | 2025-09-12 19:46:03+00:00
Hey, I’ve implemented almost the same thing, but I’ve focused on the internals. I have the server and mount system implemented and wanted to implement something similar to webtorrent to be able to mount peer to peer mounts between browsers. I have more or less the file system and the syscalls. I was using assembly script to implement user space. Take a look. Probably you can copy some parts https://github.com/intigos/possimpible
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-09-12 19:46:20+00:00
Earth is strange - a billion years of water and chemistry on every grain of sand on every beach. Every combination of temperature, sunlight, wetting and drying as tides slosh things around in every phase.

It's like a bioreactor for creating life. One could argue, it's highly unlikely given all those experiments and all that time, that life would avoid being created.

And Mars? It has a moon too, two of them. Tides as well, lunar and solar. Pretty much the same deal.
by kragen | 2025-09-12 19:46:35+00:00
Do Shaheds fly at high altitudes? Are we talking about Shahed-136 here? I thought flying low was one of their main advantages! I don't think Anvil can reach high altitudes. I mean it's a battery-powered quadcopter.

We're speculating based on very little information here. At least you didn't spell it "Shaheed".
by a3w | 2025-09-12 19:46:40+00:00
Clean, mostly. With future? No, it creates primary heat. Wind and solar do not.

Water power also does not, but power from damns is not clean if you want an eco-friendly power source.

Wind currently also has a bigger environment impact than solar, but is of course a source available more frequently at night [citation needed, just kidding].

And waste we need to dispose of, which no countries has long term experience in storing. Except for costly disasters in how not to intermediately store it, here in Germany.

If the very finite amount of nuclear fuel is so useful, why not make future generations happy by preserving it for them, and for now, limiting its use until we learned how to add to the initial price the full cost of long term storage, with further disasters as a learning experience for that?

Saving lives and being cost-effective in the short run might work, but every energy expert says in 50 years, nuclear will have to be phased out anyway. And fusion could provide clean, but also primary heat inducing energy. So even that will not save us.
by BillTthree | 2025-09-12 19:46:48+00:00
so the risk to the wallet holder is the exact same risk that exists for every single HTTPS connection right now?

Post quantum algorithms have been available. You can do it today. Why not for bitcoin?

In reality, there are very few current real world implementations. This article makes it seem that RSA is under active exploitation. If it is, bitcoin is not the first target IMO
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 19:46:58+00:00
You and maybe others keep saying that. I assure you, we don't choose to use them.

If you want to operate an ad-supported site, you need that consent. Untargeted ads are pointless and they don't make money. If you disagree, can I interest you in some brake pads for a Toyota Corolla? How about a dental chew for elderly cats? No? ok.

If you operate an e-commerce site or a SaaS of some kind, you probably need to advertise it online. To have traffic land on your site from advertising, you need to have ad network 'pixels' on your site. That's what they require. If you won't comply, then you can't advertise and you probably can't get many customers.

Websites which need neither are called "hobby sites." I'm very happy for the personal blogs which use no analytics, have no need to remember anyone or collect any "data." The sites showing the cookie banners are not that. They need to make money in order to exist.
by cm2187 | 2025-09-12 19:47:18+00:00
Well it is hard to talk about theoretical physics at the XVIII century since physics in general was nascent and there was little separation between the disciplines. But I believe the industrial revolution was largely driven by the development of the steam engine, so Watt, Carnot, later Kalvin, etc.

Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.
by yongjik | 2025-09-12 19:47:40+00:00
As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means.

But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14.

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?"
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 19:48:05+00:00
Meanwhile Iowa has more than 6000 wind turbines and is building 2-3 more every single day. You can find places in Iowa where there are wind turbines evenly spaced in all direction much farther than the eye can see. You wouldn't see 1300 turbines around Springfield because they don't put them close enough together to see that many. Most of those turbines are built by "German" companies, though the factory is local.

Get building Germany. Wind turbines are easy to scale.
by viccis | 2025-09-12 19:48:07+00:00
My experience with pure math is that this is not necessary to get job as one, even at good institutions, but you will be terrorized by the arrogance of the ones you mention. Learning to deal with the "brilliant jerk" is a problem in many fields, but the ones I've met in pure math are some of the weirdest (and most vicious)
by avidiax | 2025-09-12 19:48:11+00:00
I have heard it claimed, at least for US construction, that a nuclear plant under construction has to implement new safety measures even if those measures were adopted after the design approval or construction start date.

This means that the design can change multiple times during construction, which both slows construction and exposes the project to even more safety design changes.

Ironically, the creaky old plants that were built long ago don't need to adopt such new safety requirements. They are grandfathered in, but can't be economically replaced because the costs of a replacement are artificially inflated.

A car analogy would be that we continue driving 1955 Chevy Bel-Airs with no seat belts since an up-to-date car is too expensive to develop, since we can't start production until the latest LIDAR and AI has been added. Once the LIDAR is in, pray that there's no new self-driving hardware released before full production, or we'll have to include that too.
by btown | 2025-09-12 19:48:12+00:00
This is Python; finding new ways to subscript into things directly is a graduate student’s favorite pastime!

In all seriousness I think that encoding-independent constant-time substring extraction has been meaningful in letting researchers outside the U.S. prototype, especially in NLP, without worrying about their abstractions around “a 5 character subslice” being more complicated than that. Memory is a tradeoff, but a reasonably predictable one.
by happosai | 2025-09-12 19:48:55+00:00
That tsunami killed 20.000+ people, and spilled massive amounts of chemicals and toxic junk to the ocean.

Yet people keep fixating over the radioactive pollution, including evicting people from their homes for truly minor amounts of radiation.

Turns out the "worst case scenario" of nuclear accidents is jackpot for nature. By clearing Fukushima from humans, nature is thriving: https://www.sciencealert.com/animals-aren-t-just-surviving-i...
by sebastiennight | 2025-09-12 19:49:12+00:00
You're correct that the patent (in Claim 1) does not specifically refer to throwing a Pokeball (just to "causing the sub character to appear" based on an input), but it seems to me to still be directly linked to this dynamic.

The article itself is quite low-quality (as usual with articles where the title and subheadline are quotes) and I'd go as far as assume it's probably a PR piece placed by another player in the space.
by barbazoo | 2025-09-12 19:49:49+00:00
You really only have 1 axis of control with a brake pedal because you have to take your foot of the gas first. With one pedal driving at least you don't have to take off your foot.

One pedal driving for me only makes sense if you keep a proper distance to the people around you, such that the limited braking force is sufficient to flow with the traffic, so that wouldn't apply to many drivers out there. Perhaps that's where the confusion comes from.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 19:49:58+00:00
> there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article.

Respectfully, this is untrue. The article is there because of the ads that pay the bills. Without ads there is no article and no site. Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 19:50:26+00:00
The hiring manager told me that they were getting a lot of "signal to noise" ratio in terms of their hiring, where they'd bring someone on-site who had a good assignment and apparently more often than not, these candidates would shit the bed in a live environment. So the CTO made a live take-home assignment and didn't tell anyone. I was told that he did this to weed out the low signal-to-noise people they dealt with recently.

>Had you disclosed to then that you used LLMs for coding "basic" features outside the math and whatnot?

No it seems completely immaterial. I'll happily talk about it if asked but it's just another tool in the shed. Great for scaffolding but makes me want to rip my hair out more often than not. If it doesn't one-shot something simple for me it has no use because it's infuriating to use. I didn't get into programming because I liked writing English.
by jjk166 | 2025-09-12 19:50:30+00:00
> I have yet to find any concrete defense of the idea that costs are coming from regulation, rather than the costs of construction in advanced economies.

One of the main drivers of excessive costs of construction in advanced economies are from excessive regulations, so it's really one in the same. Nuclear is obviously more regulated than other industries, and it routinely faces more frequent, longer delays and higher cost overruns than projects of comparable scale and complexity. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.

Digging more into the details, it's all linked. The lack of regulatory clarity means that designs have to be changed more after construction starts, requirements for redundancy increase complexity, changing regulations prevents standardization, etc. Prescriptive regulations which were created decades ago limit the cost savings possible with newer technologies, like improved reinforced concrete. This study [1] goes into a lot more detail.

> Our retrospective and prospective analyses together provide insights on the past shortcomings of engineering cost models and possible solutions for the future. Nuclear reactor costs exceeded estimates in engineering models because cost variables related to labor productivity and safety regulations were underestimated. These discrepancies between estimated and realized costs increased with time, with changing regulations and variable construction site-specific characteristics.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...
by toast0 | 2025-09-12 19:50:31+00:00
The siblings so far talk about the synchronizing nature of the indicators, but that's not relevant to your question. Your question is more of

Why is U+0080 encoded as c2 80, instead of c0 80, which is the lowest sequence after 7f?

I suspect the answer is

a) the security impacts of overlong encodings were not contemplated; lots of fun to be had there if something accepts overlong encodings but is scanning for things with only shortest encodings

b) utf-8 as standardized allows for encode and decode with bitmask and bitshift only. Your proposed encoding requires bitmask and bitshift, in addition to addition and subtraction

You can find a bit of email discussion from 1992 here [1] ... at the very bottom there's some notes about what became utf-8:

> 1. The 2 byte sequence has 2^11 codes, yet only 2^11-2^7 are allowed. The codes in the range 0-7f are illegal. I think this is preferable to a pile of magic additive constants for no real benefit. Similar comment applies to all of the longer sequences.

The included FSS-UTF that's right before the note does include additive constants.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 19:50:31+00:00
If you're proposing a change, shouldn't the change be specifiable? Why is the burden of proof on those asking "what change?" to demonstrate that no change is possible? That's a complete inversion of responsibility.

I have a whole host of clearly specifiable changes to California building law that will make it cheaper, and am actively working on them both locally and at the state level! This is clear!

As somebody who is very interested in making Calforina housing cheaper, and in particular housing construction cheaper, it is my duty to say what should change, why, and convince others of it.

If I go out and advocate for "change" without being able to specify a single change, I would get jack shit done. It doesn't work that way.

Every single nuclear advocate that I have ever met that says "regulations should change" can still not yet specify how those regulations should change. That's the minimal bar for holding an opinion.

Reading the DoE LPO report on how nuclear can scale up and get cheaper, it wasn't regulations doing the work. It was learning how to build.
by stuxnet79 | 2025-09-12 19:51:14+00:00
> On good tests, your score doesn't change much with practice, so the system is less vulnerable to Goodharting and people don't waste/spend a bunch of time gaming it

This framing of the problem is deeply troubling to me. A good test is one that evaluates candidates on the tasks that they will do at the workplace and preferably connects those tasks to positive business outcomes.

If a candidate's performance improves with practice, then so what? The only thing we should care about is that the interview performance reflects well on how the candidate will do within the company.

Skill is not a univariate quantity that doesn't change with time. Also it's susceptible to other confounding variables which negatively impact performance. It doesn't matter if you hire the smartest devs. If the social environment and quality of management is poor, then the work performance will be poor as well.
by yepitwas | 2025-09-12 19:51:23+00:00
My least favorite genre of this are the ones who crow about working 60-70 hours per week and still making time for family or whatever, but it's because they're paying to make 30-40 hours of work that ordinary wage-earning folks do, go away. Laundry, lawn maintenance, getting the car in for an oil change, child care, running errands, cooking, doing your own accounting, waiting on hold to deal with erroneous medical bills, fixing that toilet that keeps running, cleaning the gutters, patching that hole a damn woodpecker put in your siding—people for whom all these things are purely optional activities that they can and do pay others to take care of, will act like they're just such hard workers, while actually working, in total, less than their employees.

Drives me up a wall.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-09-12 19:52:03+00:00
Steam in particular is known to play hardball with chargebacks. If you issue a chargeback, rumor is that Steam will lock your entire account. Which seems incredibly unfair, but capitalism.

If the theoretical angle is stolen credit cards, I am unmoved. The point of stolen credit cards is to launder for durable goods/services. The external value of a digital porn game is $0.
by V__ | 2025-09-12 19:52:30+00:00
Nuclear is also extremely heavily subsidized. Be it through state sponsored loans or tax breaks (France) or the fact, that the public has to bear the cost of dismantling them (Germany). Thus, a comparison isn't that easy to make.

System costs may be high, but they are on a downward trend due to the increasing implementation of grid batteries, which also solves the third argument.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-09-12 19:53:12+00:00
CJK unification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs) i.e. combining "almost same" Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters into the same codepoint, was done for this reason, and we are now living with the consequence that we need to load separate Traditional/Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts to render each language. Total PITA for apps that are multi-lingual.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-09-12 19:53:43+00:00
The problem in my mind with a "clean is clean" litmus test is that it eliminates the word "clean"'s ability to differentiate between sustainable and unsustainable human development.

Using systematic metrics to annoint something as clean so it can get clean energy credits so that people can invest in activities considered cleaner is valuable and useful even if none of the options are 100% perfectly in impactful to the natural world.
by marcuschong | 2025-09-12 19:53:53+00:00
I've just turned 40, have been married for almost 20 years, and now have a 9-month-old baby. I've spent most of what would otherwise be my free time working, ever since I was 15 and bought into the American idea of entrepreneurship and became obsessed with technology.

Before having the baby, I'd leave the premises maybe twice a week, forced by necessity, mostly for health reasons, and I couldn't care less most of the time about seeing a blue sky or hearing the birds sing.

I've probably never worked the insane hours some entrepreneurs put in, but I've definitely worked far more than most people I know. My wife is the same. We have a great relationship, and I love my daughter, who I'm lucky to spend time with every day since I set my own hours. But if there's one thing I'm always chasing hours to do more, is working, creating. It doesn't even feel like work, as long as it's something I'm building that's mine. Sure, there are grueling tasks I can't avoid, the real eat glass stuff. But even then, I wouldn't trade it.

I've never gotten truly rich, not in the way I once imagined I would. But it's not something that weighs on me, not even the idea that maybe I never will. The real reward has always been doing the things I love to do. Recently my wife has asked me more than once if I could make more money than I do now by working less in a company. Maybe so, and I'd probably work much less with a lighter load if I were in a company job, but the idea of going back to that doesn't excite me. I like the grueling work, I like building something of my own, and I like having my own routine, even if I end up working more this way.

Different strokes, I guess.

EDIT: typo.
by mort96 | 2025-09-12 19:54:06+00:00
That isn't really a case of UTF-8 sacrificing anything to be compatible with UTF-16. It's Unicode, not UTF-8 that made the sacrifice: Unicode is limited to 21 bits due to UTF-16. The UTF-8 design trivially extends to support 6 byte long sequences supporting up to 31-bit numbers. But why would UTF-8, a Unicode character encoding, support code points which Unicode has promised will never and can never exist?
by nostrademons | 2025-09-12 19:54:43+00:00
PyCompactUnicodeObject was introduced with Python 3.3, and uses UTF-8 internally. It's used whenever both size and max code point are known, which is most cases where it comes from a literal or bytes.decode() call. Cut memory usage in typical Django applications by 2/3 when it was implemented.

https://peps.python.org/pep-0393/

I would probably use UTF-8 and just give up on O(1) string indexing if I were implementing a new string type. It's very rare to require arbitrary large-number indexing into strings. Most use-cases involve chopping off a small prefix (eg. "hex_digits[2:]") or suffix (eg. "filename[-3:]"), and you can easily just linear search these with minimal CPU penalty. Or they're part of library methods where you want to have your own custom traversals, eg. .find(substr) can just do Boyer-Moore over bytes, .split(delim) probably wants to do a first pass that identifies delimiter positions and then use that to allocate all the results at once.
by jfengel | 2025-09-12 19:55:13+00:00
Well, duh. Historically, there haven't been sudden new sources of CO2. Temperature changes were caused by other things, and CO2 followed that, by completely different mechanisms than greenhouse gases. Rather, higher temperatures melt permafrost, reduce vegetation, and speed decay.

It could just as easily have been that different mechanisms caused CO2 to decrease rather than increase. Unfortunately for us, higher temperature does increase CO2 -- which means that by forcing CO2 we're setting up a positive feedback loop.

The atmosphere has more than one effect going on. Adding a new one causes different things than the past ones did.