Maybe if you're one of those AI behemots who works with exabytes of training data, it would make some sense to compress it down by less than 50% (since we're using lots of Latin terms and acronyms and punctuation marks which all fit in one byte in UTF-8).

On the web and in other kinds of daily text processing, one poorly compressed image or one JavaScript-heavy webshite obliterates all "savings" you would have had in that week by encoding text in something more efficient.

It's the same with databases. I've never seen anyone pick anything other than UTF-8 in the last 10 years at least, even though 99% of what we store there is in Cyrillic. I sometimes run into old databases, which are usually Oracle, that were set up in the 90s and never really upgraded. The data is in some weird encoding that you haven't heard of for decades, and it's always a pain to integrate with them.

I remember the days of codepages. Seeing broken text was the norm. Technically advanced users would quickly learn to guess the correct text encoding by the shapes of glyphs we would see when opening a file. Do not want.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565762

Points: 3

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Used to? Lots of them still are. Right now there's 150 µg/m³ of PM2.5 outside my window, and it's a "clean" day. Yesterday's concentrations were up to 900 µg (yes, that's correct), and the highest I've seen this winter were 2000 µg (yes, this is also correct). And it keeps getting worse, recently our so-called president mentioned that coal is our strategic reserve and we won't be phasing it out any time soon.

I'm relatively sure most of the "global south" has bad air quality, even if such extreme values are rare.

Here are some random photos of a typical winter day (winter is 8 months per year):

https://pasteboard.co/d2uZDyCd2gvt.jpg

https://pasteboard.co/F1zT2VPXFPKs.webp

https://pasteboard.co/r2S12bHXxzcI.jpg

https://pasteboard.co/w7CfK2Yfaz2l.webp

https://pasteboard.co/ceSDNcQuD4qL.jpg

https://pasteboard.co/z7XJcpoI6FCv.jpg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20472179

I'll take enforced HTTPS for absolutely everything, thank you very much. Preferably with certificate pinning and similar aggressive measures to thwart any attempts to repeat this.

I don't even cook it, simply soaking it with water overnight in a refrigerator does the job. Preparation takes 2-3 minutes (except for the overnight soak). Not boiling it also saves all the vitamins.

(I'm not from Poland.)

And we have a lot of traffic, regular traffic jams. The average age of a typical car is older than 10 years, according to government data. Most of them are used cars with 100k miles (or more) on them imported from western Europe or the US.

Still, the difference in particulates in summer vs winter is literally hundreds of times.

https://aqicn.org/station/@517492/

Almaty also has terrible air quality, but looking both at averages and extremes, it's about 3-4 times cleaner than this place.

As I said, it currently looks okay due to some wind, but it's a short abnormality and the first relatively clean "window" for the past ten days. Look at this station's history and you'll see conditions more typical for this region.

Even historical data shows "only" 310 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but this is also misleading. The new network includes 26 more accurate stations spread all over the city, but the public portal for these data is being worked on. Hopefully next time this subject comes up on HN I'll have something to link to.

Several of the nearby stations are simply not working and always show zero.

All I'm trying to say is that using IQAir data to rank anything global is exceedingly misleaing.

SO₂ pollution is also extreme, with levels of 1000 µg/m³ being exceeded on a regular basis, and 5000-8000 µg/m³ not unheard of. Yes, I am sure of these numbers, it's not a typo.

Right at this moment there's some wind and the pollution has somewhat subsided, but it won't last: it's an exception. For example, the average PM2.5 concentration over the last month is around 250 µg/m³, depending on the exact place.

We have extensive network of air sensors, but it's not currently public (it only started working a couple of months ago and is in the process of being made available to the public). I can only recommend looking at https://aqicn.org, which has much better coverage than IQAir, and speaking of our country specifically, it collects data from our old sensors provided by the government.

Disregard anything that looks suspicious (some of the sensors are not working and show zero levels of pollution -- they're simply broken).

My city is the worst one, but actually most Central Asian cities have terrible air quality due to harsh winters and outdated heating methods with zero emission control. Much, much worse than anything in Poland or Europe generally. You won't see them on IQAir because AFAIK they mostly collect data through their own sensors, which are expensive and not used here.