MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perihelions | 2025-08-14 05:42:23+00:00
Starlink competitors don't have SpaceX rockets and will tend towards different kinds of solutions to compensate. It is indeed significantly worse (signal strength, beam overlap) to go up to higher LEO altitudes, but that's a tradeoff you might make if you're inconfident about your orbital launchers and want to minimize risk there. You would need fewer satellites for initial coverage—fewer launches.

China's Thousand Sails (Qianfan) is secretive but possibly targets 800 km shells; I'll just quote Mike Wall and Jonathan McDowell,

> "That number is growing all the time; SpaceX has already launched more than 50 dedicated Starlink missions this year, with many more on the docket. Elon Musk's company already has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink spacecraft in LEO, and it has applied for approval for another 30,000 on top of that."

> "Qianfan won't be quite that big, but it's in the ballpark."

> ""The satellites are similar to the V1 Starlinks, with flat-panel morphology and a mass of 300 kg [660 pounds] each. This 'G60' constellation is planned to eventually have 14,000 satellites," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, posted on X shortly after today's Qianfan launch."

> "The Qianfan satellites will apparently orbit at an altitude of about 500 miles (800 kilometers), he added in another post. That's higher than the Starlink constellation, which orbits at about 340 miles (550 km)."

https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-...
by rcleveng | 2025-08-14 05:43:16+00:00
Just try using ux with Google Artifact Registry and AWS CodeArtifact. You need the username in the URL with GAR and you need it in the environment variable with AWS. I'm not sure who's causing the pain with using uv with private repositories (but I'd bet it's uv), but they are selling a solution to that pain.

Full disclosure, uv rocks and is way better than poetry, setuptools and whatever complicated and non-zen way packaging python has had in the past.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-14 05:44:52+00:00
> But stocks are insignificant in the vast perspective of human history, and even systems that lasted a lot more than our current institutions eventually were eradicated by fundamental changes in the society and in the human knowledge

Wealth creation (and at times, destruction) is as old as humans. We use our minds and our bodies to make more than what there was before, not merely taking what exists naturally without transforming it (adding value, i.e. creating wealth).

Stocks map to wealth, but they are not the wealth itself. They are a stand-in.
by drdeca | 2025-08-14 05:45:05+00:00
Seems falsifiable to me? If an LLM (+harness) is fully maintaining a project, updating things when dependencies update, handling bug reports, etc., in a way that is considered decent quality by consumers of the project, then that seems like it would falsify it.

Now, that’s a very high bar, and I don’t anticipate it being cleared any time soon.

But I do think if it happened, it would pretty clearly falsify the hypothesis .
by sshine | 2025-08-14 05:45:05+00:00
Indeed.

We met her ex once randomly on the street, and the first thing he asked was if she was still in her lawsuit.

Since the other part in the lawsuit lived in another part of the same house, you became paranoid about whether they would hear what you said through the walls, and you would be made painfully aware of the conflict every morning on the way to work.

It felt like a curse.

I would never wish for anyone to end up in a lawsuit.
by vasco | 2025-08-14 05:45:05+00:00
Almost but not exactly, any rational merchant would estimate how much they pay monthly in credit card fees and find a way to add that back to their revenue. For most practical cases, the business is started already after the existence of credit cards, so when modeling revenue in your business plan this should already be baked in and the prices you come up with already cover it.

So it doesn't mean they increase the price of every product by 3%. One guy might charge more just for coffee, another do some other thing. But any extra cost you put on a seller of anything, the rational seller will make that back in sales somehow.
by rcleveng | 2025-08-14 05:47:40+00:00
The problem is you can do whatever you want in it, and then have no way of reproducing that.

pyproject.toml tries to fix it, poetry kept wanting to use their own wonky names for the tags, I'm not sure why.

Once that is standardized, venvs should be cattle and not pets. That is all that is needed. UV makes that fast by hardlinking in the libraries and telling you the obvoius (that venvs should be cattle and not pets)

This fight was poetry's to loose.
by kookamamie | 2025-08-14 05:48:05+00:00
> It’s not clear whether AI will take our programming jobs

I think it's safe to say it is pretty clear.

As an example, you can power 10 developers with the highest tier of Claude Code Max for a year under the price of a new developer. At this point, having plenty of personal experience with the tool, I'd pick the former option.

There, one less job for a developer.
by immibis | 2025-08-14 05:48:21+00:00
"Free speech means free speech" is a tautology and does absolutely nothing to counter the idea that it could mean either freedom to oppose the government, freedom to spam, or freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater. In fact it's very conspicuously a purely emotional statement with zero logical content; anyone who uses this response is conspicuously asserting that they don't care about logical argument.

The assertion that Wikipedia has more content than it did in 2004 is also logically void.
by _the_inflator | 2025-08-14 05:50:27+00:00
„across different platforms“

First things first:

Import path, os

I love Python, the ZEN of it, and you really need to accept the fact that there are conventions - quite a lot and that bash or shell scripts are where the magic happens, like environmental variables, if you know how to secure your app.

Even the self thing finally makes sense after years of bewilderment (“Wait: not even Java is that brutal to its users.”)

Lately stumbled over poetry after really getting the gist out of venv and pip.

Still hesitant, because Windows doesn’t play a role.
by magzter | 2025-08-14 05:52:10+00:00
I generally agree that strict moderation is the key but there's obviously a certain threshold of users and activity that is hit where this becomes unfeasible - ycombinator user activity is next to nothing compared to sites like Facebook/twitter/reddit. Even on Reddit, you see smaller subreddits able to achieve this.

But just like a public park, if 2 million people rock up it's going to be next to impossible to police effectively.
by troupo | 2025-08-14 05:52:31+00:00
Moonbit the fast, compact and user friendly language for WebAssembly? Or Moonbit the language for industrial usage? Or Moonbit the AI-native general-purpose programming language?

(They are the same language)

Reason at least was an active collaboration between several projects in the OCaml space with some feedback into OCaml proper (even though there was a lot of initial resistance IIRC).
by divbzero | 2025-08-14 05:53:01+00:00
There’s nothing wrong with just using virtualenv. I too have used virtualenv plus pip (and sometimes pyenv) for the longest time without issue.

However, uv is the first alternative that has tempted me to switch. uv offers performance improvements over pip and handles pyenv use cases as well. I’ll be paying attention to pyx to see how it pans out.
by briga | 2025-08-14 05:53:17+00:00
I've been reading a lot of (human-written) books lately, and one thing this has made abundantly clear to me is that AI writing just doesn't stack up. For one AI writing is often completely wrong about the details. But it also just tends to be bland and superficial. If you want a 5-minute summary of something, sure, it can do a passable job. But if I want something substantial and carefully thought out, I'll choose a book written by a human expert every time.

Maybe this will change at some point in the future, but for now there's no way I would substitute a well-written book on a subject for AI slop. These models are trained on human-written material anyway, why not just go straight to the source?
by fraserphysics | 2025-08-14 05:54:08+00:00
I started getting migraines in the 1960s. Thanks for the link.

While a cup of coffee often helped me feel better in years past, I've found eliminating coffee from my diet has reduced my headache frequency. Triptans help when I get the occasional headache now.

I was disappointed that the article didn't talk about the variety of migraine manifestations. Some of the manifestations can be confused with transient ischemic attacks.
by quantummagic | 2025-08-14 05:54:24+00:00
> We can't make machines that fly like birds

Not only can we, they're mere toys : https://youtu.be/gcTyJdPkDL4?t=73

--

I don't know how you can believe in science and engineering, and not believe all of these:

1. Anything that already exists, the universe is able to construct, (ie. the universe fundamentally accommodates the existence of intelligent objects)

2. There is no "magic". Anything that happens ultimately follows the rules of nature, which are observable, and open to understanding and manipulation by humans.

3. While some things are astronomically (literally) difficult to achieve, that doesn't nullify #2

4. Ergo, while it might be difficult, there is fundamentally no reason to believe that the creation of an intelligent object is outside the capabilities of humans. The universe has already shown us their creation is possible.

This is different than, for instance, speculating that science will definitely allow us to live forever. There is no existence proof for such a thing.

But there is no reason to believe that we can't manipulate and harness intelligence. Maybe it won't be with Von Neumann, maybe it won't be with silicon, maybe it won't be any smarter than we are, maybe it will require just as much training as us; but with enough time, it's definitely within our reach. It's literally just science and engineering.
by spauldo | 2025-08-14 05:54:40+00:00
And DTrace. And NFS/NIS. And SunRPC. And OpenOffice (sort of - they bought the company that made it and then open sourced it). And... you get the idea.

That's what I loved about Sun, really. They strive for a leadership role in the UNIX world by actually leading, instead of just trying to dominate. No company is perfect, but Sun was better than most.

I was sad to see them go, but with Windows NT taking over corporate and Linux taking over networking, they just didn't have a place. They kept pushing "The network is the computer" at a time when PCs were cheap. If only they'd held out until the cloud craze hit...
by sriram_malhar | 2025-08-14 05:55:34+00:00
What they discover is what the CEOs would _like_ to happen for their business. Everyone is seeking an edge, and CEOs would like nothing better than hitching their wagon to the next buzzword. Gartner generates a buzzword, trials it with CEOs who make it an actual industry buzz.

Most HN readers don't have visibility into what a gaggle of CEOs is going to be tempted to do.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-14 05:56:44+00:00
> Why is that hard for the Python community to come up with a single tool to rule them all?

Design by committee is hard. Especially building consensus around reconsidering what at this point should be considered bad design. Python has a few decades of that. It took decades for the to even consider starting the process of removing the GIL, which is a great example of "it's clearly broken but lets not fix it". Packaging is the same.

These guys are laser focused on just fixing things the right way and that's what it takes,

There seems to be a lot of movement around some of these topics. The Gil is being removed, python's performance issues are meling away with recent releases, and things like uv are happening. I like it.
by waterhouse | 2025-08-14 05:57:35+00:00
As you say, it's because the speech may later give way to force. It does go farther than American free speech law permits: the latter draws the line at something like "threats of immediate criminal action", whereas this would attack "propagating ideologies that one thinks will eventually lead the followers to criminal action". There are certainly deep problems with potential implementation here: e.g. the main American political parties would probably both accuse each other's ideology of eventually leading the followers to criminal action. One would want high standards for that (of, say, what percentage engage in what magnitude of criminal action; as well as evidentiary standards), and want it to be established in a mega-trial, or by a supermajority of Congress declaring war on an ideology; and even that might not be enough. I'm not necessarily in favor of Popper's approach, except in emergencies.

However, I think that, when most people use the word "intolerance" today, they include things like speaking racial slurs or expressing any negative emotion towards a demographic group. There are contexts in which these things are done, and manners in which they are done, in which, yes, they do give a significant signal that the speaker is the type who would cheerfully escalate to aggressive violence towards the targeted group; but also contexts and manners in which they do not give such a signal.

I think there is a distinction to be drawn here, between "always tracking whether this is likely to escalate to criminal action" and "just attacking anyone who vaguely resembles a known 'intolerant' group". The latter is essentially an autoimmune disorder, which has led to massive collateral damage and its own discrediting. The former ... has a danger of turning into the latter, certainly (which has an interestingly meta angle to it), but is there any version of it that is well-protected against that fate? I expect there's room for improvement compared to earlier versions. I don't know if it can be done well enough to be worthwhile.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-14 05:58:45+00:00
Leonard was still an intelligent entity despite lacking the ability to learn.

In fact the amount of limited agency Leonard had is similar to the limits in agency we want for an agi that serves humanity.

Anyway my main point is Leonard has intelligence well past what we expect from an agi. So because people like Leonard are documented to actually exist one can say live learning is not really needed to have Leonard levels ( aka agi levels) of intelligence
by rayiner | 2025-08-14 06:00:14+00:00
> My argument stemmed only from your, to me previously unfamiliar, definition of merit... > What distinction would you make between the terms democracy and meritocracy? Are they functionally the same under your definition of merit?

I don't think I'm using "merit" in an unusual way. I think you'd agree that the specific criteria that constitutes "merit" depends on the nature of the job. You use different criteria for NFL players versus college professors.

I think the problem is that we're talking about political appointees, which because of the nature of democracy are very different from other kinds of jobs. In the political context, "merit" is a meta concept that depends on what the voters prioritize. In some contexts, voters want a traditionally credentialed person. This is true even in the Trump administration: Scott Bessent is a Yale graduate hedge fund manager. But in other areas, Trump voters have grown to distrust the institutions, like the medical establishment and the intelligence services, and "merit" in that context means someone that will upend those agencies.
by zarzavat | 2025-08-14 06:00:28+00:00
> A major point of discussion when NIST announced the SHA3 finalist being Keccak back in ~2012(?) was that BLAKE1 at the time offered significantly better software performance

IIRC, Keccak had a smaller chip area than Blake. Hardware performance is more important than software performance if the algorithm is likely to be implemented in hardware, which is a good assumption for a NIST standard. Of course, SHA3 hasn't taken off yet but that's more to do with how good SHA2 is.

> BLAKE1 family is still considered secure today, its internal HAIFA design is very close to existing known designs like Merkle–Damgård, it isn't some radically new thing.

Given that the purpose of the competition was to replace SHA2 if/when it is weakened, choosing a similar construction would not have been the right choice.
by gattilorenz | 2025-08-14 06:01:26+00:00
I find it telling that right in the first paragraph it says “People in the middle ages lit cats on fire for fun” as a fact, while it is, in the most charitable interpretation, something historians disagree on (and in the least charitable interpretation, it smells like bullshit from a mile).

I certainly am skeptical of someone taking Wikipedia as the Truth.
by birn559 | 2025-08-14 06:03:04+00:00
Budget for German train system has been cut and was too low for two decades. It was well known that would result in what we have today.

You have to invest in infrastructure to keep it at a high quality level. It's crowded because it has been lacking proper funding for years. It's a result of politics, nothing stops public transport from being popular and providing reasonable high quality service.
by energy123 | 2025-08-14 06:03:07+00:00
> My personal test question keeps bombing, and I think it's something they should be capable of doing?

The problem is that "they" isn't a monolith. How much compute went into your tests? Gpt-5 thinking in ChatGPT Plus uses less compute than Gpt-5 thinking in ChatGPT Pro, which uses less compute than the "high" reasoning effort when "gpt-5" is called via the API, which uses less compute than Gpt-5 Pro in ChatGPT Pro, which uses less compute than custom scaffolds, which uses less compute than what went into the IMO/IOI solutions. This is not just my idle speculation, it's publicly available information.
by musicale | 2025-08-14 06:04:14+00:00
You may be reading too much into the original question, which was simply:

> What does stanford offer undergrads that berkeley doesnt? IMO access to legacies and the larger alumni network is about it

Non-academic advantages (e.g. athletics programs, student housing, etc.) are still advantages.

Berkeley has its own set of non-academic advantages, such as closer proximity and access to San Francisco (via BART).
by spauldo | 2025-08-14 06:04:16+00:00
It's not hard to find Linux users shit-talking Solaris - or "Slowaris" as it was known at the time. Just browse the Slashdot archives.

Reaching feature parity and taking Solaris' market share was an often cited goal by people in the Linux community, and one they achieved.

That said, I don't remember much actual hate directed at Sun in the way that Microsoft got. As far as companies go, Sun was a better member of the UNIX community than most.
by jcgl | 2025-08-14 06:05:13+00:00
No, that’s just one of the use-cases. Also:

- wildcard certs. DNS-01 is a strict requirement here. - certs for a service whose TLS is terminated by multiple servers (e.g. load balancers). DNS-01 is a practical requirement here because only one of the terminating servers would be able to respond during an HTTP or ALPN challenge.
by maebert | 2025-08-14 06:07:09+00:00
It might be worth noting that humans also struggle with keeping up a coherent world model over time.

Luckily, we don’t have to; we externalize a lot of our representations. When shopping together with a friend we might put our stuff on one side of the shopping cart and our friends’ on the other. There’s a reason we don’t just play chess in our heads but use a chess board. We use notebooks to write things down, etc.

Some reasoning model can do similar things (keep a persistent notebook that gets fed back into the context window on every pass), but I expect that we need a few more dirty representational ist tricks to get there.

In other words, I don’t think it’s an LLMs job to have a world model, but an LLM is just one part of an AI system.
by taneq | 2025-08-14 06:07:31+00:00
Teaching is hard and training courses are often terrible. IMO, lessons need to consist of multiple (usually hierarchical) examples of (1) specific thing to learn, (2) high level motivation for doing this thing, (3) specifically when to do the thing, (4) specific causes and effects between your actions and observations during the process.

I did a snowboarding course once, and it was largely useless because they didn’t actually explain any of the mechanics of how the board actually worked beyond seesawing mostly-sideways down the ultra beginner slope. It wasn’t until I had a chance to experiment that I started actually figuring out anything useful.

I absolutely taught myself how to double-clutch from YouTube and Initial D, though. :D (Plus copious practice, of course.)
by friendzis | 2025-08-14 06:08:02+00:00
Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.

> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it

Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.

When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.
by brabel | 2025-08-14 06:08:56+00:00
O was trying to install Stable Diffusion just yesterday. They use Conda, so I installed it and tried to follow the instructions. First, the yaml file they provided was not valid . Following the commands to install packages explicitly failed because my Rust toolchain was old, so I updated it just for some other Rust dependency to fail to build, it didn’t even compile . Such a shit show.
by protocolture | 2025-08-14 06:10:20+00:00
The 2 best surveillance methods for crime investigation are LPR Cameras and cashless public transport.

Both of them then rely on the next step after providing information, following the people who triggered the first layer with CCTV.

If I went into my local CBD right now, and comitted some badass crime. explode a cop car or something we all yearn to do. All the exits are covered. I wont get anywhere walking and covering my face. I can get on a train but the rozzers will know where I get off. Likewise, if I jump in a car, they can track it almost anywhere for the next 100 kilometers.

I dont think the goal is prevention, its the guaranteed catch. Its the body of evidence that starts piling up when you burn cop car 1.

When brisbane introduced the go card system, we had our first arrest based on go card travel data within a month.

Sad really.

>bit of anecdotal evidence - once cameras at my older workplace caught robbery to a place next door. With criminal looking directly at the camera, before bashing the window with a brick, jumping in, and hopping out with accomplice. They never got caught. This was quite decent camera, with face clearly visible - i know this because we directly cooperated with police.

I helped an employer comply like this once. Someone had been brutally killed by a driver. The victim only existed for like 3 frames on the recording. But the cop wasnt interested in that anyway. They had managed to sneak drugs out of their car, into their pocket and then hide them in our garden, mid arrest. Embarrasing for the cop you see. The cop already had the driver on vehicular manslaughter, but thanks to the power of CCTV, they could also add a charge for drug crimes.
by Black616Angel | 2025-08-14 06:10:30+00:00
I think you are mixing things up. Forgejo is one of the soon implementing, self-hostable software forges and one of the 3 listed implementations.

Codeberg is the (Github-alike) central forgejo server, where the team develops and which is also available for general open source coding needs. ForgeFed issues are tracked on Codeberg, so they already show their interest.