MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-04-29 14:52:31+00:00
If you're on the younger side, you may not remember how we've been here before. In the 1990s there was a glut of satellite companies (eg Teledesic, Iridium, Worldsat) [1].

SpaceX's strategy here is quite brilliant: they induce demand for launches and prove Falon 9 reuse while deploying satellites at relatively low cost (because of the reuse) at a price level absolutely nobody can compete with. They're doing well over 100 launches a year at this point.

Bezos seems to want to repeat this with Amazon, Blue Origin and Kuiper but I think they've lost before they've even started. Blue Origin simply doesn't have the orbital launch capability that SpaceX does and certainly not anywhere near the price point. BO has underdelivered on BE-$ and New Glenn. SpaceX did too to be fair but that's in the past (ignoring Starship).

Starlink is a relatively simple design: it's surface-to-surface through a single hop. I think satellite Internet is likely already a saturated market given you're competing with 4G/5G wireless and fixed line. There's only so many remote locations and people on the move to sell to.

[1]: https://interactive.satellitetoday.com/via-satellite-at-30-t...
by philipwhiuk | 2025-04-29 14:52:58+00:00
> The terms of their FCC license require them to have half their presently licensed constellation, roughly 1600 satellites, in orbit by July of 2026. They're almost certainly not going to make it, but I would be very surprised if the FCC doesn't grant them an extension if they can show they're making serious progress and aren't just squatting on that spectrum.

I agree.

> On the other hand, the FCC must know that they will be accused of being corrupt if they don't grant an extension.

Score:5, Funny
by Eisenstein | 2025-04-29 14:52:58+00:00
Here is a list of 20 district sales taxes in California alone (out of ~150).

Los Angeles County Measure H: 0.25%, 10-01-2017 to 03-31-2025

City of Orland Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2017 to 03-31-2025

Rio Dell City Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2015 to 12-31-2024

City of El Monte Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025

City of San Pablo Reduction Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 10-01-2017 to 09-30-2022

Town of Truckee Trails Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 10-01-2014 to 09-30-2024

City of La Habra Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025

City of Seal Beach Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2019 to 03-31-2025

City of Westminster Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2017 to 12-31-2022

City of Pismo Beach Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 10-01-2008 to 03-31-2025

Pacific Grove City Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 10-01-2008 to 09-30-2022

Town of San Anselmo Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2014 to 03-31-2023

City of Sausalito 2014 Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2015 to 03-31-2023

Mariposa County Healthcare Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2005 to 03-31-2025

Mendocino County Mental Health Treatment Act Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2018 to 03-31-2023

Mendocino Library Special Transactions and Use Tax: 0.125%, 04-01-2012 to 03-31-2023

City of Atwater Public Safety Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 07-01-2013 to 03-31-2023

City of Capitola Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 04-01-2005 to 03-31-2025

City of Campbell Vital City Services Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025

City of Davis Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 10-01-2014 to 03-31-2025

* https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/formspubs/cdtfa105.pdf
by freehorse | 2025-04-29 14:53:03+00:00
Yeah, I also find very often llms say sth wrong just because they found it in the internet. The problem is that we know to not trust a random website, but LLMs make wrong info more believable. So the problem in some sense is not exactly the LLM, as they pick up on wrong stuff people or "people" have written, but they are really bad at figuring these errors out and particularly good at covering them or backing them up.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 14:53:08+00:00
It surely is, according to Apple's own documentation.

> Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics.

-- https://developer.apple.com/swift/

If developers have such a big problem glueing C libraries into Java JNI, or Panama, then maybe game industry is not where they are supposed to be, when even Assembly comes to play.
by orbital-decay | 2025-04-29 14:53:10+00:00
It will not, of course - anything that's inside is long dead, not designed for Earth atmosphere, and it had to be programmed to trigger in the first place.

In fact, the capsule could also burn up on reentry. Sure, it's a Venera-8 double designed to enter Venus' atmosphere at 11.6km/s... but it has extra mass on it (the upper stage never separated so it should look like [1]) and the capsule's CoG doesn't take all that stuff into account, which might cause it to tumble, reenter backwards, or damage it. On the other hand, it's reentering from a really low-energy orbit so it could survive the reentry - but not the impact in case it lands on the ground.

[1] https://epizodyspace.ru/01/2u/solnthe/ams/v-8/v-8.html
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-29 14:53:14+00:00
> The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).

The systematic study of Sanskrit also goes back literal millennia. Why would the understanding of the particles differ?

To the degree that we believe we understand the ancient Greek particles better, how do we know that's true? It's a dead language; the corpus is the corpus.
by epilys | 2025-04-29 14:53:17+00:00
I agree it depends on the writer and their cultural and educational background. Another example is Thucydides (which as also a native Greek speaker, find funny that anglophones pronounce as Thoo-see-dee-dees, but I digress). Thucydides was considered even in eras closer to him than to as as too abstract/verbose.

Meanwhile Plutarch enriches the laconic myth corpus by reporting that the Lacedaemonians were content with replying to a letter with only the words "About what you wrote: no." Writing style is part of the message.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

Growing up bilingual, I personally always found Greek more verbose than English even in brevity. It's good for avoiding ambiguity and getting your intent across but sometimes bad for colloquial communication.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-29 14:53:30+00:00
The US's weighted average tariff was previously something like 1.8%, and even then that was pumped up by tariffs on various agricultural products and on cars (ie stuff people were unlikely to buy on Amazon). Most developed countries are in the 1-2% range.

Their Brazilian site might be one place that it would make sense, in that Brazil does have rather high tariffs.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-29 14:53:43+00:00
Can you give an example of an everyday person search that generates a majority of AI slop?

If anything my frustration with google search comes from it being much harder to find niche technical information, because it seems google has turned the knobs hard towards "Treat search queries like they are coming from the average user, so show them what they are probably looking for over what they are actually looking for."
by freehorse | 2025-04-29 14:53:48+00:00
> And yes, the answer was supported by actual sources pointing to the tax office website, including a link to the office's well-hidden official calculator of precisely the thing I thought I would have to pay someone to figure out.

Sounds like reddit could also do a good job at this, though nobody said "reddit will replace your jobs". Maybe because not as many people actively use reddit as they use generative AI now, but I cannot imagine any other reason than that.
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-04-29 14:54:06+00:00
So I upload a pre-baked GSplat of the ground state physical space, presumably there is some kind of calibration, then I can navigate the ROS device spatially using the GSplat to reflect position details instead of, or in addition to, actual camera feeds ? Or are they producing the splats somehow on the ROS device with limited camera poses ? Whatever the case may be, I still think the human controller side is where Splats are more useful so add a VR headset into the loop and I think this could open up real opportunities for example spatial minimaps, decoupled points of view, etc.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-29 14:54:08+00:00
I was just talking to a couple friends of mine, about this, yesterday. They run a medium-sized manufacturing business that has almost all their work done overseas.

Another friend of mine was just laid off, as a transportation broker, directly because of the tariffs.

The tariffs have the potential to drive tens of thousands of small- and medium businesses into bankruptcy, overnight.

I feel as if this was not well thought-out. Maybe megacorps, like Tesla, can weather it, but many smaller businesses have no buffer.

That said, the manufacturing imbalance and trade imbalance is a very real problem that needs to be solved. I just feel as if we are approaching it in a manner that is simplistic, and favors only very large corporations.
by fuoqi | 2025-04-29 14:54:19+00:00
>BTW, government expenditure only appears in the GDP calculations by expenditure. It doesn't appear in the income nor in the production. The later one the one you are actually thinking of.

I am not sure against what you argue exactly. My point is that if we use GDP as a metric of economy strength, then it's easy for the government to cheat it by fueling it's spending by printed money (ah, sorry, the reputable economist use the "quantitative easing" euphemism instead) or by unfair debt issuing practices (like forcing banks, pension funds, or even people directly to buy government bonds), then it results in a short term "sugar rush" GDP growth, while consequences are kicked down the road. In the US case we also have an additional masking factor in the form of having control over the world's reserve currency, which significantly dampens the usual inflation reaction.

So if we want a better metric, we should somehow discount this factor. Obviously, simply removing the government spending is too simplistic (or you can call it less charitably as "dumb").
by trollbridge | 2025-04-29 14:54:42+00:00
This was at an 85 person startup.

When I've worked for a large company, I had to spend more time on expense reports, not less. However much I was being paid seemed to have on relevance to how much time I had to spend on keying things into Concur (and no, we didn't have admin staff who would do it for us).

If you're not "price sensitive" on vacation, good for you. If I'm on vacation in Israel (or DC), I would prefer rides that show up faster and are cheaper. If you prefer to use the Uber app for everything, that's fine, but I doubt there is much of a use case for "people who don't want to install an extra app and are OK with paying 15% more for everything".
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-29 14:56:02+00:00
Is autism actually on the rise, or is it just more diagnosed thanks to advances in and availability of diagnoses and general awareness in the population?

A lot of people that get a fresh autism diagnosis these days recognize the same symptoms in their (grand)parents.

Anyway, RFK does seem to focus on food stuffs, by banning certain food dyes (no more lurid froot loops for you (https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/22/nx...) but also by relaxing food safety laws (https://www.yahoo.com/news/usda-withdraws-plan-limit-salmone...).
by eblume | 2025-04-29 14:56:03+00:00
As I understand it, these constellations are all low enough in orbit that stuff deorbits from atmospheric drag relatively quickly. I think you get a few years at most for these sorts of satellites.

The "Kessler syndrome" worst case scenario - I'm just recalling stuff from Scott Manley videos here - I think is a 'really bad decade' where a cascade of collisions makes launching in to LEO impossible until everything settles down in 10ish years. Bad, yeah, terrible even, but possibly worth it in some sense? I mean, it makes about as much sense to me as growing subsidized corn for ethanol gas, I suppose. I'm sure someone is making money.
by cactusplant7374 | 2025-04-29 14:56:41+00:00
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/29/tariffs-amazon-prime-day-se...

> According to e-commerce software company SmartScout, 900 products on Amazon saw increased prices since April 9, with an average increase of 29%.

Tariffs aren't having a big impact yet.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-29 14:56:48+00:00
At the high level, it made huge sense to create a Toronto - Ottawa - Montreal -QC route.

Up until a few months ago, the plan was to create a new link between Toronto/Detroit/Chicago and upgrade the links between Toronto/New York City and Montreal/New York City. In this previous world view in which we were all friends, getting as many larger Canadian cities as possible connected to this rail network was worth the cost.
by aezell | 2025-04-29 14:56:53+00:00
I had the opposite experience coming from Django/Flask to Elixir/Phoenix. I found it very comfortable and that there were many similar patterns at the framework level. Now, LiveView is a bit of a different story but basic Phoenix routing and views seem quite similar to Django routing and views. Ecto's model schemas have a decent amount of overlap with Django's model objects.

Was it the LiveView stuff that felt foreign? I'd agree there's a learning curve there as someone coming from Django.
by smeeth | 2025-04-29 14:57:04+00:00
Elon is definitely wrong. The author seems to be advocating running the economy on vibes, however.

> The real problem with GDP ... is that it tempts us to view all human progress as an amorphous score, which we can start maximising just as soon as we fix whatever we think is wrong with how that score is calculated.

No! The problem with GDP isn't that it's a score, it's that it's a BAD score. We know whats wrong with it. It's fixable, it doesn't ignore very many things! The main issues are totally tractable. In addition to ignoring utility:

1) GDP doesn't account for changes in net wealth.

If I take out a loan to buy candy, GDP goes up. After I eat the candy, the loan remains. I'm financially worse off. GDP still went up! Economy is doing well!

GDP also ignores depreciation. Machinery/infrastructure decay doesn't affect GDP at all.

2) GDP doesn't account for externalities or zero-cost innovation/value.

If I pollute the water supply to make an additional $10, GDP went up.

The inverse is also true. If I make Wikipedia freely available, the value provided to humanity does not affect GDP.
by willglynn | 2025-04-29 14:57:20+00:00
This is not discretionary for the FCC:

> A station authorization shall be automatically terminated in whole or in part without further notice to the licensee upon:

> …

> (d) The failure to maintain 50 percent of the maximum number of NGSO space stations authorized for service following the 9-year milestone period as functional space stations in authorized orbits, which failure will result in the termination of authority for the space stations not in orbit as of the date of noncompliance, but allow for technically identical replacements.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

_Congress_ can change this, but as written, Federal law compels the FCC to automatically terminate the authorization for failing to deploy half the satellites under 47 CFR § 25.161(d), just as they must automatically terminate the authorization when the license expires under 47 CFR § 25.161(b).
by colinmorelli | 2025-04-29 14:57:22+00:00
I find this way of looking at LLMs to be odd. Surely we all are aware that AI has always been probabilistic in nature. Very few people seem to go around talking about how their binary classifier is always hallucinating, but just sometimes happens to be right.

Just like every other form of ML we've come up with, LLMs are imperfect. They get things wrong. This is more of an indictment of yeeting a pure AI chat interface in front of a consumer than it is an indictment of the underlying technology itself. LLMs are incredibly good at doing some things. They are less good at other things.

There are ways to use them effectively, and there are bad ways to use them. Just like every other tool.
by urbanisierung | 2025-04-29 14:57:38+00:00
A tool to organize my life.

All the things that are important to me in one place: notes, habit tracker, brag doc, action log, todos, events, data collection, biolinks, and a lot more.

That certainly sounds a bit boring, and rightly reminds of great tools like Obsidian. However, there was always something missing from the tools, or the configuration was too complex. That's why I started to build one myself. It's a mix of pwa and local-first and Github sync. I don't want a tool that only works in the browser, I also need to be able to continue working seamlessly on my smartphone, and Github offers an endless history that I can view. Plus: I can clone the repo locally at any time.

I don't need a habit tracker service, a tool for notes or a brag doc service anymore. Everything is stored as files that I can access at any time. Other nice features are forms (like typeform) or an infinite number of biolinks.

I've been using it daily for a few months now and have already been able to replace a few services with it.

https://lifosy.com/
by mdaniel | 2025-04-29 14:57:50+00:00
What is the error handling story? I'm shocked that Control Flow doesn't contain Try-Except

Anyway, I ask because Write File returns nothing <https://docs.getflowcode.io/docs/reference/file-system/write...> but there's also no discussion on that page of what happens when one cannot Write File (and the ways that can fall over are almost unlimited)

Also, please fix the inputs bullet list, that's a pretty glaring "no one reads these docs" bug. While you're there, never, ever, ever, ever, ever just have the documentation for anything be a repetition of the input variable's name. I can read, what I can't do is know what the domain of possible encodings are available (base64? base85? uuencoding? gzip+base64 <https://docs.cloud-init.io/en/24.3/reference/modules.html#wr...>?)
by vonzepp | 2025-04-29 14:57:52+00:00
Another note worth considering is that state and companies have different roles. Take NASA vs SpaceX. SpaceX launches cheaper rockets. But NASA for example does alot of its work in Alabama, which is supporting a poor regions econonmy and its communities. It might be more optimal to do this in Silicon Valley, or even China but as a government organisation this is part of it's remit. Like wise space science for the purpose of knowledge. SpaceX only remit is cheap rockets. Comparing the two on launch costs which I see alot, misses alot of the purpose of the spending.
by eythian | 2025-04-29 14:58:46+00:00
That's interesting to me. From my perspective, I didn't find Duolingo great, but it did give me some vocab and basic sentences, and left me feeling more competent than I actually ended up being once I was living where they speak the language I was learning.

Since then I did classes on-again, off-again and I can really feel my ability ramping up when I'm doing them, to the point where I was having short conversations in that second language. When I'm not doing classes, I'm still reinforcing things through my surroundings but I definitely feel that I plateau and don't really get much better.

However, the classes did get me to a point where now I can do things like play D&D in my second language. I still don't feel fluent (I have to active-listen the whole time which is tiring, and sometimes mentally translate still, though that's improving) but I am pretty conversational, and the classes definitely made a big difference for me.

Perhaps it's that there are classes and then there are classes, and you've had bad luck with the quality or nature of yours?
by vr46 | 2025-04-29 14:58:53+00:00
Jeepers, I worked on two startups where I met a “business” person (first was a finance-type, second was a doctor, and we (I) proceeded to do all the work in gathering requirements, building prototypes, etc etc. In both instances, neither of the “ideas” people had any experience of being in any kind of project, and both wanted to discuss equity way too often. And in the event, neither of them as CEO did a blind bit of work. Classic management-by-walking-around. When I suggested to the second one that we might want to find an actual CEO he went nuts and started raving around how he had done all the work of setting up the company and coming up the idea - reader, there was nothing on paper, he hadn’t written anything down, he just wanted to explain it and have everything magically happen.
by atlasunshrugged | 2025-04-29 14:59:07+00:00
I'm almost finished with a project that has taken up quite a lot of my life for the past few years, a book on Estonia! After working for their government and returning to the U.S. I wanted to better understand how the country modernized so effectively after gaining their independence from the Soviet Union so I did a fair amount of research into the topic and many interviews which culminated in a book, Rebooting a Nation.

If you're interested in Estonia, e-government, building tech hubs, and the future of the nation state I'd love if you take a look (and let me know what you think). It's available on Kindle now but Oxford University Press will be shipping out physical copies May 15 and buying from a smaller press is always appreciated!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rebooting-a-nation-9...
by Swizec | 2025-04-29 14:59:54+00:00
> The Soviet Venera program was really fascinating

Reading my uncle’s old tech magazines and sci-fi from the 70’s was fascinating. Eastern European sci fi was all about colonizing Venus and the Venera landers. The way kids in USA are obsessed with Mars, kids in my part of Europe used to be obsessed with Venus before the influx of Western media.

Getting to grow up on the cusp of that vibe shift was cool.
by rpigab | 2025-04-29 14:59:58+00:00
Between around 2005 and 2011 in France, if a child was born and parents Mr Bar and Mrs Baz wanted to transmit both of their last names, he or she had to be named "Foo Bar--Baz". No, that's not a typo, that's two hyphens. Check out "Circulaire du 6 décembre 2004 relative au nom de famille" if you don't believe me.

Yes, the people in charge probably didn't think or know of SQL comments. However, it worked well as long as input is sanitized and not concatenated, which is often the case using modern frameworks or common sense.

However, nowadays, we just put a WAF in front of everything, it's cheaper that way because common sense is hard to come by. People like Foo Bar--Baz still exist, and unless they've had their name changed, they're sometimes running into extremely wierd issues in the web software they're using.
by uyzeqzer | 2025-04-29 15:00:03+00:00
Bringing your keys is critical for any enterprise use. I’m surprised you have users at Google since utilizing non-gemini models there is a no-no. I would love to try, but as the other user said we use litellm so there isn’t any way to use this. The big plus with Claude code is it allows bedrock use. Codex works with litellm assuming you disable the responses. I don’t think you can reasonably call this a CC competitor until you allow for more open use. I get that it messes up making money — but both codex/cc don’t require I I sign up for anything extra.
by jplusequalt | 2025-04-29 15:00:05+00:00
>The most successful will be those with the best ideas and most inspiring vision.

This has never been the truth of the world, and I doubt AI will make it come to fruition. The most successful people are by and large those with powerful connections, and/or access to capital. There are millions of smart, inspired people alive right now who will never rise above the middle class. Meanwhile kids born in select zip codes will continue to skate by unburdened by the same economic turmoil most people face.