MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Robotbeat | 2025-07-27 14:03:03+00:00
The satellite industry in the US is larger than ever, FWIW.

Between Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, plus a gazillion startups like Astranis, K2 Space, etc, not to mention defense satellites, there has never been a time when more satellites have been launched by the U.S.

I think your friend will be fine. The real issue is the capability loss for NASA.
by bmacho | 2025-07-27 14:03:06+00:00
People: "If God, then why bad?"[0] Leibniz: "God and bad can coexist. E.g. we live in the best possible world."[1] Voltaire: "Here's a depiction of some fictional bad."

I don't think Voltaire engaged meaningfully with Leibniz's argument. (I think that Leibniz is simply right tho, in the mathematical sense, so there isn't much room for Voltaire anyway.)

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds
by eagerpace | 2025-07-27 14:03:23+00:00
I’m trying to think how I feel about this. I’ve been obsessed with space for a long time, remember traveling to see my first rocket launch of the shuttle in 2006. Follow the commercial development closely since then. Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be.

NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better. You can debate some of the specifics, sure, but if all this current state of uncertainty brings is a clean slate and new ways of thinking in 4 years, that’s better IMHO than looking back 4 years from now watching NASA brute force a token moon landing on the back of ancient technology. Which they may still do!
by hodgehog11 | 2025-07-27 14:03:43+00:00
Scepticism is generally always a good idea with ML papers. Once you start publishing regularly in ML conferences, you understand that there is no traditional form of peer review anymore in this domain. The volume of papers has meant that 'peers' are often students coming to grips with parts of the field that rarely align with what they are asked to review. Conference peer review has become a 'vibe check' more than anything.

Real peer review is when other experts independently verify your claims in the arXiv submission through implementation and (hopefully) cite you in their followup work. This thread is real peer review.
by wyre | 2025-07-27 14:03:47+00:00
Yes, it is an issue that SF doesn't have affordable housing. Any price increase by requiring induction stovetops is a rounding error compared to inflation, or is an excuse for greedy landlords to increase rents heavily.

Also, any desirable part of the country with jobs is facing a housing affordability crisis. High rents are caused by greedy landlords and the protections given to them by the government, not because of regulation requiring them to spend a little bit more on an electric range.
by Towaway69 | 2025-07-27 14:04:35+00:00
Thanks to the GPL and open source software movement, we have these hype-capitalist FAANG corporations that reduce everything down to making a profit as fast as possible - or just dump it.

No long term goals, no guarantees for users, no job security, no ownership in a renters economy. Just take the data and make as much money with it as possible.

But that’s just one interpretation, perhaps it will have a happy end. If not, I’m sure there will be an app to fix it.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-27 14:04:42+00:00
True, but OHP lessons are somehow still a lot more interactive than clicking through bullet points one at a time (not that all PowerPoint lessons are like that, but lots are).

Maybe it's simply the physical act of changing the sheet, but my memory of the lessons was that they played a much smaller part in the lesson than a PowerPoint usually does in a PowerPoint lesson (and later lecture).
by Incipient | 2025-07-27 14:04:43+00:00
I can barely get a model to refactor a 20 file repo without it catastrophically breaking it.

Reviewing an entire country's laws and regulations I have 0.00% doubt the AI isn't up to it. And there is no way a person is going to review 100k regulations. These are just going to get canned, and the little person will suffer.

I also wouldn't trust the model creator to make it mark key regulations for deletion, ones the author is ready to take advantage of...says the cynic in me.
by breadwinner | 2025-07-27 14:05:08+00:00
And you're offering nothing to back up your claim. Literally everything written in the article is backed up by sources such as New York Times, which in turn quotes experts in the field.

- Is it not true that the existence of a link between high cholesterol and heart disease is only a hypotheses that originated in the 1950s, not a scientifically proven fact?

- Is it not true that the FDA generally has not required drug companies to prove that cholesterol medicines (such as statins) actually reduce heart attacks before approval?

- Is it not true that lowering cholesterol by different means (i.e., other than statins) is not beneficial, and does that not mean cholesterol is not the villain it is made out to be?

- Is it not true that the only large clinical trial funded by the government (rather than drug companies) found no statistically significant benefit at all?

What exactly are you saying is wrong?
by sneak | 2025-07-27 14:06:20+00:00
Yes, absolutely. If you have a family and a mortgage without first having enough savings to support those things through anomalies, you’re acting irresponsibly.

Nobody should be expecting their employer (or any second party, really) to be their income stream’s low pass filter. That’s what your savings account is for.

If you can’t support your family and mortgage through 6-9 months (minimum) out of savings, you shouldn’t have them because you can’t afford them.

(Also, mortgage term is irrelevant here, I’m not sure why you mention it. I would venture a guess that most 30 year mortgages end by being paid off at sale in less than 30 years. A 30 year mortgage doesn’t mean 30 years of mandatory payments, you can sell the place and move and pay off the mortgage at any time.)
by Wilder7977 | 2025-07-27 14:07:02+00:00
In the last days I spent a disproportionate amount deleting old accounts I found in my password manager, and mostly because so many companies - despite the GDPR - have rudimentary, manually when not completely nonexistent processes to delete your data.

In this post I describe my process going through about 100 old accounts and trying to delete them all, including a top 10 for the weirdest, funniest or most interesting cases I encountered while doing so.
by kevindamm | 2025-07-27 14:07:16+00:00
I was curious about this too, so I went looking. I found this video from about a year ago. He seems cautiously optimistic.

The second half is a Q&A and he directly addresses this: in the presence of errors he finds more faults in the way the prompt was worded than in how the LLM answers, and figures that LLMs are better than the alternative approaches to programming if used well.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ia6aJIplmtc
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-07-27 14:07:36+00:00
It cost <$200 to go pay cash and get a calcium score yourself. Its hard to talk a cardiologist into getting your insurance to pay for it if you're young. As a male who had a grandfather die in his 30's from heart disease it was even hard. If you're worried about this at all just pay for it yourself. I also reccomend getting Lp(a) testing (<$50) if this concerns you, DYOR, but it will give you a better grasp on how your body is handles bad cholesterol (everyone is different).
by pyman | 2025-07-27 14:07:47+00:00
Are you saying that now, because of all the AI generated content online, you're suddenly willing to pay for sites like Wired, NatGeo, Popular Mechanics, MIT Tech Review or The Economist? These have been around for ages. Why now, and not before?

I'm curious because GenAI might actually help traditional media orgs that still hire humans to write. They just need to move away from hard or metered paywalls and move toward a token model (something less common but growing). Let people buy credits to unlock individual articles instead of forcing a full subscription. Some Substack newsletters are already trying pay-per-post.

(Note: I got downvoted for including a US newspaper as an example. I'm not from the US, it was just a random example. I've removed it to avoid unnecessary polarisation.)
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-27 14:08:33+00:00
Yes, it is a metaphor. Not everyone can understand neurobiology so we use metaphors.

Define Lacking: not available or in short supply.

Lacking (I did not say "run out" you did, again exposing your bias) dopamine is exactly what causes the symptoms of Parkinson's. It is well known that people with impulse control disorders are more likely to get Parkinson's.

Even Dopamine Receptor Antagonists increase addictive behaviors.

Reports of Pathological Gambling, Hypersexuality, and Compulsive Shopping Associated With Dopamine Receptor Agonist Drugs https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

You are accusing me of all or nothing thinking but that is not what I am doing. But you seem to think that Dopamine has nothing at all to do with anything yet there it is in our body. It must do something, yes?
by guilhas | 2025-07-27 14:08:43+00:00
Books are still super relevant

If you read something written by a field specialist you don't just learn something, you get the core of the issue. All the mechanics that lead to it, tradeoffs, and the possible paths for the future. That makes the book relevant for many years

Though it is hard to make ourselves read long form content nowadays where short content is pushed to us every day

Also seeing so much short content make us think the books are outdated. When in reality it keeps churning the same implementation details and getting us burned out for not progressing. And bleeding keeps being reinvented on set concepts

And might be a good hiring tip, read a book a year, put it on your CV

You get new career prespectives/vision, opportunities, libraries ideas, companies ideas, research ideas
by ricardobeat | 2025-07-27 14:09:00+00:00
That looks like a quite biased interpretation of these studies. Direct quotes:

> The average height of willows in fenced and dammed plots 20 years after the initiation of the experiment exceeded 350 cm, while the height in controls averaged less than 180 cm

> This suggests that well watered plants could tolerate relatively heavy browsing. It also shows that the absence of engineering by beavers suppressed willow growth to a similar extent as did browsing

They posit that the growth in control groups not matching the fenced areas is evidence of wolves reintroduction not having the effects they are said to have. It is a pretty unconvincing argument since there are so many other variables involved. They also prove that IF the wolves have indirectly lead to either the return of beaver dams, or reduced elk browsing, there is undoubtedly an impact in tree growth, which is a positive result regardless.

Their theory that things will never return to their original state, and instead will settle into a new alternate equilibrium is probably correct, but does not seem like the definitive blow to the wolf theory that it’s made out to be.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-07-27 14:09:40+00:00
And this one from the National Park Service web site, funded by NSF:

https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/ys-24-1-the-challenge-of-unde...

TL;DR - the observed reduction of the elk herd correlated with wolf introduction, but also with an increase in cougars, grizzly bears, and even bison, all of which either reduce or compete with elk. Human hunting also added pressure, but that has been limited as the herd size reduced. It is complicated.
by breadwinner | 2025-07-27 14:10:38+00:00
Cardiologists don't do their own research. Drug companies do the research, and cardiologists are limited to just trusting the drug companies. So then the question is how trustworthy are the drug companies? Pfizer’s Lipitor raked in $125 billion between 1996 to 2012, becoming the world’s best-selling drug of all time. You don't think drug companies are even a little bit motivated by profits?

You are right about one point: You should absolutely not trust a random medium article, anyone can write medium article. Instead you should follow the links, then decide whether the experts quoted in the NYT and Bloomberg articles have a point.
by flyinghamster | 2025-07-27 14:10:45+00:00
I've been playing with it[0] - it still has a few rough edges. It's rather slow to start up compared to firing up a VM in virt-manager, and when you shut it down you must wait for it to finish shutting down before trying to restart it.

Woe to you if Debian pushes a systemd update. It took repeated incantations with apt to get that update to take, because updating systemd would crash the VM Every. Damn. Time.

[0] The current console-only incarnation.
by westurner | 2025-07-27 14:11:35+00:00
Are you asking me to defend shell script syntax, or are you criticizing this except from a shell script?

The awk and printf are as obscure and unreadable as Perl, but still probably faster than just starting Perl.

Ironically, in terms of portability, it's probably more likely that awk and printf are installed than Python (or Perl). This application doesn't need Python in the (devcontainer) container, and nobody does sysadmin scripts with lua (which can't `export VARNAME` for outer shells) so shell scripting is justified though indeed arcane.

Getopt is hardly more understandable than a few loops through $@ with case statements.

I don't understand the relevance of other tools to "getting decent error reports in Bash"?

There are great logging (and TAP testing) libraries in Python, but that doesn't solve for debugging Bash?

There is at least one debugger for Bash scripts.
by ben_w | 2025-07-27 14:12:04+00:00
> I’m very skeptical about Spinlaunch, but even if you can pour enough epoxy over something to allow it to survive 10k Gs for a few minutes,

Please do watch the video I linked to — it was a surprise to the people whose cubesat design they lightly modified, that they didn't need to fill all voids with epoxy resin.

> I am not sure you can scale it to 100k+ Gs for weeks, for a postage stamp sized payload that has to be almost perfectly flat - that just seems like a completely different problem domain.

If anything, I expect "flat postage stamp" to be easier, even with a 100x increase in G-forces. Thin structure in compression -> total forces are still low. Balancing a fully laden lorry on a 10cm cube of steel (7.5kg vs 50 tons ~= 6,000x) seems borderline in the way that balancing a 10cm cube of steel on top of 1cm^2 of 80 gsm paper (=8mg vs 7.5kg ~= 937500) doesn't.

(Edit: forgot density of steel, thought it was 5 not 7.5)

> I think the idea bears further investigation, but the omission from the paper feels a bit odd.

100%. It does feel a bit like it's formalising my shower thoughts.

> Good luck with the novel!

Thanks, I'll need it! >_>
by stockresearcher | 2025-07-27 14:12:26+00:00
As with any stats-laden post, I wanted to understand what exactly a “vacation house” was. A footnote in the article references a “census of housing” and I found information on the US Census website. There are 6 main categories for vacant houses (vacation/seasonal is one of them), and at least some of them have subcategories.

It is pretty likely that “vacation house” doesn’t include a lot of housing that most people would think of when they think about vacation houses. If something is listed on AirBnb or VRBO, for example, it is almost certainly not included in these stats.
by chubot | 2025-07-27 14:12:45+00:00
I was also there in the 2000's and I remember people saying Java can be just as fast as C

And in particular that garbage collection can be faster than malloc/free.

This is technically true in the case you have a naive C program. There are tons of C programs out there, and some are slow. (But there are more slow Java programs out there)

But it's 100% clear now that GC has a significant cost, and while you can optimize a bad C program, it can be very hard in many cases to optimize the cost of GC away.

C offers more freedom and thus more footguns, but the freedom also means you don't really have a performance cap.

And I prefer GC -- most programs I write will have GC; I just recognize the performance cap, and design accordingly. (In fact I wrote a GC for a subset of C++ for https://oils.pub -- I actually think this is a language with nicer performance properties than Java, mainy due to being AOT)
by pyman | 2025-07-27 14:12:53+00:00
Humans still write for sites behind paywalls like Wired, WSJ, FT, NatGeo, NYT, and The Economist, but I don't hear anyone say "I'm finally going to pay for good content written by humans." Instead, all I hear is people complaining about the flood of AI-generated crap.

My advice: Subscribe to one or two sites or newsletters, and all your problems are solved.
by bdangubic | 2025-07-27 14:13:00+00:00
I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was doing some research for a product I am building, my daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am building and I asked her if she had time to help me with something and she did. Told her to “google ____” and she started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for suggesting she use Google… :)
by 3willows | 2025-07-27 14:13:31+00:00
I have been hyping up Hacker News for people who are not otherwise into tech/engineering: so here's version (a minor tweak of https://jsomers.net/hn/) that filters out the tech content.

The filter is not perfect, but there are lots non-technical gems that you wouldn't readily find elsewhere:

- An interactive map of history (https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/history/)

- Is Literature dead? (https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/27/is-literature...)

- The Philosophy of Anger (https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/agnes-callard-philosophy-...)

Enjoy!
by reactordev | 2025-07-27 14:13:32+00:00
For general internet stuff, a Mac mini or any SFF pc will be just fine. For ML, you’ll need at least a dozen or more thousand for GPU’s if you run your own inference. If you use a 3rd party, like OpenAI, it’s just an API call and you can do that on your SFF mini or pi.

Web hosts can start at $10 (or free + internet) and GPU hosts can start at $4,000 USD.

At peak, a “cluster node” could be $10,000 and a GPU node could be $80,000.

The question you have to ask yourself is: what are your requirements.
by abound | 2025-07-27 14:14:33+00:00
While StarLabs has shipped products before, I'd be careful with them. That StarFighter laptop was supposed to ship years ago, and I don't think any have been delivered yet. Here's a Reddit thread [1] from three years ago saying delivery would be in a few months.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/yjuahx/star_...
by sgarland | 2025-07-27 14:15:43+00:00
> join on a cte

I’ll grant you that this can generate NULLs in a variety of ways (implicit type conversion, for one), but I also think that those issues could be caught via linting if nothing else. I’ll also grant you that this is shifting the goalposts a bit.

> old code running on new schema

Yeah, this would be the primary offender. I was thinking of perfect schema:code coupling, without needing to worry about other people doing dastardly things, but that’s sadly unrealistic for many orgs.
by account-5 | 2025-07-27 14:16:50+00:00
I feel like I keep harping on about Nushell but as scripting languages go it's right up there for me. Built with rust too and comes with a ton of stuff built in.

What's the niche this fills? I came across roc-lang recently which seemed interesting too, again built with rust, and opinionated on certain things common in older languages.

It doesn't have to, and obviously it's your project, but what is this offering over other languages. Why would I reach for it?
by sokoloff | 2025-07-27 14:16:56+00:00
You can get an instructor to teach you almost anything sensible to be taught in aviation. If the instruction you’ve had up until now didn’t cover it, call up a flight school and ask to be instructed on simulated engine outs.

I can understand (and even agree with) why Cirrus teaches to “pull early and pull often”. It’s not a terrible policy, Cirrus doesn’t exactly suffer financially from a chute pull, and some Cirrus occupants died who could have lived if the chute were pulled earlier or at all.
by maxloh | 2025-07-27 14:17:21+00:00
I know that people wanted to stay in their own country. However, she could likely get a good position in the space industry in Europe.

The bottom line is, she would be very likely to get a good salary, even better than she did in the US, in China, Russia, or India, which are desperately seeking space specialists with experience in more advanced technologies.

It is a shame that the US couldn't even keep their payroll, forcing them to leave the country and flow to its enemies.
by christophilus | 2025-07-27 14:18:10+00:00
You shouldn’t use mouthwash at all ever. It’s a nuke to the microbes in your mouth. There was a long, rambling discussion with a functional dentist on the Primal Podcast[0] that goes into this.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jNrm-9sp-RQ
by throw310822 | 2025-07-27 14:18:42+00:00
People, not sure you realised, but this thread is gold. Maybe even intentionally?

You are debating over a message that imagines the consequences of generating progressively more natural-looking diamonds by adding them imperfections; you are claiming that the message doesn't look natural enough because it doesn't have the imperfections of a typed message (wrong quotes, wrong dashes).

Fact is, with diamonds and intelligence we're moving to a Dickian scenario where progressively complicated and ineffective tests are needed to tell the artificial from the natural. And soon the Voight-Kampff test won't work anymore.
by dextrous | 2025-07-27 14:20:33+00:00
Politics aside, according to a pretty comprehensive study (118 missions) it does seem that SpaceX is much more efficient than NASA [1]. Data like this would suggest privatization of space missions is a good idea. Maybe this conclusion is biased somehow, or perhaps the purpose of a dedicated govt org is different in some way that justifies its budget and scope despite the difference in efficiency?

https://qz.com/emails/space-business/2172377/an-oxford-case-...
by justin66 | 2025-07-27 14:21:04+00:00
> NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better.

It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul. Over the years NASA administrators have pushed back on SLS to the fullest extent you’d expect, but it’s not their call how Congress allocates money.

Losing career managers, scientists and engineers isn’t going to fix any of the things you want to see fixed.
by speedylight | 2025-07-27 14:22:02+00:00
Well there are lots of sites that are basically a compendium of tools like the ones you have and almost all of them are free to use. The one that comes to mind as being the best is CyberChef, but that was developed by a British intelligence agency.

I think the easiest way to increase revenue is to focus on SEO ranking and putting up more non-intrusive ads. You could also turn it into a phone and desktop app and charge people for offline access.