MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-26 06:01:12+00:00
> Why report the ambiguous "300 CPM" instead of an actual dose estimate in mSv/μSv?

It is a technical document. It is meant to communicate between experts, not to the public.

> Is there any legitimate reason to report CPM instead of dose after a contamination event?

It's not nefarious, it is the measurement that they had. CPM is an easier measurement to get. And keep in mind that these notices are just a small part of the communication going on. They're meant to be brief.

To get the actual effective dosage you'll need a lot more information and calculations. The CPM can give you a decent estimate, if you already know context, but it is meaningless if you don't. So to an expert in that space it's a good quick estimate, but to an average person it isn't (even to above average people).

In context is also being used as a stepping stone for quick evaluation. They sent the guy to the hospital and he'll get a better estimate of dosage there. I'm sure they also were doing those calculations prior to sending him out. It may just be customary to use CPM units. That part I don't know. Here's the page they reference though[0] (there's only a single (xii) so easy to find).

[0] https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/p...

[disclosure] I have training in nuclear physics, including in radiation dosages (I worked on developing shielding materials), but I have not worked on a reactor (though I've seen reactors and Cherenkov Radiation :) so the customs of the bureaucracy are beyond my wheelhouse. But from my experience I'm not surprised by this. I would expect a lot more documentation and accurate measurements are being passed through other channels.
by Too | 2025-10-26 06:01:15+00:00
Have you tried LibreOffice Calc? It’s so quirky and different from proper Excel. I would never recommend this to a family member, no matter how much better Linux is to Windows. In fact, the office suite is probably the only reason I might consider not recommending Linux.

I mean, it gets the job done but nothing is convenient. The UI looks like a Christmas tree and still everything you need to do is found several sub-menus down in confusing dialogs, like in Excel pre-ribbon times. And for the love of god, please don’t say that ribbon spoiled everything, that discussion was boring even 10 years ago. Since then, state of the art has evolved beyond that.

For small scale household data, the web version of excel is good enough and has an easier UI. For larger scale, duckdb and some python.
by cornonthecobra | 2025-10-26 06:01:24+00:00
One of my favourite bits (and a fine example of Randall's sublime humour), comes right at the end:

But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.

“In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
by Raven603 | 2025-10-26 06:01:39+00:00
Beside the framework and evaluation code, we've also released EDR-200 dataset, which contains 201 complete agentic research trajectories generated by Enterprise Deep Research. These trajectories expose the full reasoning process across search, reflection, and synthesis steps, enabling fine-grained analysis of agentic planning and decision-making dynamics. Check it out!

HuggingFace: https://lnkd.in/gYNH2ZF8
by diordiderot | 2025-10-26 06:01:56+00:00
> Otherwise it too is pure hypothetical.

You could spend 2 minutes googling to see it's a well known / understood phenomenon. I would also argue it's common sense. Ask a teacher.

https://docs.iza.org/dp17539.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/33186/...

https://anjalipverma.github.io/files/Disruptive%20Interactio...

https://ideas.repec.org/r/wil/wilehe/52.html
by dilyevsky | 2025-10-26 06:02:00+00:00
Yes, usually company hires someone with a title of "vp of eng" or similar and have them do hr-mandated "people management". CTO is then freed up to do strategy and whatever else and he/she typically has the power to organize work outside of official reporting chain anyway. Not saying I'm a fan of this arrangement but it's pretty common and not the worst way to handle things.
by Derbasti | 2025-10-26 06:02:02+00:00
On a related note, I used to have a gaming PC. I don't game much any more, so every time I booted up the darn thing, I had to wade through a thick bramble of notifications, updates, ads. It got so bad that lost my will to game altogether.

Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.
by wood_spirit | 2025-10-26 06:03:35+00:00
The other company I can think of focusing on F64 is Fujitsu with its A64FX processor. This is an ARM64 with really meaty SIMD to get 3TFLOP of FP64.

I guess it it hard to compare chip for chip but the question is, if you are building a supercomputer (and we ignore pressure to buy sovereign) then which is better bang for the buck on representative workloads?
by rkomorn | 2025-10-26 06:05:16+00:00
Random point (and definitely not agreeing with OP), but Zwift (and probably others before) has brought on an age of watts/kg competitions.

And a lot of being aerodynamic on a bike is athleticism: you need to be flexible enough and appropriately trained to be in the right posture. The bike frames, skinsuits, etc, are all in the "marginal gains" territory.

I still think OP's take is wrong though.
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-26 06:06:18+00:00
I really miss the old days, when any program I wrote only had to trust three things out of my control: the compiler, the relatively small runtime library I linked with, and the few simple O/S entrypoints I called. I could probably breakpoint my way through every possible byte of code within a day or two.

Now I can't seem to write anything that doesn't generate hundreds of megabytes from untold number of dependencies nested who knows how deep that would take me a lifetime to fully explore.

Sigh.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-26 06:08:37+00:00
It's more complicated than that. Go have a listen of the Mannerheim tape with Hitler. Hitler basically confesses to Mannerheim that Stalin was blackmailing Hitler with oil and that this was the casus belli for Hitler, but then Hitler had no idea of Stalin's tank manufacturing prowess and he says that if he had known he wouldn't have invaded Russia. Super interesting. You get the impression that though Hitler hated Russia and Russians, it was events that led to Barbarossa rather than Hitler's long-term plan -- things got away from his control real quick.
by godelski | 2025-10-26 06:09:51+00:00
Honestly, the military would probably come after you first. Or maybe an oil company? Frankly because if you could detect neutrinos at that resolution you would be able to produce a really good mapping of... just about anything. From the inside of the Earth to the inside of a secret military facility on the opposite side of the planet. Not to mention you've also invented a communication device that is essentially unjammable[0].

Sufficient to say that you'd be very popular, but in probably the least fun way possible.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
by Nursie | 2025-10-26 06:12:08+00:00
It seems to come up a lot in reference to laws like the UK one, the Australian social media ban for under 16s and all sorts of similar measures around and about.

It’s the end of democracy in country X! The government’s taking away the people’s rights to x, y and z!

I mean, kinda, but it’s also hugely popular. Regular folks want their kids protected from some of this stuff, don’t believe that Silicon Valley and allied tech bros have their best interest at heart (and shouldn’t) and will readily vote for it.

Heck, I don’t have kids and I’m broadly in favour of the principle of keeping kids off social media, it’s just very hard to answer “what exactly do you mean by social media?” or “how are we going to do this without impacting adults’ ability to interact freely?”
by sebmellen | 2025-10-26 06:12:18+00:00
Relevant from Randall Munroe https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/

> What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?

> Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
by sholladay | 2025-10-26 06:14:47+00:00
Monocultures can avoid stagnating if they occasionally accept fresh blood from the outside. But hardline stances don’t allow for that. My point is, even if you only want to work with the best of the best, and you’re willing to ignore underprivileged groups with tons of potential, you still need an on-ramp if you want it to be sustainable.

The great engineers don’t graduate from college knowing everything they need to know, nor are they born with that knowledge. It takes time and help from other people to get them there. Even if they were already a top performing engineer at Netflix, that doesn’t mean they can smoothly transition into a role at your company and perform well with zero assistance. The on-ramp matters and has a huge impact on how they will perform. Some people will require more investment than others, but that’s true regardless of whether you stubbornly try to maintain your existing monoculture. And I firmly believe that everyone brings something different to the table. It’s mostly a matter of figuring out what that is for each person.
by yaro330 | 2025-10-26 06:19:29+00:00
I hate AI as much as the next guy but to pretend that Google assistant was in any way better than Gemini is insane. I went for 10 years giving the assistant a try every time I got a new phone and it always straight up sucked. Forgot the exact name of the lamp? Good luck, I'm not changing its color. Wanna hold a conversation that isn't just "tell a joke"? Forget it. Asking it to convert one measurement into another was also a complete lottery.

Gemini is a lot better at it, and while yes, it makes typical LLM mistakes, I can't wait for the day when we're able to use a locally running model for it.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-26 06:19:58+00:00
The website doesn’t tell me why I would use this instead of just Rolldown.

The “What is tsdown” link goes to a video with pre-roll ads.

I put the video URL into Gemini and asked it what it does. Gemini hallucinated a comparison with Rspack.

I followed the link to documentation from the YouTube description and it took me back to the main page that does not have a description of what it does.

There is an FAQ with a single question:

> Will tsdown support stub mode (similar to unbuild)?

Is there any kind of text description available for what this is and why I – as somebody who is currently writing a lot of front-end code – should care?
by kazinator | 2025-10-26 06:24:13+00:00
isxdigit(*src) has another problem. The value *src is of type char, which can be negative.

The function has undefined behavior if given any value that is not in the range 0 to UCHAR_MAX, or the value EOF.

Some implementations are robust in the face of the values -128 to -1 but ISO C doesn't require that.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-26 06:24:33+00:00
I don't think you understand what he saying.

Rust is 100% memory safe in specific places yes, but much less so when you have to dip into unsafe Rust. Unsafe memory access will always exist, you can't do anything about it. If you need to interact with the underlying system it's just something you have to deal with it.

Zig on the other hand isn't 100% safe in any one part, but it's 90% safe in nearly all parts. Zig recognizes the outside world exists, and makes it easy to write safe correct code given that reality.

Time will tell, but on average I suspect Zig and Rust will produce equally safe and correct software. The further away you get from the hardware the bigger Rust's advantage is, the closer you get to the hardware Zig has the edge.
by ziotom78 | 2025-10-26 06:27:14+00:00
What strikes me is the fact that nuclear power has received an incredible amount of backslash after the Chernobyl incident (a few thousands deaths) and the Fukushima incident (one disputed death), but hydroelectric power is considered a "good" source of energy despite a few incredibly deadly incidents:

- Banquiao (China, 1975): between 26.000 and 240.000 [1]

- Derna (Lybia, 2023): between 6000 and 20.000 deaths [2]

- Machchu (India, 1979): 5000 deaths [3]

- Vajont (Italy, 1963): 2000 deaths [4]

- Möhne dam (Germany, 1943): 1500 deaths [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Derna_dam_collapse

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morvi_dam_failure

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6hne_Reservoir
by sudahtigabulan | 2025-10-26 06:27:23+00:00
I think touch screen itself limits the possibilities to create UIs usable with minimum attention. You have to look at it to find the right area to press. All those buttons, knobs, sliders, etc., imitate the real thing, but only in 2D. Can't rely on feeling to find the right control, unlike with physical designs.

It's not the only culprit, of course. There's still room to at least design a layout that is predictable, and with buttons that are easily reachable.

Some UIs make me think the designer was an alien invader in a human body. It thinks nobody can tell, but when it designs a UI that can only be called "intuitive" if you have 7 fingers, the 2-nd and 5-th longer than the others, and the 3-rd one a tentacle... I got you, motherfucker!
by kragen | 2025-10-26 06:27:34+00:00
Yes, 100kBTU/hour, which I assume is what you mean, is 29kW, which would be 133 amps at 220 volts, or 610 amps at 48 volts. But solar only supplies power intermittently; you'd need to draw much more power than that when the sun was shining to blast your mansion with 29 scorching kilowatts around the clock. Maybe 100kW, about 2000 amps at 48 volts. For that you'd need ten parallel #0 wires (8.3-mm-diameter copper bars) or the equivalent amount of copper divided among more wires. If it's running four stories from the parapets of your sprawling castle down to the physical plant in the basement, say 16 meters because of all the vaulted ceilings, we're talking about 160 meters of #0 wire, 76 kg of copper.

That's US$833 of copper, and probably US$2000 worth of wire, but it's also US$12000 of solar modules at current international wholesale prices. So the wiring is kind of the least of your worries!

But there's no need to get 2000-amp service from the electrical utility.
by k1t | 2025-10-26 06:28:16+00:00
I feel like the additional unstated context is that nothing has changed.

Power outages are still a common threat, it's just that now they are caused by the power companies under the guise of wildfire prevention.

I don't care if my power goes out because of lack of supply or because you didn't maintain the transmission lines properly - the result is the same - I'm angry.
by klempner | 2025-10-26 06:28:47+00:00
Are you sure you're not thinking of "SmartDay" days that are part of the SmartRate program?

Flex Alerts are CAISO and ultimately about grid stability. SmartRate/SmartDay are ultimately about marginal cost of production on PG&E. The two are certainly correlated -- at the very least, a Flex Alert day is almost guaranteed to be a SmartDay.

Notably, the SmartRate program is capped at 15 days per year, and in practice PG&E will keep a few in reserve for surprise late season events, but even if there are no Flex Alert days they're still going to be called on electricity-is-expensive-even-if-the-grid-is-stable days.
by roenxi | 2025-10-26 06:29:35+00:00
I'd love to know how they got to 5/3. It also offers CPM to half-life conversion which has to be at least poorly labelled. That would imply that if two piles of different radioactive substances emit the same amount of radiation (obviously different masses in each pile) they have the same half life. That isn't the case, half life depends on what the substance is which is radiating, not the measured amount of radiation emitted.
by lukan | 2025-10-26 06:30:50+00:00
I would take the advice of a surgeons son, who is also somewhat active in the field, that something sounds fishy about a operation, to further look into it. That is very different from letting him perform the surgery.

There is incentive to play down accidents. No idea what happened here, I actually rather think it recived publicity because falling into a nuclear reactor pool sounds way more dramatic than it is, but ... not my area. Still was happy to get arthurcolle's input.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-26 06:32:00+00:00
> Survival of the fittest on a long time horizon means the more diversity the better the survival rate will be.

This is just a misapplication of the analogy. For a language, "fitness" refers to similarity to whatever language is spoken by people relevant to you. Diversity is the worst quality a language can exhibit, and is the quality that causes dying languages to die.

There is no such concept as an external force coming in that certain languages handle better, allowing them to temporarily outcompete other languages. Existing pools of diversity are not protective against this, because it can't happen.

Also unlike genetic diversity, linguistic diversity does not need to be maintained as a legacy of the past. It is constantly being generated in much larger quantities than are desired. If you managed to perform the opposite of the Tower of Babel miracle and replaced every currently-spoken language everywhere in the world with a perfect monoculture, within 1-2 generations you'd be back to having mutually unintelligible varieties in different regions.
by qingcharles | 2025-10-26 06:32:25+00:00
When Nike was working on the Mags (self-lacing) there were lots of hobby projects to try and build the same thing, but none of them could come close to the finish and integration that Nike could manage with their resources and industrial processes.

These Amplify are pretty complicated:

https://youtu.be/Nz2Y0e7SgFY?t=404
by blub | 2025-10-26 06:34:14+00:00
This is particularly funny because:

a) the risk is not acceptable and several countries switched young males to Biontech from Moderna

b) every time I pointed this out on HN I got downvoted or some vaccinesplainer downplayed it.

But yes, if the “trust the science” stuff one used to suppress criticism would turn out to be wrong, then rewriting history to edit out the massive censorship of perfectly logical ideas starts making sense.

Covid was the West’s critical moment when it decided that propaganda and top-down messaging are more important than critical thinking and democracy. The poisonous fruit of this approach can be seem in the authoritarian handling of other controversial topics like migration, gender, the Ukraine war, etc.
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-26 06:35:11+00:00
That was the feel-good non-starter that I got taught in school (in the US, in the 1980s). We learned it, class-by-class, from then-old film reels projected on a relatively big screen in a relatively small classroom.

So sure, why not?

[1]: https://footagefarm.com/reel-details/nuclear/atomic-bomb/duc... is an example of a tired old film, and I distinctly recall it being shown to my class in a public school sometime in the 1980s. Even though big parts of it were already rather outdated by that time.

Even though neither I nor my classmates were never alive and aware at a time when Civil Defense was a thing.

(Thattaboy, Tony.)
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-26 06:35:47+00:00
He literally said the Soviets “started with genocide before the Nazis even arrived” and then listed three things that aren't genocide, as a way of downplaying the fact that the Nazis planned to exterminate most of the people in Eastern Europe. Baltic peoples, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs all exist today. That would not be the case if the Soviets had lost the war.
by rramadass | 2025-10-26 06:35:55+00:00
Very much overdue, i would say! Lately HN was turning into just adware for AI news.

Does anybody have pointers to similar low-level details specific to iOS/Android systems? Given that most of us by now have a few of these lying around the house gathering dust, they can make a nice DUT to hack/study/learn a few technical things. I would be quite interested in knowing more about how the RF subsystem works and maybe repurposed as an SDR for example.
by _ache_ | 2025-10-26 06:36:04+00:00
You are quite rude here. I was asking questions. The benchmarks are very new and don't explains why it can used for training.

But if FP4 means 4bit floating point, and that the hardware capability of the DGX Spark is effectively only in FP4, then yes. That was nonsense to wish it could have been used for training. But it wasn't obvious from the advertising of nvidia.
by drzivil | 2025-10-26 06:36:58+00:00
I spent hours trying to understand these transform values while building a Figma plugin. The breakthrough came when I discovered Figma's official helper function that nobody seems to know about.

Key findings: - The values are a 3x2 affine transformation matrix - They work in normalized coordinate space (0-1) - Figma provides `extractLinearGradientParamsFromTransform()` to decode them - The gradient handles don't directly map to the transform values

Hope this saves someone else the confusion I went through. Happy to answer questions about the math or implementation details.

import { extractLinearGradientParamsFromTransform } from "@figma-plugin/helpers";
by impossiblefork | 2025-10-26 06:39:56+00:00
Yeah, that's all completely illegal.

Sanctions abroad can't allow you to refuse service in this way. Depending on whether legal action is taken all these firms may be blocked from operating in Europe. There's also a specific blocking state further reinforcing this kind of thing.

Because of the blocking statue, contractual terminations because of sanctions are forbidden, so these firms still have to deliver. Apparently you may only void contracts due to terminations if you apply for a derogation from the European Commission.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-26 06:40:40+00:00
Building pytorch correctly involves building several python libraries and compiling the extensions in other languages with the correct compiler flags for your particular setup while having a lot of exact version matching software installed at the same time.

Python and pip are just bad at this.

Passing a GPU through into a docker container requires a lot of permissions and flags to be set up just right, and it's way more difficult if your host operating system isn't natively Linux.

What you're describing is essentially the most difficult imaginable container to maintain.

Maintaining a normal containerized application, especially if you want to put it in maintenance mode forever and basically just leave the container working the same way with up to date code... is essentially zero effort. A few hours a year by one person and certainly something open source that a contributor would be happy to be responsible for.

This isn't the case of a company saving money or time by stopping supporting some onerous container build... they're intentionally kneecapping the open source offering hoping more people will pay for their product, which is scummy.

I had positive feelings about minio until I read this, now I don't want to touch it expecting whatever is next to be even more annoying whether I was paying them or not.