MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Argonaut998 | 2025-10-06 21:19:21+00:00
When I was around 10 years old I remember us asking the teacher why not just print money to solve the worlds problems and the teacher scoffing. It took me another 15 years to realise that’s basically what central banks do, especially these last five years. BTC is at $125k, gold at $4000, and every other week we are inundated with some multi-hundred billion dollar deals somewhere or other. All this talk about multi GW data centers where one will notice the consumer is no where to be found, just like an extension lead plugged into itself.

Are we supposed to pretend that this is normal? Does anyone not feel like this push for AI is a last ditch effort to save the global stock market, that it MUST work out?
by gambiting | 2025-10-06 21:19:23+00:00
3. Avoiding government-mandated record keeping by ISPs in a country like the UK, where all ISPs have to keep a year of your browsing history and it can be accessed warrant free by 17 different agencies(including DEFRA, the agriculture agency).

And yes, I'm aware that you're most likely trading one surveilence for another - but honestly at this point I'd much rather trust my paid VPN provider with my browsing data than my ISP and ultimately the government.
by lxgr | 2025-10-06 21:19:28+00:00
> please recall that the mass of de-orbiting man-made satellites came from the earth in the first place.

Then again, so are CFCs, CO2, radioactive materials...

Just because some elements naturally occur on Earth doesn't mean we're completely insensitive to where they end up. (That said, I have no idea if atmospheric Aluminium is actually a problem or not.)
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-10-06 21:19:28+00:00
This is from 2020. Valve wanted to be smart and invented a new "subtick" system in 2023 which isn't as good as 128 tick. To make things worse, CS is a paid game, not free like Valorant, and makes probably much more money. They seemingly just don't care enough about the problem to solve it correctly. That or there is more work to be done on subtick to make it work better than 128.
by Fischgericht | 2025-10-06 21:19:54+00:00
Well, on purpose I have given Starlink very optimistic numbers, yes. :)

And yes, 22% yield sounds nice, but if someone would hand me their pitch deck and give me a SWAT analysis I would just laugh them away: The risks are far too high.

(See for example the article that this very thread is about.)

Of course you can only guess based on that, but it looks that in real life things are worse:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin...

These data points might be interpreted as "Starlink is getting 40% of their revenue from tax money".

And while "7 million subscribers" might sound impressive on first sight: This is the number of DSL connections subscribed to in the tiny country of Belgium. But for magical reasons Starlink is valuated at a price higher than if you would buy all of Belgium ;)

Your point in regards of laying physical infrastructure is valid for a lot of western countries. But not all of them. Some countries in the EU for example years ago created laws that say that whoever opens the street for any reasons has to put in empty tubes for someone to later put in fiber before closing the street again.

So: This is a regulatory subject really, not physical cost. Fiber is dirt cheap if you are allowed to use existing power poles for example (which is unlike with copper obviously not a problem in regards of signal integrity), or existing underground pipes, or just throw it from house roof to house roof.
by yomismoaqui | 2025-10-06 21:20:24+00:00
How can a novel compete with an interactive character that provides a roleplay conversation "a la carte" adjusting to the user and their preferences?

You want a dominant partner, maybe an initialy cold guy that hides his passionate heart, or just the sweetest more caring girlfriend in the world...? You can have it, just describing what you want in a simple text prompt.

Now let's jump ahead and imagine something a little more intelligent that adapts to the to user. Maybe 100% caring but just a little cold on specific days... with a little pinch of a fight and the following making up... a perfect storm of emotional adiction (and a lot of money to be made)

I'm both horrified and curious about the future that is coming.
by jpc0 | 2025-10-06 21:20:24+00:00
I'm in the reat of the world. Trust me I understand how entrenched WhatsApp is but realistically point to the viable alternative.

And WhatsApp for "the rest of the world" is "free", about as free as Gmail and Facebook but monetarily free. It's hard to argue a monopoly when there is no money trading hands, and for business you are free to contact your customers via Email or SMS or whatever other form you would like, I can tell you there is benefits to using WhatsApp, our stats show much higher engagement and well we can actually get more information about message delivery than other platforms, you pay a premium for that and they gatekeep that because it has business benefit to do so.

If WhatsApp campaigns didn't get higher engagement than email or sms which is cheaper we wouldn't pay the premium for it, everyone who has WhatsApp can also receive SMS.

Does that help clarify why I'm arguing WhatsApp isn't a monopoly? It's kind of ranty, I apologise for that.
by eambutu | 2025-10-06 21:20:32+00:00
2019-2020: We prototyped lots of telepresence ideas, our work shown here: https://siemprecollective.com/

2020-2022: We built https://gather.town, which during COVID blew up across every use-case possible: conferences, birthday parties, weddings, universities. It was a good business during COVID but eventually started to shrink.

2022-2025: We built Gather for remote workers, which was a long grind into in Audio/Video, performance, and making a game-interface that was good for work but replicated the parts of in-person work people enjoyed. It's a decent business, but didn't match our ambitions with how we wanted to change work for the better.

2025+: We have lots of ideas for how we can make work a lot better with AI. The general theme is, "can we make work as fun as a video game?" Idea being: video games are super similar to work at its core, and AI can both 1.) dramatically change how people need to spend their days, and 2.) help you "game design" someone's work day.

The Grapevine system is the first tablestakes layer people need to have for us to build the products we're excited about. Surprisingly, "company context" was not as good as we thought despite it being such an obvious, big business opportunity. So while I agree it's "basic," it does seem necessary, and is also not the full-scale of what we want to achieve still :)
by schoen | 2025-10-06 21:20:34+00:00
My first calculus class in high school was about 10% "conceptual explanation of limits, derivatives, and integrals", 30% "techniques for evaluating derivatives", 50% "techniques for evaluating integrals", and maybe another 10% (or less) "justifications of the correctness of those techniques". (I guess I'm putting the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in the the last 10% here.)

The style of this textbook does seem to primarily skip the "techniques for evaluating" stuff, on the basis that you just wanted to understand what each branch of mathematics is about and what kinds of theorems it has that might relate to the larger edifice of mathematics.
by in_cahoots | 2025-10-06 21:20:39+00:00
I think the real implications are much more chilling. As much as we like to believe otherwise, there is always a chance that a seemingly-healthy college kid will drop dead of something that even the best doctor wouldn't have anticipated.

And as much as we would like to believe otherwise, the modern healthcare system is riddled with problems that no technology or checklists will fix. It doesn't take someone's death to verify this- just go read your own charts and discharge papers. Even for something relatively routine there are bound to be inaccuracies. Doctors know this, which is why they spend so much time doing handoffs and interviewing patients.

We pretend that the medical 'record' is infallible, helping to reduce the mental load on doctors while protecting them from liability. But as this case shows, the 'record' is both inaccurate and not useful in showing fault. It's a paper tiger. I'm not saying we should scrap the whole system, but I do think it needs to be examined in a data-driven manner.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-06 21:21:14+00:00
The hybrid (heat-pump & heat-elements, both) water heater I installed 2 years ago has already paid for itself in savings. This design literally pulls the heat out of your conditioned space, providing both cooling and dehumidification (I live in a humid temperate rainforest so win-win). <3% of my annual electric usage goes to my water heater (typically 10%+).

During the brief winter months I just set it to heating elements only, and it behaves like a traditional watertank heater (i.e. doesn't cool house in the winter, using only resistive heating).
by araes | 2025-10-06 21:21:36+00:00
Resupply is a common case. Large amounts of material that you "only" need to take out to 0.4 radius. Or that you can "park" at 0.4 radius and then pick up later.

Persistent shuttle / subway / bus that you can meet somewhere with lower fuel and then tag along for the rest of the ride is another. Sure, its faster to drive somewhere direct with your car, yet its convenient if there's already a known cycling bus / subway route. Go to a known location, tag along. Like a bus / subway, it's also enabling. Maybe you don't want to / can't pay for a Saturn V project.

Cyclic activities that require more than just a one-way or a single round trip. Trash / waste, and similar activities on Earth are an example. Put your trash at some known meeting spot, it gets picked up and taken away.

The entire satellite economy is another, since it's a completely different orbital regime with completely different coverage, vantage points, and observational characteristics. Example, long term telescope that does a constant Earth-Moon cycle every 64 days and has baseline coverage star pattern footprint of ~500,000 miles in a relatively short time frame for observations (along with observations over the entire yearly orbit)

You can also add slowly and keep adding, cause it won't fall out of orbit.

Also works with stuff like slow LEO to GEO transfers using high ISP engines and long orbit raising spirals. (You have to go to 100,000 vs 22,000 miles, yet similar idea).

Speed's not the only metric. No fuel / no propulsion is rather compelling. Low energy, low cost, long term stability.
by aaroninsf | 2025-10-06 21:21:37+00:00
Related work that his lab was doing when I got to take a seminar with him at IU: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1993-mcgraw.pdf

Gary was one of the TAs in the class. The non-reducibility of letterforms has remained a fascination—I always did like the (computational) linguistics corner of cognitive science!
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-10-06 21:22:01+00:00
The timing couldn't be worse for American families. Total household debt has hit a record $18.39 trillion, and Americans now spend about 11% of their income just on debt payments

In 2018 our household started to exit a decade of hard poverty. FF to now and we have some savings and no debt. The other natural outcome of saving-to-buy (now that we can afford to do that) was zero credit ratings for the 6 of us.
by lm28469 | 2025-10-06 21:24:05+00:00
The next logical step for cars were flying cars, the next logical step for planes was space travel. Both were hyped not so long ago, people believed in both, it never happened and it isn't closer to us now than 50 years ago

I'm not saying it doesn't bring any value, I'm just saying that if you think we should give $7 gazillion to Altman because he's building skynet by 2030 you're smoking crack
by trflynn89 | 2025-10-06 21:24:18+00:00
The specs and the test suite are both moving targets. There are regularly new proposals to the specs, and new tests that cover them as they progress towards acceptance. The main engines implement these proposals behind feature flags, and only enable them once the proposal has been fully accepted.

Ladybird does not hide implementations behind feature flags (yet) because there's no need when you don't have users. So its score on test262.fyi includes all proposals it has implemented thus far.

The other engines on that site have an "experimental options" variant to include these proposals, which is a bit more of an honest comparison. As of right now, that shows: Spidermonkey (Firefox) at 98.3%, V8 (Chrome) at 97.9%, LibJS (Ladybird) at 96.9%, and JavaScriptCore (Safari) at 93.2%.

Here's a link with those options selected: https://test262.fyi/#|v8_exp,jsc_exp,sm_exp,libjs
by potatolicious | 2025-10-06 21:24:49+00:00
It's also a matter of incentives. Starbucks wants you in their app instead of as a widget in somebody else's - it lets them tell you about new products, cross-sell/up-sell, create habits, etc.

This general concept (embedding third parties as widgets in a larger product) has been tried many times before. Google themselves have done this - by my count - at least three separate times (Search, Maps, and Assistant).

None have been successful in large part because the third party being integrated benefits only marginally from such an integration. The amount of additional traffic these integrations drive generally isn't seen as being worth the loss of UX control and the intermediation in the customer relationship.
by exe34 | 2025-10-06 21:24:59+00:00
I have a load of crap I've accumulated over the years, but I try to regularly look at and consider everything, with the aim of simply imagining life without it. I'm reasonably confident that I could get rid of most of it without missing it much if I had to - but for now I'm still holding on to them in case they become useful again. It currently costs me less to keep them than to replace them in the future.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-06 21:25:08+00:00
https://www.aspi.org.au/report/aspis-two-decade-critical-tec... (August 2024)

> Now covering 64 critical technologies and crucial fields spanning defence, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas, the Tech Tracker’s dataset has been expanded and updated from five years of data (previously, 2018–2022) to 21 years of data (2003–2023).

> These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–2007 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker (March 2023)

> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.

> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-10-06 21:26:37+00:00
They have different definitions of failure. In Lean a failure is to calculate wrong thing. In SPARK a failure is to not calculate at all because of memory issue or something like this. As far as I've seen SPARK, it encourages ephemeral data structures and effectful computations. Lean is less familiar to me, but I've got the impression that it is about correct computation in infinite memory and stack, and value-centered computations are encouraged. SPARK did not have pointers for long period. Then SPARK has got pointers, but only unique ones. Lean has shared pointers to immutable data structures. And infinitely recursive data structures.

Yet another provable code I have found in Eiffel. There is "proven" doubly linked list in Eiffel. Something not possible in SPARK, going against unique pointers. Something not possible in Lean, going against immutability.
by mystraline | 2025-10-06 21:26:38+00:00
Yep.

And I was on Proton for 3y, until the CEO were backing Trump and Vance on Reddit and other places. Their port forwarding was also painful as well, but it worked.

Cancelled. PIA does the port forwarding nicely and stabily. No jank scripts to run every 60 seconds.

Now evidently PIA is a bunch of scum capitalists. But in reality, who isn't?

Mullvad? But they killed port forwarding for "abuse".
by cornholio | 2025-10-06 21:27:23+00:00
Sure, but the herd can still be right from time to time. While it's impossible to accurately predict the future course of AI progress, we can at least agree that the rapid take-off scenario is at least plausible, and that, if it happens, it logically leads to dramatic social and political changes unprecedented in the last centuries; in that scenario, AI-empowered human political operators will quickly become dangerous to humanity and they pose a far greater and earlier threat than the comic book scenario where unaligned AI takes over. We had unaligned HI from the very beginning.
by RajT88 | 2025-10-06 21:28:06+00:00
According to Pew, 86% of people with no religious affiliation think it should be legal.

Why? Because treating a fertilized egg or a fetus as the same thing as a baby is rooted in religion. 13% is few not many.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...

> This is simply true.

FTFY
by eambutu | 2025-10-06 21:29:07+00:00
Great question. We are actually surprised more than anything that existing products aren't better. Other companies' algo work DID get disrupted by reasoning models, because newer models don't care about what the top 3 search results are, they're really great at reading hundreds of documents and picking up signal from noise.

I can't speculate exactly on the work that other companies have done, but my guess is we were way more focused on the type of questions people actually ask to each other. We know there's still a lot more you can do to continue to improve it, and so it's up to other folks if they do it too.

Lastly, a few ways we want to be distinguished from all the other offerings are: 1) super easy to setup, 2.) very developer friendly
by tempestn | 2025-10-06 21:29:23+00:00
And conversely, if you try to preempt the crash, you might end up sitting out most of the run up. Lots of people called the dot.com bubble in the late 90s and got out, only to end up worse off than if they'd just held through the whole boom, crash, and recovery. (Of course, I'm sure there were also some that managed to time the market successfully! Not sure I'm that lucky though.)
by Centigonal | 2025-10-06 21:29:23+00:00
This is in vitro (i.e. in a "petri dish," not in a lab animal or a human being).

It's a very very cool idea, but there's a lot of work left to be done to turn something like this into an efficate and safe drug. Plus, a biologic like this would only work if it's active in your body when you're being infected with the virus. So users would either have to take it prophylactically, or it might help to reduce infection severity in a paxlovid-type role.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1217/
by lxgr | 2025-10-06 21:29:39+00:00
> The "Oops, the Sat-to-Sat links are not working, so we now have to build base stations everywhere and can not do load distribution" might have cost Starlink something like $10 BILLION? I guess I would have tested my stuff first before launching it. With now two generations of Starlink sats already being outdated and/or falling from the sky

You don't seem to understand their strategy: Constant replacement is a feature, not a bug, to them.

And in that paradigm, why wait any longer than absolutely necessary with any given launch? The problem is already fixed – at least inter-satellite links seem to be working well enough now (as evidenced by global coverage on the oceans).

> Starlink will never ever be profitable, just as no Sat ISP in history ever has been.

How do you explain the non-zero stock price of e.g. Iridium and Viasat?

> You have to be EXTREMELY remote for Sat internet to make sense. No, not rural USA. Fiber will be cheaper.

Are you sure laying fiber to every last home is really more capital efficient in the long term? Have you done the math on that side too?

And what about mobile coverage? Even solar-powered low maintenance cell stations need to be installed, repaired after storms, have their solar cells dusted off etc.

> No, not Africa. Fiber through the desert will be cheaper. Sat Internet may make sense if you live in the artic or on mount Everest or something like that.

Mount Everest has pretty good cell signal, as far as I know. It's a tiny area, compared to actually remote but still (sparsely) populated regions.
by throwacct | 2025-10-06 21:30:09+00:00
Exactly. I don't understand why we always have to bash the US. I dislike the way China does business, and I believe the greatest error of the 20th century was moving all manufacturing there. I don't know why the government allowed companies to move everything to Asia when we could have killed two birds with one stone by moving operations to Latin America. This would keep all manufacturing on the continent and result in much less illegal migration to the US. Given the political climate of the past 20 years, China hasn't had to do much to plot the United States' demise or at least become the top economic power in 20 years or less. That if the US gets its house in order and at least 2/3 of the country rallies around, becoming, cue the music, great again (I'll see myself out, hehe).
by aeturnum | 2025-10-06 21:30:12+00:00
The people at google or apple. Perhaps your phone manufacturer if you don't use a first party phone. The cell phone companies (approximately but they can triangulate pretty well). Potentially any retail establishment[1]. As facial recognition technology becomes more mature it won't even require a phone.

[1] This one is a little uncertain because it relies on tracking bluetooth / wifi radios and you have to do a pretty complex setup. Simply establishing presence is harder (and ofc the whole thing can be blocked by secure operating systems).
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-06 21:30:17+00:00
If you want to understand what's going on, I suggest reading "How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle" by Ray Dalio.

https://economicprinciples.org/

https://www.amazon.com/How-Countries-Go-Broke-Principles-ebo...

The oversimplified explanation is that there's a money cycle that lasts ~80-120 years. We're going through the rough part of the cycle right now; and trying to fight it just prolongs it.