MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-12-20 22:54:30+00:00
While this is certainly true, I don't really know if molten salt reactors are the best example. The US and Russia shared molten salt reactor technology after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then the US shared those details with China in 2014 under an international DOE initiative: https://web.archive.org/web/20130919025430/http://www.smartp...

The PRC has much credit to give the United States and Soviets for their thorium reactor designs.
by underlipton | 2025-12-20 22:54:32+00:00
They didn't fudge the truth. They reported exactly what the scientifically-supportable findings at the time were. Even if they had a notion that they were only looking at underpainting that was covered by more intricate work, they couldn't prove it. And, at the point, when they were trying to draw a distinction between objective fact and subjective sentiment, it was paramount that they come down solidly on the side of objective fact. Which they did. They proved that there was originally a weathered-away chroma layer above the base marble on these statues.

>Folks closer to center see it as controlling the narrative, lies, and conspiracy when the full truth comes out.

And this, I reject. The people who think this way aren't in the center, and they were never interested in the truth. Their aim has always been promoting the primacy of Western classical art (often as part of larger notions of white supremacy). They fought hard for the debunked no-chroma interpretation until another angle presented itself: that the chroma scientists were trying to purposely make the statues seem ugly, in order to devalue Western classical art, or to dictate its value outside of their control and terms. It's the same tack as right-wing gamers claiming that female characters are being made purposely "ugly" in order to alienate male heterosexual gamers.

And while the reason for changes in female representation in games are less objective and more complicated than the scientific inquiry that produced the knowledge of painted statues, most of the people driven to the fringes by the evolution of these topics, as knowledge and circumstances develop, are people who share their fringe (and incorrect) ideas. Implicit there is that there's no "full truth coming out", just a developing collective understanding.

If you want narrative control, lies, and conspiracy, look at Wall Street.
by rovarma | 2025-12-20 22:54:42+00:00
Thanks!

> In hindsight, making the sync point be paid for all users was a mistake, and an opt-in flag would have been the better option

Yep. It was mentioned on the original patch’s mailing list discussion, but the cost was thought to be small. Just goes to show again that “intuition” about software perf is generally ~useless. The only way to know is to measure.

> will need to try it out before as it's a paid tool

I think it’s totally worth it, but I’m biased ;-) Note that the Linux version is currently in private alpha, and not generally available yet. Hopefully soon though!
by johnwheeler | 2025-12-20 22:55:12+00:00
it's not about people disagreeing with my assessment. It's that people keep saying, "I'm not afraid of AI because it makes mistakes." That's the main argument I've heard. I don't know if those people are ignorant, arrogant, or in denial. Or maybe they're right. I don't know. But I don't think they're right. Human nature leads me to believe they're in denial. Or they're ignorant. I don't think there's necessarily any shame in being in denial or ignorant. They don't know or see what I see.

I don't have to write code anymore, and the code that's coming out needs less and less of my intervention. Maybe I'm just much better at prompting than other people. But I doubt that

The two things I hear are:

1. You'll always need a human in the loop

2. AI isn't any good at writing code

The first one sounds more plausible, but it means less programmers over time.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-20 22:56:27+00:00
>Non-Euclidean geometry (geometric axioms in which one postulate is rejected such that the 3 angles of a triangle are not exactly 180 degrees) was considered a meaningless word game and fundamental mistruth.

This is just a lie though. Non-Euclidean geometry is a mathematical model of how distances behave on non-linear spaces. Nobody ever believed it to be a "fundamental mistruth", even suggesting it would look ridiculous. It would be akin to denying linear algebra, even the meaning is unclear.

That the physical reality of space is not linear was a shocking revelation, since all human experience and basically every experiment done up until that point indicated otherwise.
by ewagoner | 2025-12-20 22:58:02+00:00
Yes, this exactly! Thank you for picking up what I was laying down. I gave them these names as a reminder to myself, the person who is using these tools, who I'm doing this particular task for, why I should remember to look at what I do through particular lenses, and how to get the best output from my tools of choice.

They're my tools in my toolbox for my code. For most of the projects I've used them in, I've been the sole developer and the issues other folks have raised about naming schemes don't apply. I've shared them with colleagues, but if they use them they can call them whatever they'd like -- I'm not trying to say my way of doing things is better for everyone, but it is better for me. And maybe could be for someone else too.

(Sorry for both a three item list and a "not X, is Y" phrasing in my reply. Oh jeez -- and an em dash too. I'm working on moving my writing style away from what LLMs are throwing out there right now, but it's slow going.)
by troupo | 2025-12-20 22:58:23+00:00
Just like with anything digital you (and Spotify) are fully at the mercy of the rights holders. When (not if) they pull their stuff, or replace their stuff, or change their stuff, you can never get the original back unless you preserve it.

Largest example: a lot of Russian music is not available on Spotify because of the Russia-Ukrane war, and Spotify pulling out of Russia. So they don't have the licneses to a lot of stuff because that belongs to companies operating within Russia.
by scythe | 2025-12-20 22:59:30+00:00
>An average level of 30.7 ng/mL generally means those people must have consumed marijuana at some time close to driving.

Averages do not work that way! The average of 48, 48, 48, 3 and 3 is 30. The study findings remain interesting but the actual proportion of impaired drivers may be less than 40%.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-20 22:59:41+00:00
The IPv6 spec looks long because it also includes protocols that are separate on IPv4 (DHCP/SLAAC, NDP, depending on the document ICMPv6, mirroring DHCP, ARP, ICMP, NetBIOS, etc.), as well as the addressing schemes that were different RFCs in IPv4 such as multicast/unicast/network classes/subnets.

As for the implementation: just about anything more powerful than an ESP32 has the entire protocol implemented and running already.
by freefrog1234aa | 2025-12-20 22:59:54+00:00
Yes. I worked for a Cambodian telco, when there was a range of Alcatel, Nokia, etc switching equipment across 10 carriers. Huawei swept the lot within 2 years, and Alcatel staff told me they were losing everywhere - they couldn't match the price or technology. This was before the US decided to sanction Huawei.
by StellarScience | 2025-12-20 23:00:11+00:00
C++ with Boost has let you grab a stacktrace anywhere in the application for years. But in April 2024 Boost 1.85 added a big new feature: stacktrace from arbitrary exception ( https://www.boost.org/releases/1.85.0/ ), which shows the call stack at the time of the throw. We added it to our codebase, and suddenly errors where exceptions were thrown became orders of magnitude easier to debug.

C++23 added std::tracktrace, but until it includes stacktrace from arbitrary exception, we're sticking with Boost.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-20 23:00:11+00:00
Sometimes you don’t have all the relevant details in scope at the point of error. For instance some recoverable thing might have happened first which exercises a backup path with slightly different data. This is not exception worthy and execution continues. Then maybe some piece of data in this backup path interacts poorly with some other backend causing an error. The exception won’t tell you how you got there, only where you got stuck. Logging can tell you the steps that led up to that, which is useful. Of course you need a way to deal with verbose logs effectively, but such systems aren’t exactly rare these days.
by dpark | 2025-12-20 23:01:02+00:00
Defining a callback for every situation where a library might encounter an unexpected condition and pointing them all at the logs seems like a massive waste of time.

I would much prefer a library have sane defaults, reasonable logging, and a way for me to plug in callbacks where needed. Writing On429 and a hundred other functions that just point to Logger.Log is not a good use of time.
by eszed | 2025-12-20 23:01:22+00:00
Excel is not "complete" until they stop forcibly converting long strings of numbers into scientific notation - or at least give me a sheet-specific way to turn it off. I know how to stop it on my machine, but I have shared documents where if any one of the 16+ other users forgets, then it's messed up for everyone.

Let alone the date issues.

At one point I did a deep dive on one or the other of these "quirks", and the earliest request for exactly the fix I want is from nineteen-eighty-fricking-five. Unbelievable.
by SonOfKyuss | 2025-12-20 23:01:28+00:00
> telling people no, that’s a bad idea. Don’t do that. This is often more useful than an you’re absolutely right followed by the perfect solution to the wrong problem

This one is huge. I’ve personally witnessed many situations where a multi-million dollar mistake was avoided by a domain expert shutting down a bad idea. Good leadership recognizes this value. Bad leadership just looks at how much code you ship
by 1dry | 2025-12-20 23:02:23+00:00
Yuck. Just to make it easier to train slop machines. The point of art is not to have completionist archives of EVERYthing that’s ever been made! Let it die. Death is the most natural part of life. Art is about the human experience, not “for researchers”.

The point is human connection. Art is a living reflection and record of human experience. Art will persevere- the kinds of folks who prioritize what they like based on popularity were never the supporters artists (contrast with craftspeople trying to make a buck) counted on in the first place. Enjoy your derivative slop - we’ll continue on our imperfect, messy, individual, human artistic lives.
by mcv | 2025-12-20 23:02:32+00:00
There's a tutorial? Maybe I should have started there.

I recently started messing around with OpenSCAD too. I found these boxes that are great for storing the tiles for various 18xx railroad boardgames: https://www.printables.com/model/287297-parametric-18xx-tile...

Cool thing is that you can easily print them in whichever size you like, and the sizes in the supplied files are rather large, so I tried some smaller sizes, and discovered some details weren't actually centered properly, so I dove into the code, tweaking some bits here and there until I got it centered properly.

Then my dad asked me to print boxes for a game that had slightly larger tiles, so I needed to tweak the sizes, the thickness, and made everything just a bit more configurable.

I've got another idea I haven't tried yet: print the shape of the track on the tile on the spot its meant for. That's a whole new feature and not merely tweaking an existing one, so maybe it's time to finally learn how this format actually works.

Although I did see in the code that you create shapes through intersections and substractions with other shapes. And that's where I got stuck. Maybe it's time to pick it up again. It's a fun way of building shapes.
by 3np | 2025-12-20 23:02:49+00:00
Quadlets aren't what I'd personally use for local dev. They are good for running a local headless persistent service. So I wouldn't use it for your service-under-test but they can be a good fit for supporting dev tools like a local package registry, proxy or VPN gateway.

The docs you need for quadlets are basically here: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...

The one gotcha I can think of not mentioned there is that if you run it as a non-root user and want it to run without logging in as that user, you need to: `sudo loginctl enable-linger $USER`.

If you don't vibe with quadlets, it's equally fine to do a normal systemd .service file with `ExecStart=podman run ...`, which quadlets are just convenience sugar for. I'd start there and then return to quadlets if/when you find that becomes too messy. Don't add new abstraction layers just because you can if they don't help.

If you have a more complex service consisting of multiple containers you want to schedule as a single unit, it's also totally fine to combine systemd and compose by having `ExecStart=podman compose up ...`.

Do you want it to run silently in the background with control over autorestarts and log to system journal? Quadlets/systemd.

Do you want to have multiple containers scheduled together (or just prefer it)? Compose.

Do you want to manually invoke it and have the output in a terminal by default? CLI run or compose.
by mstank | 2025-12-20 23:05:37+00:00
Did some early qualitative testing on this. Definitely seems easier for Claude to handle than playwright MCP servers for one-off web dev QA tasks. Not really built for e2e testing though and lacks the GUI features of cursors latest browser integration.

Also seems quite a bit slower (needs more loops) do to general web tasks strictly through the browser extension compared to other browser native AI-assistant extensions.

Overall —- great step in the right direction. Looks like this will be table stakes for every coding agent (cli or VS Code plugin, browser extension [or native browser])
by toast0 | 2025-12-20 23:06:21+00:00
Camera tickets are in a weird place legally. They might not be legal, because of the 6th ammendment and due process requirements, so states tread lightly. A light touch gets a lot of compliance and is most likely self-funding; enforcement by humans may be more effective for habitual violators, but you most likely can't have as much coverage and be self-funding.

If you had 30 speeding tickets issued in person, it would be a lot different than 30 speeding tickets issued by machine.
by 1dry | 2025-12-20 23:07:25+00:00
Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?

This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
by johngossman | 2025-12-20 23:07:33+00:00
Newton and Gauss and Euler did just fine without such solid foundations. If you get a PhD, very likely even a undergraduate degree in mathematics you cover this stuff, then (unless you choose foundations as your field) you go about doing statistics, or algebra (the higher kind), or analysis knowing you're working on solid fundamentals. It would be crazy if every time you proved something in one of those fields you had to state which derivation of real number you were using. And I guarantee at least 90% of PhD mathematicians could do so if they really needed to.
by QueensGambit | 2025-12-20 23:07:44+00:00
Both the US and China rely on uranium-based fission, but they seem to be diverging on their next bet. China is exploring thorium based fission, while US is leaning toward fusion [1]

[1] Trump Media’s merger with the fusion company TAE - https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/12/18/320754...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-20 23:08:05+00:00
> So just how many reactors will $80 billion buy? Assuming an average of $16 billion per AP1000—slightly less than for Vogtle, and allowing for cost reductions from economies of scale and learning-by-doing—the plan would mean five new reactors. That would represent an increase of about 5.7 percent in total U.S. nuclear energy generation capacity, if all the reactors currently in service remain online.
by jaggederest | 2025-12-20 23:08:32+00:00
The funny thing is that if you ask Claude if you should use email address as a primary key it will pretty adamantly warn you away from it:

> I'd recommend against using email as the primary key for a large LLM chat website. Here's why:

> Problems with email as primary key:

> 1. Emails change - Users often want to update their email addresses. With email as PK, you'd need to cascade updates across all related tables (chat sessions, messages, settings, etc.), which is expensive and error-prone

> [Edited for length]
by underlipton | 2025-12-20 23:08:49+00:00
Take with a grain of salt, as it's been quite a while since I've been to Japan, and I've never been able to make it to a (non-VR) convention. But, IIUC:

There's certainly more respect (and legal backing) for privacy in Japan, which makes things like producing uncommon, off-color, or even transgressive art less risky. People can't just take pictures of you in public and post them online. You're not expected to become an artistic personality, either. Your art (and perhaps a pseudonymous personality) can stand on its own, even when you make public appearances at physical markets, without any of it leaking out into your non-subculture life.

You're also not expected to turn the effort into a massive commercial effort. Some doujinshi are only produced in tiny runs that are meant to be distributed to friends, and maybe a handful of interested customers. That means that the production standards are more forgiving, the investment is smaller, and the barriers to trying again if a particular effort doesn't go so well are lower.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-20 23:09:23+00:00
I didn't do it consciously. When I wrote my original post, I'd hallucinated that the author had used the term "hate".

When Advael responded "the author doesn't mention hating these people at all", I went back to the article and checked. Advael was right, but I can understand where my hallucination came from. The first three sentences read:

> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator.

A "special kind of contempt" mixed with "cold, hard anger" really seems like hatred to me.

(Anyway, this really isn't the point I was trying to make.)
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-20 23:09:47+00:00
Awful stuff.

I was just starting off in life (kid, girl, job, apartment, bank, debit card, bills) when I made a 63-cent error with my bank account. Which is to say: If all of the negative debits and all of the positive credits were summed, then the account would have been in the negative by 63 cents.

I screwed up. And in a fair and just world, I'd owe the bank some extra tithing for quite clearly having spent some money that I very definitely did not have. Maybe $20 for the error and $10 per day spent in the red, plus the 63 cents, or something along those lines.

But it wasn't that way. Because the transactions were processed in batches that were re-ordered to be highest-first, I discovered that I owed the bank a little more than $430.

At the time (around 25 years ago, now) that was an absolute mountain of money to me.

The banker at the branch I went into was unapologetic and crass about the fees.

Looking over my transactions, they said "You know how to do math, right? You should have known that the account was overdrawn, but you were just out spending money willy-nilly all over town anyway."

I replied with something like "I made a single error of 63 cents. The rest of what you said is an invention."

This went back and forth for a bit before I successfully managed to leave the building without any handcuffs, fire trucks, or ambulances becoming involved -- and I still owed them more than $430.

The lesson I learned was very simple: Seriously, fuck those guys.

($12 billion in 2024, huh? That's all? Maybe the no-fee fintechs are winning.)
by IshKebab | 2025-12-20 23:10:52+00:00
He was a crazy guy (in the mentally ill sense) that wrote TempleOS. The religious craziness in this project is some kind of weird tribute to Terry, who also filled TempleOS will religious nonsense. (He believed all sorts of insane things and was also racist.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis
by wahern | 2025-12-20 23:11:07+00:00
Any economist care to chime in?

It's a common claim on HN that when a regulator caps profit margins, that incentivizes the entity to make-work to increase absolute revenue and thus profits. But capital markets, i.e. investors, only care about marginal returns. Unless your profit margin cap is really high relative to average returns in the global market, there's no market pressure to do this, AFAICT. Capital projects require investment, but what investors have so much money burning holes in their pockets that they're eager to invest at marginal rates lower than what they could invest elsewhere?

The only financial incentive for this would have to come internally from the company, say from executives whose compensation would increase merely by dint of larger absolute revenues. For regulated entities maybe that's plausible? But typically executive compensation is usually tied to margins and given in stock.

I only just came to this realization when reading about the effect of tariffs and a description of why they drive up prices much more than you think. If the import price on a widget is $100, a 10% tariff drives it up to $110. If the next purchaser in the supply chain was originally paying $X, you might think they would just pay $X + $10, and on down the chain, so that retail prices only rise by $10. But that's not how it works. If the importer was adding 20% (not atypical), they're going to need to sell the widget at $120 + $10 + ($10 * 20%), so $132.00. The next purchaser will need to do the same, but on their purchase price. Whereas before they were selling at $120 + ($120 * 0.20) = 144.00, now they need to sell at $132 + ($132 * 0.20) = $158.40, an $18 jump, not $10. It compounds on down the chain. Why? Your investors are expecting you to add a Y% margin. The reality is a little more complex, of course. Maybe a supplier can get by with a smaller profit margin, but the floor is going to be their cost of capital for buying supply, which may be least 5-10%.
by Quarondeau | 2025-12-20 23:11:55+00:00
I wonder how they'd handle this under the GDPR, which has an explicit "Right to rectification".

The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.

Taking into account the purposes of the processing, the data subject shall have the right to have incomplete personal data completed, including by means of providing a supplementary statement.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-16-gdpr/

Obviously if you change your email address, the old one ceases to be correct, even if it was correct before.