MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-05-13 23:45:13+00:00
This is exactly right, and an important fact is that there is a limited bandwidth for heat radiation. So essentially they need to create a giant lightbulb...

> Additionally, deep space is cold, which is accurate in that the "effective" ambient temperature is around -270°C, corresponding to the temperature of the cosmic microwave background.

There's a lot of bad information in their document too. This -270C temperature is ambient space, i.e. deep space. You may experience this when you're in the shadow of Earth or on the dark side of the moon but you're going to switch that negative sign to a positive when you're facing the sun... Which is clearly something they want to do considering that they are talking about solar power. Which means they have to deal with HEATING as well! I don't see any information about this in the document.

> he mass of radiation shielding scales linearly with the container surface area, whereas the compute per container scales with the volume

This is also a weird statement designed to be deceptive. Your radiation shielding is a shell enclosing some volume.

> Therefore the mass of shielding needed per compute unit decreases linearly with container size.

They clearly do not understand the mass volume relationship here. Density (ρ) is mass (m) divided by volume (V).

m = ρV.

Let's simplify and assume we're using a sphere since this is the most efficient, giving V = 4/3r^3. Your shield is going to be approximately constant density since you need to shield from all directions (can optimize by using other things in your system).

m ∝ ρr^3

I'm not sure what here is decreasing nor what is a linear relationship. To adjust this to a shell you just need to consider the thickness so you can do Δr = r_outer - r_inner and that doesn't take away the cubic relationship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation#Characterist...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/thermal-cont...

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-851-satellite-engineering-fal...
by MostlyStable | 2025-05-13 23:45:28+00:00
I have an (apparent) super power where, even in domains where I appreciate and prefer high quality versions, I am still perfectly fine with the crappy versions.

I do all the up-thread recommended coffee steps (good, fresh beans from a small local roaster, grind myself, etc.) and I love it. But in a pinch, I will drink crappy gas station coffee. It's not great, but it's...fine.

Similarly, I love high quality beer, but Coors light has it's place and is perfectly fine for what it is.

I have apparently managed to raise my ceiling for what I like, without needing to raise my floor for what I can tolerate.
by markvdb | 2025-05-13 23:45:31+00:00
Many a healthy above median earner is unaware of the privileged shortcut to capital class available to them. Spend a third of your income for nine years and you're there. Make that a quarter to finish in six years. Especially for dual income people without dependents, that's quite feasible.

Not diminish your analysis. I just hope it adds a bit of perspective.
by layer8 | 2025-05-13 23:48:09+00:00
Markup is only indirectly related to hierarchical structure. “Markup” means that there is text that is being “marked up” with additional attributes (styling, structure information, metadata, …). This is how HTML and XML work, and also languages like TeX, Troff, and Markdown. For example, in the text “this is some text”, you can mark up the word “some” as being emphasized, as in “this is <em>some</em> text”.

The general principle is that the base content is plain text, which is augmented with markup information, which may or may not have hierarchical aspects. You can simply strip away the markup again and recover just the text. That’s not at all how PDF works, however.

You cite a comparison to JSON and YAML. Those are not markup languages (despite what YAML originally was an abbreviation for, see [0]). (HTML also isn’t DOM.)

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/18928199
by zmgsabst | 2025-05-13 23:48:13+00:00
I was responding to the person above me who said:

> not investment strategy

> highest levels of transparency

Your comment makes my point, again:

Computers only happened when academics transitioned to programs with investment plans to accomplish a goal — steeped in secrecy. Before that, it was just thought experiments.

Both at Bletchley park (for some innovations) and the naval lab for general purpose computers.
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-13 23:48:19+00:00
> Even adding some randomness to the timer tick just means you need more samples to suss the statistic out.

If each timer draws from the same random distribution then sure, you could work out the real tick with greater accuracy, but I don’t know if that is practical.

If the timers draw from different distributions then it is going to be much harder.

I imagine there is an upper limit of how much processing can be done per tick to before any attack becomes implausible.
by pornel | 2025-05-13 23:48:26+00:00
So that you learn that loaning is for giving temporary shared^exclusive access within a statically-known scope, and not for storing data.

Trying to construct permanent data structures using non-owning references is a very common novice mistake in Rust. It's similar to how users coming from GC languages may expect pointers to local variables to stay valid forever, even after leaving the scope/function.

Just like in C you need to know when malloc is necessary, in Rust you need to know when self-contained/owning types are necessary.
by vacuity | 2025-05-13 23:48:30+00:00
I'm aware of personal taste, but I will say

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

and note (because it is not included in the quote) that a literal salary is not necessary or sufficient. Really? Is this not just resigning to subpar software? My counterpoint is that what is popular is not necessarily what should be popular. And I think you're still tunnel-visioning for a specific thing to criticize. Do I have to keep giving examples until I find one you will deign to agree is a serious issue? Just as hasty generalization is harmful, so is hasty specialization. Perhaps you personally don't see a problem, but there can be many reasons for that.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-13 23:48:30+00:00
At this point as long as you say AI 3 times someone will give you money.

I guess you need connections too, and maybe a previous exit.

This idea in particular doesn't make any sense... Currently. Maybe in a decade or so with better technology.

Although the prospect of polluting the stars itself with a bunch of computers generating AI slips... We paved Paradise to put up a parking lot
by dgrin91 | 2025-05-13 23:48:43+00:00
For continuous you need to either go for a polar orbit or go very far in space. Most launch centers & providers are not well situation for polar orbits because its not a common use case, so you need to sacrifice launch mass. The same goes for far away orbits - you need to sacrifice launch mass to go further. Also if you are far then you get latency issues.

So it skews the economics pretty harshly. I think OP is right - you need good batteries somehow.
by wafadaar | 2025-05-13 23:48:47+00:00
Not exactly. My aspiration would be to make a package manager that has a CLI for Java.

Additional tooling that matches the functionality of uv/ruff/ty would be nice, as it would allow you to develop Java on not just an IDE (IntelliJ) but in something like nvim (it isn't impossible, just not as good).

Decoupling this is obviously not in JetBrains interest, and it seems like there isn't much will in the Java community to break away from the IDE-centric development.
by mre | 2025-05-13 23:48:53+00:00
The thing is, once you internalized the concepts (ownership, borrowing, lifetimes), it's very hard to remember what made it difficult in the first place. It's "curse of knowledge" in some sense.

What's changed since 2015 is that we ironed out some of the wrinkles in the language (non-lexical lifetimes, async) but the fundamental mental model shift required to think in terms of ownership is still a hurdle that trips up newcomers.
by UmGuys | 2025-05-13 23:49:14+00:00
Point by point you seem off.

GOP makes poor people. They oppose organized labor and support what Lincoln would refer to as "wage slavery".

No one in government cares about sex and gender than GOP. I've never heard anyone else mention regulating the bedroom, porn, sex, etc. Ever.

Maybe you're somewhat accurate about abolishing police. I wouldn't phrase it that way, but reform is needed and abolition is likely better than our police state.

Opposing Israel's war isn't supporting an Islamic supremacist group. Practically no one in US government opposes funding Israel.

Biden and Obama both deported more people than Trump. They used the existing law s to do it. Trump is spending more, ignoring law, and deporting less.

GOP really wants government to not function so they can steal everything good that's been created.
by edalex | 2025-05-13 23:49:32+00:00
The value of a traditional degree is under scrutiny as learners seek direct pathways to employment. Institutions that resist skills recognition face shrinking enrolments, reputational damage, and lost market opportunities. AI may help, but it can’t replace the human expertise needed to define and validate real-world skills. Without action, the cost of doing nothing will only grow. Is your university ready to adapt—or at risk of being left behind?
by homebrewer | 2025-05-13 23:49:43+00:00
Just for reference, last year my friend bought a new Xiaomi 13T for $35 more (so +13%), which destroys this phone by every metric except synthetic CPU benchmarks. Apple really is heavily overpriced.

https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=11410&idPhone...

(Prices listed by GSMArena have no relation to reality for both models.)
by edalex | 2025-05-13 23:50:00+00:00
Evidence-backed skills recognition doesn’t just reduce risk—it unlocks powerful opportunities. From boosting retention to attracting lifelong learners and expanding into transnational education, institutions that validate and showcase learner competencies are seeing real impact. Learn how Credentialate and SkillsAware provide the infrastructure and tools to deliver, recognize, and scale skills-based learning across diverse learner groups.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 23:50:39+00:00
i gave it a 1-year shot at running the cabin as an airbnb, but it is only profitable the peak couple of months a year because we are extremely remote with very harsh winters. i feel a bit stuck under that until the end of this year because i have a bunch of guests booked and i would hate to rugpull them in order to transition it back to a long-term rental. I do believe with more time and money it could be a profitable short-term rental. my county just rolled out a 4% tax on airbnbs for no reason, which hurts. the city house would be income producing with another 30k$ of renovations, but in it's current state (i ran out of money on the renovations) it is half-rented, covering the operating cost.
by parliament32 | 2025-05-13 23:51:41+00:00
But isn't that a textbook self-caused problem? You could live in the city and have a 5-10 minute walking commute. But you choose to live somewhere with a lower cost of living, more space, etc.. and then complain about the commute. It feels like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and (for OP) it's predictably backfiring.
by const_cast | 2025-05-13 23:51:57+00:00
The government is already tracking things like your financial investments. Except now, they're doing it in a disconnected and sprawling way, centered around your SSN. Which is insecure.

I'm very paranoid about tracking and privacy, but the reality is that identity verification is just a necessary part of some services. Like opening a brokerage account, or riding a plane. So, if we HAVE to do it, we should have a more secure way of doing it. There's no reason we should be relying on easily-gathered 9 digit numbers.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-05-13 23:51:59+00:00
Please unflag this post. Steve Blank is an extreme moderate in the sense that he is non-political. So is this post. It is laying out an uncomfortable truth that impacts hackers in the US and everywhere. The simple facts is, our startup culture is under attack by the current administration. Should this attack be successful, we will no longer have startups, because without scientific research from US universities, supported by public grants, we will no longer have round A/B/C. It's game over for YCombinator and hacker culture in the US. We will all need to move to China. Sound extreme? It's not.
by wmlive | 2025-05-13 23:52:32+00:00
It would be great if there were a similar solution for directly running legacy NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP binaries on Linux without the system vitualization overhead of something like previous or virtualbox.

Mainly thinking about being able to reuse the NeXTSTEP versions of programs such as FrameMaker, WordPerfect, Quantrix, CedarWord, Adobe Illustrator, Altsys Virtuoso, and so many more.
by gogurt2000 | 2025-05-13 23:52:51+00:00
0. You're spot on: data centers almost exclusively run Linux.

1. CUDA runs well on Linux, but it's not real clear to me what you're asking in the second half of this question. CUDA is an SDK and driver that nvidia produces so that developers can write and run software on their specialized hardware. You wouldn't really run anything on nvidia's hardware without it. You also wouldn't really run anything independent of the OS.

2. Yes, when deploying a new model in a datacenter setting you'd use a linux terminal. Any custom tools used in a datacenter will be command line tools.

3. Data centers typically run CentOS, RHEL, debian, or ubuntu. CentOS if you're a large tech company. RHEL if you're not (ie: you're a car company looking to offload some liability on red hat when there are technical problems). Debian or ubuntu if you're a tech startup. Big cloud providers typically provide their own distro like Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux (both of which are based on RHEL) for ease of use and support, but you can run whatever distro you'd like. If you're running something in a container you might use a more lightweight, security focused distro like Alpine.

For an AI datacenter, I'd expect to see RHEL, debian, or ubuntu because nvidia officially supports them. You'd need a very good reason to put resources into customizing a distro or using an oddball distro.

4. Working on anything in a datacenter is done through a terminal, but that doesn't mean the computer you're using doesn't have a GUI. People sit at Linux, Windows, and Mac desktops with terminals connected to remote machines in the datacenter. How they interact with the datacenter is CLI only, but they've got a gui because they have other stuff open like a web browser, slack, or an IDE.

Hope that helps!
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-13 23:53:18+00:00
The explicit annotation on people is there for illustration. In real code it can be inferred from whatever the expression is (as the other lines are).

I don't think it's reasonable to specify the time complexity of insert/delete/lookup. For one, joins quickly make you care about multi-column indices and the precise order things are in and the exact queries you want to perform. e.g. if you join A with B, are your results sorted such that you can do a streaming join with C in the same order? This could be different for different code paths. Simply adding indices also adds maintenance overhead to each operation, which doesn't affect (what people usually mean by) the time complexity (it scales with number of indices, not dataset size), but is nonetheless important for real-world performance. Adding and dropping indexes on the fly can also be quite expensive if your dataset size is large enough to care about performance.

That all said, you could probably get at what you mean by just specifying indices instead of complexity and treating an embedded sqlite table as a native mutable collection type with methods to create/drop indices and join with other tables. You could create the table in the constructor (maybe using Object.hash() for the name or otherwise anonymously naming it?) and drop it in the finalizer. Seems pretty doable in a clean way in Scala. In some sense, the query builders are almost doing this, but they tend to make you call `run` to go from statement to result instead of implicitly always using sqlite.
by anenefan | 2025-05-13 23:53:32+00:00
As much as I dislike A.I. generated answers, using it as a tool to fix sentence structure or styling a passage to meet a certain level of writing required for a format will at some future date be accepted as much as we accept automatic spell checkers. It'll probably be more accepted across the web once generated BS is sorted out.

Personally, I'm against all the new BS of no double space after a sentence and no gaps around em dashes. Not doing so removes a lot of options for those who use string searches to hunt out certain things.
by echelon | 2025-05-13 23:54:05+00:00
100%. Newcomers still struggle a bit, especially if they've never used C/C++ before.

A good way to get people comfortable with the semantics of the language before the borrow checker is to encourage them to clone() strings and structs for a bit, even if the resulting code is not performant.

Once they dip their toes into threading and async, Arc<Lock<T>> is their friend, and interior mutability gives them some fun distractions while they absorb the more difficult concepts.
by juddlyon | 2025-05-13 23:54:08+00:00
Yep, I’ve used Alpine extensively and HTMX here and there. Lots of Vue.

There are not sets of polished, battle-tested UI libraries made for server side. Bootstrap ships with JS, but most of the CSS and template frameworks assume you’re using a headless setup.

I thought Web Components might spur things, but not really. React has continued to dominate.
by chris_pie | 2025-05-13 23:55:04+00:00
I've been using Pixel 8 for nearly a year now and I agree that it's surprisingly buggy. Also, the chip is excessively power-hungry, especially for the performance it offers. In addition: the modem is bad and very power-hungry as well. And the cherry on top for me was the subpar fingerprint scanner. Can't recommend.
by ngangaga | 2025-05-13 23:55:17+00:00
> For everyday use, wireless headphones offer a superior experience simply due to the lack of a cable

Surely this is offset by a) having to charge it and b) not being able to replace the battery when it dies

Not to mention a cable can be debugged easily; i don't even know which device my bluetooth headphones is connected to let alone why it's not working as expected.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-13 23:55:41+00:00
> More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.

I just don’t understand how it’s possible. I admit I was one of the skeptics predicting Twitter’s immediate demise after laying off so many. Everywhere I have ever worked had at least 3X more work to do than staff to do it. You can’t get rid of even one person without feeling the pain. I just can’t fathom working for a company that can get rid of so many people and not struggle! My current company wouldn’t be able to even keep the lights on in the offices if it lost 80% of its staff.
by UmGuys | 2025-05-13 23:55:46+00:00
Working people are effectively slaves. Everyone has children or college debt. Health care is useless in not urban areas and even then it's restricted by insurance or lack of it. There's not much hope to own a home other than through inheritance. Even inheritance is unlikely as health care for aging parents is very expensive.

People are uneducated, don't have time, and rightly feel like politicians don't represent them. No one wants to have no home or the worst health care system except the people taking bribes. There's no incentive for reform.
by tenzo | 2025-05-13 23:56:02+00:00
" then open up the links having a high number of comments or sometimes, the ones whose titles intrigue me. Roughly, this would lead to opening about 5-6 web links per HN visit. For 3-4 of those, I’d return to their respective HN posts to read the comments. I usually browse up to the 2nd, and sometimes 3rd page of HN per visit"

I have used hn like this for last 10years - is this a thing that I'm not aware of?
by lucb1e | 2025-05-13 23:56:09+00:00
To be completely fair to the person you're responding to, they're talking about pages that take 20 seconds to load. On a regular website that hopes to get visitors from search engines, say, that is indeed insane and the fix is not to squeeze out 5% by fine tuning, the fix is to re-architect the thing

I don't mind people asking why it is this slow (whether I can't or why I don't re-architect it) or suggest fixes, but as the sibling comment to yours (from u/monooso) put it well, it would be nice if one does not assume that I'm an incompetent fool. The person also doesn't seem to read what I explained before suggesting more of the same in another reply. Thanks for adding your comment as well, I appreciate the sentiment. Even if I'm not sure if it applies in this case, it definitely applies to other things I do (I may have too many hobby projects running on that server.. ^^)
by perihelions | 2025-05-13 23:57:29+00:00
- "But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult".

Surely you'd want to use satellite constellations as relays? There's thousands of those satellites in line-of-sight all the time.

It's strictly superior on pure geometry anyway (I think). You have a finite channel capacity between your satellite and your ground station; but different satellites, in non-overlapping microwave spots, are in separate spatial channels.
by tdb7893 | 2025-05-13 23:57:33+00:00
Maybe I'm wrong but I always interpreted that line as they couldn't pass any laws denying slavery, which would include the states. Lots of the clauses in that article are fairly broad rights that wouldn't make sense if it just restricted the federal government (e.g. the ability to bear arms, the right to not quarter soldiers, the right to reasonable bail) so viewing it as a fundamental restriction, and not just a restriction for Congress, isn't a crazy interpretation (though I'm not a constitutional scholar so I don't know).

Their Constitution also had a clause about how new territories needed to allow slavery so choice definitely wasn't their priority:

Article IV Section 3(3)

The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several states; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form states to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.
by strken | 2025-05-13 23:57:35+00:00
Absolute numbers are probably less interesting than the % change. If you're getting a 5% hit rate but you used to get 20%, that implies that someone who used to get a 5% hit rate is going to have a much harder time.

I'm not sure the relationship is strict enough that the formerly 5% hit rate engineer is now going to see 1.25%, but my guess would be that they'll at least find things a lot more difficult.