MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pragmatic | 2025-10-04 14:19:49+00:00
At a "telecom of telecom" we (they) were still lighting up dark fiber 15 years later (2015) when mobile data for cell carriers finally created enough demand. Hard to fathom the amount of overbuild.

The only difference is fiber optic lines remained useful the whole time. Will these cards have the same longevity?

(I have no idea just sharing anecdata)
by howieburger | 2025-10-04 14:20:17+00:00
Given what has been learned through neuroscience, how ossified and normalized for life most become, it feels like a good argument can be made much of the elder cohort is stuck in a pseudo religious and pseudoscience middle ground of thought.

Most > 50 were born into a more traditional and religion-centric life and only adopted technology. The first generation educated along vaguely scientific lines.

In the US at least, born after 1980 is roughly when opinions begin to veer into favor of empiricism and less "anything goes" new age woo and post world war extravagant capitalism due to being the only functioning manufacturing economy after the war.
by mg | 2025-10-04 14:20:25+00:00
Fiber networks were using less than 0.002% of available capacity, with potential for 60,000x speed increases. It was just too early.

I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity. As soon as we can prompt "Think about the codebase over night. Try different ways to refactor it. Tomorrow, show me your best solution." we will want as much GPU time at the current rate as possible.

If a minute of GPU usage is currently $0.10, a night of GPU usage is 8 * 60 * 0.1 = $48. Which might very well be worth it for an improved codebase. Or a better design of a car. Or a better book cover. Or a better business plan.
by squidbeak | 2025-10-04 14:20:49+00:00
Believe me, ruling them out is the last thing I'd do. I fully expect them in the next decade or two.

A practically possible path to both: Starship is perfected and mining companies begin operations in space. Vast data centers training spatial ai using virtual simulations perfect it well enough for general robotics to become practicable. Automation is then as follows: robotics manufacturing and maintenance is handled by robots. Mining is performed by robots. General manufacturing performed by robots. Potential manufacturing scales increase by orders of magnitudes. Where are the costs in this scenario that would prevent prices falling to zero? And if prices for all goods and virtually all services* fall to zero, what possible role can money have at that point, other than sitting on a shelf as a memento of a vanished system?

*excluding sex workers.
by ivape | 2025-10-04 14:21:04+00:00
One of the things before AI in the market was that capital had limited growth opportunities. Tech, which was basically a universe of scaled out crud apps, was where capital would keep going back into.

AI is a lot more useful than hyper scaled up crud apps. Comparing this to the past is really overfitting imho.

The only argument against accumulating GPUs is that they get old and stop working. Not that it sucks, not that it’s not worth it. As in, the argument against it is actually in the spirit of “I wish we could keep the thing longer”. Does that sound like there’s no demand for this thing?

The AI thesis requires getting on board with what Jenson has been saying:

1) We have a new way to do things

2) The old ways have been utterly outclassed

3) If a device has any semblance of compute power, it will need to be enhanced, updated, or wholesale replaced with an AI variant.

There is no middle ground to this thesis. There is no “and we’ll use AI here and here, but not here, therefore we predictably know what is to come”.

Get used to the unreal. Your web apps could truly one day be generated frame by frame by a video model. Really. The amount of compute we’ll need will be staggering.
by Xorakios | 2025-10-04 14:21:18+00:00
alas, in southern California 1 year for permitting would be a miracle.

my family has been in construction for 3 generations, and 2 years is now considered normal. plus we have to seal up everything for energy efficiency, then have to remove and add more venting for the next round of inspectors who want to ensure air quality. We stopped building in Sun City because of the $17K tax per unit to fund schools even though it's a 55+ senior community. Currently it's about $115K per house in permitting fees in rural Riverside county. Makes it difficult
by davidw | 2025-10-04 14:21:32+00:00
I mean, Jimmy Kimmel won and Apple is way more powerful with far deeper pockets.

This admin isn't all powerful, as much as they try and project that image. Apple and I think Google have a pretty big reservoir of good will among the public at large.

These folks won't be in power forever, but the cowardice of people like Tim Cook will always be remembered.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-04 14:23:21+00:00
> Is anyone aware of any examples of FPGAs used to implement neural nets or other connectionist architectures?

Do you mean as a specialized processor for high speed inference, or as if the neural net including weights was directly synthesized into the FPGA architecture?

Neither use case would be as powerful as other options. FPGAs don’t provide infinite leeway for implementing completely custom logic. They have a finite number of blocks that can be reconfigured in certain ways as synthesized by the software. This architecture isn’t a good fit for the large LLMs we think about which need a lot of high bandwidth memory access. You can connect an FPGA to high speed memory, but the current crop of GPUs are going to be much better at the job.
by tdeck | 2025-10-04 14:23:23+00:00
> There's precious little reason to distribute as an app, except for exploiting the user.

This is a very Hacker News centric perspective; most of us probably use the browser on our phone for hours every day. But a lot of normal people simply don't - if it isn't an app, they won't really use it. I find it strange, but I've seen this over and over again.
by spiesd | 2025-10-04 14:23:50+00:00
I wouldn't say they're "so much longer" now (since the pitch clock was implemented, that is). This year, 9 inning games averaged 2:38. In 1960, they ran 2:33. There are lots of factors that contribute to longer gametime. A couple that correlate with the general trend for longer:

- pitchers/game: 2025: 4.29, 1960: 2.45 - strikeouts/game: 2025: 8.36, 1960: 5.18

Commercial breaks are currently limited to 2 minutes by rule, and it takes some time just to run on and off the field, so I am dubious of the impact of that. (Though the rule has changed, and I forget whether there were an additional 20 minutes because of that back in the 1990s/2000s.)

That said, unless it were a stellar pitching duel, I'd really despise constant sub-2 hour games.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/misc.shtml

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/bat.shtml

https://www.mlb.com/glossary/rules/warmup-pitches
by wyldfire | 2025-10-04 14:24:26+00:00
> Because evolution doesn't care about us beyond reproduction age

I wonder if that's true. There's bound to be some benefits or drawbacks to aggregate fitness when people age. Sure, the contribution is very indirect and so it'll happen yet slower. But imagine if people lived until they were 300 years old. Depending on how frail they are, that could be a drag on reproduction and resources.
by luciferin | 2025-10-04 14:25:23+00:00
I don't know about main suspect, but autoimmune disease has been known for a long time to increase your risk of cancer. I have Celiac disease, so an increased risk of stomache, intestinal and bowel cancer.

Honestly, this article is kind of worrying for me, personally. I have many symptoms after two years of treatment with diet alone. Further evidence may eventually show treatment with antibiotics or steroids for people like me may lower more risks then it raises.
by teiferer | 2025-10-04 14:25:56+00:00
> Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system works?

No, it's not. We don't catch everybody guilty of petty theft, but those we do catch still don't end up in prison for life.

There was a time when we chopped their right hand off, but I'm glad those days are behind us.

(Reading many of the reactions here though, we are just a thin layer of judges away from mob rule.)
by jrockway | 2025-10-04 14:27:05+00:00
What is shorter games doing for attendance, concession sales, ad sales on the TV broadcast? Seems like you want people stuck in the park for as long as possible (well, at least until they make them stop selling alcohol) but if that's too long, people simply won't go. Meanwhile, I have no idea whether longer or shorter games are better for TV. I would guess shorter is better? After an hour of the same insurance commercial over and over, you're either going to switch insurance companies or you're not. Seeing the ad 3 more times probably isn't worth very much.
by ctrlp | 2025-10-04 14:27:57+00:00
Honestly, it's less about the lack of punctuation and more about the apparent lack of cohesion or even relation among the list elements. It sounds like these are just what items occurred to the writer's mind in a sort of ecstatic frenzy (that register he favors). What I'm hoping is that I'm just blind to the intricate relatedness of the images, symbols, word choices, etc... They read like just whatever he thought of at that moment of his febrile brain running along and not to have more intentionality than that. If the listicles were in a poem (even a lengthy one, like Whitman) I might be inclined to do the work of teasing out the relationships. But the enumerations are frequent and endless. That's a lot to ask if there aren't visible markers of genius. Surely there a hermeneuticists among the fandom that can shine a light on the necessity of this prose style as structural supports for the work overall. Otherwise it's just pulp and doesn't mean anything except a vibe. Which, ok, whatever, but that's not much of a selling point. Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
by pragmatic | 2025-10-04 14:28:05+00:00
In 2005 telecom was a cash cow because of long distance charges and if your mechanical phone switch was paid off you were printing money (regulations guaranteed revenue)

This didn't last that much longer and many places were trying to diversify into managed services (data dog for companues on Orem network and server equipment,etc) which they call "unregulated" revenue.

Add written an things business, irrational exuberance can kill you.
by nobody9999 | 2025-10-04 14:28:40+00:00
>Maybe in our (very near?) cyber punk future, it's not only goverments that we should be concerned about. After all, we have some measure of input regarding the goverment.

Why shouldn't we already be concerned about the corporations? They've been slurping our data and selling it for a profit for my whole life[0].

Sure, that sort of behavior started with banks and other financial institutions, but has extended, over the decades, to consumer products companies (P&G, General Mills, etc.) and to retailers (Walmart, Target, etc.), then into internet search (Google, Bing), "social" media (the Meta conglomerate, etc.), hardware and software companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.), communication devices (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.), consumer electronics (LG, Samsung, GE, Maytag), Automobiles (GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Toyota, etc., etc., etc.) and "IoT" devices (Amazon, Google and a host of others) are all hoovering up as much information as they can to both sell (and governments as well as other corporations are buying and paying through the nose) and use for "targeted" ads.

Isn't your refrigerator showing you ads, your TV recording what you're doing while you use it, your phone reporting pretty much everywhere you go, everything you do and everyone with whom you communicate, social media apps recording every key stroke, even if it doesn't end up in a post, your car tracking both your movements and your driving behavior, your internet searches used to create detailed shadow profiles of your interests and purchasing habits. I could go on and on and on. Corporations are collecting levels of private data on people that would have been beyond the Stasi's[1] wildest dreams.

And so I'll ask again, when, exactly, should we "start" to be concerned about corporate surveillance?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act#Hist...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi
by JCM9 | 2025-10-04 14:28:44+00:00
Broader impact, but while the big players will take a hit the new wave of startups stands to take the brunt of the impact. VCs and startups will suffer the most.

At the end of the day though it’s how the system is designed. It’s the needed forrest fire that wipes out overgrowth and destroys all but the strongest trees.
by cl42 | 2025-10-04 14:29:23+00:00
Not sure why you're getting downvoted.

If you speak with AI researchers, they all seem reasonable in their expectations.

... but I work with non-technical business people across industries and their expectations are NOT reasonable. They expect ChatGPT to do their entire job for $20/month and hire, plan, budget accordingly.

12 months later, when things don't work out, their response to AI goes to the other end of the spectrum -- anger, avoidance, suspicion of new products, etc.

Enough failures and you have slowing revenue growth. I think if companies see lower revenue growth (not even drops!), investors will get very very nervous and we can see a drop in valuations, share prices, etc.
by mkovach | 2025-10-04 14:29:42+00:00
The time between half-innings increases, so the radio and TV could play commercials on the broadcast. Pitching changes are longer, etc. You don't see it much at the game, but if you are one of the folks who used to listen to the game on the radio, at the game itself, you get a feel for how the flow of the game is affected by the broadcasts.
by buran77 | 2025-10-04 14:30:13+00:00
The equation itself makes no assumptions. But anyone trying to calculate something with it must.

The last five factors in the equation will be filled in by assumptions based entirely on one data point, life on Earth. From your link:

ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets. fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point. fi = the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations). fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space. L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

Can you define any one of those without assumptions, in a scientifically proven way?
by gedy | 2025-10-04 14:30:33+00:00
I don't disagree with the idea that people can be a little kooky about FP, but the idea that webapps are perfectly fine without modern front end approaches is a bit exaggerated. Managing UI state is much easier in the client - sure, if you don't have a stateful UI to begin with don't go build some JS SPA. But I've have been there done that with teams and companies that dislike JS then try to fake UI state back and forth from server to client, and it really sucks, overcomplicates stuff that should be simple.
by specialist | 2025-10-04 14:30:36+00:00
Need to get crafty.

Make ICE spotting a plausibly deniable covert subtext via an otherwise popular medium.

Like (probably apocryphal) Jesus fish.

Both Pokemon and Polytopia have ice themed combatants, right?

Whenever you see some masked thugs staging for another round of terror, start a match as one of those tribes, trainers, or whatever. Build a certain kind of (creature) deck recognizable by anyone "in the know". Use some kind of slang. Like WWII's code talkers.

I don't actually know how Pokemon and the multiplayer Polytopia work. But y'all get the idea.

I keep thinking of the "slug bug" game bored kids play in the back seat. See a VW Beetle, yell "slug bug" first, and then punch your sibling. I think "Eye Spy" is the nice version.

Do mobile games like that exist? Surely someone's done it. A Foursquare for kids. Or something.

Again, y'all get the idea.
by achierius | 2025-10-04 14:31:03+00:00
Haha you're going to be in strange company claiming to hate ""leftists"" and Nietzsche at the same time. Who, might I ask, do you consider "ontologically good"? Do you believe in a God that could provide such content, or is this just your own definition of what that entails? Ironically enough, between that and your seeming rejection of all prior moral philosophies, it sounds like you're operating quite in line with Nietzsche's actual recommendations -- which is far more than I could say about myself, given my rather more religious tendencies.

> But instead you patronize me by acting like I don’t read.

Rather quaint to be upset about this given the bucket of assumptions you yourself made in the comment above.
by stephc_int13 | 2025-10-04 14:31:20+00:00
Knowing history of past bubbles is only mildly informative. The dotcom bubble was different than the railroads bubble etc.

The only thing to keep in mind is that all of this is about business and ROI.

Given the colossal investments, even if the companies finances are healthy and not fraudulent, the economic returns have to be unprecedented or there will be a crash.

They are all chasing a golden goose.
Tell HN: Stripe seems to have suspended human customer support
by almost | 2025-10-04 14:32:12+00:00
While trying to get in touch with Stripe today for a standard support enquiry (turning on a feature on my account) I found that the support button leads only to an AI Assistant. It is possible to still get to the "Support Center" but there's no way to create a ticket. So it seems like Stripe have completely replaced human support with an LLM that can only repeat back the public documentation to you.

It does still say in various places on the Stripe website that "All Stripe customers receive 24x7 phone, email, and chat help" but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore

I'm sure a lot of people here rely on Stripe so I thought this was worth a post! Has anyone else has any luck getting in touch with Stripe recently?
by Zigurd | 2025-10-04 14:32:29+00:00
AGI is not near. At best, the domains where we send people to years of grad school so that they can do unnatural reasoning tasks in unmanageable knowledge bases, like law and medicine, will become solid application areas for LLMs. Coding, most of all, will become significantly more productive. Thing is, once the backlog of shite code gets re-engineered, the computing demand for a new code creation will not support bubble levels of demand for hardware.
by mkovach | 2025-10-04 14:32:54+00:00
Yes, the pitch clock and the relievers' requirement to face at least three batters in an inning have done a very good job of handling game times.

At some point, as the game continues to evolve, I think we'll see an upward swing in game times in the future, but I don't believe it will trend as high as it has before. I think that sub-three-hour games will remain the sweet spot going forward.

Now, for sub-two-hour games, this is one I wish I could watch and re-watch

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1908/B10020CLE1908.htm

In the middle of a pennant race, Addie Joss pitched a 74-pitch perfect game against Ed Walsh, who had already won 39 games that year. The game kept Cleveland in the running for the pennant. Game time? 1:40 minutes. The minimum number of batters for a nine-inning game is 54, this game had 56.
by mr_mitm | 2025-10-04 14:33:22+00:00
Thanks, I read that part before I shared it. It's pretty clear to me, these are pretty well defined quantities, just hard to measure. What is unclear is perhaps the definition of life. But at no point does it assume a planet must be in the Goldilocks zone. So perhaps you want to point out those assumptions you are talking about to me, because I don't see them.

Edit: the parent post has been edited substantially after I replied.
Show HN: Got sick and tired of AI in search engines, so I made my own
by eightballsystem | 2025-10-04 14:33:24+00:00
I got sick and tired of how much AI was being pushed at me from nearly every search engine. So I built my own, Project Glass.

It is built on a few core beliefs: Transparency and Privacy is paramount. AI isn't required. Real user engagement is the best signal.

It has a clear transparent (puns intended) algorithm, that you can view on the home page, it takes the following things into account for the ranking: 1. Title 2. Snippet 3. Number of clicks/Click Rate 4. Recency (with a slow decay)

It uses 0 front end Javascript, and no AI in any part of the creation or use of this.

I have been working on this for a while, and this has been my daily use search engine for a few weeks now, if you can please try it out, let me know what you think, and please be kind!

Ill be around all day to answer questions and review feedback.

Thank you!
by pyrale | 2025-10-04 14:33:26+00:00
> in places which experienced the industrial revolution

People experienced the industrial revolution everywhere.

I suspect, when you think "places which experienced the industrial revolution", you think about a small subset of areas where some development happened as a result of that, likely the areas where industrialists lived.

But you would also have to consider other places' experience of industrialization. For instance, Congo under EIC colonial rule did experience industrialization - it was the place where industrial amounts of rubber were harvested to allow for plants elsewhere to produce joints, pipes, motor belts, etc. It's not really hard to believe that, had Congo not experienced that, its citizen would almost certainly have been better off now.
by bjourne | 2025-10-04 14:33:35+00:00
> They didn't. SOAP is still widely used. COM and CORBA and similar IPC were mostly replaced by HTTP-based protocols (which would have seemed as a wasteful overkill for a few decades ago, now nobody bats an eye) like REST or GraphQL.

You have to consider how much REST gives you for "free": encryption, compression, authentication, partial content, retransmission, congestion control, etc.
by cl42 | 2025-10-04 14:33:42+00:00
Great points. I am bullish on AI but also wary of accounting practices. Tom says Nvidia's financials are different from Lucent's but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be wary.

The Economist has a great discussion on depreciation assumptions having a huge impact on how the finances of the cloud vendors are perceived[1].

Revenue recognition and expectations around Oracle could also be what bursts the bubble. Coreweave or Oracle could be the weak point, even if Nvidia is not.

[1] https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/18/the-4trn-accou...
by Mo3 | 2025-10-04 14:34:39+00:00
> I doubt we will see unused GPU capacity

I'd argue we very certainly will. Companies are gobbling up GPUs like there's no tomorrow, assuming demand will remain stable and continue growing indefinitely. Meanwhile LLM fatigue has started to set in, models are getting smaller and smaller and consumer hardware is getting better and better. There's no way this won't end up with a lot of idle GPUs.
by Bhulapi | 2025-10-04 14:34:41+00:00
Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, depending on location

Technologies: Physics/Math, Python, C/C++, Pytorch, DL inference approaches, classical ML models/techniques

Résumé/CV: Message me and I can send it to you

Email: martin.fama.98@gmail.com

Worked in precision agriculture, with computer vision models on edge devices. Open to new areas if they seem interesting and a good match.