MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-09-12 21:14:26+00:00
I don't see a controversy on HN where the problem with North Korea is supposed to be the people must not be human. You, me, North Koreans, South Koreans, and anybody else are obviously all people. These are regions of people, not species listings. As such, we obviously all fall for silly beliefs - that's one thing humans do.

Sometimes that bites us in the ass real bad, sometimes it's less severe, but humans aren't defined as being perfect. Believing being human makes you immune to the same kinds of belief problems as other humans have gotten themselves into results in bite-you-in-the-ass results more often, among other problems.
by mapmeld | 2025-09-12 21:14:29+00:00
I work at a university and we do a lot of moving data around, inspecting the files and columns, scripting, etc. so we have everyone use QGIS. Governments and other major consumers have open-ended long-term contracts for whatever Esri products they can think of, so those are solid.

For me the real ongoing question is the role of MapBox, MapLibre, to some extent Google Maps API, and other web-first solutions. It's difficult for Esri to connect with the average web developer or researcher who just wants to start with clickable pins on a map.
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-09-12 21:14:35+00:00
The dumbest people I’ve ever encountered in university were the math and physics majors who thought they could score some easy points by taking humanities classes, because just like you they considered that below their level. I’m sure they were smart on an IQ test but they couldn’t reason their way out of a paper bag, and their writing skills were just laughable.

The smartest ones were usually the philosophy majors. Also some of the weirdest (in a good way) folks.
by vintermann | 2025-09-12 21:14:36+00:00
I agree, actually. It looks a lot like Afghanistan.

But you remember, even though the US foreign policy establishment basically got every single outcome it wanted from supporting the rebels in Afghanistan, right up to the split up of the Soviet Union and Russia becoming a republic run on Chicago school of economics principles by a pro-US president, in another couple of years they instead got Russia back as an enemy state and al Qaeda.

Also, while the situation ended up back in a pretty bad place for the US, that's nothing to where Afghanistan ended up. I think the US should try pretty hard avoid winning, if winning means the same as the way they won in Afghanistan. And Ukraine should definitively avoid an Afghanistan-style victory at all costs.
by bell-cot | 2025-09-12 21:14:57+00:00
(May 2025) The article has about 20 comments across its postings on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=china+will+be+dominant

In the bigger picture - you could argue that China should have dominated the world for the past 2+ millennia. The real barriers to their ever doing so are internal - not in America. Nor nor Europe. Nor somewhere else.

(None of which prevents America from sabotaging itself into irrelevance, BTW):
by ryao | 2025-09-12 21:15:03+00:00
> Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.

This is incorrect. Alan Coopersmith does not share this view and he is a Xorg developer. Anyone repeating this propaganda is arguing from ignorance.

That said, I have used both X11 and Wayland. X11 does its job well in many applications and honestly, we would have been better off had Wayland just been a X11 extension. As for things being broken, I have encountered far more brokenness when using Wayland than when using X11 exclusively. Wayland has gotten better of late, especially in desktop applications, but I do not consider it a replacement in general.

Just recently, I built a display based on a CM4 at work that uses X11 and I can remotely view and interact with the screen using x11vnc, which is fantastic for remote development and debugging. That is a convenience I simply do not have with Wayland. I have tried to do steam remote play by streaming from a desktop to my Steam Deck. If the desktop is running a Wayland session, a pop up appears on the physical display asking if I want to permit remote access and I currently have no way of clicking it without being physically present. This ruins the remote play experience, which I want to use when I am physically not present. A X11 session does not have this problem. If a tool like x11vnc existed for Wayland, it would be useless if it does what Steam Remote Play does with Wayland. :/
by conductr | 2025-09-12 21:15:37+00:00
I hated manual labor as a kid/young adult, associated it with chores and whatnot, now in my 40s I build homes as a hobby/side gig. I like to be as hands on as possible with it and do about 70% of the work myself on every house. I work a knowledge worker job during the day and need something physical to feel like I’ve accomplished any real which helps my overall fulfillment. Most people think it’s strange, but I do most of the house work between 10pm-3pm. After my job and family duties are complete for the day, I’m somewhat nocturnal and it’s not as hot at night (Texas). I’m usually fine with just the 6 or so hours of sleep but it’s kind of like I have a whole second life at night lol
by simion314 | 2025-09-12 21:15:49+00:00
This sounds very soviet, I see them all the time showing some traveling guide to NK and claiming is a paradise like USSR was, but then you ask why do this regimes have walls and kill the people that try to escape the paradise? why do people want to escape the paradise risking their lives ?

And to have the balls to claim you can't trust people that lived in NK and escaped and you should better trust who? those NK propaganda images the soviets are spreading around ?

I call soviets the home sovieticus, the imperialists bastards that excuse that criminal regime and want it back, like the Zeds and their friends.
by cyphar | 2025-09-12 21:15:52+00:00
UTF-16 is absolutely not easier to work with. The vast majority of bugs I remember having to fix that were directly related to encoding were related to surrogate pairs. I suspect most programs do not handle them correctly because they come up so rarely but the bugs you see are always awful. UTF-8 doesn't have this problem and I think that's enough reason to avoid UTF-16 (though "good enough" compatibility with programs that only understand 8-bit-clean ASCII is an even better practical reason). Byte ordering is also a pernicious problem (with failure modes like "all of my documents are garbled") that UTF-8 also completely avoids.

It is 33% more compact for most (but not all) CJK characters, but that's not the case for all non-English characters. However, one important thing to remember is that most computer-based documents contain large amounts of ASCII text purely because the formats themselves use English text and ASCII punctuation. I suspect that most UTF-8 files with CJK contents are much smaller than UTF-16 files, but I'd be interested in an actual analysis from different file formats.

The size argument (along with a lot of understandable contention around UniHan) is one of the reasons why UTF-8 adoption was slower in Japan and Shift-JIS is not completely dead (though mainly for esoteric historical reasons like the 漢検 test rather than active or intentional usage) but this is quite old history at this point. UTF-8 now makes up 99% of web pages.
by hardwaregeek | 2025-09-12 21:17:09+00:00
Nice! I've wanted to give a similar talk. My thesis is that Rust won on usability above all else. If you look at the semantics of Rust, it's essentially an ML style language with typeclasses and linear types. In some alternate history that's a PhD thesis by someone at Inria that exactly 4 people use. But by making the language actually usable with good errors, familiar syntax (yes, syntax matters!), and documentation, Rust got users. I don't want to get into an in depth comparison but if you look at the documentation of even the most popular functional languages, it's not even close. And they've had a head start of decades!
by refulgentis | 2025-09-12 21:17:14+00:00
I would venture to suggest that to read it as "Qwen made MoEs in toto || first || better than anyone else" is reductive - merely, the # of experts and #s here are quite novel (70b...inferencing only 3b!?!) - I sometimes kick around the same take, but, thought I'd stand up for this. And I know what I'm talking about, I maintain a client that wraps llama.cpp x ~20 models on inference APIs
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-12 21:17:45+00:00
If you look at the top sites that have articles submitted it is totally unlike the front page, a lot of nytimes.com articles are submitted for instance and get ignored. I post a lot of articles about science, engineering and diverse topics that aren’t in the word of usual front page material and only front page a few times a week for about 20 submissions a day.
by cdavid | 2025-09-12 21:18:09+00:00
It is not cheap, but it is clearly made by people who care about music. In those days where "slop" is so common, for people who can afford it, it is a nice refresher.

Another minor inconvenience is that it is memory hungry for large libraries. In my case, for ~1 TB of flac, the docker takes 5-6 GB RAM on my debian NAS. Limiting it at 4 GB definitely crashed w/ OOM, at 8Gb never had issue.
by littlestymaar | 2025-09-12 21:18:11+00:00
The US had limited interest in the Ukraine winning and a lot to gain from Russia wearing down until they are far from even dreaming of being a peer adversary.

The EU on the other hand is under existential threat from Russia so they (we, actually as I'm French) really ought to do something serious to help Ukraine not only stabilize the front line and wear down Russia, but win this war.

But because we underinvested in defense for decades (because the Western Europe couldn't imagine a conflict was possible with their biggest trade partner, and because eastern Europe was too keen on trading political influence inside the EU to the US in exchange for security guarantees against Russia without having to build a capable military on their own) we ended up in 2022 with little capabilities to really help Ukraine.

And because of the obsession with public spending and debt reduction, countries refused to seriously invest seriously in their industrial capabilities to supply the Ukrainians with a war-changing amount of ammo and other assets. (the fact that South Korea alone was able to give more ammo to the Ukrainians than the whole of EU in 2023 is a sad joke really).

I can't really blame the US, they played their own interests while minimizing consequences for them (and that's also why they wanted to avoid escalation in priority). But I do blame European leaders, including my own president, for not taking this matter as seriously as they should have. (For a full 10 month in 2023 Les forges de Tarbes, France's main production of 155mm shells, has been stuck with no way of producing anything because they couldn't pay their suppliers because they lacked liquidity to do so, this was utterly ridiculous and should have been solved with a single phone call. But nobody in charge bothered, for almost a year…)
by iisan7 | 2025-09-12 21:18:21+00:00
my understanding/recollection is that it was necessary for surveillance to note when decedents had COVID; it was listed as a (contributing or underlying, not sure of the jargon) cause, and so depending on how you cut the data you could count it either way -- tally all deaths with COVID as deaths from COVID (bigger), or only those where COVID was the main cause (smaller).
by bayindirh | 2025-09-12 21:19:38+00:00
I write my digital garden and blog for myself. They are just happen to be public. The pleasurable part is putting it out there, not forcing people to read it.

If people prefer to have short attention spans and leave what I put out after 30 seconds, it's their own choice. My blog has minimal analytics (provided by the platform), and digital garden has no analytics whatsoever, so I don't care and get bothered what humans do with my site.

I personally don't use any AI tools whatsoever, and still prefer to read half-foot thick novels end-to-end. Hyperion Cantos (4 x 700 pages) was great. My next target is Foundation by Asimov (7 volumes incl. expansions).
by tstrimple | 2025-09-12 21:19:54+00:00
> I think industry overreaction to the regs is possibly as large or larger of a problem than the regs themselves.

I see this over and over again in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. No one wants to risk tripping up the regulations so company lawyers write up crazy and often conflicting “requirements” to satisfy legislation. The limitations placed by company council are often far more restrictive than regulations actually require. You have lawyers dictating engineering or software design requirements based off of a shoddy understanding of other lawyers attempts to regulate said industries they also don’t really understand.

And this isn’t to say that engineers are somehow better at this than lawyers. Engineers make just as many of these sorts of mistakes when developing things via a game of telephone. As someone who has played the architect role at many companies, it’s not enough to set a standard. You have to evangelize the standard and demonstrate why it works to get buy in from the various teams. You have to work with those teams to help them through the hurdles. Especially if you’re dealing with new paradigms. I don’t know to what degree this happens for other industry standards. But it seems like mostly folks are left to figure it out themselves and risk getting fined or worse if they misinterpreted something along the way.

I’d like to believe there is a way to balance lenience for companies that are genuinely trying to adhere to regulations but miss the mark at places and severely cracking down on companies that routinely operate in grey areas as a matter of course. But humans suck. And lenience given is just more grey areas for the fuck heads to play in. We cannot have nice things.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-09-12 21:21:32+00:00
You are mistaken. Chinese Hanzi and the languages that derive from or incorporate them require way more than 65,536 code points. In particular a lot of these characters are formal family or place names. USC-2 failed because it couldn't represent these, and people using these languages justifiably objected to having to change how their family name is written to suit computers, vs computers handling it properly.

This "two bytes should be enough" mistake was one of the biggest blind spots in Unicode's original design, and is cited as an example of how standards groups can have cultural blind spots.
by palata | 2025-09-12 21:21:47+00:00
> Most of modern web sites are just tested for Chromium

Again I find it ironic to cheer for Linux on mobile and at the same time not support Firefox.

Firefox is pretty much on par with Chromium. I can switch between Firefox, Chromium and WebKit and just do everything I need to do. I have been playing with PostmarketOS, and I clearly cannot do a fraction of what I do with my Android. So if we're cheering for challengers, we may as well respect Firefox :-).

> No, it was just to mention a reference hardware

I don't think there is a chance this ever happens. Who would want to spend that much resources into it?

Really, I think by far the best chance to get an alternative OS is to build on top of AOSP. Like GrapheneOS does.

> The essential apps are already almost there

If by that you mean you can run a browser on Linux, sure. But I don't count this as apps.
by froh | 2025-09-12 21:21:55+00:00
> Germany, long a symbol of anti-nuclear politics, is beginning to shift.

err, no. it's not. industry lobby tries again and again, yes, and party officials parrot that lobbying, yes.

but no: there is no Endlager (permanent spent nuclear fuel waste site) in sight, the costs of dismantling used plants are outrageous and if it were not for nimbyism, we'd be essentially self sustaining on wind and solar within a decade.

matter of fact fossil and nuclear sponsored fud on wind and solar is the single biggest issue we face in Germany.

Atomkraft? nein, danke.
by gitfan86 | 2025-09-12 21:22:32+00:00
LOL, the BTC people who thought "Digital Gold" was a good slogan are going to learn what happened to self custody of gold and the gold standard.

BTC is in a much worse situation than gold was in 1970. The government has the technology to follow transactions and require BTC transactions to be done on their chain with their BTC equivalent GBTCs. That is until the government decides to issue print more BTC equivalents
by pcthrowaway | 2025-09-12 21:23:01+00:00
> But then someone at IBM came up with a new scheme that would be faster when using punch cards in sorting machines. And that became ASCII eventually.

Technically, the punch card processing technology was patented by inventor Herman Hollerith in 1884, and the company he founded wouldn't become IBM until 40 years later (though it was folded with 3 other companies into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company in 1911, which would then become IBM in 1924).

To be honest though, I'm not clear how ASCII came from anything used by the punch card sorting machines, since it wasn't proposed until 1961 (by an IBM engineer, but 32 years after Hollerith's death). Do you know where I can read more about the progression here?
by NoboruWataya | 2025-09-12 21:23:25+00:00
Well, it can make regulations, which are directly effective. And some directives are actually directly effective - there is a whole line of case law on this (starting with a case called Van Gend en Loos).

But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
by viceconsole | 2025-09-12 21:23:28+00:00
Having working in US immigration, most reporting on immigration issues leaves a lot to be desired.

Because of the poor reporting, it's not possible to say for sure what happened, but it sounds like Hyundai/LG/subcontractors brought in hundreds of South Koreans on B visas and had them engaging in productive work. That's not what B visas are for. B visas are for meetings, sales, and maybe some light training/setup/integration. When the CEO talks about needing specialized, skilled workers, that's a strong suggestion these workers should have been on L visas.

Times reporting confirmed a few of the workers were on B visas: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/business/economy/hyundai-...

Unfortunately the same article doesn't even mention the L visa, and cites an immigration lawyer who complains about the difficulty of getting H-1B visas. But L visas are not capped like H-1Bs. In India we approved thousands of L visas specifically for skilled workers to assist with bringing plants/equipment online.

In short, the B visa is not a work visa. Most countries worldwide are quite restrictive about the conditions surrounding work visas, and people who violate the conditions of their visa shouldn't be surprised when there are consequences. Having a valid visa but violating its conditions means you are violating immigration law.

Corporate immigration departments can and do cut corners and may have thought they would save money and time by sending foreign workers on B visas (which they might have already had) or on the visa waiver program. L visa holders don't even have to get paid US-level wages, so one take on the visa type is that it is already a way for companies to undercut US labor.
by spankalee | 2025-09-12 21:23:38+00:00
Wouldn't you only need to read backwards at most 3 bytes to see if you were currently at a continuation byte? With a max multi-byte size of 4 bytes, if you don't see a multi-byte start character by then you would know it's a single-byte char.

I wonder if a reason is similar though: error recovery when working with libraries that aren't UTF-8 aware. If you slice naively slice an array of UTF-8 bytes, a UTf-8 aware library can ignore malformed leading and trailing bytes and get some reasonable string out of it.
by mockingloris | 2025-09-12 21:23:55+00:00
> Also, could you consider making each fourth (or first) column a very slightly lighter grey

This could be a component logic; a row of drop downs for customizing the UI and a good examples are color and grid count. This could even be a toml/json config file that can be imported/exported.

My own addition is ability to import samples from my own device.
by cyphar | 2025-09-12 21:24:32+00:00
I disagree, but I think this is a question that could only be answered in court (and probably over several court cases).

The end-stage result of your argument would be that copyleft licenses are practically unenforceable because if you just make a separate textual file and then make reference to internal APIs in order to make extensions then you're simply using an interface regardless of the implementation and thus not bound by the license. So the strongest copyleft license you could possibly have is an even weaker form of the MPL ("function-based" rather than "file-based", and one that you could trivially bypass).

As for GPL condoms -- personally, I think a judge would not look favourably on GPL condoms precisely because they look like pedantic rules lawyering. If usage without a GPL condom would be a violation then I would be surprised if a GPL condom made a lick of difference in the eyes of a judge. But I've been surprised plenty of times, and as far as I know they've never been tested in court.
by theptip | 2025-09-12 21:25:31+00:00
Agreed, you are talking about non-safety factors. I don’t think they necessitate the price levels we see; for example, look at how cheaply China can build reactors.

I think it’s quite clear that we pay a high safety / regulatory premium in the west for Nuclear.

My point about safety is that we are over-indexing on regulation. We should reduce (not remove!) regulations on nuclear projects, this would make them more affordable.

I don’t think this is a controversial point, if you look into post-mortems on why US projects overrun by billions you always see issues with last-minute adaptations requiring expensive re-certification of designs, ie purely regulatory (safety-motivated) friction.
by Zacharias030 | 2025-09-12 21:25:33+00:00
When Swe-Bench was new in 2023, it was — with all due respect — a bit of a niche benchmark in LLM research. LLMs were so incredibly useless at solving these tasks that I think you could find a bit more empathy for the original academic authors. I don’t think the Theranos example applies. Even the flawed benchmark was good enough to get us from ~GPT4 to Claude 4‘s coding ability.
by cdavid | 2025-09-12 21:25:36+00:00
Since the OT is about EU, it is important to keep in mind that costs per MW are much lower in EU than in the US (or the UK).

E.g. according to https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/infrastructure-costs-nuclear-e..., UK/US is ~10 millions GBP, France ~4.5, and China/Korea/Japan around 2.5.

I don't know much about nuclear plan, but I doubt UK are much safer in practice than French ones, or even Korean/Japanese ones. I suspect most of the cost difference across countries of similar development to be mostly regulation. And it is a nice example that sometimes EU can be better than the US at regulations :) (I don't know how much nuclear-related regulations are EU vs nation-based though).
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-09-12 21:25:45+00:00
These kinds of lists are just completely worthless. Like ok, let’s look at “Stage 1 Elementary Stuff”. It’s a list of 18 books. So what are you supposed to do with that? Figure out which ones are good and useful? Take the next five years working through them all?

Either write a good guide, explaining why you pick each book, what it will teach you and why it’s needed, or just post a link to a university degree and say “just finish all these courses, good luck”.