MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyphar | 2025-09-12 23:27:53+00:00
I went through a Japanese ePUB novel I happened to have on hand (the Japanese translation of 1984) and 65% of the bytes are ASCII bytes. So in this case UTF-16 would end up resulting in something like 53% more bytes (going by napkin math).

You could argue that because it will be compressed (and UTF-16 wastes a whole NUL byte for all ASCII) that the total file-size for the compressed version would be better (precisely because there are so many wasted bytes) but there are plenty of examples where files aren't compressed and most systems don't have compressed memory so you will pay the cost somewhere.

But in the interest of transparency, a very crude test of the same ePUB yields a 10% smaller file with UTF-16. I think a 10% size penalty (in a very favourable scenario for UTF-16) in exchange for all of the benefits of UTF-8 is more than an acceptable tradeoff, and the incredibly wide proliferation of UTF-8 implies most people seem to agree.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-12 23:28:24+00:00
> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies.

It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy nuclear plants designed to use moderately high enrichment rates, not newer designs that can do without that.

> Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup with an extra coolant loop.

You're describing a heat exchanger and some pipes. If this is the thing that costs a billion dollars, you're making the argument that this is a regulatory cost problem.

> You need shielding and equipment to move spent fuel and a spent fuel cooling pond.

Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Equipment to move things is something you need at refueling intervals, i.e. more than a year apart. If this is both expensive and rarely used then why does each plant need its own instead of being something that comes on the truck with the new fuel and then goes back to be used at the next plant?

> Insurance isn’t cheap when mistakes can cost hundreds of billions.

This is the regulatory asymmetry again. When a hydroelectric dam messes up bad enough, the dam breaks and it can wipe out an entire city. When oil companies mess up, Deep Water Horizon and Exxon Valdez. When coal companies just operate in their ordinary manner as if this is fine, they leave behind a sea of environmental disaster sites that the government spends many billions of dollars in superfund money to clean up. That stuff costs as much in real life as nuclear disasters do in theory. And that's before we even consider climate change.

But then one of them is required to carry that amount of insurance when the others aren't. It should either be both or neither, right?
by austin-cheney | 2025-09-12 23:28:50+00:00
I have told you my opinion and you either are incapable of understanding it or choose to not understand it because diverging opinions aren't of interest to you. I am not trying to persuade you one way or the other, but agreement appears to be all you seek. I really don't care if you agree with me and I am not trying to convince you of anything. This seem lost on you.
by photon_garden | 2025-09-12 23:28:54+00:00
> There is no indication that we will, no matter the administration, as a society/civilization/species will do a single thing to avert the worst case climate scenarios.

This is untrue. For instance, earlier this year Poland generated less than half its energy from coal for the first time. [1]

[1]: https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/05/13/polands-monthly-coal-...
by beloch | 2025-09-12 23:29:01+00:00
Would the author of this post have enjoyed or hated seeing a movie in Cinerama? Anyone who has been seated too close to a flat IMAX screen knows that even a flat screen can give a severely distorted viewing experience if you're not in a good viewing position (e.g. if you're seated off-axis and close).

In recent years, curved panels have been a way to compensate for issues created by limited viewing angles offered by LCD screens. If a screen is sufficiently large and the seating position close enough, one could often see a pattern on the screen even when viewing a single solid colour. The choice of screen geometry was a choice between different forms of image distortion. As technology improves and viewing angles become wider and more consistent, we'll probably see curved panels become more niche again.
by vasac | 2025-09-12 23:31:31+00:00
> You install everything you can get your hands on

Nah, I install what I find useful - sometimes I know exactly what I want and search for a specific plugin; other times, I just stumble upon something useful. Every now and then, I remove plugins I haven't used in a long time, but since most of them are lazily loaded, it's not like they get in the way.

> Unless there's a specific error message, how do you even know which package is responsible for the breakage?

If I recall correctly, there were one or two plugins I removed because they broke something, and in both cases, it was obvious which one was the culprit.
by fidotron | 2025-09-12 23:32:15+00:00
It's incredible how in 2025 people still don't grasp what a system on a chip is [1], and that the CPU cores are just a small part of the whole. Your operating system is barely concerned about the instruction set, and much more concerned about the buses and so on that are available, and how to drive them.

You only get standardization in servers because relatively speaking the number of peripheral types on the server SoC is smaller, and their usage modes more predictable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-12 23:33:39+00:00
This is good timing; I was just looking at a use-case where we need more iops and the only immediate solutions involve allocating way more high-performance disks or network storage. The problem with a cache is having a large dataset with random access, so repeated cache hits might not be frequent. But I had a theory that you could still make an impact on performance and lower your storage performance requirements. I may try this out, but it is block-level, so it's a bit intrusive.

Another option I haven't tried is tmpfs with an overlay. Initial access is RAM, falls back to underlying slower storage. Since I'm mostly doing reads, should be fine, writes can go to the slower disk mount. No block storage changes needed.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-12 23:34:25+00:00
In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class.

Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.

Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
by pfdietz | 2025-09-12 23:35:30+00:00
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).

In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
by roenxi | 2025-09-12 23:36:08+00:00
> Shielding is concrete and lead and water. None of those are particularly expensive.

Well, anything is expensive in enough quantity. But there is a bit of a tell not covered where of regulatory problems because nuclear plant projects keep going way over budget. Even stupid planners can notice trends of that magnitude and account for them, there is something hitting plant builds that isn't a technical factor and it is driving up costs.
by bigglywiggler | 2025-09-12 23:36:14+00:00
I used to have a pebble time, it worked fine for me with my iphone that I had at the time. It died when I swam with it the first time. I loved that thing, was really bummed when it died. My Apple Watch SE2 blows literally everything it could do out of the water. Even not including the apple proprietary walkie talkie feature which I use more than anything else on my watch because me and my wife love it. Except the battery life but I can't sleep with a watch on so it doesn't really matter. It still gives me 2-3 solid days. It's a shame that they had/have difficulty making it work but the reality is that I never ever used it to do any of the things that they couldn't get it to do. And I don't use my current apple watch for any of that either. I never cared about sending texts with it, I didn't do much with the watchfaces and I'd never have paid for one. I used it to control music, count steps and see notifications without going in my pocket. If it lived up to it's waterproofing claims I'd probably still be using it today. It certainly wasn't trash and I want to see them succeed but if they had these features then [URL for first google result for aliexpress smartwatch removed] would also have these features and that would not be what anyone wants. Least of all the repebble team who wouldn't have any edge over the dollar or so price new user welcome deal on that particular piece of ewaste. IMO pebble should focus more on the things that people actually care about like the cool e-ink screen, distraction-lowered functionality, battery life and making sure it doesn't die the first time you swim with it like in the ads than bashing Apple for making their stuff more secure than everyone else and raising the barrier to entry for manufacturers of slop. Pebbles worked great on Android but 40% of their current customer base uses an iphone and they still want the pebble. Maybe the 'less developed' functionality wasn't so bad? Maybe, like me, they wanted a smart-lite watch as opposed to a smartwatch? If I had known that they were actually making watches again then I'd have actually bought one instead of my apple watch and I'd live happily never knowing about walkietalkie. I do marketing, if by some chance Eric Migicovsky reads this then I'd be honored to quit my current job and go sell pebbles for him.
by devmor | 2025-09-12 23:36:17+00:00
Your tool wont tell me about human anatomy, but will happily tell me where to look for graphic videos of a man being shot to death. But when I ask it what to do if “dad is bleeding and can’t talk” it doesn’t even advise me to get help, just tells me about content moderation settings. That took just a couple prompts to suss out.

I don’t have any confidence you’ve done the due diligence to properly handle content moderation here - it seems very haphazard and poorly thought out. It would be incredibly unethical to market this for use by children right now.

If this is an important project for you, I strongly recommend you bring on an advisor with history in child safety and education experience and make them a core part of your development. You might also consider working with a university that has a good developmental psychology program - they often do a lot of supervised research of children’s habits and could provide valuable insight.
by arjie | 2025-09-12 23:36:23+00:00
They don't really have to be. I don't have many mitigations and the AI bots crawl my site and it's fine. The robots.txt is pretty simple too and is really just set up to help the robot not get stuck in loops (I use Mediawiki as the CMS and it has a lot of GET paths that a normal person wouldn't choose). In my case, a machine near my desk hosts everything and it's fine.
by kragen | 2025-09-12 23:37:02+00:00
It's true just about anywhere. Maybe if a militant group was really cut off from global markets it would be an exception.

But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.

More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.
by locallost | 2025-09-12 23:38:59+00:00
LCOE refers to the price in MWh (produced electricity), so it takes capacity factor into account. Whatever electricity you produce and sell depends on your installed capacity multiplied with the capacity factor.

Similarly, you pay for the electricity you receive and this is priced as say 40$ per MWh. Obviously when you receive nothing the price is 0, you don't pay them to idle, they either produce or not. Thus when storage costs kick in you don't add the costs of both together. You either pay one or the other, not both.

You might average them out taking into consideration what their output is, but you don't stack the costs on top of each other which I often see people do.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-12 23:39:16+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 Hinkley 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.

The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-09-12 23:40:11+00:00
"I don't see how the US comes back from removing the underpinnings of the post Bretton Woods world of mutual trust."

There never was any. Many countries were cheating us on corporate ownership, regulations, tariffs, I.P. theft, etc. Others taking our markets as elites offshored our jobs. Many doing serious, human, rights violations on top of it. All kinds of international corruption.

The U.S. itself always tried to coerce others into its empire with protection, aid, petrodollars, and so on. That we had a Five Eyes agreement with priority ovet other partnerships shows we don't trust most countries much at all.

Peace was a lie. It was more like a Cold War for politicians and corporations mixed with some military interventions in unstable (for them) areas. Then, U.S. wanted to re-balance the trade deals to favor us by doing to them a fraction of what they did to us. They're responding. It's heating up.

Who knows what will happen. I'm glad our trade deals might benefit our job market now even if it hurts for a while to reverse the past. Don't forget that we lost hundreds of thousands of jobs during prior trade deals. They hurt us for nothing but now we're hurting for maybe something.
by zahlman | 2025-09-12 23:40:32+00:00
> If you actually converted the opaque type to a real integer, or tried to subscript the string directly, an index to the string would be generated.

What conversion rule do you want to use, though? You either reject some values outright, bump those up or down, or else start with a character index that requires an O(N) translation to a byte index.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-09-12 23:40:39+00:00
The author appears to be nostalgic for the wintel monopoly that made it possible to write software for one system standard "PC" and have it run on dozens of different manufacturer's hardware. The people who use ARM chips typically write their own code because they aren't building general purpose computers, they are building an appliance of some sort, whether its a phone or an access point or a disk controller.
by droptablemain | 2025-09-12 23:40:39+00:00
Right now seemingly all of Bluesky is in a frenzy trying to insinuate that this killer is somehow a Republican or "MAGA." Or a Groyper.

The level of cognitive dissonance when people lock themselves in echo chambers is truly astonishing.

You can literally scroll for hours, thousands of posts of people making the same sorts of outrageous and deflective claims.

https://bsky.app/profile/trending.bsky.app/feed/412019139
by valorzard | 2025-09-12 23:41:28+00:00
So, as you can see in the article, there are already games and other projects that have grown past this limitation.

The main thing I need to do is honestly just sit down and rewrite the signaling server to make it work for multiple players, and also add CORS support.

(to be clear it will already support other computers, just not browsers on remote computers due to lacking CORS support)

So yeah this isn't an inherent limitation of WebRTC or anything, it's just writing a good signaling server for WebRTC is annoying
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-12 23:41:34+00:00
150k per violation of copyright law by means of pirating a book is excessive even for the largest company in the world. I agree that punishment should be somewhat proportional so that "too big to fail" firms don't see it as just a fine to be accounted for as any expense, but among things that ought to be worth a a fine of that magnitude, downloading a book is not among them.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-12 23:42:25+00:00
You do know that a large portion of the energy crisis was caused by half the French nuclear fleet being online when it was for once truly absolutely needed?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...

I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
by IMTDb | 2025-09-12 23:42:32+00:00
This exists because of a cognitive bias: we tend to focus on direct, attributable harm while overlooking larger, diffuse, and indirect harm.

A nuclear plant could operate safely for 50 years, causing no harm, but if it explodes once and kills 10,000 people, there's gonna be a trial. A coal plant could run for the same 50 years without any dramatic accident, yet contribute to 2,000 premature deaths every single year through air pollution—adding up to 100,000 deaths. Nobody notices, nobody is sued, business as usual. It's legally safer today to be "1% responsible for 1000 death" than to be "100% responsible for a single one". Fix this and that law goes away.
by evmaki | 2025-09-12 23:42:44+00:00
The underlying idea tracks. The next generation of kids is going to interact with AI, and we should anticipate that and try to build systems that are healthy and safe for them to interact with.

On the other hand, I wonder if this doesn't just further alienate children from their parents. Kids are already given access to unlimited supernormal stimuli via iPads so that parents don't have to parent. This just seems like more of that: now parents don't even need to have basic conversations with their kids because the AI can do it.

Anecdotally, some of the most formative interactions I had as a child started by asking my parents questions. These were things that not only shaped me as a person, but deepened my relationship with my parents. These interactions are important, and I wonder if Aris doesn't just abstract it away into another "service" that further deepens social decay. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn't had the chance to ask my dad as an angsty pre-teen what the point of life is, and for him to tell me it is to learn and create so that we can make a better world for humanity. I guarantee a smoothed-over LLM would not have offered something so personally impactful.

My two cents is that you should ponder that deeper point a little bit, and think about how it informs the way you market your idea, and scope the service it provides.
by kieranmaine | 2025-09-12 23:43:41+00:00
The report mentions this:

> Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply.

My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid.

> In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at this 97% benchmark is $104/MWh. This is already 22% lower than the $132/MWh estimate based on global average capital costs of solar and battery a year earlier. It is also more cost-effective than coal in many regions ($118/MWh) and far cheaper than nuclear ($182/MWh).
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-12 23:45:52+00:00
Almost every parent comment on this is negative. Why is there such an anti-OpenAI bias on a forum run by YCombinator, basically the pseudo-parent of OpenAI?

It seems that there is a constant motive to view any decision made by any big AI company on this forum at best with extreme cynicism and at worse virulent hatred. It seems unwise for a forum focused on technology and building the future to be so opposed to the companies doing the most to advance the most rapidly evolving technological domain at the moment.
by pfdietz | 2025-09-12 23:46:11+00:00
It's a bogus talking point that the nuclear industry in the US was shut down due to increase in regulation.

The actual situation was that relentless 7%/year demand growth for electrical energy suddenly stalled, while at the same time a large amount of new capacity from cogeneration, made possible by the passage of PURPA in 1978, suddenly started to come on line. In this environment, and with the cost overruns and delays of the earlier nuclear builds, utilities could not make a case for new nuclear construction. High interest rates also didn't help.
by pandaman | 2025-09-12 23:46:28+00:00
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?

PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
by favflam | 2025-09-12 23:46:35+00:00
I most humbly suggest that your finger is pointed in the wrong direction.

The ASMR deportation videos from the Homeland Security department and the fetish this maga movement seems to have in brutalizing foreigners coming to the US would indicate to me that the paperwork is not the problem.

Maybe that is the underlying point. Why does the US government, this administration, and its supporters have a fetish for chaining up foreigners and putting them in deportation camps housed no better than cattle (alligator alcatraz?)? Do they not consider the consequences of this?

US sales pitch: "Please build factories here, but I reserve the right at my own discretion with no warning to parade your employees in chains and stuff them into poorly maintained detention centers. Then to kick them out of the country and blame you.".