MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daveguy | 2025-07-28 20:24:59+00:00
This analysis doesn't concern the limited bandwidth available for call delivery on plain old telephone networks (POTS). They did squeeze extra money out of the system with their networks as a monopoly, but the cost was zero only if you don't consider the cost of operating and maintaining the network, or the opportunity cost of having much less bandwidth than currently available. For the former, they still had to fix problems. For the latter if they had made calls pennies everyone would have had "all circuits are busy" all the time. A single line wasn't capable of carrying 10,000 calls back then. Pricing to limit usage to available bandwidth was as important as recouping infrastructure costs and ongoing maintenance. There's also a lemonade stand pricing effect. If you charge too little you don't get enough to cover costs. But if you charge too much, not enough people will do business and you won't cover costs. Also, ma bell was broken up in 1982, but regional monopolies lasted a lot longer (telecommunications act of 1996).
by crvdgc | 2025-07-28 20:25:07+00:00
The problem of Visa/Mastercard blocking Steam is not the loss of revenue per se, but a potential viable alternative could capture this niche market and use it as a base to displace them entirely. To buy games, we have to set up GamerPay, then why not use it for the next online shopping?

In China, where more than two competitors exist, many are willing to subsidize their customers just to have their service used.
by icelancer | 2025-07-28 20:25:12+00:00
It's not too bad - I run 6x RTX 3090s on a 2nd-gen Threadripper with PCIe bifurcation cards. The energy usage is only really bad if you're training models constantly, but inference is light enough.

I use 208V power but 120V can indeed be a challenge. The USA has split phase wiring; every house has 220-240V if they need it. Bit of a misunderstanding of how our power works - we have 220-240V on tap, but typical outlets are 110-120V.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-28 20:25:44+00:00
It's a little bit like the state of chip fabrication.

The US has enjoyed a high concentration of R&D talent and funding which has somewhat starved out the desire of the rest of the world to do similar research.

If you are China, for example, why spend the funds to R&D new drugs when you can pull the same research from NIH and FDA efforts of the US and produce those same drugs for cheap.

And that isn't to say China is the only nation doing this. India is pretty famous for doing the same thing.

The issue with these drugs is once the chemical structure is known and proven to work, it's (usually) relatively trivial to spin up manufacturing.

China puts in R&D on products that are hard to manufacture even if the "how" is well known. They do that because China is a country built on international trade. That's why they are a world leader in battery tech.
by AlexandrB | 2025-07-28 20:25:47+00:00
I don't get why they're being called grifters. These groups - both left and right - probably genuinely believe this stuff is harmful and are following their beliefs to their logical conclusion. I don't think companies should bow to such pressure, but that doesn't make them "grifters".

"Grifter" seems like the new shorthand for "person I don't like".
by godelski | 2025-07-28 20:26:03+00:00
> a high minimum investment

This is the only part I actually disagree with.

Science is incredibly cheap. It can have a long time to mature but interestingly that is dependent on the number of "bonds", with quicker returns when there's more "bonds" issued.

I'd say there's 4 common classes of misinterpretation:

Perception bias: ----------------

Most of science is performed by grad students and academics. Neither of which are known to make much money and the former is known to make poverty wages lol. I can say as a recent graduate that one summer internship at a big tech company gave me more money than my university's spend for the rest of the year. And as an intern I was still much cheaper than a full employer. My equivalent yearly salary was higher than most professors in my department too.

I'd say 80+% of research is being done at this scale. A few hundred grand per year, if even that.

Amortization (time bias): -------------------------

We often hear about the big science projects and this creates the notion that it's expensive but it's usually misleading. You might hear news like the $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission, but that's spread out over many years. Work began in 2015, construction in late 2019, full assembly in early 2022, and launch in late 2024, where there's 6 years of flight and the budget is for a mission life until late 2034. Amortized that's $5.2bn over 19 years, so $274m/yr ($347m if we conservatively count from 2019).

Distribution: -------------

Most mega projects have a cost that's distributed over many funders. Take CERN. It cost about $10b to build, took 10 years to construct, and costs $1bn/yr to operate. That's distributed through many countries, the largest contributor being Germany, which only accounts for ~20% (so $200m/yr), followed by the UK (15%), France (13%), and Italy (10%). There are also occasional contributions by the US.

Scale: ------

All these numbers are large, but they're also the biggest projects and there's few projects that big. $100m seems like a lot of money to us because we're imagining it in our bank accounts. But that's not the same as money in a government's bank. The US budget is $6.8 Trillion! $100m is 0.0015% of that! In other words, if you had a million dollars to spend each year you're talking about $1.5k (or $1.47 of a $1000 budget). This is not a big ticket item.

===

I'm sure you agree with most of what I've said but I wanted these points "on the record" since we live in a time where we're frequently arguing about $1 from a $10000 budget instead while ignoring the $1000 items. We need to get our heads straight. It's like someone complaining about the cost of your bus ticket while they're buying the latest fully loaded Macbook Pro. I don't think their actual concerned is the budget...
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-28 20:26:04+00:00
Lightning channels are centralized entities with their own fee structures

They can be opened peer to peer, or hop between other channels, similar to dns routing

They are prefunded with a certain quantity of bitcoin that dictates the size of bitcoin that can move in that route at once - although smaller denominations can go through in rapid succession this just means more fees levied

All of this incentivizes a larger channel to be created by a well funded party, which can be coaxed into censoring transactions because they are a payment processor or institutional service. Likely an incumbent such as Visa joining the lightning network as a victim of LN’s own success.

There are some mitigations built in and actively developed. We are 8 years deep into Lightning.
by kldg | 2025-07-28 20:26:21+00:00
Since a year or two before the individual mandate ended (it was worth the fee), I dropped health insurance and self-pay for self and family; I pay now in a year for actual service what I paid in a month in premiums, mostly to dentist, without feeling any restrictions on seeking healthcare. I don't often need referrals, can self-order procedures directly, and the amount insurance says they "negotiated" is pretty misleading, often comparable to what I pay in cash without insurance. Since ACA was implemented, prior to covid, life expectancy in the US stopped increasing; not to say ACA is directly responsible (without more data), but whatever its net benefits may be are clearly losing out to other signals.

That said, our ... fascinating ... experiences ... in trying to get the government to fix our health systems is certainly no outsider's fault. Europeans and others can feel at ease continuing to mock us.
Show HN: KrackTheKode – Daily number code-breaking game
by Pyrrho3 | 2025-07-28 20:26:29+00:00
A Wordle-inspired daily challenge where you crack a 4-digit code in 10 attempts. Each guess reveals how many digits exist in the code and how many are in the correct position. Same code for everyone daily, plus a practice mode for unlimited attempts. Clean design with dark mode and result sharing.

Built with Svelte + Tailwind. Try it: https://krackthekode.pyrrho.dev
by bananapub | 2025-07-28 20:26:36+00:00
> Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but it seems like Anthropic has quietly 4x'd the real cost of the Pro plan. There are 168 hours in a week, and if I'm able to (safely) bet on 40 hours of use, realistically, I just lost 75% of the value of the plan.

I think you're just confused about what the Pro plan was, it never included being used for 168 hours/week, and was extremely clear that it was limited.

> What are the reasonable local alternatives? 128 GB of ram, reasonably-newish-proc, 12 GB of vram? I'm okay waitign for my machine to burn away on LLM experiments I'm running, but I don't want to simply stop my work and wake up at 3 AM to start working again..

a $10k mac mini with 192GB of vram with any model you can download still isn't close to Claude Sonnet.
by Tokumei-no-hito | 2025-07-28 20:26:41+00:00
guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively.

clearly that's abusive and should be targeted. but in general idk how else any inference provider can handle this situation.

cursor is fucked because they are a whole layer of premium above the at-cost of anthropic / openai etc. so everyone leaves goes to cc. now anthropic is in the same position but they can't cut any premium off.

you can't practically put a dollar cap on monthly plans because they are self exposing. if you say 20/mo caps at 500/mo usage then that's the same as 480/500 (95%) discount against raw API call. that's obviously not sustainable.

there's a real entitled chanting going on too. i get that it sucks to get used to something and have it taken away but does anyone understand that just the cap/opex alone is unsustainable let alone the RD to make the models and tools.

I’m not really sure what can be done besides a constant churn of "fuck [whoever had to implement sustainable pricing], i'm going to [next co who wants to subsidize temporarily in exchange for growth]".

i think it's shitty the way it's playing out though. these cos should list these as trial periods and be up front about subsidizing. people can still use and enjoy the model(s) during the trial, and some / most will leave at the end, but at least you don't get the uproar.

maybe it would go a long way to be fully transparent about the cap/op/rdex. nobody is expecting a charity, we understand you need a profit margin. but it turns it from the entitled "they're just being greedy" chanting to "ok that makes sense why i need to pay X to have 1+ tireless senior engineers on tap".
by lucb1e | 2025-07-28 20:27:16+00:00
> affecting less than 5% of users

Probably phrased to sound like little but as someone used to seeing like 99% (or, conversely, 1% down) as a bad uptime affecting lots and lots of users, this feels massive. If you have half a million users (I have no idea, just a ballpark guess), then you're saying this will affect just shy of the 25 thousand people that use your product the most. Oof!
by hnuser123456 | 2025-07-28 20:27:32+00:00
I actually needed that button the other day. I have an account on Etsy, but wasn't sure if it was sign in with google or an etsy account using my gmail. Signing in to the website's own "login with google" button was a redirect loop. Requesting password reset sent me no email. At some point Chrome offered to sign-in for me, and that worked.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-28 20:27:58+00:00
Ha, now I feel like you're going out of your way to misinterpret me.

"the network" is the same network we've been talking about the entire conversation. Employer's network.

Obviously they can't control what I plug into a network they don't know about, I don't know why you think I was trying to argue that or how it's the strongest interpretation of my comment.
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-28 20:28:14+00:00
You're delusional if you think people don't want Medicaid.

In 2017, the last time Republicans tried to repeal the ACA and Medicaid expansion, there were nearly riots at town halls from the very same blue collar families you're claiming look down upon the programs and legislation.

People aren't stupid, they know they're going to be fucked without the Medicaid coverage they've had for years.
by lvl155 | 2025-07-28 20:28:48+00:00
This is why I stopped using the MAX. Downgraded to Pro and started using o3 and others via API. I really don’t need that many hours to game plan in the beginning. At most it will cost me $10 between o3, Gemini, and Opus per project. There are new model releases every couple of weeks and I’d hate to get stuck with just one provider.
by reducesuffering | 2025-07-28 20:28:52+00:00
It's so common for people to throw out those accusations, despite zero evidence from the lesswrong crowd, because they need explanations that are way more comforting than facing down the scary implication that lesswrong "doomers" are right.

One thought path leads to business-as-usual comfort, happily motivated by trillions of $ in market cap and VC.

The other is dread.

It makes sense why people take the easy road. We're still battling climate change denialism after all.
by ktaraszk | 2025-07-28 20:28:53+00:00
Great question, let me clarify:

At Miget, you always start with a fixed plan: say, 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM. That’s your hard cap — you can deploy as many apps as you want within that limit. We support autoscaling within your plan, meaning your workloads can scale horizontally as long as you stay within your allocated resources.

We intentionally dislike mandatory usage-based billing because it often leads to unpredictable costs. That’s why we made it optional.

For advanced users or production workloads that do want to scale beyond their plan, we’re working on opt-in usage-based billing. But only if you explicitly enable it. That way, you get a stable, predictable base, and optional elasticity if your needs grow.

So the core idea remains: No surprises. You’re in control.
by tzs | 2025-07-28 20:28:56+00:00
> On short trips, you're carrying the extra weight of an unused ICE drivetrain. On longer trips, you're carrying the weight of an unused battery and electric motors.

The battery and electric motors are not unused on long trips, at least on the cars from the better hybrid makers. They are used for acceleration and passing, or when extra power is needed. They might also be used when going downhill to provide regenerative braking.

> What might make more sense for 2 car households is one electric vehicle and one ICE

For most households that need 2 cars EV + hybrid makes more sense.

A non-plug in hybrid from one of the better makers is generally can be used exactly like you'd use the non-hybrid version of the car, but with greater reliability and lower maintenance costs.
by arach | 2025-07-28 20:29:16+00:00
if it affects only a minority of accounts, why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else is the primary question I would ask myself if I worked on this

the principle: let's protect against outliers without rocking the behavior of the majority, not at this stage of PMF and market discovery

i'd also project out just how much the compute would cost for the outlier cohort - are we talking $5M, $100M, $1B per year? And then what behaviors will simply be missed by putting these caps in now - is it worth missing out on success stories coming from elite and creative users?

I'm sure this debate was held internally but still...
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-28 20:29:26+00:00
While I agree that the author clearly has to keep the details private from the press for their own safety, the whole article frames the alleged victims as powerless, but in truth they are not.

The behaviors described are mostly criminal, they have legal recourse, it's not like civil cases where they would be buried from the other sides legal team.

And speaking of the other side they are private companies employing ex intelligence people they don't have the immense backing of a state behind them, if they get caught doing illegal things a few times thats it their whole business could be under threat.

I am guessing they are very chummy with law enforcement, have good lawyers and may be in bed with politicians but the whole thing looks extremely precarious it would only take a couple of cases to stick for real prison time for these folks.
by jgilias | 2025-07-28 20:29:40+00:00
I happen to know a guy who has invested a lot in solar parks. He’s deeply unhappy about that investment because the electricity prices are often zero or negative when the sun is up and he’s underwater on that investment.

I also know a guy who recently installed a dummy load in a thermal power plant which they switch on when they can’t give the power to the network due to overcapacity, as they can’t just switch off the plant willy nilly.

The point is, in a grid with lots of renewables in it not only there’s a lot of stray energy that can be captured, but a flexible load that can be switched on/off in milliseconds is actually hugely valuable if we’re to have stable grids.
by raylad | 2025-07-28 20:29:40+00:00
The problem with this drug is that it inhibits one of the final stages in viral replication. This means that before it can work the virus has already infected the cell and added its RNA to the host cells DNA permanently.

So if a patient is exposed to HIV while on the drug, this will not prevent their cells from being infected with the virus. The infected cells will not subsequently create any virus, and therefore additional cells will not be infected, however nothing prevents actual exogenous HIV from infecting cells while on this drug.

That means that if someone discontinues the drug, cells that have been infected with HIV during the time they were on the drug can start producing it causing AIDS.

It’s great that there’s a drug that works as well as this for chronic use, but nobody should think that it’s actually preventing infection. It’s allowing infection but inhibiting viral replication post infection.
by jedberg | 2025-07-28 20:29:51+00:00
Chaos engineering was created to be the "red team" of operations. Let's figure out all the ways we can break a production system before it happens on its own.

And there are a host of teams working on the "red team" side of LLMs right now, using them for autonomous testing. Basically, instead of trying to figure out all the things that can go wrong and writing tests, you let the AI explore the space of all possible failures, and then write those tests.
by Terretta | 2025-07-28 20:30:13+00:00
Moreover, if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.

The stat would be more interesting if instead of 1 in 20 users, they said x in y of users with at least one commit per business day, or with at least one coding question per day, or whatever.

I suspect this could be a significantly higher percentage of professional users they plan to throttle. Be careful of defining Pro like Apple does if you market to actual professionals who earn based on using your product. Your DAUs might be a different ratio than you expect.
by nsteel | 2025-07-28 20:31:59+00:00
Sorry, you are right, I missed it somehow. Still isn't correct, though.

Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest. The division, assembled by the Home Office, will aim to “maximise social media intelligence” gathering after police forces were criticised over their response to last year’s riots. ... “This team will provide a national capability to monitor social media intelligence and advise on its use to inform local operational decision-making. “This will be a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence to help local forces manage public safety threats and risks.

Some might say that's a sensible thing to do in 2025. Others, might spin it another way to fuel their immigration-focused political agenda. The quotes from the Tory and Farage are painful.
by arclight_ | 2025-07-28 20:33:10+00:00
Thanks for sharing, those are good points.

Another aspect of image optimization that I'm aware of, but haven't even bothered with yet, is handling the art direction problem of responsive images.

Like "pan and scan" conversions of widescreen movies to the old 4:3 TV size, if you're serving a narrower image to mobile devices than say a desktop browser, the ideal image to serve is probably not a generic resize, or center-cropped version of the image. Mozilla has a nice page on responsive images that explains it better than I could: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Guides/Res...
by tgv | 2025-07-28 20:33:25+00:00
Funny, but a bit too easy, I think. At least, I got a warning when I made an error (my only one), which makes light work of progress. The fact that I had only one error is an indication of the ease (I'm not a native speaker of English), and complex puzzling usually involves backtracking or multiple tries to achieve a single step.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-28 20:33:52+00:00
I worked at a startup that offered an unlimited option.

It's amazing how fast you go from thinking nobody could ever use that much of your service to discovering how many of your users are creatively abusing the service.

Accounts will start using your service 24/7 with their request rating coming at 95% of your rate limiter setting. They're accessing it from a diverse set of IPs. Depending on the type of service and privacy guarantees you might not be able to see exactly what they're doing, but it's clearly not the human usage pattern you intended.

At first you think you can absorb the outliers. Then they start multiplying. You suspect batches of accounts are actually other companies load-splitting their workload across several accounts to stay under your rate limits.

Then someone shows a chart of average profit or loss per user, and there's a giant island of these users deep into the loss end of the spectrum consuming dollar amounts approaching the theoretical maximum. So the policy changes. You lose those 'customers' while 90+% of your normal users are unaffected. The rest of the people might experience better performance, lower latencies, or other benefits because the service isn't being bombarded by requests all day long.

Basically every startup with high usage limits goes through this.
by jonahkpump | 2025-07-28 20:34:00+00:00
Hey HN- my team was having trouble remembering all of the tasks we'd talk about during standup so we built this tool we call SnapLienar. You drag in a transcript or recording of your meeting and it will auto generate and assign the tasks for you (short demo - https://www.loom.com/share/66699607d25b416393d32087be5bd5d7?...). Would love to get feedback if this is useful.

My email is jonahk@buildwithlayer.com.
by data-ottawa | 2025-07-28 20:34:29+00:00
The 5% being ‘abusive’ limit seems high (1/20 users — that feels like an arbitrary cost cut based on customer numbers rather than objective based on costs/profit). I would have much preferred to see a scalpel applied to the abusive accounts than this — and from what I’ve seen those users should be very obvious (I’ve seen posts on Reddit with people running dozens of CC instances 24/7).

I also have to wonder how much Sub Agents and MCP are adding to the use, sub agents are brand new and won’t even be in that 95% statistic.

At the end of this email there a lot of unknowns for me (am I in the 5%, will I get cut off, am I about to see my usage increase now that I added a few sub agents?). That’s not a good place to be as a customer.