MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-27 01:21:55+00:00
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket

This classic book tells the story of liquid rocket fuel development

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

You'd think that you could mix any of a wide range of fuels with a wide range of oxidizers and get a good rocket fuel but it does not really work that way, most combinations are pretty awful, including the ethanol + O2 used in the V2. There was a time when there was interest in "storable" liquid propellants but once solid propellants reached this level of maturity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman

those were obsolete.

It is hard to beat H2+oxygen or hydrocarbons+oxygen if you pick the right hydrocarbons (rocket kerosene isn't quite the kerosene you use in a lamp)

I'm not sure if ethylene is really that good of a rocket fuel. In the context of a space economy I see it as a "reactive carbon" substance which is easy to make other things out of, say,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene

in the sense that glucose is reactive carbon you can build structural carbohydrates and all sorts of biological molecules out of. There is talk about SpaceX establishing a methane economy on Mars, methane is definitely an easy to synthesize rocket fuel but it not very reactive and not on the path to making other things you might want.
by themafia | 2025-08-27 01:22:27+00:00
> It undermines the prevailing media narrative that China is behind and backwater.

The prevailing narrative, particularly around hacker news, is that China is a dangerous foe and it's technological progress is a sign that we need to give our own government more money and less oversight so that we don't lose our "technological advantage."

> Americans don't like the idea that maybe China is actually rocketing past them technologically and infrastructurally

I don't buy this explanation given it's value to American propagandists. American society is naturally competitive. There's only two likely reasons why it doesn't get reported.

It's either not as true as the Chinese would like you to believe or American industry is already profiting off of it.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-08-27 01:23:10+00:00
Where are they claiming that?

For example, this is from their Flight 4 press release (https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-4):

"Flight 4 ended with Starship igniting its three center Raptor engines and executing the first flip maneuver and landing burn since our suborbital campaign, followed by a soft splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean one hour and six minutes after launch."

Note that they clearly say since the start of their suborbital campaign. And this from their Flight 6 press release (https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-6):

"Starship completed another successful ascent, placing it on the expected trajectory. The ship successfully reignited a single Raptor engine while in space, demonstrating the capabilities required to conduct a ship deorbit burn before starting fully orbital missions. With live views and telemetry being relayed by Starlink, the ship successfully made it through reentry and executed a flip, landing burn, and soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean."

And from today's pre-launch press release (https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-10):

"The Starship upper stage will again target multiple in-space objectives, including the deployment of eight Starlink simulators, similar in size to next-generation Starlink satellites. The Starlink simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and are expected to demise upon entry. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space is also planned."

To be fair, there were two press releases where they didn't correctly use "sub-orbital" and used orbital instead. Releases 3 and 9. Neither said they achieved orbit, but more causally talked about the "orbital coast" and the worst: "Starship's six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected orbit" from flight 3. It's true these statements are incorrect, but they aren't asserting a direct claim to having reached orbit (though they imply it), when they make an assertion about the nature of the program they seem fairly consistent in talking about their "suborbital campaign" as well as talking about their orbital missions being in the future.

The way I'm reading it, it looks like they get sloppy with language sometimes, but it doesn't look like they are directly asserting anything other than being in a suborbital program.
by anal_reactor | 2025-08-27 01:23:15+00:00
This statistic is complete bullshit because it relies on self-reporting. When you ask average person "do you speak English?" they understand "can you ask in English where toilet is?", not "can you consume content in English comfortably?". Ignoring this, sure, there are some countries where true bilingualism is common, but even there, most people are effectively monolingual consumers because what happens is that they just pick one favorite language and consume most content in that language.
by bluGill | 2025-08-27 01:23:29+00:00
We won't. while we don't know for sure if there is life there is nothing close enough to contact. The closest star is 4 light years, anything within 20 light years has been studied and has no signs of radio or other communication. Anything more than 20 light years is a 40 year message round trip - too far to establish contact in your likely lifetime. (If you are very young maybe 30 light years - but that doesn't add much)
by mlyle | 2025-08-27 01:23:50+00:00
I think "this is your missing analysis" is a strong assertion to make to another human-- that sounds like an invitation to argue the merits. Through text, we don't have the benefit of tone.

If your intention was to be curious about it, your comments don't convey that.

> Consider if you see everyone around you as the asshole who the asshole might be...

And now you're just effectively calling names.

If you want to talk about economic concepts in a forum like this, you should either ask questions or fill yourself in on the foundational knowledge.
by alt187 | 2025-08-27 01:23:51+00:00
The proximity with that rough cultural area is only incidental, I think. In fact, I think if you sit around for 10 mlre years, the tide will have entirely turned.

I'm not gonna get into detail, but for me, some defining elements:

- A compulsive need to criticize, demean and replace every piece of code written in C by Rust (rarely, it's another language).

- A willingness and strong activism to separate from figures that created the FOSS landscape, like Richard Stallman.

- A sort of laxism towards non-free software, and a particularly cringy hype towards corporate lip service paid to OSS, or trojan horses.

- Subtle propositions made to consolide FOSS communities around centralized services, and promiting those.

This isn't exhaustive, because it's just off the top of my head.
by tavavex | 2025-08-27 01:23:59+00:00
It's mind-boggling and insane how hostile YT became to multilingualism. You'd think that out of the hundreds of people involved in this project, at least one would've been bilingual and experienced this hostility firsthand. I can't even come up with any explanations for how this happened, except for no one important being bilingual (or even having thought of bilingual people), and/or some kind of systemic flaw that lets these breaking changes slip into the final product.

YouTube doesn't care about the languages listed in your Google account, as everything else does. It doesn't care what content you watch. The algorithm seemingly takes your display language and forces poorly AI-translated content down your throat, more often than not completely obliterating any coherence the original video had. And this change is forced upon you, you must watch it in the language YouTube decides you have to watch it in.

There is a browser extension that reverts this behavior to how it used to be and makes YouTube load the proper audio track. What happens when that stops working?
by alexchantavy | 2025-08-27 01:24:02+00:00
This. The unintended side effect is worse and I feel like the only winners would be the lawyers in the middle.

There are many ways for a company to justify leaving a posting up if sued:

- candidate’s resume did not meet bar so company did not interview

- candidate could not be scheduled

- candidate was interviewed but did not pass

- offer was given to competing candidate but competitor rejected so company couldn’t fill position and still had to leave posting up

Companies would then need to keep super detailed records on job postings which is overhead, and then many would just choose to not publicly post to avoid the hassle
by pabs3 | 2025-08-27 01:24:54+00:00
A public git repository is even more interesting, for both ArchiveTeam Codearchiver, and Software Heritage. The latter offers an interface for saving code automatically.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Codearchiver https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software_Heritage https://archive.softwareheritage.org/save/
by bjornsing | 2025-08-27 01:25:47+00:00
I think it will be hard to expand psychiatry to that level while keeping it professional. The fundamental issue is that people ascribe personality flaws to others instinctually and also have strong feelings around being subjected to such treatment, in a way that they don’t have around sprained ankles. In everyday life it’s called badmouthing or trash-talking. It’s a part of human nature.
by autoexec | 2025-08-27 01:26:36+00:00
It's a safe bet that if they know about us at all they'll just stay away from us. Our media is filled with depictions of us killing aliens. There's little reason to think we'd accept them. We can't even get along with/accept other humans. Some people's first instinct will be to shoot them. Others will want to lock them up and experiment on them.

If aliens did come here they'd have to be very brave, powerful enough not to worry about what we'd do, or unaware of what we are.

I'm not too worried they'd kill us to protect themselves though. At the rate we're going, we'll kill ourselves off along with every other living thing on the planet long before we get out of our own solar system.
by kelnos | 2025-08-27 01:27:12+00:00
> They are objectively faster because you can click anywhere rather than moving a finger to a button or keeping one finger always on the button.

I have no problem with the current trackpad (and prefer it), but when I used a trackpad with dedicated buttons, i'd use my index finger to track and my thumb to click, so I wouldn't have to move my fingers around at all.

Regardless, why do we feel the need to argue with people's personal preferences? You don't have to agree with someone on this. It's fine. People can prefer other things.
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-27 01:27:25+00:00
These nutjobs still don't want to grasp the reality that the UFO sighting at Area 51 was the radar test of the A-12 prototype, which was made out of shiny unpainted titanium and done in the salt desert due to its properties of absorbing electromagnetic waves. And then some people that saw this around Roswell were spreading the rumor of UFOs because at the time that was the trend on television.

Always bet on stupidity, they'll say anything to get their 5 minutes of attention on TV / social media. I mean, there were even senate and court hearings over this. Over a rumor that was disproven decades ago.

The US (and probably by extend our species) has a serious education and information validation problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12

edit: Downvotes without comments create the downvote paradox, and kind of prove my point
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 01:28:34+00:00
The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.

Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
by o11c | 2025-08-27 01:28:50+00:00
That's completely missing the point of agency.

A slave lacks agency, despite being fully human and doing work. This is why almost every work of fiction involving slaves makes for terrible reading - because as readers, agency is the thing we demand from a story.

Or, for games that are fully railroaded - the problem is that the players lack agency, even though they are fully human and taking action. Games do try to come up with ways to make it feel like there is more agency than there really is (because The Dev Team Thinks of Everything is hard work), but even then - the most annoying part of the game is when you hit that wall.

Theoretically an AI could have agency (this is independent of AI being useful). But since I have yet to see any interesting AI, I am extremely skeptical of it happening before nuclear fusion becomes profitable.
by naveensundar | 2025-08-27 01:30:03+00:00
I think this is not a valid criticism.

By this criteria, you can then say many other non-psych conditions are not disorders.

What classifies as a disorder other than making life worse for someone?

There is no universal book given by a holy entity that we can read to classify something as normal or a disorder.

Why do we have arbitrary cutoffs for cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc?
by jibal | 2025-08-27 01:30:54+00:00
Mars is extraterrestrial. The sun is extraterrestrial. Even the moon is extraterrestrial.

And this article isn't about "coming here".

As for your claims about the motives of people seeking extraterrestrial life or even wanting there to be such life, they are beyond absurd. Likening it to religious faith: it is belief without evidence.
by mlyle | 2025-08-27 01:31:07+00:00
> We will have to pay more, and we should, for those things.

No. US labor costs are high and working conditions are better, in large part, because US labor is worth it and US productivity is high. That labor is spent in high value industries and is often highly skilled.

We should accept we're better at some things and trade according to the principle of comparative advantage.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-08-27 01:31:14+00:00
I'm not sure that a government that goes out of its way to try to silence political dissent and enforce social order through fear should be considered interested in the wellbeing of its people. [0][1][2]

[0]: https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/china-tran...

[1]: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/358765...

[2]: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/peng-shuai-china-disappeared-ho...
by nimih | 2025-08-27 01:31:56+00:00
It’s completely revitalized the group text I have with my siblings: seemingly every week, there are novel and extremely stupid uses of LLMs for us to discuss. For instance, earlier this month my sister spent hours posting entertaining excerpts from the Reddit forum where people discuss their AI “girlfriends/boyfriends,” which were some of the funniest things I’ve read in recent memory. Overall, it’s been a great topic that we can set aside our differences and bond over.

As to whether it’s worth the cost, societally probably not, but there’s not much I can personally do about that so I try not to think about it too much.
by pseudochemist | 2025-08-27 01:32:02+00:00
> I'm inclined to give them a pass. It's easy enough to figure out that it should be germanium and not gadolinium, and dyslexia already exists among scientists.

I’m not. If somewhat said Pi was 9.14 I think no one would give it a pass. It’s not like a misspelling. It’s an invalid element which is the chemistry equivalent of an absurdly wrong number in maths.
by lowbloodsugar | 2025-08-27 01:33:22+00:00
Couple of examples can think of off the top of my head from recording logs for analysis. 1. It might be better to buffer up logs, then sort on a different column than time. You may benefit from the delta encoding or prefix encoding. 2. If you have tracking info, which is usually a random like a UUID or something, then ditch it. Not debugging with this dataset so don’t waste the space on a crazy high noise column. Shit like that.
by tkgally | 2025-08-27 01:34:50+00:00
More than twenty years ago, I had fun tracing a similar phenomenon: English “proverbs” that appeared in English dictionaries and textbooks published in Japan but that did not seem to have any actual currency in English. It became clear that they had been copied from dictionary to dictionary for decades before large-scale corpora and search engines made it possible to check actual usage.

“Every man has his humo(u)r.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html

“Losers are always in the wrong.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html

In their heyday, dozens of English-Japanese dictionaries were published in Japan:

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html

Producing an original dictionary from scratch would have been expensive and time consuming, so most publishers borrowed liberally from each other.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-08-27 01:34:58+00:00
I can imagine an automated blackmail bot that scrapes image, video, voice samples from anyone with the most meagre online presence, which then creates high resolution videos of that person doing the most horrid acts, then threatening to share those videos with that person's family, friends and business contacts unless they are paid $5000 in a cryptocurrency to an anonymous address.

And further, I can imagine some person actually having such footage of themselves being threatened to be released, then using the former narrative as a cover story were it to be released. Is there anything preventing AI generated images, video, etc from being always detectible by software that can intuit if something is AI? what if random noise is added, would the "Is AI" signal persist just as much as the indication to human that the footage seems real?
by WASDAai | 2025-08-27 01:35:08+00:00
Imagine an AI system in a hospital that can predict a patient’s risk of a heart attack. A doctor inputs a patient’s information – things like their age, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, whether they smoke, and family history. A conventional AI might spit out a single verdict: “High risk: around a nine-in-ten chance of a heart attack in the next decade.” Impressive, but also alarming. The doctor is left scratching their head, wondering why the risk is so high and what to do about it. Is it mainly the patient’s cholesterol? Their blood pressure? The fact that they’ve been a lifelong smoker? If the risk is so extreme, how could we reduce it?
by phs318u | 2025-08-27 01:35:25+00:00
Most posts are rightly focusing on the dangers of the lethal trifecta. Nevertheless, Anthropic have got a reasonable set of safeguards in place e.g. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/12012173-getting-s... (obviously they're still in a learning phase; Thanks users^H^H^H^Hbeta-testers!)

However, I think the "Skip All Permissions" (high-risk) mode shouldn't even exist.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-08-27 01:36:00+00:00
What's surprising is that people are still resorting to this silly complaint about not reaching orbit when there's a perfectly sensible complain they could be making instead: that SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that they can reach orbit and return safely. The safe return is important because I would expect a failure to return safely to be a big deal: it's not like this thing is going to completely burn up if they don't have control during a deorbit. The inadequate retry thermal protection is a large issue even if the Ship has managed to get to the landing areas on target and soft land in the right spot: the burn through on the control surfaces seems to mean that was as much luck as good engineering that the thing didn't crash somewhere less intended.

I appreciate none of that is as pithy as saying it simply didn't reach orbit, but it's a real concern versus something that is really irrelevant.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-08-27 01:36:47+00:00
It’s even more nuanced than that.

You could pilot a crewed vehicle without a license, but that is, usually, not lawful. You might not be a pilot, but you would be piloting.

You are a pilot if you have a license, and you usually cannot obtain a license without having flown a plane with instructional personnel.

In some places you may pilot a drone for which you don’t have to maintain a license or registration.
by ojbyrne | 2025-08-27 01:37:05+00:00
I was just looking at water usage in the Las Vegas area and found that one Google data center in Henderson consumes 320 million gallons a year. Just for comparison I looked at golf courses in the area and 1 golf course consumed 450 million gallons.

I see quite a few golf course near The Dalles, Oregon. (“The” is actually part of the town name).
by tavavex | 2025-08-27 01:37:39+00:00
> This statistic is complete bullshit because it relies on self-reporting.

Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find the primary source for those numbers (everyone says 43%, quoting each other), but my assumption for anything that quantifies people across the entire planet is that it's probably not based on polling, but making statistical inferences and relying on other data from individual countries, so a mix of different things.

Regardless, even if you disagree with that number, true fluency in multiple languages is still extremely common. And it's not just countries that have multiple official languages. People from one country who live close to another country with a similar language will commonly be fluent in both. Depending on your culture, you may be exposed to English to an extent where you'll have a good understanding of it. Try talking to a Dutch person in their language without being fluent in it.

And sure, if what you're watching is news or knitting videos, you'll watch them in your first language. The reason why I watch content in another language is because there's often stuff that doesn't even exist in my own. Lots of people with bad formal English education became proficient in English because of the internet, they want to consume English-speaking content because the English internet is far larger and more international than, say, the Norwegian, Polish or Korean internet.

It's very, very common.
by k310 | 2025-08-27 01:37:44+00:00
Short: conservative investor blames DEI for company downturn, and "woke" executives rather than changing customer preferences, rapidly rising costs of everything,[0] and an outside agency hired to transform the business.

Oh, I forgot, the article is at Fox.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-day-one-post-eggs-ga...

"When I win," he declared, "I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1" ... Snopes.
by floating-io | 2025-08-27 01:38:03+00:00
Absolutely!

I think there are still a few unique tiles on Starship around joints and such IIRC, but either way, the number of tile types is much smaller for Starship.

To my thinking, the sane sequence will be launch; catch; survey and maintain (heat shield and other items); and then launch again 24 hours later if everything checks out.

And that will be an absolutely massive improvement over what we have today, let alone what we had with the Shuttle.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed...
by sbuttgereit | 2025-08-27 01:38:46+00:00
They're never reaching orbital velocity on purpose. The reason is that they're still proving that they can fire rockets and deorbit under control; until they do that, any problem automatically puts the ship in the ocean no matter what while if they go to orbit and can't control the deorbit they end up possibly causing a disaster.

Now, they are getting it to pretty damn close to orbital velocity... which is why saying they still haven't reached orbit is a bit silly. They're clearly technically able to reach orbit if they really want to... that they haven't proved they can safely leave orbit is the problem.