MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cavisne | 2025-06-22 03:14:53+00:00
Its a good read but are his intentions unambiguously good? He had a windfall from crypto (ie contributing nothing to society). Then he was desperate to avoid paying the tax he owed on that windfall.

Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him?

Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project.

EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-22 03:15:53+00:00
> past gains

To focus on "past": I don't think deferring the gains for a couple years is a big deal. It's not a handout because he'll still be paying the same taxes if he doesn't end up reinvesting the money. It just offers him some more time to set up a business, instead of having to do it same-year.

To focus on "gains": If you don't like the entire idea of reinvested money not counting as profits, oh boy that's a big objection, and it's not that way because of corruption.
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-22 03:15:58+00:00
Aside from the p-values, I don't understand the reasoning behind whatever "experiment" is being used for the A/B testing. What test is being done whose result is interpreted as "A is winner"? The discussion is about those being separate comparisons, and yeah, okay, but what are they comparisons of? Each group in isolation vs. all the others? If (as the article says) the hypothesis is "layout influences signup behavior" then it seems more reasonable to do a chi-squared test on a contingency table of layout vs. signed-up-or-didn't, which would give you one p-value for "is there anything here at all".

And then, if there isn't. . . it means you can just ship whatever you want! The real root cause of p-hacking is glossed over in the article: "Nobody likes arriving empty-handed to leadership meetings." This is the corporate equivalent of "no one will publish a null result", and is just as harmful here. The statistical techniques described are fine, but there's not necessarily a reason to fortify your stats against multiple comparisons rather than just accepting a null result.

And you can, because of the other thing I kept thinking when reading this: you have to ship something. There isn't really a "control" condition if you're talking about building a website from scratch. So whether the result is null doesn't really matter. It's not like comparing different medicines or fertilizers or something where if none of them work you just do nothing; there is no "do nothing" option in this situation. So why not just take a simple effect measurement (e.g., proportion who signed up) and pick the layout that performs best? If that result is statistically significant, great, it means you picked the best one, and if it's not, it just means it doesn't matter which one you pick, so the one you picked is still fine. (And if you have an existing design and you're trying to see if a new one will be better, the null result just means "there's no reason to switch", which means the existing design is also fine.)
by kragen | 2025-06-22 03:16:56+00:00
It's hard to know what to count as "global compute". How many bit operations do we count for the clock propagation across your CPU? Two for each clock cycle per buffer? Even though the bit operation is just identity, or do we omit that? Does it change if you use inverting buffers, since NOT is a nontrivial operation? Did you know that in CMOS a normal buffer is made out of two inverters? Can you do twice as many bit operations just by using buffers that are half as big, so that you have to use twice as many? How about DRAM destructive read and refresh cycles? Do you count the bit operations in the TLB CAM and the caches to test if entries are already present? Then going to a higher associativity, like from two-way to four-way, doubles the bit operation count.

For power consumption I think the answer to all of these is "yes", except for the one where you split the clock buffers in half.

How about DNA replication in bacterial cells? Is that two bit operations per base? My pot of yogurt is 4 kg of mostly Lactobacillus casei, with a genome of about 2 million base pairs, 4 megabits, and a generation time of about 30 minutes, 2 kilobits per second of reproductive copying per bacterium, plus presumably a much higher transcription rate into mRNA. Each bacterium is about 5 cubic microns, so there are about 10¹⁴ bacteria in the pot, so about 10¹⁷ bit operations per second for reproduction, and maybe 10¹⁹ for mRNA, wildly guessing. That would make the pot of yogurt millions of times more computationally powerful than my CPU, though only for a few hours. Fortunately, the bacteria are more energy-efficient than AMD, or the yogurt would be exploding.

But none of those operations can be used directly for cracking a key, because they aren't programmable. What the paper says is sensible, because it's comparing two things that are very much alike. Even though you can't use Bitcoin mining ASICs for key cracking, you can build very similar key cracking ASICs for a very similar cost and energy consumption. But things get very vague when you start trying to quantify all compute.
by runako | 2025-06-22 03:17:05+00:00
If I’m a head of state in a contested region, I would read your post as an urgent appeal to make acquisition of nuclear capability as the top priority of the state.

Nonproliferation via war is not a viable approach.

This reminds me to read more on the game theory aspect of nuclear states. But I do find it fascinating that no nuclear-armed states have ever been in a shooting war. Interesting to speculate whether the Middle East could have seen less bloodshed over the decades if all the players had been armed since near the beginning of the nuclear age.
by trhway | 2025-06-22 03:17:23+00:00
GBU-57 reaches 200ft depth, Fordow is 300ft. The seismic wave of explosion at 200ft of several tons of TNT would reach 300ft with pretty damaging energy.

And, if it weren't enough, you can always put a second bomb into the hole made by the first one.

To the commenters below:

- nobody would let Iran to come even close to remilitarizing again. No centrifuges, and no placing them or anything similar under ground, etc.

- I do think that US may get involved in enforcement of no-fly zone over Iran. The no-fly is necessary, and Israel just doesn't have enough resources. The further scenario that i see is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44343063

- jugding by, for example, the precise drone strikes on the top military commanders, Israel has had very good intelligence from Iran, so i'm pretty sure that general parameters like the depth were well known to them (the public statement of 300ft may be a lie, yet the point is that US and Israel know the depth and thus weapons to use)
by algorithmsRcool | 2025-06-22 03:18:38+00:00
The kinetics matter here. The B2 flies much higher than the C-130 which would aid the GBU-57 MOP (almost certainly used here) in it's ability to penetrate to maximum depth. 80% of the 15 ton weight of that bomb is just heavy metal to give it maximum energy as it borrows into the ground.

Also, each B2 can carry 2 MOPs making it a better platform than a C-130, and that isn't even taking the stealth of the platform into account
by XorNot | 2025-06-22 03:18:55+00:00
While true, the problem is it wouldn't meaningfully change the security situation for Iran.

Deliverable nuclear weapons make you invasion proof - nobody wants to risk it. A "dirty bomb" isn't something that can come flying in on an ICBM and eliminate large chunks of your nation - the threat of it is more likely to enhance aggression rather then deter it.
by epgui | 2025-06-22 03:19:13+00:00
Even if you have to be honest with yourself about how much you care about being right, there’s still a place for balancing priorities. Two things can be true at once.

Sometimes someone just has to make imperfect decisions based on incomplete information, or make arbitrary judgment calls. And that’s totally fine… But it shouldn’t be confused with data-driven decisions.

The two kinds of decisions need to happen. They can both happen honestly.
by dralley | 2025-06-22 03:19:25+00:00
This stuff gets grammar-hacked a million different ways.

Yes, 60% enriched Uranium is not weapons-grade, but it can be made weapons grade very quickly. Once you've gotten to 60%, you've done 99% of the work - U-235 starts as such a small percentage of natural Uranium that most of the process is spent at very low concentrations.

It can simultaneously be true that Iran isn't "imminently creating a bomb" and also that they're actively working towards a breakout point where they could build a dozen bombs in very quick succession once they did decide to go forwards with the process.

I don't personally think they were rushing towards a bomb at this moment, but Israel isn't really in the mood to wait around until they decide to do so.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-06-22 03:20:16+00:00
> for people who don't follow news. last year Iran strikes on Israel with IRBM (two times, 150 missiles each time) weren't particularly effective (either intercepted or falling in empty fields).

For clarification, those interception efforts last year required massive assistance from the US and Jordan, and required a hugely disproportionate and unsustainable investment of munitions to pull off. What we've seen in the last week is that Israeli air defenses are much more brittle than they want anyone to believe.

EDIT: For the down-voters, here's Bloomberg citing Israeli media that defending against Operation True Promise cost ~$1 billion USD: https://archive.is/WHDvG

and here is NPR about Jordan's assistance: https://www.npr.org/2024/04/15/1244900560/what-is-known-abou...

and here is the NYT questioning Israel's missile stockpiles: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/world/middleeast/israel-i...
by phillipseamore | 2025-06-22 03:20:38+00:00
Offer a contingent payment of 10% (or similar) of the savings pr. month for one year after the migration. If a migration doesn't make sense then it won't happen and the client doesn't pay (would be very rare!) but when a migration happens 10% of the savings is probably more than you would have charged by the hour or quoted as a fixed price.
by SllX | 2025-06-22 03:21:58+00:00
Supposedly we dropped six, but I'm interested in any information that comes out about the final damage to see if this was sufficient. Ideally this would be the beginning and end of our direct engagements in this conflict.

EDIT: I kind of wish you had broken your "commenters below" piece into separate replies, but I assume this one was directed at me:

> - I do think that US may get involved in enforcement of no-fly zone over Iran. The no-fly is necessary, and Israel just doesn't have enough resources. The further scenario that i see is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44343063

I didn't even consider a no-fly zone, and perhaps. I mean at this point, the current Iranian regime is in the most precarious situation it has ever been in whether they go for the kill against Ali Khamenei or just keep picking out the people below him and the IRGC's ability to fight. But if we do this, then we, and I guess I mean we now that we've actually bombed them, then we're committing to more than just taking out their nuclear capabilities, but we're committing to seeing a full regime change come to fruition.

To be blunt, given our most recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm still very much of the opinion that the least amount of American involvement, the better. If our bombs help curtail Iran's nuclear weapon R&D and we didn't lose a single B-2 in the process, then great, we've done some good for the world[1], but our track record on seeing regime changes through to the end has been less than fabulous.

[1] Still waiting to see how successful the mission was towards this goal by the way.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-22 03:22:19+00:00
I sympathize with people thinking Israel is wagging the dog but I don't think it's true.

Israel exists in the way that it does and does what it does because we allow it to. It is a toolf our imperial interests, not the other way around. To argue otherwise absolves us of our responsibility and can often descend into antisemitism (which I oppose).

We have described Israel as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in a region we want to destabilize becuase it has resources that are important to us.

Oh and this is uniparty too. Don't kid yourselves if you think things would be different if the Democrats were in power. It would not. There is universal agreement on US foreign policy across both parties. The events in Gaza began under a Democratic president who did absolutely nothing to rein Israel in where he could've ended it with a phone call.

There is no opposition to what Israel is doing. Even now, Democratic leaders in Congress aren't complaining about what the president is doing and has done. They're complaining that they weren't consulted. And not to oppose it but to have the opportunity to express their support.

And yes, the media is absolutely complicit in what's going on too.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-22 03:22:21+00:00
I read the article in full. There is no confirmation of using GBU-57 in the strike. Re-read your quoted section. The English is a bit convoluted, but does do not confirm usage.

Tin foil hat engaged: For all we know special forces detonated plastic explosives deep on site after doors were blown off.

More seriously: Nothing has been confirmed except a Truth Social post.
by dooglius | 2025-06-22 03:22:43+00:00
If the goal is for the company to maximize profit from having the best page, this is an instance of a very well-studied problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit?useskin=v... and one can do much better than statistical significance testing. (If the goal is to validate scientific theories, or there are other extenuating factors, things may be different.)
by FeepingCreature | 2025-06-22 03:22:51+00:00
> Okay, fine, but what indicates that multiple behaviors were not physically possible?

I don't follow. Whether multiple behaviors are possible or not possible, you have to demonstrate that the human feeling of free-will is about that; you have to demonstrate that the human brain somehow measures actual possibility. Alternatively, you have to show that the human cognitive decision algorithm is unimplementable in either of those universes. Otherwise, it's simply much more plausible that the human feeling of freedom measures something about human cognition rather than reality, because brains in general usually measure things around the scale of brains, not non-counterfactual facts about the basic physical laws.
by vFunct | 2025-06-22 03:22:57+00:00
And that's something we will have to accept, that Islamic populations will always have nukes.

How do you plan to handle a world with Islamic populations having nukes? Because that's something you will have to plan for. You have no choice. They will not let you not let them have nukes. They will make sure they will have nukes. That's just given.
by BrenBarn | 2025-06-22 03:23:51+00:00
The other thing is that in those medical contexts, the choice is often between "use this specific treatment under consideration, or do nothing (i.e., use existing known treatments)". Is anyone planning to fold their startup if they can't get a statistically significant read on which website layout is best? Another way to phrase "do no harm" is to say that a null result just means "there is no reason to change what you're doing".
by oa335 | 2025-06-22 03:24:53+00:00
Sure, by that token the US wasn’t really at war with Germany or Vietnam, it was at war with the Nazis and the Viet Cong. It’s a meaningless distinction to anyone actually affected by the wars.

Additionally, Israel bombed Damascus during Assad’s reign. Here’s one recent example (bombing an embassy building):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_airstrike_on_the_Ira...

> no provocation

There’s a long history of violence in that region. To say that either side was “unprovoked” is a bit rich.

E.g https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_cla...
by dlubarov | 2025-06-22 03:25:03+00:00
Just to clarify, is your position that Iran was never working toward nuclear weapons, or just not until recently? I think enriching uranium to 60% is pretty clear evidence of their intent, even though it's just one component of an eventual weapon.

Being an NPT signatory could be evidence of Iran not working toward nuclear weapons, if they were compliant. But they have violated their NPT obligations on some occasions, with major violations recently.
by rixed | 2025-06-22 03:26:15+00:00
If it's Ok for you to claim that your taste in movies has no deep roots beyond what's immediately accessible to your consciousness, it's also Ok for us to derive from that claim that you are, indeed in this instance, incapable of critical examination. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Now, if what you wanted to say is that you believe that this domain is not worthy of critical examination, then there would be several difficulties still:

- how to know what's worth of examination without examination?

- How could such a culturally influential industry be not worthy of critical examination?

- Aren't we naturally more resistant to examine what we suspect would yield unpleasant knowledge rather than what we suspect would be unworthy?
by disqard | 2025-06-22 03:26:21+00:00
...and don't forget Gödel's Loophole (from Wikipedia):

> Gödel's Loophole is a supposed "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel postulated in 1947. The loophole would permit America's republican structure to be legally turned into a dictatorship.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-22 03:26:29+00:00
So facts are thin on the ground currently. More will become clear in the coming days. I've heard different accounts all the way from 12 bunker busters were used on Fordo to none were used and the entrance was bombed after Iran was warne, kinda like a warning shot, to say "we can get you".

What Iran does next depends on the extent of the damage. It could be nothing. It could be a token response. It could be escalation.

But so far Iran has been the only rational actor in this region. Iran has been attacked with justification. Anytime someone says "preemptive strike" they mean "attack without justification". Their responses have been measured, rational, justified and proportionate.

When Israel tried to previously escalate the conflict with Iran and drag the US into war with Iran, Iran just didn't take the bait. And this is despite Israel assassinating government officials, bombing Iranian embassies and bombing Iran for absolutely no reason.
by vel0city | 2025-06-22 03:27:12+00:00
> It is expensive (I have no idea related to other areas but seemed expensive).

That's what I mean. You have to want to pay for someone who is going to upcharge you more for the equipment you want and the cheaper installers won't touch it. So you have to go with the primo installers charging you a lot more for otherwise the same equipment.

Aside from the backup heat requirements, having a central AC installed is already 95% the same equipment. And yet they'll easily charge you 20%+ before even talking about installing extra resistive heat. And from what I've seen (a dozen quotes in North Texas) none of them would install gas as the secondary heat source despite the gas line being right there already. They were all arguing "no, it needs to be resistive electric for the secondary".

I wanted a heat pump. I shopped around for months. The only people willing to do what I wanted (heat pump + gas backup) wanted more than 2.5x the cost of the group I went with that installed ac and a gas furnace.
by tbrownaw | 2025-06-22 03:27:26+00:00
> Another unrelated point, a significant number of Iranian civil engineering graduates are women. A somewhat dichotomous economy, when you consider the theocratic restrictions on costume and behaviour.

I thought it was generally known that richer societies with me equal treatment - where people are generally more able to choose jobs they like rather than needing to take whatever's a ticket to a decent life - are the places with higher disparities in well-paying occupations?
by aisenik | 2025-06-22 03:27:34+00:00
The development, acquisition, and use of nuclear weapons has been against Islamic law in the Islamic Republic of Iran since the mid 90s under a fatwa issued by Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. It is well understood that Iran wants the ability to develop nuclear weapons in the event of an existential threat that justifies the atrocity of their creation but all of the evidence suggests that they are otherwise uninterested in nuclear weapons.

We do not significantly disagree, but I take umbrage at the repetition of the pernicious lie that Iran wants nuclear weapons. They want sovereignty in their land and justice for the Islamic people. This is a reasonable position.
by Cyph0n | 2025-06-22 03:27:37+00:00
Iran has been escalating reasonably, and is clearly acting as a sovereign state should. You can project all you want, but Saddam was playing another ballgame.

Unfortunately, international law means nothing these days, so it might have been a mistake to not establish deterrence sooner.

Regardless, Iran is not going to be as easy to topple as some people might think.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-22 03:27:54+00:00
A couple issues with the "just declassify stuff" approach, for those unfamiliar:

- The actual declassification decisions would be made by career nat'l security people. Who know that nobody was ever disciplined for keeping "2 + 2 = 4" secret. Nor promoted for declassifying the (metaphorical) blueprints for George Washington's false teeth.

- I've not seen it articulated, but there's also the "never speak honestly around troubled children" nature of declassifying anything. Capitalist journalism promotes junior high school drama queens, and the internet is crawling with simpletons and nut jobs. If you declassified the fact that, in 1971, DoD Junior Analysts Joe & Alice suggested basing nuclear missiles on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockall - it wouldn't matter if their idea was vetoed the next day by an O-4, or was physically impossible anyway. There would still be a giant "OMG AMERICAN NUCLEAR MISSILES WERE GOING TO BE LAUNCHED AGAINST INNOCENT BRITISH SEAGULLS!!!" shitstorm about it - because for a (seeming) majority of humankind, "truth" is whatever idea is pushing their buttons the hardest right now.
by nsingh2 | 2025-06-22 03:28:07+00:00
> Yes. Do not proliferate nuclear weapons. It’s not a big ask.

It's a very big ask to not proliferate nuclear weapons, because nukes correlate with sovereignty. You didn’t address that point at all.

> This is a completely acceptable and reasonable solution. It is how most of Europe operates.

US friendship in the case of Iran means a puppet ruler (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran). And now Europe is in the process of decoupling itself from the US. Not to mention how the US completely dropped support for Ukraine. Turns out relying on an "ally" for defense like this is not such a great idea.

Israel also understands this, and so has multiple nukes in its arsenal. Why did Israel "simply" not proliferate nuclear weapons even when it enjoyed the protection and support of the US?
by dralley | 2025-06-22 03:28:42+00:00
The petrodollar is severely overrated by people who claim it's the cause for every foreign policy decision they disagree with. USD is attractive because the US government is stable and US companies are attractive investments, due to a historical track record of competence and rule of law adherence - unlike, say, Saudi currency, or Russian currency, or Chinese currency. The US government doesn't do a lot of currency manipulation relative to those other countries either.

Of course, that historical record is being shat upon currently, and the importance of petroleum is on a downward trajectory from here on.