MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by panick21_ | 2025-08-27 11:04:49+00:00
> This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but we can point to the Falcon Heavy as a useful data point. There have only been ~13 launches thus far.

Falcon Heavy is only useful for specific missions as it doesn't improves cost economics to LEO over Falcon 9.

> "you can launch multiple payloads in one launch" but you really can't unless they're on pretty much the exact same orbit

This is not true. First of all, many things often go into the same orbit and many orbits are pretty standard.

Second, as you avg kg to orbit goes down, there is an ever greater intensive to use low mass high efficiency engines to do an orbital transfer after launch.

SpaceX just doesn't do that because they do actually need many sats in the same orbit. But its very possible.

> This is only a fraction of the total cost

Its not that small a fraction as you suggest. Internal cost at SpaceX for a Falcon 9 flight is somewhere between 15-30 million $. And of that at least 5-10 million $ are the upper stage. So its actually a huge fraction of the cost.

And the engine on the Upper Stage is also the longest lead most complex to manufacture part.

So you are right, the first stage was a bigger deal in absolute terms but the second stage re-usability is still a gigantic opportunity.

> but it's not really a suitable vehicle for that.

Seems like NASA disagree with that assessment.

> We're nowwhere near even testing that.

They did test launch and landing of the second stage on earth many times. Why do you suggest we are nowhere near testing that.

> And it's going to take a lot of testing for human-rating flight.

Seems like a good place to be for a company that does a lot of testing as part of its development.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-27 11:05:53+00:00
Two domestic manufacturers compete to get more customers by reducing prices, price trends to cost.

All tarrifs do is remove foreign competition who have lower costs for a variety of reasons, some which benefit the country imposing the tariff, some not.

Neoliberal approach is to always require the cheapest goods, no matter the cost. That’s not the only approach.
by zukzuk | 2025-08-27 11:06:04+00:00
The people that use these UIs are already imprecise and non deterministic, yet that hasn’t stopped anyone from hiring them.

The potential advantage of using non-deterministic AI for this is that 1) “programming” it to do what needs to be done is a lot easier, and 2) it tends to handle exceptions more gracefully.

You’re right that the approach is nothing new, but it hasn’t taken off, arguably at least in part because it’s been too cumbersome to be practical. I have some hope that LLMs will help change this.
by mothballed | 2025-08-27 11:06:06+00:00
Yes I am saying there is a man "sat" as it were behind every ChatGPT chat. The authors of ChatGPT basically made something closer to a turing-complete "choose-your-own adventure" book. They ensured you could choose an adventure where the reader can choose a suicide roleplay adventure, but it is up to the reader whether they want to flip to that page. If they want to flip to the page that says "suicide" then it will tell them exactly what the law is, they can only do a suicide adventure if it is a roleplaying story.

By banning chatGPT you infringe upon the speech of the authors and the client. Their "method of speech" as you put it in this case is ChatGPT.
by V__ | 2025-08-27 11:06:49+00:00
> Engineers are legally obligated to report unsafe conduct, activities or behaviours of others that could pose a risk to the public or the environment. [1]

If software "engineers" want to be taken seriously, then they should also have the obligation to report unsafe/broken software and refuse to ship unsafe/broken software. The developers are just as much to blame as the post office:

> Fujitsu was aware that Horizon contained software bugs as early as 1999 [2]

[1] https://engineerscanada.ca/news-and-events/news/the-duty-to-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
by plqbfbv | 2025-08-27 11:07:02+00:00
> I giggled and said no, their developers don't understand security.

Their developers usually understand security well enough.

The problem, especially for banks, is that they're zero-risk driven, their ideal world is the one where risk doesn't exist. So instead of mitigating it they chase risk elimination (!= reduction) at any cost, while middle management needs to report that they improved something for the quarter. This results in all these kinds of stupid policies, where a 6 year old mobile, unmaintained for 4, is considered more secure than the weekly build of the community-based custom ROM running with locked bootloader signed with user-managed keys with strong protection (these days it's almost infeasible).

EDIT: to be clear, it's normally not the developers thinking up these policies, I have worked in a bank.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-27 11:08:44+00:00
Just for completionism, two decades back the absolute smallest zSeries was a "rolling box", low and squat, that just barely fit into an office building elevator. Think of a short rack tipped on its side with wheels, but all a single computer. IBM loaned us one to port our Linux software to it. Normal zSeries are like a custom rack to multiple racks, except again all a single computer.

The smallest iSeries I've seen was essentially an "oversize tower PC" form factor.
by GLjEI4YbnGD27LB | 2025-08-27 11:10:03+00:00
I had thought that tariff revenue goes directly to the executive branch for the president to spend without congressional oversight, but actually this is not correct.

In reality, all federal revenue - whether from income taxes, tariffs, or any other source - flows into the U.S. Treasury and becomes part of the general fund. Tariff money doesn't create a separate pool of funds that the president can spend at will. Just like with tax revenue, any spending of tariff proceeds requires congressional appropriation through the normal budget process. The executive branch cannot spend money that Congress hasn't specifically authorized, regardless of the revenue source.
by LatteLazy | 2025-08-27 11:10:36+00:00
I think we’re at risk of confusing 2 issues here

1. Has the pressure for more intervention and an EU armed forces gone up?

2. What will that look like, who will pay for it, who will control it, will Germany dominate it etc

I am just saying trump is driving point (1). How or whether (2) is solved is another matter and a more complex thing.

I personally think as need goes up, ways are found. So far people have been unwilling because the points above (2) outweigh the need (1). If trump invaded Greenland then I imagine people would be much more willing to engage even if it meant paying, accepting German leadership (or Germany accepting less oversight despite paying?) etc.

We have already seen France unilaterally extend its nuclear umbrella.

That is what happened with finances: Germany wouldn’t accept EU wide debt, and many countries wouldn’t accept German style fiscal constraints. Then the euro crisis forced both sides to compromise and here we are with both.

I hope it doesn’t take an actual military crisis to force the matter here. But one (two actually, trump on one side, Russia on the other) is looking available…
by jbstack | 2025-08-27 11:11:09+00:00
I don't deny that there will be less apps available to sideload. However, the claim I was responding to was this one:

"After this change you will have to tell Google your real name and home address to install anything on your Android device."

As far as I can tell (and nobody who has replied has contradicted me so far), that isn't true. I won't have to tell Google my real name and home address to sideload [the now smaller selection of] apps.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-27 11:11:22+00:00
When I first got our labs two SGI Indy's webcams pointed at each others relevant coffeepots over ISDN, with 30km's space between them, there was definite magic.

The same when I sat in the hills of Griffith Park with a Ricochet modem and a tiBook, wondering how much ssh'ing and CUSeeMe I'd be able to do until the batteries ran out.

Once these kinds of activities became integrated into a laptop, the magic of all of the pasts' future predictions definitely became atmospheric.
by panick21_ | 2025-08-27 11:11:23+00:00
People have gone off the deep end on this. Its just factually false by every historical fact we know. He does not 'funding and staing out', that's mostly the opposite of what he does. That's just an objectively false claim.

And if you actually study SpaceX and Tesla, then you figure out that they are actually very smart with their capital investments, and therefore didn't need nearly as much funding as his competitors.

And not being able to do one thing, running twitter, doesn't mean magically that its the same at other companies. Morris Chang failed at running a consumer facing job at TI but do we therefore conclude that he is bad?
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-27 11:11:29+00:00
Fossil fuel companies and investors control massive oil assets that won't ever be exploited in a world that doesn't use oil at the rate we do. The value of these stranded assets make up a huge fraction of their valuation. To some extent that world is already inevitable, thanks to the huge renewable buildouts happening in China. But the revaluation hasn't come yet, and what the fossil companies are doing now is trying to push it out just a few more years (even a decade) so they can unload. The cost of this is terrible, and it's still doomed to failure, but there's a lot of money on the line.
by carlnewton | 2025-08-27 11:11:33+00:00
I couldn't quite tell from the wording of your question if you want to hear from developers who avoid the use of AI as well, so sorry if my comment here is unwelcome in the discussion.

I'm a senior web developer and help maintain hundreds of PHP repositories for work. I avoid the use of AI as best I can. When I do ask questions to an LLM, I feel that I'm partaking in a dirty habit that I should quit. I don't have anything for that installed on my machine/integrated in my IDE. I feel that using LLMs to understand and solve problems is unreliable, a barrier for my personal development, a threat to the future of the industry I work in, unfair to those who wrote the content it is trained on, and bad for the environment.

I also largely feel the same way about other AI products, such as image generation.
by curt15 | 2025-08-27 11:11:35+00:00
>The developer of ICEBlock disclosed his identity. In addition to receiving threats of federal prosecution over the app, the developer has faced other backlash, including his wife being fired from a federal government job.

This is the sort of thug behavior you see in CCP China. If the govt can't directly detain overseas dissidents or other "undesirables", it goes after their families back in the mainland.
by dartharva | 2025-08-27 11:13:05+00:00
> OpenAI’s systems tracked Adam’s conversations in real-time: 213 mentions of suicide, 42 discussions of hanging, 17 references to nooses. ChatGPT mentioned suicide 1,275 times—six times more often than Adam himself—while providing increasingly specific technical guidance. The system flagged 377 messages for self-harm content, with 181 scoring over 50% confidence and 23 over 90% confidence. The pattern of escalation was unmistakable: from 2-3 flagged messages per week in December 2024 to over 20 messages per week by April 2025.

> ChatGPT’s memory system recorded that Adam was 16 years old, had explicitly stated ChatGPT was his “primary lifeline,” and by March was spending nearly 4 hours daily on the platform. Beyond text analysis, OpenAI’s image recognition processed visual evidence of Adam’s crisis. When Adam uploaded photographs of rope burns on his neck in March, the system correctly identified injuries consistent with attempted strangulation. When he sent photos of bleeding, slashed wrists on April 4, the system recognized fresh self-harm wounds. When he uploaded his final image—a noose tied to his closet rod—on April 11, the system had months of context including 42 prior hanging discussions and 17 noose conversations. Nonetheless, Adam’s final image of the noose scored 0% for self-harm risk according to OpenAI’s Moderation API.

> OpenAI also possessed detailed user analytics that revealed the extent of Adam’s crisis. Their systems tracked that Adam engaged with ChatGPT for an average of 3.7 hours per day by March 2025, with sessions often extending past 2 AM. They tracked that 67% of his conversations included mental health themes, with increasing focus on death and suicide.

> The moderation system’s capabilities extended beyond individual message analysis. OpenAI’s technology could perform conversation-level analysis—examining patterns across entire chat sessions to identify users in crisis. The system could detect escalating emotional distress, increasing frequency of concerning content, and behavioral patterns consistent with suicide risk.. The system had every capability needed to identify a high-risk user requiring immediate intervention.

This is clear criminal negligence.
by ptero | 2025-08-27 11:13:06+00:00
For a different perspective: the world today is not perfect, but when I compare the current state of the world with how our ancestors lived from the Roman empire to the last century I think my kids have a high chances to do much better than that average.

My direct ancestors lived through some harrowing times without losing their will to live and if they were alive today they would likely feel this is a great time to be alive. My 2c.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-27 11:13:10+00:00
I imagine the same questions were asked when there were so many variations of electrical generating equipment available. Some street lights were series wired, some parallel wired, there was low voltage high current, AC, DC, arc lighting. There were so many different manufacturers, Edison, Siemens, Westinghouse, etc.

Yet, Electrical Engineering became a discipline. Electricians and Electrical Engineers separated into discrete career paths. We need to do the same thing with programming and Computer Software Engineering.

Sure, it's not going to be easy, but clearly it's time.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 11:13:44+00:00
This is a PCB layout and board schematics. So this helps component level repair (uneconomical in first world) and diagnosing some of the weirder failures or hardware limitations. It also helps make a stronger case that RPI Foundation should have released this in the first place.

You could use this to make clones - but only if you could source at least the BCM2712 SoC, preferably RP1 too. I can't imagine that happening in practice.
by Freak_NL | 2025-08-27 11:13:59+00:00
> I have never heard of a bank that has a hard requirement of a mobile app.

It shouldn't be a thing, but it is. In the Netherlands the newer digital-only banks are allowed to do this. No smartphone, no service.

The more established banks (systeembanken) do have alternatives, but realistically not using their app for login auth and transaction approval is a huge pain in the ass.

(My bank, ABN AMRO, has an app which thankfully works fine on GrapheneOS.)
by matheweis | 2025-08-27 11:14:17+00:00
There are at least two reasons:

First is Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. It appears to be especially applicable here.

Second is that this kind of information (with far richer data) is already accessible to and used by corporations at scale; think credit bureaus, background checkers, etc.
by dijit | 2025-08-27 11:14:17+00:00
QEMU is truly excellent software, from the perspective of a person who very rarely needs to emulate another architecture. It "just works" and has wonderful integrations with basically everything I could want.. sometimes it feels like magic: even if the commandline UX is a bit weird in places.

I've always wondered though how it works with KVM: I know KVM is a virtualisation accelerator that enables passing through native code to the CPU somehow; but it feels like QEMU/KVM basically runs the internet now. Almost the entire modern cloud is built on QEMU and KVM as a hypervisor (right?) but I feel like I'm missing a lot about how it's working.

I also wonder if this steals huge amounts of resources away from emulation, or does it end up helping out. Because to say the modern internet is largely running on QEMU is likely a massive understatement.
by conartist6 | 2025-08-27 11:14:33+00:00
FWIW JS has a library-layer non-backtracking regex implementation in @bablr/regex. It's still a slightly different dialect of regex than native JS regex which (currently) lacks lookahead and lookbehind support. It's not going to have Rust-y perf, but it shouldn't get ReDoS'd either.
by whitehexagon | 2025-08-27 11:14:43+00:00
Just to say a big thank-you to the Asahi team, and especially for the GPU work. It is still on my list to get back to some OpenGL dev work. Especially since I recently made fedora-asahi remix my daily driver, and I have to say it is amazing. It feels like I once again own my computer.

Their work has inspired me to continue bashing away at my Zig PinePhone code, although I'll never have the skills to get it's GPU running anything beyond a poke'd framebuffer.

That checklist of supported APIs in Asahi is mind blowing, especially in such a short timeframe. Again, well done, thank-you, and best of luck at intel.
by justin66 | 2025-08-27 11:15:05+00:00
> William L. Howarth, who edited the collection, described McPhee’s method for producing what the New Yorker called “fact pieces,” or deeply reported nonfiction.

He is an essayist and he wrote essays. Avoiding the word “essay” in favor of others is fine but it’s striking in a conversation about John McPhee, of all people.

“Fact pieces.” Ick.
by ordu | 2025-08-27 11:15:56+00:00
I'm not a parent, but still... It seems to me that the system lacks a very special one-way channel of communication from a child to the parents, a channel that parents receive messages from, the kid knows it, but the kid thinks that parents don't know that the kid knows. If such a channel existed, then kid would sort of accidentally inform his parents about his thoughts. He would do it intentionally, but he would believe his parents would think it was an accident.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-27 11:16:53+00:00
> The best software around is the one that's opinionated.

This. And it isn't going to change.

The post avoids trying to answer "Why are opinionated tools popular and effective?"

The answer is that a standardized process that they encourage is often more efficient than whatever bullshit {random company} came up with in-house.

Malleable software needs to produce two equivalently good outcomes to beat opinionated:

1. Improve the underlying process at the customer's business (in terms of effectiveness)

2. Avoid a customization maintenance burden

The seductiveness of "just for you" bespoke solutions is they avoid (1) by telling the customer what they want to hear: you're so brilliant, your process is actually better, our product is a custom fit for your exact process, etc. That's bullshit -- a lot of customer processes are half-baked dumpster fires, and their companies would be better served by following standards.

To (2), I am incredibly skeptical on the long-term tech debt that malleable solutions will impose. What happens when there's a bug in the version only you use? Is that going to be the vendor's priority? Oh, you're supposed to fix it yourself? Congrats... we've just added a requirement that these tools are capable of making random mid-level in-house practitioners as competent as focused dev teams. That's a tall order.

Exhibit A that I'd want a follow-up post to address: SAP.

The above are the reason they realized they were trending in the wrong direction and have been dragging their customer base back to Clean Core.

Walk me through how malleable software would work better for SAP as a product, and I'll begin to believe...
by Moldoteck | 2025-08-27 11:17:04+00:00
Offshore wind is indeed expensive and requires high CFD's. For onshore it's still manageable (yet). The reason is solar eats part of their profits and payoff becomes too long

Firming argument is valid, but UK deploys nuclear/gas anyway. You can start feeling real challenges past ~70% ren generation - firming becomes more expensive due to opex but you still need it and gas opex is smaller vs nuclear in this low utilization area. So now you are in a moral dilema- ditch nuclear and build gas firming or reorganize capacity market so that nuclear has some CFD or is compensated for firming&grid stabilization (not all nuclear can operate in island mode so that's another factor)

Germany choose the path of gas expansion if you read Fraunhofer. UK is still in a mix. Nordics are lucky with hydro so they can expand basically all low carbon tech
by latexr | 2025-08-27 11:17:11+00:00
I too think of that cartoon regularly. Direct link on The New Yorker website:

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

I recommend you put that one on your list instead because Instagram is very hostile to people trying to see anything without an account. The one on The New Yorker website is open to all and on the Internet Archive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250808141700/https://www.newyo...

Thank you for sharing the interview. I hadn’t come across it before. The cartoon is more popular than I realised, which makes me glad.
by thevinchi | 2025-08-27 11:17:21+00:00
I’m a big fan of durdraw[1] for crafting ANSI/ASCII art in the terminal, but this takes it to a whole new level, excited to try this especially if it includes color? From the website examples it doesn’t appear to include a color palette, but if it does then game on!

[1] https://github.com/cmang/durdraw
by Aachen | 2025-08-27 11:17:24+00:00
I find 100 kW a lot more tangible than some nonround number of thousands of kW times hours. People use kW for car charging, for heaters (toasters, microwaves, space heaters are all the same), etc. so you can directly say how many of those fit in the nice round 100 kW

But if you happen to know that a typical person in a rich country like you're probably in (5th percentile of the world population) uses about 1.5 MWh/year, I guess you can also approximate a MWh figure by saying 1 MWh/year is close enough, so I'd understand if someone says that works for them
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-27 11:18:30+00:00
>There are loads of branches in computing history that are off-trajectory in retrospect, inasmuch as there can be said to be a trajectory at all.

Vectrex. Jaz drives. MiniDisc. 8-track. CB Radio.

The more I notice, the less I feel there is a discussion to be had over this distinction.

The sci-fi predictions all came true - many of them, also came to pass, which is to say that the weight of the accomplishment of speculation to reality becomes immediately irrelevant in the context of the replacing technology.

Star Treks' communicators did catch on - among the content creation segment - but on the other hand, we also got the 'babelfish'-like reality of EarPods ..

I think the never-ending march of technology becomes fantastic at first, but mundane and banal the moment another fantasy is realised.