MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-16 18:08:54+00:00
> This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid"

I do not even remotely accept your premise. A short list of jobs that are crucial to modern life that are chronically underpaid:

* Teachers

* Nursing/care staff

* Daycare workers

* Janitorial staff

* Delivery/logistics workers

FAR from an exhaustive list.

> However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work"

Considering how many working poor there are I'd say there's a solid reason for rejection. If people are working full time hours and still unable to meet their needs, clearly something is wrong.

> only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.

This is an utter non-sequitur to anything I was talking about. You assert that value of work is tied to the wealth of the one doing the work. I challenged this by pointing out numerous whole categories of laborer that are and have been underpaid for some time. You assert that this is a subjective measurement. I don't know what to really say here.

If doing work that needs doing for the understood full time hours we as a society have stated is not a path to at least a stable life, if not a particularly luxurious one, then what's the point of working? And, more concerningly, why would anyone take up that job that being the case? Nurse and teacher retention right now is horrific specifically because the pay isn't very good and it's a very demanding job, and as a result we have a shortage of both. But we still need them.
by implements | 2025-06-16 18:08:54+00:00
Generally, it’s news because it helps to confirm that gender or sex-based discrimination hasn’t interfered with the career success of a female individual.

Specifically, it’s another milestone for the British intelligence and security community - one that Stella Rimington made in 1996 at MI5 and Anne Keast-Butler made in 2023 at GCHQ.

Also, this sort of thing goes “Notable for its absence, notable for the first, no longer really notable at all”. It’s hard to have the last one without the middle.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-16 18:08:55+00:00
It's interesting to contrast Starlink on airlines vs Starlink on cruises.

AFAICT, all the airlines rolling out Starlink have made it free on their flights. Which implies cooperation from Starlink -- either Starlink has made "free" a condition of their service, or they've just priced it cheap enough to make free a reasonable option for airlines.

There's no good reason why Starlink for cruise ships should be priced significantly higher than on airlines. So either the cruise lines or Starlink are gouging. Or both. Probably both.
by Doohickey-d | 2025-06-16 18:09:14+00:00
This is actually quite common: I've been on ferries, at airports, even hotels, which give you some amount of time for free, often anonymously. So just a mac address change gives extra internet.

New Android versions make it especially convenient, with a "Wi-Fi non-persistent MAC randomization" option in the developer options, meaning you can just "forget" the wifi network and connect again with a fresh mac address.

In some cases I've seen networks that allow any traffic on port 53 - it doesn't have to be DNS traffic. The most surprising one was a mobile network with a pay as you go payment model: load money first, buy a data package, when the data package runs out, you get a captive portal that says "you've run out of data" - but port 53 wasn't blocked, so a commercial VPN resulted in unlimited internet at unlimited speed, with roaming anywhere in the world (and that was back in the day before SIM card registration was required too, so anonymous, too).
by colanderman | 2025-06-16 18:09:18+00:00
See also: emergent fox-treasure gravity in Skyrim: https://www.eurogamer.net/skyrims-myth-of-the-treasure-fox-f...

TLDR: areas around treasure have higher entropy by a measure relevant primarily to stochastic movement of foxes. Since there are thus on average more ways for a fox to walk toward treasure than away, they tend to gravitate toward treasure.
by ano-ther | 2025-06-16 18:09:58+00:00
> bland hellscape of conformity

I see three reasons to use swearwords sparingly, even though they don’t particularly offend me.

1 Managing my own emotions. Most swearing is negative and that drags you down which is not very productive or fun.

2 Managing others‘ emotions as they burst out, which stresses the people around the swearer.

3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which makes them sound fucking stupid.
by strogonoff | 2025-06-16 18:10:32+00:00
I have a wide definition of “art”. Also, I think many of us do care, and those who don’t care perhaps should ask themselves more often why they find themselves appreciating something and not something else.

> We don't value artists they struggle financially and most do contract work and not their art.

True, but I also know artists who earned money from commissions. Unfortunately, I also know business owners who would commission such works previously but now would rather pay $5 to a big corporation for an image to be generated. Considering those models are based exactly on tons of those underpaid artists’ work, scraped without consent and licensing, it’s not a very great look.
by wlll | 2025-06-16 18:10:43+00:00
If I earned ~50 million dollars per year then I think I'd just pay for Internet.

Maybe .1% was a bad choice, should we only post articles that are relevant to people on a global average yearly wage of ~$12,000? How are we defining relevant? People earning $2000/year might be /interested/ in a thing, but not able to afford it (eg. a Mac computer or a large hadron collider), where do we draw the line?
by NotAnOtter | 2025-06-16 18:12:36+00:00
Yes.

He self-published a lot of material under various pseudonyms / sponsored others to write biographies that painted him as a Tony Stark adjacent character. A lot of Iron Man comics are based on exaggerated version of Feynman stories.

He was a truly brilliant "top 100 of all time" type physicist, but also had one of the biggest ego's I've ever looked into. Pair it with the misogyny, abuse of power, racism, etc... I'm not his biggest fan.

E: Why is my original comment being downvoted/flagged lmao. This site is odd sometimes.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-16 18:12:53+00:00
The Indian programs are tied to other larger initiatives by the Indian government so they are obfuscated.

For example, for semiconductors and chip design, a portion of the semiconductor subsidy that the Indian government is giving is earmarked for university R&D, and individual INIs [0] (top public Indian STEM universities) are given matching grants (around $50K) that are earmarked as lab seed funding with an additional $50K dollar-for-dollar match when creating a lab with a private sector partner (and plenty of EU domiciled firms like NXP and Infineon participate in this), so the right PI can make an NXP branded lab with $150k in seed capital and an in-built commercialization pipeline.

It's a similar story for Battery Tech, Drones, and Biopharma as well.

On top of that, most top researchers will choose to work in a private sector R&D group like Microsoft Research India or Samsung Research India which pay EU level salaries, give US level backing for internal research, and have none of the academic politics.

And this is just 1 (large) country. Other countries like China, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, etc have equally if not more lucrative programs to attract diaspora researchers. European initiatives just don't compare when even most Indian postdocs at programs like the Plack Institutes choose to take tenure track positions back in India and even mid-tier IITs, NITs, IISERs, AIIMSes, NIPERs, and IIITs are attracting junior faculty with PhDs and post-docs from programs like Purdue, UCLA, UW, UIUC, Yale, etc.

On top of that, major diaspora American VC funds like Foundation Capital and Sequoia/PeakXV are running their own versions of YC targeting grads from these programs to build in both India and the US.

And this is nothing compared to initiatives that the Chinese government have been running to attract Chinese diaspora academics, and more establish programs created by the Japanese and Australians that have operated since the 1970s.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutes_of_National_Importa...
by nunobrito | 2025-06-16 18:13:04+00:00
That is a question you can answer yourself when trying it out.

In Portugal +90% of tetra stopped working. DMR only locally.

Satellite APRS continued working. Who will listen? Well, those from north to south on the country were listening. More important, they were listening who was still active because those were the stations running with their own energy because even FM stations started to go down quickly as the generators ran out of fuel.

Had the blackdown lasted a week, those with a 20 euros walkie-talkies would very likely be the only ones still capable of +50 km distance communications and +1700 km reach using satellite APRS text messages.

Try to see from it from that perspective. You really won't have electricity nor cellphone coverage and not even FM in such scenario.. It's all gone.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-16 18:13:35+00:00
This is not my understanding, it’s more like adding certain kinds of basic apps to the App Store. Great! But at some point if it’s essential enough Apple will just create their own app and put you out of business.

This isn’t a case of like not seeing the future and thinking AI is dumb. This is a case where the vision of AI is that the AI becomes powerful enough that the custom workflows and UI don’t matter. Now maybe that future doesn’t come into existence? But if you’re just wrapping ChatGPT, there’s a real risk to your business model on every new model release.

Basically this idea from Satya Nadella:

https://firstmovers.ai/death-of-saas/
by kal-el1974 | 2025-06-16 18:14:04+00:00
Yes. And also culture-ism. My age is only coincident with the fact that I'm a private person and don't like to do the "company culture" events like dressing up for Halloween or messing around at the office like it's kindergarten. I want to come in, do my work, and go home to my real life and family. I'm not "family" with anyone at work. None of them are related to or depend on me like that.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-16 18:14:44+00:00
It's commonly believed that the standard model doesn't predict any phenomena at the energies that could be reached by a future collider, but that might not be the case. This phenomenon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphaleron

probably has a threshold energy of 9 TeV or so but hasn't turned up at the LHC because it is hard to produce and could be hard to detect. For one thing you need three baryons to interact and just having two colliding head on isn't enough, but a very high energy collision might produce enough of them that it happens. Sphalerons are part of the answer for why we have matter but not antimatter in the universe and could be the Higgs particle of the next generation.
by philipkglass | 2025-06-16 18:14:46+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Uses

Benzene is used mainly as an intermediate to make other chemicals, above all ethylbenzene (and other alkylbenzenes), cumene, cyclohexane, and nitrobenzene. More than half of the entire benzene production is processed into ethylbenzene, a precursor to styrene, which is used to make polymers and plastics like polystyrene. Some 20% of the benzene production is used to manufacture cumene, which is needed to produce phenol and acetone for resins and adhesives. Cyclohexane consumes around 10% of the world's benzene production; it is primarily used in the manufacture of nylon fibers, which are processed into textiles and engineering plastics. Smaller amounts of benzene are used to make some types of rubbers, lubricants, dyes, detergents, drugs, explosives, and pesticides.

It's an important feedstock in the chemical industry but it is no longer used directly in household products. It used to be common in solvent/glue/grease remover formulations before the health hazard was widely appreciated.
by xenadu02 | 2025-06-16 18:15:06+00:00
It's glib and funny but also hilariously wrong.

In 1800 the US population was 5.3 million (give or take). Non-industrialized. In 2025 it was 340 million (give or take a bit more). Fully industrialized.

In 1800 even if you put every able bodied potential logger to work logging you couldn't make that much of a dent in the forests in the short term. Crews had to cut the trees by hand, move them via river or animal power, etc. In 2025 a single person in a machine can exceed the output of entire crews from 1800. A parcel of land that would take a year to log in 1800 can be clear-cut in three days in 2025.

340 million people need far more lumber per year and fully industrialized are capable of cutting down far more trees.

In 2025 if we wanted to do it we could cut down every single tree in the entire USA within a handful of years. That was not even remotely possible in 1800.

Scale matters.

Will life survive? Sure. Will geologic events eventually clean up the land? Yes. But I don't think saying we can only be as bad as one of the great extinction events is the zinger George Carlin thinks it is.

And just to be clear: I think reasoned acceptance of some extinction may be necessary to make humanity a multi-planetary and eventually multi-solar system species. In the long long run every single species on earth is a dead end. The sun will die and all life with it. As the only intelligent life with the capability I consider it our moral duty to make life resilient to such things, taking as many species with us as we can. But what are doing now is basically lighting our inheritance on fire to fuel executive bonuses and nothing more. That's just stupid.
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-16 18:15:11+00:00
on a recent trip, i stayed at a hotel that had a 1-hour free wifi trial per device. after it expired, i toggled mac randomisation and reconnected. worked again. did it four times, no issues. never paid.

later checked the captive portal domain. it was hosted by a third-party vendor. not the hotel. same pattern as cruises. backend didn’t care who i was, just tracked mac and time.

this blog just confirmed what i suspected: enforcement is surface-level. they want friction low enough to upsell, but not tight enough to annoy casual users. the systems are optimised for conversion, not for plugging leaks. most abuse is silent and tolerated. these aren't security flaws. they're tradeoffs
by duxup | 2025-06-16 18:15:35+00:00
Just seems like a lot of expense that by working you're decreasing the value.

Also depends on who you're traveling with / anyone.

I've been on trips with the "I have to work" folks, it's a pain, they're not really "there" you end up trying to schedule around them. Then they just show up unaware / uninvolved in whatever is going on.
by cwharris | 2025-06-16 18:16:26+00:00
The problems I wanted to solve couldn't be solved with software, so I started researching ceramic semiconductors, starting with positive temperature coefficient ceramics as fail-safe heating elements. The geometry I needed to manufacture for that project wasn't scalable in a way that solved the problem for enough people, so I switched to working on DC cold atmospheric plasma. Saw enough progress there to convince myself it's possible, but wasn't happy with the current HV supplies on the market, so I'm working on making my own based on converting compressed argon in to a high voltage source that self-regulates based on plasma generation in an attempt to not exceed metastable argon charge levels, which would produce NOx and Ozone at completely harmless levels (unless maybe you're using it during surgery) but are heavily regulated.

It's uhh... been a ride.

But yes, posting to hacker news is a new thing. Because I'm seeing the limitations of the world we live in through the lens of someone who's gone through industry long enough to know how slowly controlled progress is, and beginning to see what happens when you apply semiconductors to more than just microprocessors on your own terms. The world is stagnating, not because we don't have what it takes to bring about the future... but because 1) we do, 2) the people in control don't care to make it happen, and 3) everyone has their hands tied up in corperate profits while we wait for someone to make a move that makes things better.

I'm just... done waiting.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-16 18:17:00+00:00
Maybe if we bow enough to our billionaire overlords they will spare us is your rationale?

This is bullshit. You can have lower income inequality without necessarily having an elite with destructive amounts of money with proper regulations and taxation against the most wealthy.

It's alright for a rich guy to live in a nice house ans drive around in a luxury car. It's not right when they have enough money to just buy access to the highest levels of everything to their benefit (and the rest of society prejudice).
by dustbunny | 2025-06-16 18:17:14+00:00
Just signed a contract with a lawyers pen which was too heavy on ink so I got ink all over my hands. Was a pain to put my hat on after without getting ink on it. Seriously considered bringing my own pen before hand. Guess I will next time.

Not only is this pen ubiquitous, but it's ink flow is usually pretty light, which makes it not smear on your hands or the page.
by mr_mitm | 2025-06-16 18:17:22+00:00
I did something similar at the Zürich airport and gained access to a second four hour window of free wifi. You had to bind your MAC to your identity either via SMS or via boarding pass, two independent channels. Only problem was that I only had an android phone without root. So I disabled MAC randomization for that wifi, deleted the cookie, and signed up via boarding pass. Never felt more like a hacker (and I hacked dozens of active directory domains to domain admin on my job).
by voxic11 | 2025-06-16 18:17:23+00:00
> copilot implicitly trains AI on copilot interactions with customers’ private repo code unless you get some enterprise tier of service?

Seems incorrect to me, from the copilot individual license docs:

> By default, GitHub, its affiliates, and third parties will not use your data, including prompts, suggestions, and code snippets, for AI model training. This is reflected in your personal settings for GitHub Copilot and cannot be enabled.

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing...
by adrian_b | 2025-06-16 18:17:40+00:00
The most important reason is that the frequencies of optical clocks can be very different, from ultraviolet to infrared.

When the frequency of one clock is 10 times greater than the frequency of another, it is hard to find a significance for any other kind of mean, except the geometric.

More clearly, if the input frequencies have the same relative uncertainty, the geometric mean will preserve that relative uncertainty. If the input frequencies have different relative uncertainties, the geometric mean will have a relative uncertainty that is intermediate between them.

Other kinds of means do not offer guarantees about the relative uncertainty when the ratio of the inputs is high. If one frequency is much bigger than the others, the arithmetic mean will depend only on that frequency, the others will not matter.
by ykjs | 2025-06-16 18:17:58+00:00
Hey HN! The easiest and fastest way to get a localized website was to add a single line for the Google Translate Widget script in your head tag.

Unfortunately, the Google widget was deprecated and has never been updated to match the modern standards of sites like React frameworks and many more. While the translation quality, especially, has lagged compared to where we are with AI today.

So I built the a open source translation widget that you can do a quick one script add and translate your website to 100+ languages. Comes with other fancy features like local storage caching, react page change watches, etc so you get the full package out of the box.
by JohnMakin | 2025-06-16 18:18:01+00:00
> My CoreWeave analysis may seem silly to some because its value has quadrupled — and that’s why I didn’t write that I believed the stock would crater, or really anything about the stock.

I think the underlying belief causing people to believe things like this are "silly" or that AI criticism is overstated is that the market does not really make mistakes, at least not in the aggregate. So, if XYZ company's CEO says "Our product is doing ABC 300000% better and will take over the world!" and its value/revenue is also going up at the same time, that is seen as a sign that the market has validated this view, and it is infallible (to a point). Of course, this ignores that the market has historically and often been completely wrong, and that this type of reasoning is entirely circular - pay no attention to the man (marketing team) behind the curtain or think about it too hard.
by disambiguation | 2025-06-16 18:18:07+00:00
To engage with the devils advocate:

The problem with the reasoning is, either we already know who's a smart decision maker, in which case the mechanism isn't efficient. or else we don't know, in which case the logic is circular - whoever gets the most tokens must be the best decision maker.

in any case i think all smart decision makers have learned to stay away from crypto.
by jcranmer | 2025-06-16 18:18:26+00:00
There's a two step-process to stochiometry.

The first step, as people have elaborated below, is combust the compound and measure the weights of various oxides, which (after the atomic masses of the relevant elements were settled around the 1820s) lets you work out the empirical formula of an unknown molecule. For benzene, this would tell you that there is 1 C : 1 H, but this doesn't tell you if it's C₄H₄ or C₆H₆ or C₁₁₁H₁₁₁.

The second step is to determine the molar mass of your compound, which requires finding something that depends on the amount of substance but not the mass directly. (In modern times, this is primarily mass spec). Back in the 19th century, this is probably abusing the ideal gas law, which lets you compute the number of moles in a gas given the pressure, temperature, and volume of a vessel. Combine this with the mass of that container, and you know how much a mole weighs. If you get out, say, 77g/mol, and you know that the ratio is 1 C : 1 H, well, the only formula that makes sense is C₆H₆ (which should ideally have 78g/mol, but you might not get the right answer for various experimental reasons).
by thfuran | 2025-06-16 18:19:08+00:00
I have made no claim of any kind about the inherent badness of words. I'm just saying that your claim that

>The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd

is completely ridiculous. There plainly do exist words that offend people. Maybe you meant 'everyone' rather than 'anyone'? But that's pretty much a straw man anyways.