MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smallmancontrov | 2025-10-21 20:51:01+00:00
Liu Cixin had to break the laws of physics -- badly, multiple times -- in order to make the Dark Forest game theory work. That's not a problem, fictional rules are good fun, but generalizing his conclusions back to the real world without sending them through a customs inspection first is a problem. See also: do the dinosaurs escape because the laws of chaos theory dictate that dinosaur zoos are mathematically impossible? Or do they escape because otherwise I wouldn't pay to see the movie and neither would you?

If we ground ourselves back in reality where the speed of light is probably law and the spooky aliens probably don't get to tamper the laws of physics, the actual game-theoretic winning move is always to grow voraciously, threat or no.
by languagehacker | 2025-10-21 20:51:22+00:00
Very disingenuous to put second-coming style prognostications from religious nutsos in the same list as people trying to use science, pattern analysis, or surveys of scholarly literature to identify when society will gradually break down from writing too many checks the environment or the economy can't cash.

I gotta say I didn't know about this Johnny Silverhand post, but I hope that if these things don't come to fruition he still finds time to stick it to the corpos in the most rockerboy way possible.
by folmar | 2025-10-21 20:51:33+00:00
You need to consider your location known to the government at all times if they know they'd want it beforehand. Most places are either surveilled heavily or sparsely populated, i.e. good for satellite-based observation. Maybe also to big enough corporations if they really want.

This does not imply that it is easy to track everyone everywhere at all times. I guess most targeted ones would like to protect their communication, and even meetings in person are possible if you keep some safeguards.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-21 20:51:57+00:00
Seems odd there's still doing old school tests like sit-ups (which from what I've read is a poor exercise even for a casual gym goer). I assume that there's some tradition in "army recruits doing push-ups and sit-ups", but it still seems odd that the off-the-shelf physical trainer has moved on years ago from the 1950s style workout.
by generuso | 2025-10-21 20:52:06+00:00
One of the popular speech-to-text models is Whisper, which starts with the conventional spectral analysis of the speech signal, and then feeds the data into a Transformer model. It works quite well.

https://openai.com/index/whisper/

Such approach dates back to 1940s, when people were trained to read the speech from spectrograms. There is a 1947 book "Visible Speech" by Potter, Kopp, and Green describing these experiments. Here is a more slightly recent 1988 review of the subject: "Formalizing Knowledge Used in Spectrogram Reading"

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA206826.pdf
by dzhiurgis | 2025-10-21 20:52:38+00:00
I'm not entirely convinced. On one hand for bots you pretty much need AGI which Tesla is near solving. On another hand you need massive battery improvement for flights to move from toy to actually useful. But also there are more than 1 eVTOLS that already been certified for flight.

Bots would admittedly be far more useful in helping with tons of various tasks (I'm sure each task will be a subscription), but eVTOLs would unlock new capability.
by allenrb | 2025-10-21 20:53:06+00:00
If they had achieved orbit on any Starship flight test, it would have been a serious violation of their launch license & test criteria. Hint: they’ve never tried to orbit Starship.

Yes, they had expected to do more, sooner. So say that. What you’ve written here is nonsense.

Starship is trying to do more than anyone ever has. If all (ALL!) they’d wanted to do was build a giant rocket with a reusable booster and an expendable second stage, they’d already be done.
by jandrese | 2025-10-21 20:53:50+00:00
Faster, but not "much faster". Depending on where you were writing it could be as low as 300 bytes/second. You're starting to cut close to the margins, especially if the C=64 is having to also manage the modem communications at the same time. So yeah, doable but that's about the max you can expect out of the hardware. A 4800 baud modem would be right out.
by apelapan | 2025-10-21 20:53:51+00:00
Official EoL from the Python foundation was back in 2020, but the vendors providing Extended Lifecycle Support are still putting out regular patch releases.

ActiveState puts their releases on GitHub. Look around and you can find similar from RedHat (RHEL7 ELS), TuxCare etc.

If you still got Python 2.7 apps on production, you don't need to be stuck on old operating systems and using a base Python with known vulnerabilities.
by ai_critic | 2025-10-21 20:54:08+00:00
"Why isn't there more industrial reshoring via robotics?" is a narrower subset of the question "Why isn't there more industrial reshoring?"

It might be helpful to start at the endpoint and ask: "Okay, we have fully automated factories and power and resources for them, all under US control...how do you turn a profit? What do we even do with that much surplus capacity?"

Not that I think this is a bad thing, mind you!

(I'll also point out that the assumption is that we don't have a lot of domestic industrial capacity which is...not accurate. Wasteful, overpriced, and in that weird slump of tech where we used to have really good tech and coasted for too long, sure: but, I'd double-check that the reality on the ground matches what everybody's claiming on social media.)
by mwigdahl | 2025-10-21 20:54:19+00:00
Speaking as someone who has had a lot of experience talking with doctors in poorly-understood clinical situations over the years, most doctors display a need to establish informational authority over their patients.

So if the "dumb guy" take is "just expose the kids, they'll adapt to it", in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary (and maybe even with it) the average doctor is going to _reflexively_ take the opposite position, because that shows that you (or the conventional wisdom) were wrong.

There are exceptions, and they are either the ones that just don't care at all, or they're the best docs you'll ever find.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-10-21 20:54:27+00:00
I'm generally a fan of Cuba so take whatever I say with that in mind, but to me the big difference was Cuba was able to make a cleanish break from the big neighbor to the north while Haiti always had a US hand reaching in, possibly to avoid Cuba II.

While Cuba is pretty poor(and we can talk about embargo in those respects), they generally met their revolutionary goals. They got the mobsters out of Havana, who previously had massive sway in the government alongside the American ambassador. They massively improved literacy, put tons of effort into health for their citizens(prior to the revolution, a majority of cuban children suffered from foot parasites among other things), and did a relatively forgiving land reform to remove the big land-owners from power(ie Land reform in Japan post WWII by the US was considerably harsher policy wise iirc).

As far as a country with a huge trade embargo against it, they've done pretty well and built up allies around the world.

If Haiti followed a similar path, we'd see just as many complaints over their governance, but from a totally different angle.

As for DR, I think its still debatable. From the 30s to the early 60s, DR was under a dictatorship that was fairly brutal. After that, a democratically elected president was couped with US support, then essentially a man described as a puppet for the previous dictator was put into power for another 12 years. Perhaps the relative stability + having a ruler with US approval is enough to explain the relative success.

I think any time a country is kicked in the shins for being a little too democratic, there's going to be a period of rebuilding. That period gets longer each time they get kicked in the shins, with the more intelligent folks leaving each time, until they're left with the people you don't want leading a country. A self fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
by awillen | 2025-10-21 20:54:33+00:00
Yeah, again, it would be trivial to actual put an example of the prompt in there rather than just making me take their word for it. Also, how do I know this isn't being done by someone who has custom instructions or has a history of talking to the LLM about other parties or political positions, causing the LLM to adjust its answers based on those memories?

This would be more credible with details logs of what was done.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-21 20:54:47+00:00
You can reasonably assume that if no terms and conditions were offered, then your use of a publicly accessible endpoint is authorized.

But if terms and conditions ARE offered to you, and you bypass acceptance somehow, then you're knowingly accessing the system without being authorized.

I really doubt this would be prosecuted except as part of some much larger misbehavior, but it is there.
by floating-io | 2025-10-21 20:55:20+00:00
Complexity vs. Tedium. There's a difference.

The SpaceX approach requires a lot of launches, but they're already proven experts at that. They've launched something like 130 rockets this year alone. That's one every couple of days.

High launch cadence is not complexity for SpaceX. It's normal for them. After the first half dozen or so refuels, it will be second nature, just like delivering satellites with Falcon is.

And they are, in essence, developing a single craft for it, just with a few variations.

Blue's architecture requires three distinct vehicles. Each one has to be developed separately. Then we get to the launch; last I saw, here is the comparison:

SpaceX:

* Launch the Depot

* Launch N tankers to fill the depot (this is the tedium I mentioned).

* Launch the HLS to LEO

* Refill the HLS in LEO

* Send the HLS to NRHO

* Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people

* Land on and then return from the moon

* Rendevous with Orion in NRHO and transfer people back.

That's a fairly complex architecture, but let's compare that against the last I saw of Blue's [1]:

* Launch the Transporter to LEO

* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter

* Launch the Lander to LEO "dry"

* Fill the Lander from the Transporter

* Send Lander to NRHO

* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter

* Raise Transporter to "stairstep" orbit

* Launch tankers and refill the Transporter again

* Send the Transporter to NRHO

* Refill the Lander again in NRHO

* Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people

* Land on moon and return with people

* Rendezvous with Orion and transfer people back

That is far more complex than what SpaceX is proposing.

The number of tanker launches is really quite irrelevant for both in this context. It's less risky for SpaceX due to their extensive ops experience, but both will be fine there I think. That's just tedium for both of them.

The complexity comes in with the number of operations and precisely where BO is doing the refueling. I'm not terribly worried about the LEO ops; they'll manage those. The NRHO refuelling though? That one strikes me much riskier if only due to comms lag.

And the sheer number of steps in Blue's architecture seems crazy to me.

So no, I can't agree that Blue's architecture is in any way simpler. Quite the opposite, in fact.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20250008728/downloads/25... :: the last slide in the set.

(edit: formatting)
by danaris | 2025-10-21 20:55:24+00:00
Well, sure—and I am, in general, a very positive person.

But there's a huge difference between (a) "given that this thing exists that seems very bad, can you imagine a way to a better future?" and (b) "can you imagine ways that this thing that seems very bad could actually be very good?"

The ways to a better future are in spite of these developments, not because of them, and I don't think it's at all helpful to act like that's not the case or be all disappointed (and, frankly, a bit condescending) at people who refuse to play along with attempts to do so.

And it's possible that (a) above is what you meant, but your wording very much sounded like (b).
by Barrin92 | 2025-10-21 20:55:57+00:00
>A bit harsh off a single post.

I don't think it is. Labeling passion and love for your work "tech fetishism", is spiritually bankrupt. Mind you we're in general here not talking about people working in a mine to survive, which is a different story.

But people who do have a choice in their career, doing something they have no love for solely to add more zeros to their bank account? That is the fetish, that is someone who has himself become an automaton. It's no surprise they seem to take no issues with LLMs because they're already living like one. Like how devoid of curiosity do you have to be to do something half your waking life that you don't appreciate if you're very likely someone who has the freedom to choose?
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-21 20:56:11+00:00
Another time to link The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, 1909: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...

> “The Machine,” they exclaimed, “feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.”

..

> "she spoke with some petulance to the Committee of the Mending Apparatus. They replied, as before, that the defect would be set right shortly. “Shortly! At once!” she retorted"

..

> "there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended."
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-10-21 20:56:43+00:00
I considered donating to Wikipedia until I read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

The TL;DR is that Wikipedia has a massive spending problem, and if they brought it back to something reasonable, their existing war chest would last them for at least a decade, even with no additional funding.
by agumonkey | 2025-10-21 20:56:44+00:00
I beg to differ. I wouldn't praise magit if it was just another power user UI that required to become a black belt to do anything.

magit is a (somehow) thin layer on top of git output, and the brilliance comes from

- keeps the information similar to git cli - depending on the context it allows to use indirect features (chunk staging) live from the diff - for most use cases it will infer obvious flags/parameters from where you're at. e.g: if you're on branch and start rebasing, it will soft-infer the source and target branch. another one, in the log view, selecting a few commits and diff will get you the diff for that range it basically reify the informations from the output transparently for you and reuse it where useful, saving you input and efforts multiple times per day - lastly very low complexity so it's quick and out of your way. every time I have to pair, my colleagues say they couldn't follow what I did because by the time I started talking about staging/pushing, I'm already finished and back to source
by paulgerhardt | 2025-10-21 20:56:46+00:00
Aside from the skin lotion thing[1] that got popular recently, what is the state of the art in 2025 for allergy prevention? It feels like there is a lot of common ignorance in this space but literature is full of better practice.

[1] https://www.nationaljewish.org/clinical-trials/seal-study-st...
by bluGill | 2025-10-21 20:56:53+00:00
> If instead they rarely parked we could have far fewer of them

Except that they would still spend most of their time parked. Almost nobody is driving at 3am - they will nearly all be parked every night. There are vastly more cars needed during rush hour than mid day, and then there is a smaller peak at lunch time. Most cars will still be parked 95% of the time as we don't need them that often.

> If instead they rarely parked we could have far fewer of them,

At the expense of putting even more of them on the road unoccupied going to their next pickup. Or a parking spot in a cheap area: pay less for parking is a motivation though I expect even self owned cars will do that. This is an environmental disaster - unless you have a 100% renewable power source.

> have better saturation of modern safety features into the vehicle pool (since they'd wear out at a more uniform rate), and have better incentive alignment re: maintenance

People whoes self image is wrapped up in a new car will not put up with older cars. People who want cheap will ask for older cars. As such I expect either the taxi will have different categories of costs, or more likely they will sell their used cars (with 30k miles) to someone else - if this actually develops, which again I mostly expect it won't (but it might in some areas where we will see these patterns).

> because the wastes associated with an ever growing percentage of the population owning a personal vehicle will eventually cross a tipping point.

If that is your concern you should be asking for good public transportation. In places where it is good a lot of people don't own cars. I wouldn't be surprised if you have never been to such a place (people who live in such places are rarely native English speakers, though is a common English second language for some) Still that is a much better focus on your efforts - we have the technology today, is scales much better than cars ever can, and is cheaper!
by adventured | 2025-10-21 20:57:18+00:00
~$260 billion in today's dollar for the whole Apollo program. Cut out what we don't need to figure out in the present. Maybe a $100-$150 billion cost spread over five years. Trivial sum against a $40 trillion economy. If the only thing we needed to get back to the moon was $30 billion per year in expenditures for five years, Congress would sign off on that instantly.

I think the US is lacking the organization, culture, and on-a-mission mentality today, not money. I believe the money is the easiest part of the equation, the rest can't be faked or supplied at the click of a button. The US is no longer a serious nation hell-bent on accomplishing great/difficult things. Congress knows if they supply the $30 billion per year, what we'll get in the end is a broken program that won't achieve the set aims, and it'll just take 15 years at $40 billion per year instead, without a single Moon landing. They know full well how dysfunctional the US is, everybody is just acting when the cameras are on.
by zachlatta | 2025-10-21 20:59:07+00:00
We've had a similar experience at Hack Club, the nonprofit I run that helps high schoolers get into coding and electronics.

We used to be on Heroku and the cost wasn't just the high monthly bill - it was asking "is this little utility app I just wrote really worth paying $15/month to host?" before working on it.

This year we moved to a self-hosted setup on Coolify and have about 300 services running on a single server for $300/month on Hetzner. For the most part, it's been great and let us ship a lot more code!

My biggest realization is that for an organization like us, we really only need 99% uptime on most of our services (not 99.99%). Most developer tools are around helping you reach 99.99% uptime. When you realize you only need 99%, the world opens up.

Disco looks really cool and I'm excited to check it out!
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-21 20:59:50+00:00
I started writing code in basic on a beige box. My first code on windows was a vb6 window that looked like the AOL login screen and used open email relays to send me passwords.

I've written a ton of code in my life and while I've been a successful startup CTO, I've always stayed in IC level roles (I'm in one right now in addition to hobby coding) outside of that, data structures and pipelines, keep it simple, all that stuff that makes a thing work and maintainable.

But here is the thing, writing code isn't my identity, being a programmer, vim vs emacs, mechanical keyboard, RTFM noob, pure functions, serverless, leetcode, cargo culting, complexity merchants, resume driven dev, early semantic css lunacy, these are thing outside of me.

I have explored all of these things, had them be part of my life for better or worse, but they aren't who I am.

I am a guy born with a bunch of heart defects who is happy to be here and trying new stuff, I want to explore in space and abstraction through the short slice of time I've got.

I want to figure stuff out and make things and sometimes that's with a keyboard and sometimes that's with a hammer.

I think there are a lot of societal status issues (devs were mostly low social status until The Social Network came out) and personal identity issues.

I've seen that for 40 years, anything tied to a persons identity is basically a thing they can't be honest about, can't update their priors on, can't reason about.

And people who feel secure and appreciated don't give much grace to those who don't, a lot of callous people out there, in the dev community too.

I don't know why people are so fast to narrow the scope of who they are.

Humans emit meaning like stars emit photons.

The natural world would go on without us, but as far as we have empirically observed we make the maximally complex, multi modally coherent meaning of the universe.

We are each like a unique write head in the random walk of giving the universe meaning.

There are a ton of issues from a network resilience and maximizing the random meaning generation walk where Ai and consolidation are extremely dangerous, I think as far as new stuff in the pipeline it's between Ai and artificial wombs that have the greatest risks for narrowing the scope of human discovery and unique meaning expansion to a catastrophic point.

But so many of these arguments are just post-hoc rationalizations to poorly justify what at root is this loss of self identity, we were always in the business of automating jobs out from under people, this is very weak tea and crocodile tears.

The simple fact is, all our tools should allow us to have materially more comfortable and free lives, the Ai isn't the problem, it's the fact that devs didn't understand that tech is best when empowering people to think and connect better and have more freedom and self determination with their time.

If that isn't happening it's not the codes fault, it's the network architecture of our current human power structures fault.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-10-21 21:00:01+00:00
Cycling/spin can yield more aerobic intensity with less stress on knees, you can't even get to Zone 2 with walking unless you're very overweight. Of course there are bodyweight options like aerobics, shadow boxing, jumping rope.

Skipping rope would be my favorite were it not for the fact that you need a lot of headspace for the rope. This makes it unviable except outdoors or at a gym/facility.
by actionfromafar | 2025-10-21 21:00:01+00:00
In Russia, loyalty is the highest virtue. In the USA, it's the other way around!

⁽"ᵀʰᵉ ʰᶦᵍʰᵉˢᵗ ᵛᶦʳᵗᵘᵉ ᶦˢ ˡᵒʸᵃˡᵗʸ"⁾
by rikafurude21 | 2025-10-21 21:00:02+00:00
The cloud has made people afraid of linux servers. The markup is essentially just the price business has to pay because of developer insecurity. The irony is that self hosting is relatively simple, and alot of fun. Personally never got the appeal of Heroku, Vercel and similar, because theres nothing better than spinning up a server and setting it up from scratch. Every developer should try it.