MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amluto | 2025-09-12 19:18:01+00:00
> To be fair, UTF-8 sacrifices almost nothing to achieve backwards compat though.

It sacrifices the ability to encode more than 21 bits, which I believe was done for compatibility with UTF-16: UTF-16’s awful “surrogate” mechanism can only express code units up to 2^21-1.

I hope we don’t regret this limitation some day. I’m not aware of any other material reason to disallow larger UTF-8 code units.
by SCUSKU | 2025-09-12 19:18:09+00:00
The reason PGE is so expensive is because it's a privately owned monopoly with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns. Additionally, the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state.

The "fake costs" are not primarily from regulation as much as it is from the need to squeeze profit. For comparison, look at Silicon Valley Power which is owned and operated by the city of Santa Clara. SVP charges $0.175/kwh vs PGE $0.425/kwh. [1]

[1] - https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
by wrs | 2025-09-12 19:18:28+00:00
UTF-16 made lots of sense at the time because Unicode thought "65,536 characters will be enough for anybody" and it retains the 1:1 relationship between string elements and characters that everyone had assumed for decades. I.e., you can treat a string as an array of characters and just index into it with an O(1) operation.

As Unicode (quickly) evolved, it turned out not that only are there WAY more than 65,000 characters, there's not even a 1:1 relationship between code points and characters, or even a single defined transformation between glyphs and code points, or even a simple relationship between glyphs and what's on the screen. So even UTF-32 isn't enough to let you act like it's 1980 and str[3] is the 4th "character" of a string.

So now we have very complex string APIs that reflect the actual complexity of how human language works...though lots of people (mostly English-speaking) still act like str[3] is the 4th "character" of a string.

UTF-8 was designed with the knowledge that there's no point in pretending that string indexing will work. Windows, MacOS, Java, JavaScript, etc. just missed the boat by a few years and went the wrong way.
by Eji1700 | 2025-09-12 19:18:33+00:00
There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them, not *US*.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-12 19:18:50+00:00
> the big unlock is a bunch of people that would never file lawsuits can at least approach it

Totally agree again. LLMs are great at collating and helping you decide if you have a case and, if so, convincing either a lawyer to take it or your adversary to settle.

Where they backfire is when people use them to send chats or demand letters. You suggested this, and this is the part where I’m pointing out that I am personally familiar with multiple cases where this took a case the person could have won, on contingency, and turned it into one where they couldn’t irrespective of which lawyers they retained.
by bigwheels | 2025-09-12 19:19:09+00:00
Thanks for the clarification. Your comment made me connect the similarity (in spirit) of Speculative Decoding to Speculative Execution [1] in CPUs. Very cool and clever optimization strategy for LLMs, IMHO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution

Does it work to predict tokens 3 and 4 (or 5, 6) in the same way? I wonder how extreme the hit rate drop-off is.
by n8cpdx | 2025-09-12 19:19:20+00:00
LibreOffice vs Office 365/Google Drive is probably the more relevant comparison.

I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing.

LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on desktop, but the competition is lost because Office on desktop is just an accessory for Office 365 (which competes with Google Docs/Drive).

Disclosure: I work at Esri.
by jama211 | 2025-09-12 19:19:46+00:00
I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?
by rmccue | 2025-09-12 19:19:49+00:00
Love the UTF-8 playground that's linked: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app/

Would be great if it was possible to enter codepoints directly; you can do it via the URL (`/F8FF` eg), but not in the UI. (Edit, the future is now. https://github.com/vishnuharidas/utf8-playground/pull/6)
by space_fountain | 2025-09-12 19:20:07+00:00
I'm not sure that any ethnic group has a right to a country, but I think it's pointless to talk about if Jews should have one though because they went and did it. That's done. I agree with you in so much as there's no going back now, but talking about what happened thousands of years ago is a poor way to decide what should happen now, especially when it's done simplistically.

The Jews who moved back to Israel did not have a greater claim to the region through ancestry than the people they pushed out and honestly I don't think it really would have mattered if they did.

Yes it is a bit of a religious war at times, but also imagine you were born in Palestine in the period of the british mandate. Your family likely lived in the region for thousands of years practicing more or less the same faith you did. You would have been forced out of your home in 1948. Your house would literally be given away as abandoned. If you happened to settle in East Jerusalem you might have been given a home in compensation. That home was originally some poor jewish families, but still somewhere to live, but then when Israel annexed the East Jerusalem they passed laws giving the property back to the original owners. Fine, but did you get your home back? No the law was structured explicitly so as not to apply to you. Maybe you were unlucky though and you resettled further into the interior of the west bank. Well then you might see extremist come into your community in the middle of the night and bulldoze your home. I'm not sure you need religion to end up radicalized in this situation. It isn't fair what Israel did to palestinians in the 40s and it isn't fair what they're doing now in the west bank and gaza. It also isn't fair what Arab countries have done to the jews, but the people who live in the west bank have now power over that
by FluxParadigm | 2025-09-12 19:20:22+00:00
We’ve been working on a new framework called MoroJS.

Why we built it: Most existing frameworks (Express, Fastify, etc.) are excellent, but we found ourselves consistently trading off between three things: •Strong type safety •Edge/serverless deployment •Features built for the AI era

MoroJS is an attempt to combine all three, while still pushing performance to the edge.

Key details: •Performance: Benchmarked at ~68k synthetic req/sec and ~50k real-world req/sec •TypeScript-first: Every route, param, and return strongly typed by default •Edge/serverless ready: Runs on Node.js, Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, Vercel •AI-ready: Native support for building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, so APIs can plug directly into AI agents (e.g. Claude Desktop) •Batteries included: Middleware ordering, Zod validation, caching, and rate limiting

Links: •Docs: morojs.com/docs •GitHub: github.com/Moro-JS
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-12 19:21:34+00:00
More than 850000 Jews who used to live in Arab countries have emigrated to Israel since 1948 lured to Israel by The One Million plan.

Arab countries did not ethnically cleanse Jews. That’s a complete fabrication.

You are defending genocide. I feel dirty talking to you. I’m going to stop for my sanity. I pity you to be frank.
by jltsiren | 2025-09-12 19:21:56+00:00
I believe Greenpeace leaders and activists genuinely consider themselves environmentalists. As an organization, Greenpeace is also pretty strict on declining funding that could compromise its independence.

However, it's likely that Greenpeace benefits from indirect support from the fossil fuel industry and petrostates. If you get too deep into Realpolitik, you start believing that ideologies and convictions only hinder and weaken you. Then it becomes acceptable to support groups that are ideologically opposed to you, as long as it advances your strategic interests. There have always been ways of manipulating the public sentiment, and social media has made it easier to do that without linking the manipulation back to you.
by smileysteve | 2025-09-12 19:22:53+00:00
My original clutch is at 197k miles, and I downshift to decelerate until i use the brakes the last 10-20'.

The clutch is much more difficult to replace on my car; (i've done the brake discs 2x -- track days),

If you're relatively smooth on your downshifts, each downshift should be much shorter than your average braking duration.

More generally speaking, if you're in a gear that slows you down, or downshift to it, you're more likely to avoid a full stop and start, which puts much more wear on the clutch than a series of downshifts.

... I also downshift when I drive automatics ... when I can... there are large downhills near my neighborhood (in a school zone) coming from a stop, if I switch to manual mode or short/sport mode, I can be in 3rd, at a controlled speed, and barely touch the brakes (versus others ride their brakes all down the hill)
by delusional | 2025-09-12 19:22:54+00:00
> limitless clean energy source

Like the guy you're responding to, I'm not a nuclear hater. We also have other "limitless clean energy sources" however, wind and solar.

How is nuclear going to benefit humanity in ways electrical energy hasn't already? We haven't been energy constrained in the past 10-20 years. It really doesn't seem like additional energy production is going to make that much of a difference.
by no_wizard | 2025-09-12 19:23:01+00:00
Generally, accounted instances of credible calls for political violence originate far more often from the right side of the political spectrum[0], in fact it’s nearly their entire domain at this juncture (remember that both attempts on Trump’s life were carried out by registered Republicans, for example)

Additionally, it’s disingenuous to say allegory statements to the behaviors of a person is inciting violence. Calling someone Hitler, describing them as “like Hitler” etc are not credible calls to violence. They aren’t even inherently violent in so far as they suggest nothing as to what to do with that information

[0]: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rise-of-poli...
by kulahan | 2025-09-12 19:23:15+00:00
I had no idea I was off by so much with respect to waste, thanks - that's important to know. Still seems like a fairly good trade though - 7000 tons for ~400GW.

You're definitely right about long-term storage being a concern; I think only one long-term storage facility exists right now.

I believe the cost of recycling fuel is largely because it's completely unexplored. I'm sure it'll follow a similar cost reduction path most industries share.
by the_af | 2025-09-12 19:24:19+00:00
The implication goes the other way: someone who has done a lot of things and learned many lessons has lived a longer time. Not that people who have lived longer necessarily drew valuable lessons.

It's less likely that a 20 year old has done as many things, faced as many challenges, and drawn as many lessons, as someone who doubles them in age. They simply haven't lived long enough to be able to tell if their lessons validate or generalize well.

Even the perspective of someone who has most of their life ahead vs someone who has a few decades more is wildly different. Someone with most of their lives ahead can course-correct more easily. Someone who hasn't had their mid-life crisis yet, etc, etc -- you get the idea.
by munksbeer | 2025-09-12 19:24:49+00:00
London has got worse, that is true. Or at least, that is the impression you get from the media. Personally, I lived in central London for years and didn't feel unsafe.

But the rest of the UK is extremely safe. Compared to the US? Very! And we don' have guns to defend ourselves. How does that work? And it is the same in many, many countries that don't have guns - a lot safer than the US.

So that argument for guns just doesn't work. There must be something deeper to it. It must really be something that triggers a deeper response in people.
by ajross | 2025-09-12 19:25:04+00:00
Enrichment requires feed stock, and active reactor fuel is much higher in fissionable isotopes than the uranium with which it was fed originally. The U238 naturally breeds up into stable-ish U/Th/Pu isotopes which you can totally turn into a bomb.

Obviously there are such things as "breeder reactors" that are deliberately designed for this. But there's really no such thing as a can't-be-used-for-bombs reactor.
by rhet0rica | 2025-09-12 19:25:31+00:00
See quectophoton's comment—the requirement that continuation bytes are always tagged with a leading 10 is useful if a parser is jumping in at a random offset—or, more commonly, if the text stream gets fragmented. This was actually a major concern when UTF-8 was devised in the early 90s, as transmission was much less reliable than it is today.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-12 19:25:40+00:00
It's not greed. They're not plants. They're just trapped in a self-reinforcing social structure that, as is common, adopt group ideological beliefs inconsistent with the real world. People are pretty good at finding ways to rationalize and internalize beliefs enforced by groups that form their social superstructure.

It's the same dynamic that gets people to earnestly and fervently believe in, say, they're infested with Body Thetans or that the local cult leader is Jesus or (as Pythagoras believed) eating beans (yes, the food) is sinful. The belief becomes a tenet of the group, a reason for its existence and a prerequisite for membership. Evaporative cooling fixes the belief by ejecting anyone who rejects it.

Greenpeace will never accept nuclear power. Opposing it is part of their core identity and anyone who disagrees leaves. Greenpeace the organization can be defeated, but it cannot be reformed.
by alwillis | 2025-09-12 19:25:45+00:00
> I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors

The materials used is a factor: the last few iPhones were built with aluminum (iPhone 16), titanium (iPhone 16 Pro) and stainless steel (iPhone 13 Pro).

Not all colors work with all materials; my understanding is titanium is particularly bad for bright colors. The colors for the iPhone Pro models have been pretty drab--not this year.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-12 19:26:07+00:00
And I agree with those programmers! I'm one of them. They're two sides of the same coin: Rust's power is allowing the programmer to write safe wrappers around unsafe code for those cases where the compiler can't prove the code is safe, and the weakness of `unsafe` is that it allows undefined behavior to be triggered. It's effectively a consequence of Rice's theorem: there can never be a program that is capable of proving all safe programs to be safe & all unsafe programs to be unsafe. So the compiler is designed to be "conservative" and reject some safe programs when it can't prove their safety. Rust added unsafe blocks to allow programmers to manually use more powerful logic than the compiler can in order to verify the safety of their code & wrappers, but in turn had to allow UB if the programmer messes up or just outright skips that proof.

Rust's `unsafe` blocks are great, and a necessary part of the language. The reason they're great is that they allow containing the code which could exhibit UB to a subset of the program, thereby making it easier to find the source of any mistakes. But they don't (and were never intended to) provide any guarantees about what happens if UB is encountered. It's no worse than C or C++'s UB, and having it in `unsafe` blocks means it's easier to notice where it could happen, but when it does happen it's also no better than C or C++'s UB.
by xp84 | 2025-09-12 19:26:13+00:00
Military spending is healthcare -- think of it as preventative medicine so that you don't get sudden massive lead poisoning when Putin decides it would be nice to have more territory.

I'm being cute above with the phrasing, but your attitude of "why spend on military, it's wasted money" is obsolete thinking. It's based on a world where the US was spending enough to intimidate Russia or anyone else from stepping out of line, and where the US could be relied upon to keep their commitments.

It was logical for Germany, for instance, to spend only 1.2% for the past 25 years because the NATO obligations guaranteed the US's support and the US's leaders understood the qualitative ROI of having all of Europe firmly in its own sphere of influence.

Now, regardless of how we feel about it, it's foolish to depend on the US anymore. NATO still has some value -- the US may defend parts of Europe, and under this presidency it probably depends on stupid stuff like how impressed Trump is by your head of state's handshake, how hot their wife is, whether they compliments Trump, etc. But you can't stake your safety on that silliness.
by tracker1 | 2025-09-12 19:26:25+00:00
I'm sorry but the default USPTO position should be to deny process/algorithm/software patents without true innovation. In this case, their own game/show was first released in 1996 in which the patent itself would be invalid from that position, even if they had completely invented the mechanics/idea with no other prior art, their own art is well longer than the term a Patent can/should protect.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-12 19:26:50+00:00
Always look at caps and look for/test corrosion shorts before energizing old gear.

Caps are easy fixes if you can get the board out. Use quality electrolytic caps if bothering to go through the trouble, or I'd see if modern ceramic alternatives exist that will essentially last forever. (Don't get me started on how (vintage) tantalums suck.)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-12 19:26:51+00:00
>The UK is dependent on immigrants.

Why move the goalposts? I was just fact checking you on your claim that UK removed access to low paid workers after Brexit when clearly they didn't, in fact they doubled immigration when you look at post-Brexit numbers, that's all. Whether huge immigration is good or not I didn't and won't get into.
by verisimi | 2025-09-12 19:26:53+00:00
> how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?

The thing is, you don't know what happened in the past - you weren't there. What you have is a lot of stories and films that bring that to life for you.

Personally, I'm pretty sure nothing in the implementation has changed, but that the goals being sought have changed, as has the technology and therefore the implementation.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-09-12 19:26:56+00:00
>the urban areas of California are subsidizing the fire prone rural areas of the state

Meanwhile Rural California is where the electricity is actually generated[1]; they're "subsidizing" urban use.

>SVP vs PG&E

This has nothing to do with the ownership model and everything to do with not being obligated to serve rural areas. They get to serve only lower cost dense areas

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-09-12 19:27:01+00:00
Before anything one should probably check or at least ballpark their IQ score. The median IQ for mathematics PhD students probably hovers somewhere around 145, about the top 0.2% of the population, correlated with about a 1510/1600 on the SATs, a 34 on the ACTs, etc. Those aren't perfect correlates but you're much more likely to have an SAT or ACT score than a professional IQ score handy.

Math is infamously g-loaded, pure math even more so. An unfortunate fact of life. On the bright side, math is very much a "shoot for the moon and you'll land among the stars" subject to pursue if you even loosely keep industrial or business applications in mind.
by downrightmike | 2025-09-12 19:27:22+00:00
"On one hand, H1B holders can be paid below market rates because it is very hard for them to switch jobs. For this reason, they create resentment from American citizens."

This directly lowers the wage an American can earn. This is one way corporations pin the market to a wage they want rather than what is reasonable and fair for the worker. "That's the market rate" Is some serious bullshit, they manipulate it at every turn.
by justin_justin62 | 2025-09-12 19:27:33+00:00
That's because everybody wants to show off.

And Instagram (or any other "fake universe" which pushes video-quality as a minimal requirement) algos, favor content made with a newer/better/bigger (thus more expensive) phone.

How come there's close-to-0 improvements about audio quality (both recording and listening) with respect to visual technologies?

Make the audio counterpart of Instagram/Tiktok and I'll chime in right away.

But pop-people (and markets) are mostly interested in visuals at the moment.

And for audio-sensitive people like me, it's almost a blessing.
by samsonradu | 2025-09-12 19:27:39+00:00
You might be referring to the Spectre mitigation changes:

Timer precision from performance.now and other sources is reduced to 1ms (r226495)

https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-...

https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/226495/webkit
by bluGill | 2025-09-12 19:27:48+00:00
Maybe in some companies. Every interviewer I've talked to has never considered those a negative. Most don't even think of them at all once the interview is over. Of course I've always worked in companies where people work their 8 hours and go home to their family and so you would be a good fit (depending on what you asked).

I know applicants need the job more than they need you. However you still have options if you don't get this one - you should always be following several leads until you finally get a job. Odds are your other leads are not anywhere close to as advanced as this, but if you can wait a couple more months you have a chance.
by javier123454321 | 2025-09-12 19:28:02+00:00
I agree, I actually often criticize people in the right (and I do consider myself conservative) for dismissing postmodernism when they clearly misunderstand it. A tipical argument in the right could go: 'big pharma funds the studies so what comes out of these studies are not objective truth, because of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics at play'. It's a Latourian argument.
by ryao | 2025-09-12 19:28:08+00:00
Data reported by Forbes put the death rates for nuclear power in the US below all other sources of energy including solar:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

The death rates are wildly different than the ones at the site you linked. I wonder what the reason is for the discrepancy.
by HankStallone | 2025-09-12 19:28:17+00:00
I've been doing that lately with cleaning my barn, which is partly disorganized and partly too much junk, both mine and the previous owner's. I'd been telling myself to set aside a day or two to tear into it and get it all done, and it never happened. So lately I go out every day on my lunch break and work at it for 15 minutes.

It's not as efficient as doing it all at once, since it takes a minute to look around and pick something to do next. But I'm making progress, which I wasn't at all before.