MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-10-20 11:45:17+00:00
Discomfort only kicks in under more extreme conditions. We're talking about very mild asphyxiation that is not noticeable but degrades mental and physical performance.

CO2 outdoors has gone from about 280ppm to 420ppm in the last hundred years. If we kept going for another century it could approach 1000ppm, which is where you start seeing these effects.

The scary question is whether there is any effect at 420ppm. We don't think so, but very marginal effects are hard to detect. Yet a global loss of an average of 5 IQ points would have significant large scale effects on society. It's also possible that it doesn't affect all people equally, since most things don't.

There have been times in Earth's history where CO2 concentrations were in the thousands of ppm, but there were no humans then.
by bdangubic | 2025-10-20 11:46:18+00:00
> Is there a reason why AI cannot be far better than Google at providing results to queries?

There isn't just like there isn't any reason why Bing or Duck could have overtaken Google all these years.

> but it is completely logical that they would.

Logical yes, there are a lot of things that are logical, actually making something logical practical is whole other thing...

> it appears that Google just sells off placement to the highest bidder

They have been doing this for years while their search and other business has been growing and growing...

> these AIs could easily beat that by giving free AI access in exchange for nibbling at the queries and adding a tab of 'sponsored results'

agree 100% on everything here except easily part :)
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-20 11:47:09+00:00
Fascinating, thanks for sharing this.

I found this summary:

https://fortune.com/2025/07/31/amazon-aws-ai-andy-jassy-earn...

And the transcript (there’s an annoying modal obscuring a bit of the page, but it’s still readable):

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4807281-amazon-com-inc-amzn...

(search for the word “tough”)
by philipallstar | 2025-10-20 11:47:26+00:00
> If your company is in anything finance-adjacent or critical infrastructure then you need to be able to cope with a single region of AWS failing

That still fits in with "almost guarantee". It's not as though it's true for everyone, e.g. people who might trigger DR after 10 minutes of downtime, and have it up and running within 30 more minutes.

But it is true for almost everyone, as most people will trigger it after 30 minutes or more, which, plus the time to execute DR, is often going to be far less than the AWS resolution time.

Best of all would be just multi-everything services from the start, and us-east-1 is just another node, but that's expensive and tricky with state.
by Nextgrid | 2025-10-20 11:48:29+00:00
Yeah that's the issue - nobody wants to just rent you a gaming PC in the cloud, they all want a cut of game sales/licensing. But if someone were to do it, the technology is absolutely there.

You don't even need to create any internal tech - Steam Remote Play already has everything you need, and I successfully used it to play Battlefield from an AWS GPU instance (was even good enough for multiplayer).
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-20 11:49:02+00:00
The "unlimited dollars" come from somewhere after all.

GCP is behind in market share, but has the incredible cheat advantage of just not being Amazon. Most retailers won't touch Amazon services with a ten foot pole, so the choice is GCP or Azure. Azure is way more painful for FOSS stacks, so GCP has its own area with only limited competition.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-20 11:49:13+00:00
There is no "hard error of logic" in saying "humans were created by God" either. There's just no evidence pointing towards it, and an ever-mounting pile of evidence pointing otherwise.

Now, what does compel someone to go against a pile of evidence this large and prop up an unsupported hypothesis that goes against it not just as "a remote and unlikely possibility, to be revisited if any evidence supporting it emerges", but as THE truth?

Sheer wishful thinking. Humans are stupid dumb fucks.

Most humans have never "contributed to frontier research maths" in their entire lives either. I sure didn't, I'm a dumb fuck myself. If you set the bar of "human level intelligence" at that, then most of humankind is unthinking cattle.

"Advanced mathematical reasoning" is a highly specific skill that most humans wouldn't learn in their entire lives. Is it really a surprise that LLMs have a hard time learning it too? They are further along it than I am already.
by tim333 | 2025-10-20 11:50:07+00:00
In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-20 11:50:09+00:00
There's also the issue of the vehicle on the space elevator falling back to Earth if it detaches from the space elevator (accidentally or deliberately in case of malfunction that stops it from moving up). This means each vehicle will need rockets on it. At low altitude, the rockets are fired to keep the vehicle from reentering the atmosphere too fast at a steep angle, killing the passengers. At high altitude, the rockets fire to raise the perigee enough that the vehicle misses the atmosphere entirely (or enters at a very shallow survivable angle). There's a cross over point that dictates the delta V the rocket must be able to deliver. which if I vaguely recall correctly is greater than 4 km/s.

Pure payload capsules with no passengers wouldn't need this.

The argument for space elevators is that there's a pretty strong limit on how much payload can be launched by rockets due to injection of water into the upper atmosphere. Starship could arguably reach this limit with plausible projected growth rates in traffic.
by matsemann | 2025-10-20 11:50:43+00:00
"Is that also your contingency plan if unrelated X happens", and "make sure your investors know" are also not exactly good faith or without snark, mind you.

I get your point, but most companies don't need Y nines of uptime, heck, many should probably not even use AWS, k8s, serverless or whatever complicated tech gives them all these problems at all, and could do with something far simpler.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-20 11:52:25+00:00
You make a good point.

This part:

> access to computing power, storage, databases, and other IT resources

could be simplified to: access to computer servers

Most people who know little about computers can still imagine a giant mainframe they saw in a movie with a bunch of blinking lights. Not so different, visually, from a modern data center.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-20 11:52:50+00:00
But that's the thing - if I have an ops guy who can cover this then sure it makes sense - but who does at an early stage ? As a semi competent dev I can setup a terraform infra and be relatively safe with RDS. I could maybe figure out how to do it on my own in some time - but I don't know what I don't know - and I don't want to do a weekend production DB outage debugging because I messed up the replication setup or something. Maybe I'm getting old but I just don't have the energy to deal with that :)
by ho_schi | 2025-10-20 11:53:01+00:00
The internet is a weak infrastructure, relying on a few big cables and data centers. And through AWS and Cloudflare it has become worse? Was it ever true, that the internet is resilient? I doubt.

Resilient systems work autonomously and can synchronize - but don't need to synchronize.

* Git is resilient. * Native E-Mail clients - with local storage enabled - are somewhat resilient. * A local package repository is - somewhat resilient. * A local file-sharing app (not Warp/ Magic-Wormhole -> needs relay) is resilient if it uses only local WiFi or Bluetooth.

We're building weak infrastructure. A lot of stuff shall work locally and only optionally use the internet.
by rswail | 2025-10-20 11:53:24+00:00
I had a problem with an ACME cert terraform module. It was doing the R53 to add the DNS TXT record for the ACME challenge and then querying the change status from R53.

R53 seems to use Dynamo to keep track of the syncing of the DNS across the name servers, because while the record was there and resolving, the change set was stuck in PENDING.

After DynamoDB came back up, R53's API started working.
by js8 | 2025-10-20 11:53:30+00:00
I feel the same, too many people doing similar stuff in slightly different syntax, too few people looking at how things are similar and could be unified.

I think it's time to look beyond syntax in programming and untyped lambda calculus is the simplest choice (that is universal and can easily express new abstractions).

Mathematics suffers to some extent from a similar problem, but recent formalization efforts are really tackling it.
by jiggawatts | 2025-10-20 11:54:31+00:00
> xz is a rare event too.

The discovery of the hack is rare, sure. Once a decade kind of thing.

The implication is that Jia Tan is a professional, and XZ was one of many irons on the fire.

Don’t be like Trump!

Don’t confuse positive tests with cases!

Jia Tan surely had many other attacks going.

Surely he’s not the only one.

Famously, there are two kinds of large organisations: those that have been hacked, and those that don’t yet know they’ve been hacked.

The open source community was the latter.

Now they’re the former.

Some of you all are still playing catch up.
by theamk | 2025-10-20 11:54:42+00:00
And the first thing you do to them is to convert them to binary.

Look at any Ethernet PHY for example - you have that nice 5-level signal coming on.. and the first thing you do is feed it into AFE/ADC so you get digital signals that you can actually work with.

So yes, in some specific situations, like Flash memory or interconnects, there are multi-level signals. But the computing itself is always binary.
by pfdietz | 2025-10-20 11:55:23+00:00
A space elevator is kind of like a vertical mass driver, so just build one of those along the surface of the moon with modest acceleration, survivable by passengers.

Rotating cables ("rotavators") on the moon seem much more practical than full space elevators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_exchange_tether#Rotov...
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 11:55:27+00:00
> Everytime somebody comes up with a new programming language, I am like, yeah, so you added these abstraction, just in a different syntax.

I got this feeling too, until I started to explore languages outside of the C/Algol-like syntaxes. There is a wide range of languages out there, from array languages to lisps, and they don't give me the feeling of "just a different syntax" but actually changed the way I think.

So yeah, I love lisp now and spend most of my days writing it, but it also comes with the downside that now Java, C# and Golang look more similar than different to each other.

> It would also allow to build a library of universal optimizations, etc. So I think programmers would benefit from having a single universal language.

I think assuming everyone would use the same hardware, same environment and same workflows to solve the same problems, this would make a lot of sense and would be hugely beneficial!

But in reality lots of problems need different solutions, which has to be made in different ways, by different people who think differently. So because the world is plural, we need many programming languages too. Overall I feel like that's a benefit.
by dzaima | 2025-10-20 11:55:51+00:00
I'd perhaps generalize that to "it's useful to have visual grouping correlate with semantic grouping"; applies to separating words with spaces, sentences with punctuation, paragraphs with newlines, lines of code, UIs, and much more.

An important question for this also is what qualifies for "single thing"; you can look at a "for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) sum += arr[i]" as like 5 or more things (separate parts), 2 things (loop, body), or just one thing ("sum"). What array languages enable is squeezing quite a bit into the space of "single thing" (though I personally don't go as far as the popular k examples of ultra-terseness).
by psychoslave | 2025-10-20 11:56:38+00:00
This is planning future based on best things in the past. Not completely irrational and if you can't afford plan B, okayish.

But thinking AWS SLA is granted forever, and everyone should put all its eggs in it because "everyone do it" is neither wise not safe. Those who can afford it, and there are many businesses like that out there, should have a plan B. And actually AWS should not necessarily be plan A.

Nothing is forever. Not the Roman empire, not Inca empire, not china dynasties, not USA geological supremacy. That's not a question of if but when. It doesn't need to be through a lot of suffering, but if we don't systematically organise for a humanity which spread well being for everyone in a systematically resilient way, we will make it through more lot of tragic consequences when this or that single point of failure finally falls.
by reactordev | 2025-10-20 11:57:54+00:00
This is a good read.

A couple years ago I introduced my daughter to Bill Nye’s show. She knew of Bill Nye but didn’t know why he was famous. I always told her “he had a show on TV” but we never bothered to go hunt down an episode until she was 17.

We watched it together.

And oh my god is that the most ADD show of all time. Every 5 seconds was a bang/whiz/fact/cut/weird thing. How on earth did I watch this and actually keep track of it? Was I high on sugar? Was my brain just rapid firing that all of this was perceived as a single episode with masterful writing as would make a soap opera cry? From the outside looking in 30 years later, I’m convinced I was just hyper and a nerd and this show just somehow made sense to me.
by kldg | 2025-10-20 11:58:19+00:00
a democracy would be neat; we have a representative democracy here, so I can only vote for one of two candidates with a plausible chance of being elected, neither of who(m, if you must) have a coherent policy on AI or general disbursement of product, and even if they did, would be unable to convince the existing power structures in legislature to do something bold. probably better for mental health to accept a lot of these things (progression of AI or regulation of it, healthcare, etc) as variables in the environment we just live with, and focus on local/personal things.

we do actually have real democracy in this state, where we have binding referendums, but legislature is able to act faster than we're allowed to, to work around and nullify the policy we vote for. -so voting is fine; nothing wrong with it; but I guess I just worry, oftentimes, people get too involved in it and attached to movements which can accomplish something one day only for it to be reversed by the end of the decade. feels like the two sides are getting angrier and angrier, spinning their wheels in dysfunctional politics, and we can't have a functional government in this environment; one side guts government to replace with loyalists, then the other guts it again in a few years to replace the partisans, to replace with their own partisans. meanwhile, national debt just keeps climbing as people swarm into gold.

my compost piles, though -- not directly, but I can eat that; I can feed people with that. you know, you want to solve hunger -- you can contribute directly to food pantries. it's more work than voting, but something actually happens. -and almost all the regulation government cares about relates to capitalism; they don't care about my carrots because my carrots don't engage in capitalism. -and for some people in some circumstances, it doesn't take too much engagement with capitalism to be able to get $100k or whatever you need for a plot of land with electricity in a rural area if you plan out for it.

Herbert, as an aside, expressed a kind of appreciation for Nixon. His son wrote in a foreword to some edition of a Dune book I read mentioning this. He was glad the corruption was exposed and so blatant, because now, surely, voters would see how bad things became and will not let it happen again. Optimistic guy.
Show HN: Playwright Skill for Claude Code – Less context than playwright-MCP
by syntax-sherlock | 2025-10-20 11:58:35+00:00
I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit, so I built this using the new Claude Skills system. Built it with Claude Code itself.

Instead of sending accessibility tree snapshots on every action, Claude just writes Playwright code and runs it. You get back screenshots and console output. That's it.

314 lines of instructions vs a persistent MCP server. Full API docs only load if Claude needs them.

Same browser automation, way less overhead. Works as a Claude Code plugin or manual install.

Token limit issue: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp/issues/889

Claude Skills docs: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills
by 7thaccount | 2025-10-20 11:59:24+00:00
I think it's a simple abstraction situation and the move for programming environments that include everything.

Geordi Laforge doesn't code much on the Enterprise. He simply asks the computer to build him a model of the anomaly so he can test out ideas. In a way, modern languages like Python (even before LLMs) let you get a lot closer to that reality. Sure you had to know some language basics, but this was pretty minimal and you'd use those basic building blocks to glue together libraries to make an application. Python has a good library for practically anything I do and since this is standard, it's expected that a task doesn't take too long. I can't tell my boss I'll need 3 years to code my own solution that uses my own libraries for numpy and scipy. You're expected to glue libraries together. This is why MIT moved SICP from scheme to Python. It's a different world.

With Forth, every program is a work of art that encapsulates an entire solution to a problem from scratch. It's creator chuck moore takes this to such a level that he also fabs his own chips to work with his forth software optimally. These languages had libraries, but they weren't easy to share and didn't have any kind of repository before Perl's CPAN. Perl really took off for awhile, but Python won out by having a simpler language with builtin OO (Perl's approach was a really hacky builtin OO or you download a library...).

To be honest though, I spent a decade trying many languages (dozens including common lisp, Prolog, APL, C, Ada, Smalltalk, Perl, C#, C++, Tcl, Lua, Rust...etc) looking for the best and although I never became experts in those languages, I kept coming to the conclusion that for my particular set of needs, Python was the best I could find. I wasted a lot of time reading common lisp books and just found it much easier to get the same thing done in Python. Your mileage will vary if you're doing something like building a game engine. A lot of people are just doing process automation and stuff like that and languages like Python are just better than common lisp due to the environment and tooling benefits. Also, although Python isn't as conceptually beautiful as lisp, I found it much easier to learn. The syntax just really clicked for me and some people do prefer it.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 11:59:31+00:00
The internet seems resilient enough for all intents and purposes, we haven't had a global internet-wide catastrophe impacting the entire internet as far as I know, but we have gotten close to it sometimes (thanks BGP).

But the web, that's the fragile, centralized and weak point currently, and seems to be what you're referring to rather.

Maybe nitpicky, but I feel like it's important to distinguish between "the web" and "the internet".
by lproven | 2025-10-20 12:00:06+00:00
TIL: Bat != .bat != The Bat.

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

https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/

Expanded...

I have 2 mental definitions of "bat" as a term in computing. Only one can be interpreted as a standalone piece of software that has a version number. And this isn't it.
by sedawkgrep | 2025-10-20 12:00:28+00:00
> how are you different from other llms ?

Magisterium AI differs from generic large‑language models in several concrete ways that flow directly from the Church’s own teaching and from the way the system has been built. 1. A Catholic‑only knowledge base All of the textual material that trains Magisterium AI comes from authentic Catholic sources—official magisterial documents, the Catechism, papal writings, the Church Fathers and Doctors—so the model never draws on secular or contradictory material. The Church itself reserves the interpretation of the Word of God to the magisterium, and Magisterium AI respects that boundary by limiting its corpus to those very sources.
Ask HN: I have a CS degree but taught for 5 years– how can I get back into tech?
by padzochambers | 2025-10-20 12:00:50+00:00
I’m 28 (m) and have a Computer Science degree under my belt. A few years after graduating, I pursued a teaching degree because it came with a great tax-free incentive. Now I’ve realised I want to use my original degree and get back into tech.

After my degree I didn't want to pursue it as I fell out of love with it, possibly due to stress and letting uni life get the better of me. It became stressful environment but through recent experiences and talking with close friends who are in the field of CS, overtime I've realised and processed that I still have a massive interest and constant want to learn more within it or somewhat be involved in it. The years of teaching it has definitely played a part in showing students my passion for the subject, reminding myself how much I love it too.

I've started picking up on python again and taking online courses to refresh myself but I want to make myself employable after these years. I have previous experience in java, php and C+ also. I've never worked in a professional coding environment either, hence why I am coming on here to seek advice on what would be best.

Any recommendations/advice would really help. What stacks I should be looking at?
by account42 | 2025-10-20 12:01:17+00:00
> They're not going to Paris, are they? 4chan brings their services into the UK.

They don't bring their services to the UK, ISPs and other network operators do - the UK can go after those and force them to implement the Great Firewall of Britain but that would be less popular so they don't yet.

> The US does the same thing: Kim Dotcom comes to mind.

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. The UK can try to go after US citizens abroad if they want to but they will quickly find out why that's a bad idea.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 12:01:22+00:00
Can also be much easier than that. Say you live in Mexico, hosting servers with AWS in the US because you have US customers. But suddenly the government decides to place sanctions on Mexico, and US entities are no longer allowed to do business with Mexicans, so all Mexican AWS accounts get shut down.

For you as a Mexican the end results is the same, AWS went away, and considering there already is a list of countries that cannot use AWS, GitHub and a bunch of other "essential" services, it's not hard to imagine that that list might grow in the future.
by sofixa | 2025-10-20 12:01:40+00:00
You can spin up a redundant database setup with backups and monitoring and automatic fail over in 10 mins (the time it takes in AWS)? And maintain it? If you've done this a few times before and have it highly automated, sure. But let's not pretend it's "even easier" than "insanely easy".

Load balancing is trivial unless you get into global multicast LBs, but AWS have you covered there too.