MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wenc | 2025-09-12 20:55:34+00:00
For me

Twitter: anger

Instagram: vanity

Facebook: pride

Of those, I hate anger the most so I am off twitter, even though it’s still a great place to overhear the latest in the business, geopolitics and tech zeitgeist. You literally hear about things before anyone else. But I decided that life is too short to be angry all the time.

I like instagram because it’s entertaining (and am of the age where I can ignore influencer antics). This is not true of younger folks for whom instagram is a mimetic model (there’s so much bad advice on it — especially on how to be a man or a woman today). As an older person, I want to tell young people: don’t get relationship advice off instagram. They’re so shallow and make you so entitled — “if your guy doesn’t do this, you’re too good for him” is pretty toxic.

Facebook used to be this political rage bait place but everyone’s left so I’m still hanging around with my geezer friends in their 40s. It’s become a place to share travel photos and pictures of kids.

Tiktok: I’m too old for Tiktok but I hear young people use it for news.

Google: I still use Google but young people are now increasingly abandoning Google and search on ChatGPT.
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 20:55:42+00:00
We have recent examples of construction costs going through the roof in the US: Vogtle and Summer.

Both projects were welcomed by their communities in Georgia and South Carolina. And at the state level, legislators were so enthusiastic for the projects that they passed new laws so that the costs of any overrun would get directly passed on to ratepayers, letting utilities escape financial risk for construction overruns.

I have no doubt that constructing nuclear at a new site would run into many NIMBY complaints. But most (not all) existing nuclear sites have communities that welcome the nuclear reactors, and want new ones to replace the aging ones, and ensure continuity of jobs for the community.
by codefined | 2025-09-12 20:56:00+00:00
Looks fantastic! As someone who has done it before, if this gets popular you'll run into some abusive users that you'll want to deal with. Microsoft will often give out free access to it's PhotoDNA service for detection of explicit images of minors. VirusTotal will often do the same for malware in exchange for samples. You'll also want to have a structured retention process, e.g. size is inversely proportional to storage time.

Good luck, get in contact (see my profile) if you run into any issues.
by throw0101a | 2025-09-12 20:56:19+00:00
> A major reason nuclear plants are super expensive is because we do it so rarely

Once you have your supply chain running, and PM/labour experience, things can run fairly quickly. In the 1980s and '90s Japan was starting a new nuclear plant every 1-2 years, and finishing them in 5:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

France built 40 in a decade:

* https://worksinprogress.co/issue/liberte-egalite-radioactivi...

More recently, Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, but Unit 4 cost 30% less (though still not cheap).
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-12 20:56:56+00:00
Can reasoners be optimizers?

Like does reasoning find a gradient to optimize a solution? Or are they just trying to expand state until finding what the LLMs world knowledge would say is highest probability?

For example, I can imagine an LLM reasoner might run out of state trying to perfectly solve for 50 intricate unit tests. Because it ping pongs between solving one case, then another, playing whack-a-mole and not converging.

Maybe there's an "oh duh" answer to this, but where I struggle with the limits of agentic work vs traditional ML.
by photonthug | 2025-09-12 20:57:03+00:00
The silly thing about this is that context is everything. I bet it's extremely easy to be a top-tier figure-skater in, say, a small tropical island nation? In a similar way, I very much doubt that you'd really need to be in the top 0.2% of the population to complete a phd. Do you need to be in the top 0.2% of people to compete as a contributor with absolutely everyone else in the whole world at the same time? Well yeah, but at that point the statement is so obviously true that it doesn't mean much.
Show HN: StripeMeter – pre-invoice parity for Stripe usage billing
by coryli | 2025-09-12 20:57:05+00:00
I’m a contributor to StripeMeter, a tiny open-source tool to prove Stripe usage invoices are correct before they finalize.

What it does (small surface):

- POST /v1/replay — reconcile late/duplicate events (dry-run or apply)

- GET /v1/reconciliation/summary — see drift and counters before/after

- GET /v1/usage/history — time-series to visualize the effect

Why: real systems have retries, late events, and dupes. StripeMeter sits beside your billing/pricing layer to ensure the numbers are exact pre-invoice.

Not: a pricing/plan/entitlement system or a warehouse.

Scope & limits: aimed at early/mid-stage SaaS on Stripe usage billing; local target ~10k late-event replay in ≤ ~2s (queue/workers recommended at scale).

Contributors & Feedback wanted: docs polish, SDKs (Node/Python), replay worker improvements, minimal visualizer, observability (Prom/Grafana), integrations. Check Good First Issues and our pinned Design Partners thread if you want to run a quick parity session.
by throw310822 | 2025-09-12 20:57:22+00:00
I'm surprised that anyone can believe to be protected from Israel. Neither the US or European countries demand accountability when Israel kills their any of their citizens; the EU and even the US have curtailed freedom of speech to benefit Israel; in its favour they send the police against their own citizens to disrupt protests, and betray their deepest values and international law. It's clear that in the West, Israel's interest comes before everything else.
by SyrupThinker | 2025-09-12 20:57:56+00:00
Seems overly protective, and possibly a bit ridiculous depending on your sensibilities, if thought through.

By similar logic supermarkets should not carry alcohol or tobacco, theaters cannot show 18+ movies (even non-explicit ones), and entire parts of some cities need to be redone because of their red-light districts, because there are some at central locations a kid could reasonably stumble into.

I think just restricting access to this stuff, being discreet about it, and maybe limiting advertisement, is enough. I've lived somewhere with a pretty plainly visible red-light district close to the central train station, yet most people don't even realize it is there. I'd hope something similar could be accomplished for Steam as well.

Finally, at the end of the day parents gotta parent.
by jagged-chisel | 2025-09-12 20:58:15+00:00
I don’t think “artificially increased” is correct. See your sibling. If the runtime waits until expiry, and only then adds the task to the end of the work queue, there’s no point at which any delayed work could happen at expiry except the work to place it on the end of (an empty) queue.

Any busy runtime (e.g. one with lots of parallel tasks, plus anything running less than optimally) will have a delay.
by keeda | 2025-09-12 20:58:25+00:00
I was a big user of IntelliSense and more heavily, IntelliJ, for most of my career. It truly seemed like magic back then. I recall telling a colleague who preferred Emacs that it felt like having an editor that could read your mind, and would joke that my tab key was getting worn out.

Then I discovered LLMs.

If you think IntelliSense is comparable to what LLMs can do, you really, really need to try giving an AI higher-level problems to solve. Throwaway example I gave in a similar thread a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892576

I think a big part of simonw's shtick is trying to get people to give LLMs a proper try, and TBH that's what I end up doing a lot too, including right now! The problem is a "proper try" takes dedicated effort, because it's not obvious where the AI will excel or fail for your specific context, and people legitimately don't have enough time for that.

But once you figure it out, it feels like when you first discovered IntelliSense, except you already know IntelliSense, so it's like... IntelliSense raised to the power of IntelliSense.
by bbanyc | 2025-09-12 20:58:53+00:00
US Patent #5,662,332 - Trading card game method of play, inventor Richard Garfield, assigned to Wizards of the Coast https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en

Obviously there have been lots of other TCGs, but up until that patent expired in 2014, they had to either be sufficiently different from MtG to avoid the patent, or pay royalties to WOTC.
by tolerance | 2025-09-12 20:59:05+00:00
I always felt like it was a matter of time before this became the norm in the U.S, as it is in some other countries. South Africa is one off the top of my head, if I’m not mistaken. I’m sure where ever they are, they’re know by titles that lack the American-styled euphemistic oomph and same sort of technical mediating.

Once it’s figured out how to interface these “executive assistants” with the carbon market, look out.
by dmoy | 2025-09-12 20:59:17+00:00
Seems reasonable to me, yea

It's probably a nonstarter for the current year, given that you'd need to pay for substantially more patent examiners, and better trained patent examiners (even if it does ultimately come a lot from increased fees). Or maybe fewer patent examiners but much more highly trained ones? I'm not sure how that would pan out.

But it would be very cool if the gap between "granted patent" and "proven useful patent" was closed substantially.
by gruez | 2025-09-12 20:59:46+00:00
>> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation.

>It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days

Maybe it can't be as cheap as coal, but at the very least it shouldn't be absurdly expensive compared to what South Korea and China can do.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250906_WBC...
by iLemming | 2025-09-12 20:59:47+00:00
I don't even write in Rust, yet I'm curious if those libraries you talk about are truly in "abandoned" state and not simply in "done" state? Some languages somehow managed to build thriving ecosystems of libraries where they don't require constant attention and perpetual churn like in JS and Python. I see it too often e.g., in Clojure, where lib authors even have to add "maintenance disclaimers" noting that the lib is good for what it was designed for and there are no plans to add new features and no known bugs or critical dependencies found, and the lib is not abandoned, and they update those notes periodically, just for the sake of showing any git activity.
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 20:59:59+00:00
> The lack of regulatory clarity

Oddly enough, that sounds like a request for more regulation. And I have heard many people say that if the regulators had made sure that if approval had gone beyond mere safety, into constructibility and other areas, that Vogtle would have been closer to the initial budget, and that Summer might have completed.

Thank you for the link, and I will read it in detail later, but at a high level, I think it's great support for my point that it's construction productivity that's the key driver of cost, not regulation (emphasis mine):

> Relatedly, containment building costs more than doubled from 1976 to 2017, due only in part to safety regulations. Costs of the reactor containment building more than doubled, primarily due to declining on-site labor productivity. Productivity in recent US plants is up to 13 times lower than industry expectations. A prospective analysis of the containment building suggests that improved materials and automation could increase the resilience of nuclear construction costs to variable conditions.
by jonnycoder | 2025-09-12 21:00:13+00:00
Hah I feel you there. Around 2 years ago I did a take home assignment for a hiring manager (scientist) for Merck. The part B of the assignment was to decode binary data and there were 3 challenges: easy, medium and hard.

I spent around 40 hours of time and during my second interview, the manager didn't like my answer about how I would design the UI so he quickly wished me luck and ended the call. The first interview went really well.

For a couple of months, I kept asking the recruiter if anyone successfully solved the coding challenge and he said nobody did except me.

Out of respect, I posted the challenge and the solution on my github after waiting one year.

Part 2 is the challenging part; it's mostly a problem solving thing and less of a coding problem: https://github.com/jonnycoder1/merck_coding_challenge
by lovich | 2025-09-12 21:00:33+00:00
As someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies, it’s bullshit on the hiring side too.

It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can.

I’ve seen how the faangs interview process accounts for those types of bias and mental blindness and are actually effective, but their solutions require time and/or money so everywhere I’ve been implements the first 80% that’s cheap and then skips on the rest that makes it work
by al_borland | 2025-09-12 21:01:06+00:00
I ran into this thing someone built and is releasing kits for. It won't be near as smooth as PalmOS, but if you're into hacking a little bit, it might be worth looking at.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPQ2q7yVjZs

I've seen some other people hack together similarly devices. One was a Raspberry Pi 0 with a blackberry keyboard and a screen.

Anything off the shelf and even remotely polished these days is likely running Android, which seems like it would defeat the purpose.

The are Remarkable Move might be an option, if you're looking more for a notebook to organize everything, but if you want a Palm-like experience, that will also miss the mark.

You could try for an old Palm or Handspring device off eBay. It might be its own island, or getting in syncing could be a project.

You can run old Palm ROMS on smartphones. I tried it, but once the nostalgia wore off in 5 minutes I gave up on it. It also seems to defeat the purpose of what you're going for.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-12 21:01:11+00:00
"The government is not the solution to our problem! The government is the problem!" (Reagan) has been the (imo dis-noble) anti-governing belief striving (angrily) to undo the United States government for at least half a century now.

How I wish people could believe in America, in liberty and the project of civilization and democracy. It just feels like that has slipped so much, that people want (have been incited into wanting) something narrow and different.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-12 21:01:17+00:00
It’s wrong for leftists to gloat over Kirk’s death or for rightists to call for a pogrom, and…

This article very rightly points out that Kirk has never been a liberal in the sense of really advocating for free speech but rather he’s mobilized the idea of liberalism to wrongly differentiate himself from campus illiberals who have notably given up on liberalism, the categorical imperative and such. Like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz

would very much like to punish everyone who disagrees with him but things have gone so far with certain groups, particularly transgender activists, that it is easy to mobilize the idea of liberalism in service of an illiberal cause (notably: I see both Kirk and canceling transgenderists as more similar than different, Kirk can fool a lot of folks like Ezra Klein into thinking he’s better by mobilizing the idea of liberalism)

I dom’t appreciate “cancel culture” though in the title because it is a coded word.
by hkpack | 2025-09-12 21:02:36+00:00
I have a suspicion that Finland is able to do well against fake news mostly because it is Russian fake news and people know them very well.

I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.

The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
by epistasis | 2025-09-12 21:03:02+00:00
ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.

However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.)

That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing ALARA.

Removing ALARA may provide some sort of cost savings, but without some concrete and specific indication of how that would change the design, and to what savings during construction, it's hard to agree that ALARA is at fault.
by opo | 2025-09-12 21:03:10+00:00
Why are you implying that Germany has decarbonized their grid? Germany has a long term goal of decarbonizing the grid, but it isn’t there yet. They made the decision to keep coal plants burning and shut down their nuclear power plants. And even years later in 2025 they continue to burn coal - the most dangerous and dirty source of power ever invented.

>…The share of electricity produced with fossil fuels in Germany increased by ten percent between January and the end of June 2025, compared to the same period one year before, while power production from renewables declined by almost six percent, the country’s statistical office

>… Coal-fired power production increased 9.3 percent, while electricity production from fossil gas increased by 11.6 percent.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/fossil-electricity-prod...

The direct deaths caused by burning coal are significant. I didn’t see any current estimates for those being killed downwind from Germany's reckless burning of coal, but overall the EU has a high death rate:

>…Europe, coal kills around 23,300 people per year and the estimated economic costs of the health consequences from coal burning is about US $70 billion per year, with 250,600 life years lost.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030147972...

Never mind that all those coal plants are also contributing to climate change and are poisoning the oceans enough that many species of fish are not safe to eat. The waste problem from coal will also be a problem for future generations to deal with - not all the ash from burning coal is being deposited in people's lungs.

In 2023, I saw a stat that in 2023 about 17.0% of Germany electrical production was from burning coal. As a comparison, I believe that before the phase out of nuclear power, it generated about 25% of the electricity.

If Germany wanted to shut down nuclear power plants after they had decarbonized their grid, that would be their choice - shutting them down when you are still burning coal is almost unbelievable. I don’t think future generations will look kindly on countries who shut down a clean form of power while they still are running the most dangerous and dirty form of power generation ever created.
by theptip | 2025-09-12 21:03:20+00:00
It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms.

See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats.

I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.
by jraph | 2025-09-12 21:03:32+00:00
> What is needed is a SpaceX-like enterprise

I'm not sure. They have more injuries per worker than their competition [1]. Space should already not be "let's work too fast at safety's cost", nuclear really can't.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/spacex-worker-injury-rates...
by natebc | 2025-09-12 21:03:35+00:00
Well, I assure you I'm not making it up. If you can't believe that people will misconfigure complicated systems that almost no single person can completely understand or that working in the storage industry exposes you to bizarre and interesting failures of both hardware and software (and firmware!) then I'm not sure what I can say to have you take a story at face value.

I'm not being melodramatic. You can take a story or leave it. I'm not here to convince you one way or another.

And frankly I don't particularly appreciate being called a liar, btw. Nice use of quoting also. Good day.
by speed_spread | 2025-09-12 21:03:36+00:00
Rust will not "flatten" Go. They have some overlap but generally don't serve the same purpose and don't appeal to the same crowd. Go's popularity is undeniable, both in open source and in the industry. Outside of major shops and the odd shady Fintech startup, there are still very little Rust jobs out there. It's not necessarily bad, it's just the nature of it. Rust adoption is a slow thing because it addresses problems faced by slow moving software.
by more_corn | 2025-09-12 21:04:22+00:00
I mean technicality this is possible .

Solar panels are simply the collectors for the best fusion reactor we know of. It’s safely positioned 93M miles away. The thermal and radiation isolation is about perfect. A tad high in the UVA,B but a thin cloth mesh and cheap protective glasses are sufficient protection.

A series of distributed fusion collectors across our unused roof space could easily provide all of our power needs. Also due to its distributed nature, the project can be implemented in millions of segments simultaneously in project with segment costs measured in tens of thousands of dollars and can deliver results immediately as each segment is completed (in the timeframe of months). Furthermore grid resilience is a trivial byproduct. Since the collectors are already distributed we can give each one a standalone failover by co-deploying power caching stations onsite. This plan would virtually eliminate the risk of grid outages.

All this can be achieved with minimal government investment. By simply saying this is a priority, and providing some modest tax credits we could be 80% fusion powered in five years given existing technology and minimal government investment.

That would truly make America strong, resilient and energy independent.
by MarcelOlsz | 2025-09-12 21:04:58+00:00
>As someone who’s hired 10s of engineers across multiple companies

Any way to reach out? :)

I think it boils down to companies not wanting to burn money and time on training, and trying to come up with all sorts of optimized (but ultimately contrived) interview processes. Now both parties are screwed.

>It was humbling having to explain to fellow adult humans that when your test question is based on an algorithm solving a real business problem that we work on every day, a random person is not going to implement a solution in one hour as well as we can.

Tell me about it! Who were you explaining this to?