MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-07 21:49:35+00:00
> There was a similar idea/proposal for extracting aluminum from Lunar regolith, also a good space mission for private interests.

With the asteroids, I assume the idea is to bring enough platinum and gold back to Earth to offset the costs of getting them from space. That doesn't sound especially realistic, but in the right circumstances I guess it could be.

With aluminum on the moon or iron on Mars, that will never happen. You'd have to want to use those materials on location.

So what would the value be of producing aluminum on the moon?
by taberiand | 2025-09-07 21:49:50+00:00
At only 20k a month, the work put into reducing the bill back down probably costs more in man hours than the saving, time which would presumably be better spent building profitable features that more than make up for the incremental cloud cost. Assuming of course the low hanging fruit of things like oversized instances, unconstrained cloudwatch logs and unterminated volumes have all been taken care of.
by glenstein | 2025-09-07 21:50:14+00:00
>That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term

While I have a lot of problems with their comment (which I elaborated on in a reply of my own), I don't think that using it as a catch-all term is a problem (to the extent that they would agree with that characterization). In fact, I think it's truer to the spirit of the problem than the definition that you're offering. I think a lot of times when people make the objection that we haven't defined it, they're not just saying we haven't selected from one of several available permutations, I take it to mean that there's a fundamental sense in which the idea itself hasn't agreeably crystallized into a definition, which among other things, is a meta question about which of the competing definitions is the right one to use.

I do think there is a tension in that position, because it creates a chicken and egg problem where you can't research it until you define it, but you can't define it until you research it. But I think there's a way out of it by treating them in as integrally related, and taking a practical attitude of believing in the possibility of progress without yet having a final answer in hand.

I understand that this notion of self-reflecting for some people is key, but I think choosing to prioritize other things can be for good reasons rather than, as you seem to be contending, having accidentally skipped the step of selecting a preferred definition from a handful of alternatives, and not having selected the best one. My feeling is much closer to that of the article, at least in a certain way, which is about the fact that there's "something it's like to be" at all, prior to the question of whether there's self-reflection.

In fact, I'd be curious to know what you call the mental state of being for such things as creatures with a kind of outwardly directed awareness of world, with qualia, with "something it's like to be", but which fall short of having self-reflective mental states. Because if your term for such things is that they don't involve consciousness I think it's not the GP who is departing from appropriate definitions. And if self-reflection is necessarily implied in the having of such things as qualia, then you could say it's implicitly accounted for by someone who wants to talk about qualia.
by lokar | 2025-09-07 21:51:16+00:00
I agree, it's probably the law (not just in the US, but most places). But, IME, it's almost universally ignored, and has to be.

I've never worked in fab/manufacturing, but I assume if you buy a bunch of gear from ASML (100s of millions of $), they are going to send a team out to help set it up and get it working for you. How else could that work? Some story for advanced batteries.

And a similar story for large (multi-national) tech/software companies. People need to travel back and forth between sites. Getting "work" visas for these short visits would be impractical.

Why are you happy to see a crack down? How do you think this should work?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-07 21:51:41+00:00
I think I agree ( with some asterisks ). On this very forum, at one point someone suggested that lspci is some sort of higher level of command that is some sort of sign that the person is competent. They were not even arguing proxy for something else, but suggested that just knowing it somehow indicates a person that knows that area.

Obviously, knowing one command is not mastery. It is not even competence for that matter. It is just one piece of information and how you use it determines whether you are considered competent or not.

I work in heavily regulated corporate and I sometimes yearn for a fintech or other startup, but, honestly, after all those years, I am not sure if I even would make it. My mind has not been built for competent. It was built for compliance and CYA.
by mdp2021 | 2025-09-07 21:52:05+00:00
> starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't

"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).

So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
by will4274 | 2025-09-07 21:52:06+00:00
I actually think this attitude is the reason modules are so slowly adopted. The committee did exactly what you suggest and relegated the preprocessor to the dustbin and modules are seeing slow adoption.

The truth is 98% of the preprocessor is fine - it's ifdefs for platforms and defines of constants and inline functions that are defined exactly once and never redefined. Because modules supports none of this, that means we can't modulize Windows.h. Or zlib. Or gtest.

The committee should have remembered that one of the selling points of C++ is C compatibility, and figured out a way to get modules to work with 98% or the preprocessor and forbid only the nasty 2%.
by userbinator | 2025-09-07 21:52:31+00:00
They call it "calibration" when it's presumably nothing more than writing a serial number to an EEPROM somewhere. See also the related story of sabotaging iPad screens to work but subtly degrade when the serials don't match, and cameras that only semi-work when swapped (with genuine original Apple parts). This type of pathological lying that Apple loves to do is why I'll never buy or recommend to others any of their products.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955071

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36926276
by MBCook | 2025-09-07 21:52:44+00:00
I hate this argument. Android exists. It’s 50% of the phones out there.

If Garmin’s products are so amazing why aren’t they killing it with Android users?

From other people in these comments sounds like their own software quality is holding the back.

If not being on the iPhone was truly the main problem, they’d be doing way better.
by alphazard | 2025-09-07 21:53:15+00:00
If the utilities didn't get any subsidies from the government then it wouldn't be an issue. Electricity costs would increase as demand shifts out, the excess surplus for the power company would allow them to invest in more infrastructure. The big customers would contribute more to the new infra because they buy more electricity.

However if utility companies do get subsidies to spend on infra, then it doesn't matter how much electricity a person buys, the money is coming from taxes separately from how much electricity anyone is buying. This would allow large consumers to take advantage of tax payers to build the infra to shift out the supply, which mostly benefits the large consumers.

The TLDR is that this is a known drawback of utility monopolies and subsidies, and if you took those away it wouldn't matter how much electricity anyone was using, it would all sort itself out with prices.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-07 21:53:58+00:00
One of the items off the Serverless Horrors submission from today.

https://serverlesshorrors.com/all/aws-13k/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45157110

As noted in comments, AWS no longer charges for bad/unarhorized requests. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/08/amazon-s3...

The Serverless Horrors submission has some pretty amazing scenarios in it. Truly scary surprises!
by parsimo2010 | 2025-09-07 21:54:18+00:00
Well if you want to be completely literal, then you’re right. It also isn’t literally a Tandy 1000.

But if you actually comprehended the article, the author said that you use your phone to perform all those functions. The iPhone can replace all of those functions you listed. It is water resistant and has a speaker. It does not have an AM/FM station but most broadcast radio stations also have a live stream that you can get in your phone. The iPhone came with earbuds when this article was written. It had a calculator app on day one, and it’s just fine. You don’t have literal CB but you can use a variety of apps to communicate with voice in real time. You can’t play the literal CDs but you can’t play the literal .wav files on the CDs.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-07 21:54:32+00:00
> Do you assume they just came one morning and decided to write PB without taking a look at what existed?

Considering how bad an imitation of 1984 ASN.1 PB's IDL is, and how bad an imitation of 1984 DER PB is, yes I assume that PB's creators did not in fact know ASN.1 well. They almost certainly knew of ASN.1, and they almost certainly did not know enough about it because all the worst mistakes in ASN.1 PB re-created while adding zero new ideas or functionality. It's a terrible shame.
by pchiusano | 2025-09-07 21:55:16+00:00
The Unison language supports algebraic effects and optimizes handlers that call their continuation at most once in tail position (we call these "affine"), so you can have the best of both worlds. Some links at the end if you're curious.

Here are a few places where "multi-resumable" stacks are still useful, even outside of nondeterminism:

* For instance, in a workflow engine a la Temporal, a `sleep` primitive might serialize and store the continuation in a distributed priority queue. The workarounds of not having access to the continuation are all not nearly as good.

* A pure interpreter of a structured concurrency ability is quite useful for testing, since it can test different interleavings of threads and produce tests that fail or pass deterministically. For Unison Cloud's distributed programming API, we have an (in-progress) chaos monkey interpreter that you can use for local testing of distributed systems.

* You can implement a simple debugger... as a library. It lets you set breakpoints and go forwards and backwards in time. Here's an example: https://share.unison-lang.org/@pchiusano/stepwise

Basically, any time you want to stash and do something interesting with the continuation, even if you only end up ultimately using it once, you still need the more general form of algebraic effects.

And then there are various nondeterminism effects that do call the continuation more than once. I'd say these are somewhat niche, but when you need them, you need them, and the code comes out much nicer. I especially like it for testing. You generally want tests to just be the logic, not a bunch of looping code or map/flatMap.

Some links:

* https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pchiusano_dan-doel-has-been-d... has some details on the optimization we do in Unison

* https://dolio.unison-services.cloud/s/blog/posts/optimizing-... is Dan's blog post on optimizing affine handlers

* https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pchiusano_kestrel-is-a-higher... is a typed query DSL that uses nondeterminism in an interesting way. For a declarative query DSL, it's nice to avoid explicit looping, similar to what SQL does.
by ben_w | 2025-09-07 21:57:12+00:00
You’d have spent $3054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5100 in 2012 dollars.

For a fancy but not top-end device, we pay one third, or one fifth inflation adjusted, not three times as much.

For a budget device, we pay, what, 2%? Not 2% less, just 2%.
by reducesuffering | 2025-09-07 21:58:25+00:00
That's about oral ingestion as a food additive. I would also not recommend eating chemical-based sunscreen lotions...

From your link: "There are currently no indications that the use of titanium dioxide in cosmetic products is harmful to the health of consumers if the legal requirements are complied with. Titanium dioxide is not absorbed dermally, i.e. through the skin, and consequently not by application of skin care products containing titanium dioxide. In several opinions on titanium dioxide nanoparticles in sunscreens the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) has considered absorption via the skin of no concern according to the current state of knowledge when applied to both intact and sunburn-damaged skin."
by areoform | 2025-09-07 21:59:59+00:00
Then what stops this "counter-measure" from "working?" Could they not just "flash with a different ROM or something" to allow the part to work normally?

I genuinely doubt that the level of theft ever rose to a large enough margin, if it did, Apple would have pulled out of China.

For reference, Apple employs ex-NSA, CIA, TLA professionals to solve this exact problem with a near endless budget and 0 oversight and accountability.

Most notably, one of the organisational leaders was caught bribing the sheriff's office for concealed carry permits, https://www.ft.com/content/e73676d7-c6bc-4b07-b9bf-9bd702f1f... / https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/29/apples_chief_security...
by Doxin | 2025-09-07 22:00:05+00:00
I've heard it described as 3d having the effort front-loaded: you make models that need to look good from ~all angles, but then you can basically play with them like dolls.

2d on the other hand has the effort more spread out: you don't need to do much up front, but you need to do a drawing for every single frame.

I can see how 3d would be worth it, even if more effort total, if you expect to make sequels.

I think another issue is there's too much design by committee going on, too much aiming for "sure things", too many studio notes. Not enough trying to make something good. It's hardly surprising that if you don't aim to make something good you won't make something good. That's not a dig on the animators etc involved, I'm sure they are giving their best but they are operating in a system that does not have as goal to make art.
by d10 | 2025-09-07 22:00:14+00:00
I've also experimented with Go for both frontend and backend, using WASM. The approach I took was build the client-side like a backend service. What I mean is, some (normal) requests from the browser reach the hosted server, while others reach the local WASM. That code running locally is written like a server, i.e. HTTP handlers.

It's definitely experimental. In my experience it pairs well with HTMX or Unpoly for a good UI. You can see a live demo at https://clientcide.d10.dev/.
by eightys3v3n | 2025-09-07 22:00:39+00:00
I consider it to be so because the product cannot be taken away through any form of update after you have started using it without the cloud account. At that point it's basically a purchasing account and is functionally useless after that. Though I do understand the frustration. I hope Pebble releases something that is cloud free and no-service usable.
by brudgers | 2025-09-07 22:00:46+00:00
Realistically, might I be able to make meaningful contributions do these fields as a part-time amateur?

Logically? yes.

Realistically? Most likely not because scientific fields are shared human endeavors, share human endeavors are undertaken by communities, and for better or worse you are not a member of those communities.

So you are not connected to the pulse of problems people within the communities are currently interested in and don’t have relationships that will get your papers read by members of the community. Only freshmen get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to endless September.

On the other hand, publishing your work is as simple as wordpress.com or Youtube. So if the work is important to you, there are no meaningful impediments to putting it out there. People might not care, but if the work is meaningful to you that won’t matter.

Of course, the simplest way to join the community is to do the things the community expects of its members…grad school. Good luck.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-07 22:02:24+00:00
Because (1) they are at or near capacity, (2) they are very costly to operate so those 'reasonable rates' are very hard to come by when using nuclear as power source. There are other, cheaper sources for power than nuclear that are more in line with what data center operators are willing to pay. There has been some talk of data centers with their own power plants. But usually that centers on fossil fuels rather than on nuclear.

There are some efforts in that direction though:

https://neutronbytes.com/2025/05/07/google-plans-three-600-m...

And I'm aware of a much smaller scale project in Europe besides this one and there are probably others.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-07 22:03:06+00:00
Sadly, I have to agree. I was fortunate to work for a company that absolutely insisted that I take full personal Responsibility and Accountability for my work.

I was there for almost 27 years, so had plenty of time to deal with the consequences of my decisions.

They were insane about Quality, so testing has always been a big part of my work, and still is, though I haven't been at that company for eight years.
Show HN: Claude Context but local – semantic code search without API keys
by farhan99 | 2025-09-07 22:03:27+00:00
Hi HN! I built a local alternative to Claude Context (the popular semantic code search tool).

The original requires OpenAI API keys for embeddings and Zilliz Cloud for vector storage. This version runs entirely on your machine using EmbeddingGemma and FAISS.

Key differences: - No API keys needed (uses local EmbeddingGemma model) - Your code never leaves your machine - Zero ongoing costs - Same semantic search quality

Technical details: - Tree-sitter for AST parsing to understand code structure - EmbeddingGemma (1.2GB) for semantic embeddings - FAISS for fast vector similarity search - MCP protocol for integration with Claude Code and other AI tools

Early benchmarks show ~70% reduction in token usage for Claude Code when searching large codebases.

Supports most major languages through Tree-sitter parsers - Python, JS/TS, Go, Java, JSX/TSX, Svelte, with more coming.

GitHub: https://github.com/FarhanAliRaza/claude-context-local

Would love feedback, especially on the approach to code chunking and embedding strategy!
by throw0101c | 2025-09-07 22:03:33+00:00
> The last coup was quite a stretch.

Yes, but it still shows the mindset (of some) in the military.

And military action against government wasn't a new thing in Japan either:

> Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated by 11 young naval officers. The following trial and popular support of the Japanese population led to extremely light sentences for the assassins, strengthening the rising power of Japanese militarism and weakening democracy and the rule of law in the Empire of Japan.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_incident

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan
by oarla | 2025-09-07 22:03:44+00:00
13B it’s not entirely from treasuries. The breakdown is 7B from treasuries —> probably from the methods you described 5B from Gold —> believable if you notice how gold has done in 2024 1B from other sources. No idea what they are.

The article mentions that tether may not have been audited by a third party. So I’m not sure how believable these numbers are.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-09-07 22:03:44+00:00
Wow, cool, but is it a good thing? It's a bummer that so much of computing has moved from content creation devices to content consumption devices. Desktop applications can be more advanced than mobile apps, there's just inherent limitations on the mobile input methods and OS. Though if you're playing games or browsing the web, touching and swiping works great.

Don't even get me started on the fact that only one tech giant allows you to run code on your mobile OS without their permission, and next year we're even losing that. Because the other tech giant normalized taking away the freedom.
by glenstein | 2025-09-07 22:03:55+00:00
I certainly agree with your assessment that it's got multiple definitions and intuitions of all sorts, and that they cause chaos, and that one way of making progress is by isolating those out and clarifying.

I'm not sure I agree with this idea that the essence of consciousness is self-reflection, because that seems to exclude important things. It seems like there might be simple states of being that involve some kind of phenomenal (in the philosophy sense) experience, some amount of qualia, some amount of outwardly directed awareness, some amount of "something it's like to be". And it seems to me that there might be life forms for whom there's an engagement with an interaction with that phenomena that involves having internal mental states, but that might not necessarily have self-reflection. It might be something closer to instinctual functioning or response to incentive. It recently blew my mind to learn that there's studies strongly suggesting honey bees are conscious. And from my perspective that raises questions for things all the way down to fruit flies. It seems like there might be a continuum a simple states through complex ones and that some of the simpler ones might not include self-awareness.

If such a thing as sense of self is necessarily implicit in such a way that satisfies that definition, anytime we talk about qualia, then it would seem to be a moot point. Which raises another issue, which is that some of these things might be correctly regarded as entangled, and having an integral relation between them.

I also think I kind of agree and disagree about qualia being well defined. I think it's probably the closest to what most people have in mind when they say there's no such thing as a definition of consciousness. And I think it's a sense of despair toward the broader research project of tying an understanding of qualia to an understanding of the physical world that relies on third-person descriptions.

Now all of that said you seem like you don't have an attitude of treating the definition problem as one that preempts and stops everything, so there's a pretty fundamental way in which I'm probably in agreement with you more than disagreement. I think that clarifications of the type that you're talking about give us everything we need to iterate forward in a constructive way in talking about it and researching it.
by jdlshore | 2025-09-07 22:04:14+00:00
All health insurance plans in the US are private-market.* You may be confusing ACA-compliant plans (private insurance that's allowed to be listed on healthcare.gov and is eligible for subsidies) with non-ACA-compliant plans (not allowed to be listed on healthcare.gov, not eligible for subsidies).

Be careful about non-ACA-compliant plans. They're cheaper because they engage in sketchy behaviors that leave you without coverage when you need it.

*Well, except Medicaid, Medicare, etc.