MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubefox | 2025-07-03 20:58:51+00:00
The article mentions that the inflatable Goodyear torus has become much more realistic since the inflatable BEAM module (2016) on the ISS. That one has a volume of 16m^3.

But since then, Sierra Space has been working on much larger inflatable modules. Their latest test volume was already 285 m^3:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/25/24206219/nasa-sierra-spac...

According to the report, Sierra wants to move to testing a 500 cubic meter volume this year. And the roadmap on their website lists two further habitats with volumes of 1400 and 5000 cubic meters:

https://www.sierraspace.com/commercial-space-stations/life-s...

That would already be pretty close to the 6000 m^3 von Braun wheel mentioned in the original article. Though Sierra doesn't seem to plan for creating something like the flexible Goodyear torus which could rotate, just pill-shaped inflatable capsules. Not sure whether this has technical reasons.
by navane | 2025-07-03 20:59:26+00:00
On these wiki definitions:

Ethnic cleansing: "with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group"

"Mass killings" is a big detail which is hard to overlook. If we can't agree where ethnic cleansing includes mass killing it's hard too agree if ethnic cleansing is taking place.

Personally, ethnic cleansing to me sounds like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, which is not happening in the US yet.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-03 21:00:37+00:00
This isn't new in general, no. While I meant more adversarial situations than contracts and laws, to which people are used and for the most part just go along with, I do recognize that those are common too - competition can be fierce, and of course none of us are strangers to the "alignment issues" between individuals and organizations. Hell, a significant fraction of HN threads boil down to discussing this.

So it's not new; I just didn't connect it with AI. I thought in terms of "right to repair", "war on general-purpose computing", or a myriad of different things people hate about what "the market decided" or what they do to "stick it to the Man". I didn't connect it with AI alignment, because I guess I always imagined if we build AGI, it'll be through fast take-off; I did not consider we might have a prolonged period of AI as a generally available commercial product along the way.

(In my defense, this is highly unusual; as Karpathy pointed out in his recent talk, generative AI took a path that's contrary to normal for technological breakthroughs - the full power became available to the general public and small businesses before it was embraced by corporations, governments, and the military. The Internet, for example, went the other way around.)
by ben_w | 2025-07-03 21:00:43+00:00
Sure, but also you should expect that regardless.

By the time the UK was voting for the Investigatory Powers Act*, I realised that laser microphones could be mass-produced so cheaply that London's Metropolitan Police could put every window in London under surveillance for less than that police force's normal annual operational budget.

And thanks to what Snowden showed, I am distrustful of modern software. And not just closed source stuff, I expect agencies to hire people to attempt to sneak backdoors into OSS, and some of them to even succeed.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016
by crazygringo | 2025-07-03 21:01:05+00:00
> my real eyes don’t have grain.

They definitely do at night when it's dark out. There's a kind of "sparkling" or "static" that comes in faint light.

Fortunately, our eyes have way better sensitivity than cameras. But the "realism" just comes from how it was captured using the technology of the day. It's no different from phonograph hiss or the way a CRT signal blurs. The idea is to be "real" to the technology that the filmmaker used, and the way they knew their movie would be seen.

It's the same way Van Gogh's brush strokes were real to his paintings. You wouldn't want his oil paintings sanded down to become flat. It's the reality of the original medium. And so even when we have a digital print of the film, we want to retain as much of the reality of the original as we can.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-03 21:01:25+00:00
Oh okay, we are indeed in agreement then.

> That said, you might be working in a domain where X is fundamentally untrue. Then this is the wrong framework and an experienced practician will go "This is the wrong tool and choose a tool that fits better".

Agreed, this is always the money shot. I further think that the holy grail for advancements is for them to lead people's hands in a way that is self-justifying. It's a very tall and cruel order, but I think it's absolutely essential. If a solution fails to do this, people eventually turn on it, and adoption reverts or otherwise falls apart. I'm particularly worried about this happening to e.g. Rust, but this can be applied to basically anything.
by db48x | 2025-07-03 21:01:28+00:00
No, that’s simply incorrect. ICE is following exactly the same process that has been in place since 1996. It can’t be due process under Biden but then suddenly unconstitutional under Trump.

ICE is not “kidnapping” anybody, and is not “trafficking” them. They are federal police officers who arrest criminals and deport them according the legal process defined by Congress in 1996.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-03 21:01:28+00:00
If tmux was a new project then I'd agree with you. But, like yourself, I've using tmux for probably close to 15 years now and never had it crash once.

In fact the author of this project has admitted that they've introduced bugs with their rewrite. I know it's a hobby project so I'm not being critical of their work. But if we're only interested in reducing bugs then rewriting an existing project isn't the right way to go. Something like Zellij makes more sense because it's offering something new in addition to being written in Rust.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-07-03 21:02:03+00:00
> Currently, the Trump admin is actually deporting fewer illegal immigrants per month from the U.S than either the Biden or Obama admins did previously.

Interesting, got any source for this claim ?

Whether current claims are overblown or not, I assume that it's what Trump 2 might do next that is a cause of concern for a lot of people. Between his mercurial behaviour, disregard for the rule of law, and some of the previously stated goals...

The situation is quite different of course, but one of the planned first "Jewish Solutions" by the Nazi regime was instead deporting them to... Madagascar. (A really weird alternative to consider to the current Israelo-Palestinian conflict, huh. Someone should perhaps write an alternative Man in a High Castle story about this...)

Things can turn very bad quite quickly when previous norms of behaviour go out of the window...
by godelski | 2025-07-03 21:02:17+00:00
It's always hard to tell. But have you considered you might be measuring the wrong way?

To me it sounds like you learned a real important lesson one that some people never seem to learn.

I think one of the most beneficial aspects of doing things "just because" is these other skills or information you get along the way. It is very easy to miss all of this progress if you're too focused on the progress of the more tangible things. But that doesn't make any of that not progress. So don't put yourself down for that, because I'm sure you learned a lot. The only reason you can look back and see a better way is because you made that progress and learned those lessons. These are things mentors can usually help you get through faster but not everyone has a mentor nor access to one. But don't undermine your own progress just because you didn't finish projects or because you did things differently than others
by krapp | 2025-07-03 21:03:23+00:00
>Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.

Literally every Quaker could die today and their beliefs would still survive because we can do things like write books and publish websites now. The spread of knowledge and culture isn't limited to direct person-to-person transmission, and it doesn't depend on anyone doing violence on anyone else's behalf.
by vaindil | 2025-07-03 21:03:48+00:00
I absolutely love websites like this that have a ton of information about a very niche topic. No ads or monetization, just someone who put together a very detailed website about something they love.

I think my first encounter with a website like this was for the movie Donnie Darko, which I found after I first watched the movie and was trying to understand the story. The website is still up! [0]

If anyone has examples of similar websites, I would absolutely love to read them.

[0] http://www.donniedarko.org.uk
by dingnuts | 2025-07-03 21:05:23+00:00
I know it's popular; that doesn't mean it's not a fad. Consequences take time. It's easy to use but once you get burned in a serious way by the bot that's still wrong 20% of the time, you'll become more reluctant to put your coin in the slot machine.

Maybe if the AI companies start offering refunds for wrong answers, then the price per token might not be such a scam.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-03 21:05:36+00:00
> If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver

That's how I feel about D&D - but only in the hands of a decently skilled DM. I think other games provide a lot more tools & framework for the storytelling aspect.

And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-07-03 21:06:59+00:00
I am fully in favor of doing things on the moon, but have a theory that its relative convenience is actually detrimental. Without going into a lengthy spiel, convenience means low commitment, which translates into a high likelyhood of projects getting the plug pulled.

Elsewhere, the hurdles to clear to get something started are higher, but once you’re out there it’s a lot less justifiable to reverse course.

It could very well be true that it’s necessary to settle the Moon before doing anything else, though, which could spell bad news for any endeavor involving crewed spaceflight. We might end up with a series of false starts on the Moon (due to events like funding getting pulled as a result of changing politcal winds) that end up going nowhere which then puts crewed spaceflight in a state where it's stuck in LEO perpetually.
by zahlman | 2025-07-03 21:07:16+00:00
... Ah, reading these as well as more carefully reading TFA, I understand now that there is an MCP based on Playwright, and that Playwright itself is not considered an example of something that accidentally is an MCP despite having been released all the way back in January 2020.

... But now I still feel far away from understanding what MCP really is. As in:

* What specifically do I have to implement in order to create one?

* Now that the concept exists, what are the implications as the author of, say, a traditional REST API?

* Now that the concept exists, what new problems exist to solve?
by dylan604 | 2025-07-03 21:07:38+00:00
> Why? If you're spending a significant chunk of your bits just transmitting data that could be effectively recreated on the client for free, isn't that wasteful? Sure, maybe the grains wouldn't be at the exact same coordinates, but it's not like the director purposefully placed each grain in the first place.

I'm sorry your tech isn't good enough to recreate the original. That does not mean you get to change the original because your tech isn't up to the task. Update your task to better handle the original. That's like saying an image of the Starry Night doesn't retain the details, so we're going to smear the original to fit the tech better. No. Go fix the tech. And no, this is not fixing the tech. It is a band-aid to cover the flaws in the tech.
by godelski | 2025-07-03 21:07:45+00:00
Sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy. Remember, what makes someone fiscally wealthy is still defined by culture and society. Most of our needs aren't necessities.

And I still don't think it's unethical that doctors are wealthy. I'm very happy with them making good money for their work. It doesn't mean all doctors are ethical, but certainly it is one (of several) path to make money without needing to be unethical.
by dodomodo | 2025-07-03 21:07:56+00:00
first of all I want to say that I have a lot fun talking to you! Honestly I would also prefer dll based approach, if you really want to see the limits of the architecture of Lsp I recommend you to read the discussion about adding syntax highlighting to the protocol, but I see why the people behind LSP did what they did.

One final point!

I think there is a difference between absorbing low quality tools and absorbing low quality code. I think that it makes a lot of sense for a plugin system to design for low quality plugins. I have two examples from my job, the first is a micro services based parsing infrastructure, where each team is responsible with parsing it's own formats, which are oftentimes layered apon formats parsed by different teams. I believe this takes about 10x-100x more resources than it should, but it has the benefit that a rouge parser can't takes everything down with it. The second example is internal scripting capability of a different system where a lot of work was done to make sure the script can't do anything stupid.

In both of those cases the system is designed for low quality code because it is more cost effective to make sure code can be low quality without affecting the overall system, than to make sure low quality code doesn't exists.
Anyone drowning in emails? I'd love to learn how you deal with it
by rushikk | 2025-07-03 21:08:06+00:00
Hey everyone, I’m a college student building a small side project around managing email, but I realized I’m not the best person to understand what the real pain feels like… because I don’t get that many emails myself haha

If you’re someone who constantly feels overwhelmed by your inbox, or if replying to emails takes up way too much of your time, I’d really love to hear from you. I’m not trying to pitch or sell anything, just trying to learn from real people who deal with this daily as I really have no insight whatsoever.

Even a 5–10 minute chat would help a ton. You can reply here or DM me if you’re open to it

Thank you :)
by tucnak | 2025-07-03 21:08:16+00:00
This is perhaps more important in the age of AI agents, but before we can tackle all these fancy ZKP constructs in the mainstream — we have to, as the industry (and so far consistently failed to) — implement Zanzibar, or whatever ReBAC, and maybe ZKP stuff could "sneak in" that way, in the form of zero-knowledge warrants, or whatnot. Unfortunately, even though it works consumption-wise, it's fundamentally at odds on the provider side.

The providers are clutching their OLAP like pearls! :-)
by z3c0 | 2025-07-03 21:08:34+00:00
An LLM salesman assuring us that $1000/mo is a reasonable cost for LLMs feels a bit like a conflict of interests, especially when the article doesn't go into much detail about the code quality. If anything, their assertion that one should stick to boring tech and "have empathy for the model" just reaffirms that anybody doing anything remotely innovative or cutting-edge shouldn't bother too much with coding agents.
by runeblaze | 2025-07-03 21:08:43+00:00
It is weird to be honest. I first learned Coq and then started taking upper level maths classes. My group theory proofs were panned by my TAs as overly verbose, very precise, and I was specializing on H_1 and H_2s everywhere and having IHns flying around like crazy because I could not fathom how one proves things without formally connecting things up.

Then my profs told me I was not “wrong”, but proofs or expositions are to most mathematicians not programs (ha! How did I not know. You teach me natural deduction and expect me not to program?), more like convincing arguments/prose. At some point one abstracts.
by alganet | 2025-07-03 21:09:15+00:00
It's finally happening. The acceleration of the full AI disillusionment:

- LLMs will do everything.

- Shit, they won't. I'll do some traditional programming to put it on a leash.

- More traditional programming.

- Wait, this traditional programming thing is quite good.

- I barely use LLMs now.

- Man, that LLM stuff was a bad trip.

See you all on the other side!
by mathiaspoint | 2025-07-03 21:10:17+00:00
Network affects come from people building on extra stuff. There's no special sauce with these models, as long as you have an inference endpoint you can recreate anything yourself with any of the models.

As to the nailgun thing, that's an interesting analogy, I'm actually building my own house right now entirely with hand tools, it's on track to finish in 1/5 the time some of this mcmansions do with 1/100th of the cost because I'm building what I actually need and not screwing around with stuff for business reasons. I think you'll find software projects are more similar to that than you'd expect.
by zahlman | 2025-07-03 21:10:36+00:00
Possibly because most people who could mentor you, would give up and switch to their preference of {Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, ...} far earlier.

(Check out Dave Eddy, though. https://github.com/bahamas10 ; also occasionally streams on YouTube and then creates short educational video content there: https://www.youtube.com/@yousuckatprogramming )
by nanna | 2025-07-03 21:10:39+00:00
This looks great but delivery via Amazon SES is a problem. I'm an academic and I tried to set up a work newsletter like this with Listmonk recently, but SES rejected my request to relieve me of sandbox mode for unspecified 'security reasons'. Everything was set up properly, it was under a domain under my personal name, I gave links to my profile page on my university website, ample explanation about what I would do with it (one email ever few months), that I would be the only sender, but they rejected it. So in the end I've opted for a hosted solution... anyone else had similar issues?
by RugnirViking | 2025-07-03 21:11:28+00:00
I don't really know if its possible to go through life without harming life as small as that. There's a religion where they try, Jainism. They will literally avoid eating food that's stored overnight, because it has higher concentrations of microorganisms. But even they acknowledge its impossible to entirely avoid causing harm, and only seek to minimize it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism
by trhway | 2025-07-03 21:13:00+00:00
That obviously should and will be fixed architecturally.

>For each new token generated, the model must access the intermediate state of all previous tokens.

Not all the previous tokens are equal, not all deserve the same attention so to speak. The farther the tokens, the more opportunity for many of them to be pruned and/or collapsed with other similarly distant and lesser meaningful tokens in a given context. So instead of O(n^2) it would be more like O(nlog(n))

I mean, you'd expect that for example "knowlegde worker" models (vs. say "poetry" models) would posses some perturbative stability wrt. changes to/pruning of the remote previous tokens, at least to those tokens which are less meaningful in the current context.

Personally, i feel the situation is good - performance engineering work again becomes somewhat valuable as we're reaching N where O(n^2) forces management to throw some money at engineers instead of at the hardware :)
by avmich | 2025-07-03 21:13:09+00:00
> People begin from the premise that there should be lots of primates living away from earth, and then work backwards from there.

No, people begin with interest in all things around them and from that conclude that being closer to them would be more convenient. This idea is perhaps as old as the human race itself.

Modern robots aren't as capable as humans, so if the project is big enough, human involvement is reasonable.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-03 21:13:15+00:00
For content that we're concerning ourselves with this level of detail, I'd prefer the old iTunes method of prefetching the file and not stream it. For typical YT content, streaming is fine. For typical sitcom or other content, streaming is fine. For something like a feature that I'm so concerned about the details of grain, I have no problem downloading to play a local version. No, not a torrent.
by emrehan | 2025-07-03 21:13:23+00:00
LLMs can read documentations for a language and use it as well as human engineers.

"given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content"

Source: Gemini 1.5's paper from March 2024 https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_...
by philip1209 | 2025-07-03 21:13:32+00:00
Postcard originally used Postmark. But, Postmark deliverability has been decreasing. And, for the open-source version, I wanted to simplify dependencies. So, I moved it to SES. It works for small lists, but won't scale to massive ones.

I welcome PRs to add additional sending providers - it wouldn't be onerous.
by fragmede | 2025-07-03 21:14:03+00:00
I don't understand. Obviously I can't run Opus on an H100, only Anthropic can do that since they are the only ones with the model. I am assuming they are using H100s, and that an all-in cost for an H100 comes to less then $1000/month, and doing some back of the envelope math to say if they had a fleet of H100s at their disposal, that it would take six people running it flat out, for the $200/month plan to be profitable.
by fizlebit | 2025-07-03 21:14:08+00:00
I actually prefer a game where the rules mostly come from the DM. I think it is better if there is no players handbook. The characters develop along their story arc, e.g. at some point you character acquires new powers, e.g. your character has been spending a lot of time developing new combat moves, they kind of level up and now the DM explains a new mechanic. Your character has become adept at disarming opponents and now gets such and such a bonus to attempt a disarm.

This is a lot to place on the DM, but I like the anarchy of a system like dungeon crawler classic. You expect some of your characters to die, e.g. in one adventure my character in a last ditch effort to save himself drank a potion of unknown origin, that potion turned him into a mithral statue. It was a fitting end to his short but eventful life.

Another character played by a different player managed through a long process involving books and negociations with his patron to construct a demonic sentient flying dog through whom he could cast spells and see.

This kind of exploration I think encourages players to see their characters much more as characters than machines to be min maxed and it is way more fun.

Give the DM total control to decide the dice roles that determine the outcome of the shenanigans. You try to hire an army of peasants you're going to be dealing with appointing sergeants, logistics, mutany, desertion all before you try to line them up to throw a ladder at some dude, which in the end is probably like a 1d20 >= ac for a chance of 1d4 damage, with of course crit tables, where on a critical success the dude might be tangled up in the ladder and fall over or something.
by avmich | 2025-07-03 21:15:10+00:00
> We didn't learn any of that from the ISS which we didn't already know from Salyut 6 and 7, and Mir. The ISS, aka Mir 2, hasn't taught us anything new.

I doubt that. ISS served in space longer than Mir and Salyut-7 combined, I would expect it to run more experiments and get more data - especially as the equipment is more modern and experiments are planned with the benefit of knowledge of the previous works.