MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vincenthwt | 2025-10-22 22:57:42+00:00
1. What is a "reasonable cost," and who decides?

Reasonable cost is subjective, but NASA’s budget provides perspective. At 0.4 percent of the US federal budget, it amounts to just 27 billion dollars in 2023, while the defense budget is 842 billion dollars, or 13 percent of annual spending. Redirecting just 5 percent of defense funding, about 40 billion dollars, would more than double NASA's budget and allow for significant progress on Moon and Mars projects. This minor reallocation would not impact national security, making space exploration both affordable and worthwhile. When we consider the technological, scientific, and economic benefits, investing in space stands out as a smart, future-focused decision.

2. Are there any minerals on the Moon worth exploring?

The Moon holds valuable resources like helium-3 for clean fusion energy, water ice for fuel and life support, and rare earth metals for advanced technologies. Helium-3 could power nuclear fusion reactors and potentially yield trillions of dollars in energy benefits. Water ice can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen, creating rocket fuel that reduces reliance on costly Earth resupplies for space missions. Mining rare earth metals on the Moon could also lessen our dependency on Earth’s finite resources and help minimize ecological damage caused by terrestrial mining. The long-term financial value of these resources far outweighs the costs of extracting them.

3. Will Moon and Mars bases actually double NASA’s existing budget?

This claim is incorrect. The Artemis program, for example, is projected to cost 93 billion dollars over more than ten years, with yearly spending far below doubling NASA’s current 27 billion dollar budget. Additionally, technologies like reusable rockets, such as SpaceX’s Starship, have lowered launch costs by 90 percent, making Moon and Mars exploration increasingly achievable. With international collaborations and private investment, developing these projects is far less expensive than critics often assume, and will not significantly burden taxpayers.

4. What about other technologies, like AI or synthetic biology?

While AI and synthetic biology can offer exciting short-term benefits, they focus on Earth-based solutions and neglect humanity's long-term survival. Space exploration addresses critical long-term challenges, such as resource scarcity, reducing dependence on Earth, and avoiding extinction-level threats. Unlike efforts in Earth’s hostile environments like Antarctica or the deep sea, Moon and Mars exploration unlock completely new resources and pathways for innovation. Delaying investment in space exploration risks stagnating progress, and waiting for the "perfect time" could mean missing transformative opportunities that secure humanity's future.
by antonvs | 2025-10-22 22:59:29+00:00
> the “simplicity” of SSA only exists because we’ve decided mutation is evil.

Mutation is the result of sloppy thinking about the role of time in computation. Sloppy thinking is a hindrance to efficient and tractable code transformations.

When you "mutate" a value, you're implicitly indexing it on a time offset - the variable had one value at time t_0 and another value at time t_1. SSA simply uses naming to make this explicit. (As do CPS and ANF, which is where that "equivalence" comes from.)

If you don't use SSA, CPS, or ANF for this purpose, you need to do something else to make the time dimension explicit, or you're going to be dealing with some very hairy problems.

"Evil" in this case is shorthand for saying that mutable variables are an unsuitable model for the purpose. That's not a subjective decision - try to achieve similar results without dealing with the time/mutation issue and you'll find out why.
by operrs | 2025-10-22 22:59:40+00:00
If you need to manage risk for a legacy service that has a requirement to be internet exposed, I suggest checking out https://knocknoc.io/ for a self-hosted and/or cloud based solution that was not built with vibe coding, but actual customer security use cases. They provide 2FA and/or single sign-on to allow just in time access to internet exposed applications which remain hidden from unauthenticated/approved users.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-22 23:00:02+00:00
Politico (5 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45659249

PCMag (6 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45660457

CNN (9 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45660459
by thenaturalist | 2025-10-22 23:00:33+00:00
> OpenAIs leadership and strategy feel unclear.

Fixed that for you.

Shipping a TikTok clone slop app and a keylogger browser while incinerating money and simultaneously talking a big game how AGI is imminent are the opposite of leadership or strategy.

More like acts of desperation to fill massively oversized shoes.

The ones who have been shipping quality consistently are the Chinese AI labs.
by aenvoker | 2025-10-22 23:00:40+00:00
I rather enjoyed some of these

https://reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1lq299r/postscarci...

https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1o6ickx/dreaming_on...

https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1n6mzig/how_to_buil...

https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1nwdjdn/the_perfect_bo...

https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1m8a9wz/pinkington_rop...

https://reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1n52kut/derek_the_agin...

https://reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1muwyah/still_here_...

https://reddit.com/r/DefendingAIArt/comments/1mttoi4/my_not_...
by wagwang | 2025-10-22 23:00:54+00:00
As usual with communist work, the critique is poignant but the prescription is trash. It is true that we live in a post labor society, that a fraction of the work done is actually required for survival and that automation and the forces of international capitalism has crushed what is left of the true working(production) class, and that much of "GDP" is just meaningless consumerism that has no bearing on productivity. However, the proposed self-determining, post-work activity will be equally if not less meaningful. This left-existential view that you can "community" your way into purpose is just BS. Purpose comes from needs and having a post industrial society where needs are cheaply met means nihilism is inevitable.
by danaris | 2025-10-22 23:01:03+00:00
I frankly don't believe this. (edit for clarity: the proposition that our current rates are highly likely to be towards the top end of what's feasible, not the existence of such a curve)

It's been cited as unshakable truth many times, including just before places like Washington State significantly raised their top tax brackets—and saw approximately zero rich people leave.

There's a lot of widely-believed economic theory underlying our current practice that's based on extremely shaky ground.

As for how SS taxes are handled, I'm 100% in agreement with you.
by hinkley | 2025-10-22 23:01:31+00:00
HN used to have a policy of not editorializing article titles when published here, but I've caught them modifying headlines a few times to match the source article instead of the linked article. One that stuck out was just the other day, and it had a confusing title that was not only wrong but also hard to parse.

Maybe we complained with enough concrete examples of how absolute shit editors and summarizers are now.
by tylerhou | 2025-10-22 23:01:58+00:00
Here's a concise explanation of SSA. Regular (imperative) code is hard to optimize because in general statements are not pure -- if a statement has side effects, then it might not preserve the behavior to optimize that statement by, for example:

1. Removing that statement (dead code elimination)

2. Deduplicating that statement (available expressions)

3. Reordering that statement with other statements (hoisting; loop-invariant code motion)

4. Duplicating that statement (can be useful to enable other optimizations)

All of the above optimizations are very important in compilers, and they are much, much easier to implement if you don't have to worry about preserving side effects while manipulating the program.

So the point of SSA is to translate a program into an equivalent program whose statements have as few side effects as possible. The result is often something that looks like a functional program. (See: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.pdf, which is famous in the compilers community.) In fact, if you view basic blocks themselves as a function, phi nodes "declare" the arguments of the basic block, and branches correspond to tailcalling the next basic block with corresponding values. This has motivated basic block arguments in MLIR.

The "combinatorial circuit" metaphor is slightly wrong, because most SSA implementations do need to consider state for loads and stores into arbitrary memory, or arbitrary function calls. Also, it's not easy to model a loop of arbitrary length as a (finite) combinatorial circuit. Given that the author works at an AI accelerator company, I can see why he leaned towards that metaphor, though.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-22 23:02:28+00:00
Related

Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue (248 points, 1 day ago, 260 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45658056

I found a backdoor into my bed (980 points, 8 months ago, 393 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43129439
by defrost | 2025-10-22 23:02:34+00:00
Damian Cowell can be an acquired taste for some, glad you enjoyed - in other random DC moments that might tickle your fancy:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLAFy7o7Zvo

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxoODPQ4CTM

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENnAa7rqtBM

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0heT2_OX8bY

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGxDVXGRQpY
by vincenthwt | 2025-10-22 23:03:25+00:00
Crossing oceans and building planes were not always seen as clearly useful by everyone. Skeptics at the time dismissed them as dangerous, impractical, or unnecessary, yet those who pursued these goals unlocked advancements that transformed human history. The same applies to the Moon. It is far more than just a big, dry ball of rock; it contains highly valuable resources with practical potential.

For instance, the Moon has helium-3, a rare isotope that could one day power clean nuclear fusion energy, a trillion-dollar industry waiting to happen. Lunar water ice can be converted into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel and life support, making sustainable space exploration feasible and reducing the need for costly Earth-based resources. The Moon also has rare earth metals that are vital for technology and renewable energy systems, helping us address resource scarcity and reduce the environmental damage caused by terrestrial mining.

We do not explore the Moon for its own sake. The point of space exploration is to create a foundation for future industries and innovation while solving long-term challenges, such as resource depletion and planetary risks. Given the enormous technological, economic, and environmental benefits these resources could provide, the Moon is far more than just a barren rock; it holds the key to securing humanity's future.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-22 23:03:26+00:00
Heh right on cue:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/22/tesla-ear...

> It also reported a net income of $1.4bn, down from $2.2bn, a drop of 37% in its profits.

I’m not saying the company is doomed but there are some serious red flags going up in recent months
by smcin | 2025-10-22 23:03:32+00:00
1) The Monty Hall Problem (to be precise it hinges on ambiguity and the distinction between prior and posterior probabilities, but that is something most people aren't aware of and will get wrong the first time they see it, even people with knowledge of say Bayes' Theorem)

2) For several others, see Alon Amit's superb Quora answer to "What are the most interesting or popular probability puzzles in which the intuition is contrary to the solution?" ([2], login-walled). Mentions the very counterintuitive Penney's Game [0].

3) Berkson's Paradox, aka "People in hospital/getting treatment tend to have worse health indicators".

4) Asymmetric dice behavior is counterintuitive, when you first see it.

5) Benford's Law, on quantities occurring in nature (e.g. river lengths), as opposed to uniform distribution.

6) There are lots of counterintuitive things about Platonic solids.

7) Bayes' Theorem itself, superbly useful but possibly one of the things in probability most abused on a daily basis by bad journalism and bad statistics.

8) The Multiple Testing Problem/p-hacking/aka the xkcd "Green jelly beans cause acne" and as a corollary: 8a) Most published (academic) findings aren't replicable, aka "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", Joannidis (2005)

[9] Almost-integers

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

[2]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-interesting-or-popul...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem

[9]: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/AlmostInteger.html

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penney%27s_game

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Probability_theory_pa...
Data Scientists and ML Engineers – How do you keep track of what you have tried?
by arma97 | 2025-10-22 23:03:43+00:00
Hi all, I’m curious about how data scientists and ML engineers organize their work.

In your recent projects, how did you keep track of what you tried — preprocessing steps, model runs, or errors?

Did you have a process or system to look back at past experiments and learn from them?

Did you use any tools to help with this, like experiment tracking software? How did that work for you?

If you’ve ever struggled with this, what’s been the hardest part?
by scorpioxy | 2025-10-22 23:04:29+00:00
I'm curious, why is that? I've heard that sentence before but usually from people who want to write their own task system and end up partially implementing what celery implements just worse.

Celery is large and complex now and edge cases always show up at scale but that is usually not a reflection of the platform quality. The custom implementations I've seen are no where near what celery is capable of and can cater to so haven't seen the edge cases yet but that doesn't mean they implemented bug-free code and celery hasn't.

After asking about it, the issue always went towards a hand-wavey "performance". What is your experience on that front?
by MrDarcy | 2025-10-22 23:04:33+00:00
I’m a firm believer in open source and have decades of experience with it as an active community member.

There are two sides to this coin and tension in between.

On the one side license change rug pulls are annoying and deserve negative consequences.

On the other side, open source users are often far too entitled and demanding, contributing little and taking much.

At the end of the day the license terms are clear and users would do well to expect no more than the license says they’re entitled to expect.

Maybe then everyone can start being pleasantly surprised by each other’s behavior instead of both sides being disappointed by the other.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-22 23:05:20+00:00
Like I said, I have a lot of games that I love playing on the Steam Deck. I am often looking for games that run well on Steam Deck.

I am not sure what behavior on the margins I can change that would change the situation. My favorite games can't be played on Steam Deck. Like I said, I have been playing these games for 30 years. I am not about to change my favorite games just so I can make a point about the importance of Steam Deck compatibility. That won't change anything other than I won't be able to play my favorite games anymore.

Honestly, I am happy that they have added proper PC support along with cross platform play at all. Most sports games focus almost exclusively on consoles, and most of the player base play on consoles. Before they added cross platform gameplay a few years ago, it was really hard to find games when I would try to play online. Now it is easy.

The reason they are able to offer cross platform support is because of the anti-cheat.

Take. for example, the NBA2k series, which I used to play a lot; the anti-cheat for PC is awful. They don't allow cross platform play because of that, so games are hard to find and every few games you play a game against a guy who is 12 feet tall and hits every 3 pointer from any spot on the court. It was so bad I stopped playing entirely. For years I settled on playing on XBOX, but i eventually got annoyed enough i stopped buying the game completely.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-22 23:05:26+00:00
> without having cheaters in every game.

That's highly debatable. How do you know for certain they aren't using any undetectable cheats (like a driver-level cheat, say an aim assist) or a hardware level cheat? Cheating aside, how do you know that they aren't better than you simply because they've got better hardware? How do you get satisfaction from playing such games when there's so many variables that can affect gameplay that goes beyond human skill that you can't do anything about?
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-22 23:05:28+00:00
>My real question, if/when that happens, who is pulling the strings with the most sway?

I think it's evident that no one is in firm control. The Elon Musk fallout was that... Musk overreached or miscalculated, and one of the other contenders saw the opportunity to oust him. But I don't think that contender has consolidated his hold yet, Trump's too flighty. The answer could be changing day to day, depending on which asshat manages to ambush him first (or best) as they walk to the meeting room.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-10-22 23:06:12+00:00
In the next sentence:

"It features a new pedal-by-wire drivetrain called “DreamRide” developed in-house. The rider pedals a generator, which replenishes the battery,"

So uh, keep peddling?

Yes, the motion->electric->motion circuit is not as efficient as direct pedal but you are explicitly not stranded.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-10-22 23:06:20+00:00
> Fast builds are what truly makes a difference to developer productivity. With SourceFS builds complete over 9x faster on a regular developer machine. This sets a new standard as it enables developers to get their sword fighting time back and speeds-up the lengthy feedback loop on CI pipelines.

Objection! Long build times are better for sword-fighting time. The longer it takes, the more sword-fighting we have time for!
by jcranmer | 2025-10-22 23:06:35+00:00
SSA isn't about saying mutation is evil. It's about trivializing chasing down def-use rules. In the Dragon Book, essentially the first two dataflow analyses introduced are "reaching definitions" and "live variables"; within an SSA-based IR, these algorithms are basically "traverse a few pointers". There's also some ancillary benefits--SSA also makes a flow-insensitive algorithm partially flow-sensitive just by the fact that it's renaming several variables.

Sure, you still need to keep those algorithms in place for being able to reason about memory loads and stores. But if you put effort into kicking memory operations into virtual register operations (where you get SSA for free), then you can also make the compiler faster since you're not constantly rerunning these analyses, but only on demand for the handful of passes that specifically care about eliminating or moving loads and stores.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-22 23:06:54+00:00
I think we were able to strike a chord with nationalist tendencies, which can be strong motivators, for public infrastructure during the New Deal era with the PWA and WPA and their associated propaganda. There was both a personal pride in bettering oneself with hard work, and larger shared pride of building huge, sometimes incredible feats of engineering, infrastructure that your neighbors and nation depend on, and quite literally rebuilding the nation for a new modern era.

There are already some related things in popular culture that seem to inspire younger generations, like new urbanism. The hope for a new way of living can be a huge motivating force.
by wkat4242 | 2025-10-22 23:07:18+00:00
> Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.

This is why it makes sense that we haven't planned for that too occur.

And really, if they do have FTL capability it's very unlikely we would have any tech that would be of any danger to them anyway.

It makes for nice SciFi B-movies but I don't think it's a realistic scenario.
by atotic | 2025-10-22 23:08:06+00:00
Thanks for sharing. I'v'e read the book, and for me it made everything click. I've had serious childhood trauma (violence, alcoholism, etc) and have been "clumsy" all my life. Basically, I was all brain, and I completely neglected my body till I was 40. After reading the book, I posited that clumsy is trauma-related, and since I've resolved the trauma, there is no reason why I can't fix the clumsy. It's a process, and clumsy is almost gone.

I think people who deny this have not experienced serious childhood trauma. I agree that body might not keep the score for everything, but sometimes it really does.

The other thing that happened after reading the book is that I've become aware of how common trauma is. 4 out of 5 my college buddies experienced variety of early traumas: SA, alcoholism. Often I can sense trauma while speaking with someone. There is awkwardness, intensity in their gaze, emotions slightly off. I used to be attracted to it.
by tylerhou | 2025-10-22 23:08:57+00:00
It is not critical for register assignment -- in fact, SSA makes register assignment more difficult (see the swap problem; the lost copy problem).

Lifetime analysis is important for register assignment, and SSA can make lifetime analysis easier, but plenty of non-SSA compilers (lower-tier JIT compilers often do not use SSA because SSA is heavyweight) are able to register allocate just fine without it.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-10-22 23:09:12+00:00
Which is why getting rid of friction is a good idea.

This is R&D. You want a skunkworks culture where you have the best people in the world trying as many new things as possible, and failure is fine as long as it's interesting failure.

Not a culture where every development requires a permission slip from ten other teams, and/or everyone is worried if they'll still have a job a month from now.
by alganet | 2025-10-22 23:09:42+00:00
Maybe we're on a Speed (1994) situation.

There's a bomb in the bus. It will activate once we go past a certain speed. Once it activates, we can't go below a certain speed.

Also, the bus driver is injured, and a random lady with no driver's license or bomb-defusing experience is now driving. Furthermore, a part of the track is missing. Also, all passengers are hysterical.

That's more like what's happening right now.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-10-22 23:09:53+00:00
I have a friend who hates any electric bike not "pedal-assist". His opinion is they are electric motorbikes - that happen to have pedals as a backup option, usually not used.

And if anyone said "lets ride motorbikes with pedestrians" they'd be looked at funny.

I'm seeing more near misses each week AND in 20 years I'll be old enough to feel real vulnerable...