Because AI is attacking, plagiarizing, competing with, and destroying the most common industry of people here on HN, so suddenly it mattered more to people who were previously unaffected.

Some people have been concerned with this kind of politics all along. Some people are realizing they should be now, because of AI. And that's okay; both groups can still work together.

I went to a conference and people were suggesting nationalizing AI companies so it's basically everywhere.

Same way we turned internet into a public utility? Wait, did we do that?

The parent comment is a pretty measured take. What’s your problem with it?

Don't invest in companies that disclose enough information.

They aren't banning quarterly reporting, they'd just no longer require it.

there is no F500 company that likes quarterly filing.

this is why they've been lobbying for it, and with Trump in power they pushed and got it.

once it is gone none of them will do it, or at best will do it half-heartedly for a while.

5 years after its repeal there will be no large company doing it regularly

I'm definitely curious to see what happens

My guess is that most report quarterly, my question is what they report. But we will see.

Helium output from the Persian Gulf is about 5 million cubic meters a month. Which (liquefied) is about 40 truckloads a week

This article is just hysteria

Removing 30% of the supply of a very important, and completely irreplaceable for most of its uses, resource isn’t hysteria.

The point is it doesn’t take giant tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz to move this volume. It could be handled by tanker trucks going to Suez….

This has nothing to do with transport. Iranian drone strikes disabled a Qatari helium _production_ facility.

You should be able to make a killing placing commodity bets right now, because you have such crystal clear vision for the causal chain currently underway

What are your top positions? You will never need to work again!

> I've seen too many "we'll just rack a few servers" projects turn into full-time infrastructure jobs

Really? How many?

Utf8 solved this completely. It works with any length unicode and on average takes up almost as little storage as ascii.

Utf16 is brain dead and an embarrassment

Blame the Unicode consortium for not coming up UTF-8 first (or, really, at all). And for assuming that 65526 code points would be enough for everyone.

So many problems could be solved with a time machine.

The first draft of Unicode was in 1988. Thompson and Pike came up with UTF-8 in 1992, made an RFC in 1998. UTF-16 came along in 1996, made an RFC in 2000.

The time machine would've involved Microsoft saying "it's clear now that USC-2 was a bad idea, so let's start migrating to something genuinely better".

I don't think it was clear at the time that UTF-8 would take off. UCS-2 and then UTF-16 was well established by 2000 in both Microsoft technologies and elsewhere (like Java). Linux, despite the existence of UTF-8, would still take years to get acceptable internationalization support. Developing good and secure internationalization is a hard problem -- it took a long time for everyone.

It's now 2026, everything always looks different in hindsight.

I don’t remember it quite that way. Localization was a giant question, sure. Are we using C or UTF-8 for the default locale? That had lots of screaming matches. But in the network service world, I don’t remember ever hearing more than a token resistance against choosing UTF-8 as the successor to ASCII. It was a huge win, especially since ASCII text is already valid UTF-8 text. Make your browser default to parsing docs with that encoding and you can still parse all existing ASCII docs with zero changes! That was a huge, enormous selling point.

Windows is far from a niche player, to be sure. Yet it seems like literally every other OS but them was going with one encoding for everything, while they went in a totally different direction that got complaints even then. I truly believe they thought they’d win that battle and eventually everyone else would move to UTF-16 to join them. Meanwhile, every other OS vendor was like, nah, no way we’re rewriting everything from scratch to work with a not-backward compatible encoding.

Microsoft did the hard work of supporting Unicode when UTF-8 didn't exist (and mostly when UTF-16 didn't exist).

Any system that continued with only ASCII well into the 2000s could mostly just jump into UTF-8 without issue. Doing nothing for non-English users for almost two decades turned out to be a solid plan long term. Microsoft certainly didn't have that option.

Blame Java - their use of utf-16 is the sole reason that Microsoft chose it.

Sun sued Microsoft in 1996 for making nonportable extensions to Java (a license violation). Microsoft lost, and created C# in 2000.

At the time, “Starting Java” was the most feared message on the internet. People really thought that in-browser Java would take over over the world (yes Java, not Javascript)

Sun chose UTF16 in 1995 believing that Unicode would never need more than 64k characters. In 1996 that changed. UTF16 got variable length encoding and became a white elephant

So Microsoft chose UTF16 know full well that it had no advantages. But at least they can say code pages were far worse :)

At the time it was introduced it was understandable, and Microsoft also needed some time to implement it before that of course. But by about 2000 it was clear that UTF-8 was going to win, and Microsoft should have just properly implemented it in NT instead of dithering about for the next almost 20 years. Linux had quite good support of it by then.

MS could easily have added proper UTF-8 support in the early 2000s instead of the late 2010s.

Yep. It would've been a better landing pad than UTF-16 since they had to migrate off UCS-2 anyway.

It gets worse for UTF-16, Windows will let you name files using unpaired surrogates, now you have a filename that exists on your disk that cannot be represented in UTF-8 (nor compliant UTF-16 for that matter). Because of that, there's yet another encoding called WTF-8 that can represent the arbitrary invalid 16-bit values.

The model companies are the new OS, you bet they are thinking about projects like this

This is ridiculous. New developers will learn a completely different skill path from what we learned, and they will get where we are faster than we did.

I watched star wars, so I know how to fly a spaceship

No they’re saying that the schools should repay the loans, not the government

Student loan forgiveness yes, paid for by the schools that let people rack up debt for low value degrees.

In the olden days student loans qualification depended on the students degree program and grades, and there wasn’t any repayment problem

“People asking if Al is going to take their jobs is like an Apache in 1840 asking if white settlers are going to take his buffalo” (Noah Smith on Twitter, I mean X)