MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moomoo11 | 2025-10-06 02:27:12+00:00
What exactly do you mean?

The only people who make “actual” money at the average startups that exit (acquired or scrapped to PE) are founders, maybe the first 5 hires.

I’ve worked at only one startup. We IPO’d. I did pretty good and I joined a unicorn at like series B. Enough to go a decade figuring out what I want to work on next.

Most of my other friends went to work at other startups. Most of them went bust and they made nothing but their base salary (and a couple of them got screwed on that too).

So unless someone’s working at an actual unicorn like I was it’s really no guarantee.

FWIW I made 8x on my latest shares, and multiples on that on earliest. Some people I know who had been there a few years more than me walked away with many more Ms which ain’t bad for 6-8 years of work.

But that is SUPER lucky. It has sort of ruined my outlook too because I have no interest making 250k base + 200k RSUs, and I have zero interest in most of these current startups that I have a good hunch will not work out. And 400k isn’t that meaningful anymore, I’d rather live off interest or work as a barista if my own startup doesn’t work out.
by jleyank | 2025-10-06 02:27:39+00:00
From where I've lived over the decades, a "real chemist" is somebody who gets their hands wet: natural product, synthetic, process or medicinal chemist trying to make white powders vs. brown oils. A computational chemist is often a synonym for somebody doing quantum chemistry while a molecular modeler is somebody doing computational medicinal chemistry. A theoretician, who could be doing QM method development or application sits somewhere on the spectrum between physics and chemistry but is often dismissed as "not a real chemist". AI applied to various pharmaceutical/biotech problems is probably going to end up like theoreticians.

Doesn't matter where they work, only what they do and possibly how they approach the problem. There's a set of titles appropriate for academia and one for industry, which aren't being discussed here.
by jordanb | 2025-10-06 02:27:53+00:00
I found that learning Ada was a good way to learn how to write good C++ code, because both languages are at the same level of abstraction but Ada is clean and opinionated.

The best a example is RAII. This is a pattern in C++ that you have to follow if you don't want to make a mess. In Ada it's a language feature called Controlled Types.
by jart | 2025-10-06 02:28:15+00:00
The most sophisticated countries and companies are smart enough to use the least sophisticated backup methods. SK needs to backup their data to cassette tapes and tape libraries cost a bit more than that, but not much. Even if they boat their tapes over to an iron mountain in the US, I can't imagine the equipment and service fees are going to cost them more than a few hundred grand. They'll be spending more on the headcount to manage the thing.
by runarberg | 2025-10-06 02:29:23+00:00
Yes, theorizing a future possibility that has no president is, by definition, fantasy. I mean, you can do fantasy, it makes good science fiction, but until we have evidence that von Neumann probes exist and are capable of colonizing the entire galaxy, it remains fantasy. Theoretically we could build a high speed rail between Seattle and LA, we could build a permanent settlement on Antarctica, and we could replace our jet-planes with hydrogen powered flying wings, but until we do, a world with those things are just fantasy.

The only argument for von Neumann probes that I can think of is as a specific answer to the Fermi paradox. The universe should be filled with these probes, but since it obviously isn’t, we can infer that no civilization has reach the interstellar age.

I reject this framing, the Fermi paradox is only a paradox if you assume that space colonization is a thing that is not just possible, but inevitable. My solution to the Fermi paradox simply rejects this assumption. Civilization will not colonize definitely, they will do their space explorations with telescopes and targeted probes, and they won‘t build any von Neumann probes (at least not ones continue to replicate for dozens millennia).

Aside: I am aware of the irony that my description of civilizations outside of our solar system is also a fantasy.
by hinkley | 2025-10-06 02:29:50+00:00
NCSA also used it for some data archival and I believe for hosting the website files.

I looked up at one point whatever happened to AFS and it turns out that it has some Amdahl’s Law glass ceiling that ultimately limits the aggregate bandwidth to something around 1 GBps, which was fine when it was young but not fine when 100Mb Ethernet was ubiquitous and gigabit was obtainable with deep enough pockets. If adding more hardware can’t make the filesystem faster you’re dead.

I don’t know if or how openAFS has avoided these issues.
by yen223 | 2025-10-06 02:30:26+00:00
Yeah, something we are confident about is that

a) training is where the bulk of an AI system's energy usage goes (based on a report released by Mistral)

b) video generation is very likely a few orders of magnitude more expensive than text generation.

That said, I still believe that data centres in general - including AI ones - don't consume a significant amount of energy compared with everything else we do, especially heating and cooling and transport.

Pre-LLM data centres consume about 1% of the world's electricity. AI data centres may bump that up to 2%
by jleyank | 2025-10-06 02:30:30+00:00
Single people without significant real-world constraints are capable of quite amazing acts of pique, or idealism, or altruism. And in today's connected world, criticism and support can be gained almost instantly. To some (significant?) fraction of the population, one's (on-line) reputation is more important than your bank account - so actions have to be viewed in this light.
by jakeinspace | 2025-10-06 02:30:38+00:00
28kW of dissipation is pretty solid, though obviously is irrelevant during a short burst with hundreds of watts of heat generated. I guess the frame itself act as the fallback heatsink for storing excess heat in these scenarios? Because by my math, a modest 100kg heatsink (no idea if that's reasonable) would reach 270°C in only around 45 secondw if it's trying to handle 250kW+ of heat transfer (270C is roughly the max differential for heat pipes,liquid cooling might be significantly lower limit). And obviously the batteries can't handle 270C.
by plantain | 2025-10-06 02:31:47+00:00
A hectare of land is a few hundred euros per year to rent - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Power consumption in the EU has flatlined and is even falling. New HV transmission lines are not needed - put the solar farms next to some of the shut down nuclear plants (as we now do with big batteries in Australia and decrepit coal plants).
by kobebrookskC3 | 2025-10-06 02:33:14+00:00
in this example, aren't the scoping rules for c pretty much the same?

what do the annotations for the tool look like? is the analysis local, in that it doesn't look into the bodies of other functions? if it is, surely you would have to have lifetimes and be generic over them.

how much c code satisfies the tool? if there's hardly any c satisfying the tool, there might actually be a larger ecosystem of rust code to use.
by waterTanuki | 2025-10-06 02:35:03+00:00
I understand data sovereignty in the case where a foreign entity might cut off access to your data, but this paranoia that storing info under your bed is the safest bet is straight up false. We have post-quantum encryption widely available already. If your fear is that a foreign entity will access your data, you're technologically illiterate.

Obviously no person in a lawmaking position will ever have the patience or foresight to learn about this, but the fact they won't even try is all the more infuriating.
by samus | 2025-10-06 02:35:29+00:00
I see a high risk of idioms getting butchered. It's usually a good idea to translate into English and fix that up first. And unless a native-language editor revises it, there might be sentence structures that feel unnatural in the target language.

A classic issue is dealing with things like wordplay. Good bilingual editors might be able to get across the intended meaning in other ways, but I highly doubt translation software is capable of even recognizing it.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-06 02:35:33+00:00
This makes sense. My wife and I didn’t start sharing our locations until we had already developed complete trust in each other. It has never caused us any issues, because we don’t have doubts about our trust.

For us it’s just about practicality. We have two kids and are busy with things, sometimes it is just easier to check to see how close she is rather than text and wait for a response (especially if she is driving and I don’t want to distract her!)
by Keyframe | 2025-10-06 02:35:51+00:00
Not always. Disregarding CSGs and parametrics, Nvidia itself was almost buried for not adhering to that philosophy with their first product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1

funny side note. SEGA invested $5m in Nvidia then, after the fiasco to keep them alive. They sold that equity when Nvidia went IPO for roughly $15m. Have they kept it, it would be worth $3b today. SEGA's market cap is around $4b today.
by rmunn | 2025-10-06 02:36:27+00:00
> And another reason people don't like them is a record of pairing them with abnormally short yellow lights.

This. I heard an anecdote, which I can't prove but I'm sure has happened dozens of times in various places, about a guy who got a red-light ticket and suspected the yellow light was too short. He went back to that intersection and filmed the yellow lights, proving that they were shorter than the mandated-by-law 3 seconds. (I think state law, I imagine different states and countries might have different minima). He took that recording to court and got not only his ticket thrown out, but (according to the version I heard) all red-light tickets produced at that particular intersection.
by TheDong | 2025-10-06 02:36:45+00:00
> There's nothing new about being able to copyright something that's a transformation of another work

There is something novel here.

Google Books created a huge online index of books, OCRing, compressing them, and transforming them. That was copyright infringement.

Just because I download a bunch of copyrighted files and run `tar c | gzip` over them does not mean I have new copyright.

Just because I download an image and convert it from png to jpg at 50% quality, throwing away about half the data, does not mean I have created new copyright.

AI models are giant lossy compression algorithms. They take text, tokenize it, and turn it into weights, and then inference is a weird form of decompression. See https://bellard.org/ts_zip/ for a logical extension to this.

I think this is the reason that the claim of LLM models being unencumbered by copyright is novel. Until now, a human had to do some creative transformation to transform a work, it could not simply be a computer algorithm that changed the format or compressed the input.
by Our_Benefactors | 2025-10-06 02:36:57+00:00
Read receipts are just as much of a social anxiety trigger for me; “oh they read my message, why haven’t they responded” or “they read my last few messages, why didn’t they read this one, am I boring them”. I turned those off entirely. Sometimes new acquaintances ask me why. I tell them it stresses me out and makes me overthink social interactions. Most people are amenable to this explanation.
by cortesoft | 2025-10-06 02:40:00+00:00
We often send those, but sometimes we are busy or traffic is worse than normal. I don’t want to text to ask where she is, because she might be driving and I don’t want to distract her.

When you have two young kids, surprises aren’t usually on the table. We need to know when things are happening.

I also like having the feature in case she is in an accident or something.
by jasoneckert | 2025-10-06 02:40:02+00:00
The ICON picture in this blog post is of my ICON and taken from my blog (with credit, which is a nice gesture). If anyone is interested in reading my two posts about the Burroughs ICON computer running QNX, here are the links (the first post has YouTube links of my QNX demos):

https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/icon-computer/

https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/lexicon-computer/
by hedora | 2025-10-06 02:40:25+00:00
The operational expenses of this stuff dwarfs the hardware cost. For the tape mountain, you need robots to confirm the tapes still work (mean time to detection of device failure and recovery are key for RAID durability computations). So, someone needs to constantly repair the robots or whatever.

If I was being paid to manage that data set, I’d probably find two enterprise storage vendors, and stick two copies of the data set on them, each with primary secondary backup. Enterprise flash has been under a dollar a gigabyte for over a decade, so that’s under $1.7M per copy, amortized over five years. That’s $700K per year, and one of the four copies (at 3-4 sites) could be the primary store.

(I can’t be bothered to look up current prices, but moore’s law says there have been six capacity doublings since then, and it still applies to flash and networking, so divide my estimate by 2^6 — so, ten-ish grand per year, with zero full time babysitters required).
by antisol | 2025-10-06 02:40:27+00:00
With respect, I'm not sure which of these guidelines you think my post violates? Could you clarify for me? I'm particularly interested in your "destroys what it is for" comment, I'm not sure I understand. If you could elaborate that would be awesome.

I think it's important to point out that this person who is lionised by so many was actually an objectively bad person who did reprehensible things.
by hamdingers | 2025-10-06 02:40:42+00:00
A car with a 4 second 0-60 time can reach 40mph, a speed lethal to 80% of pedestrians, in under 80 feet from a standstill. That's the distance from the limit line to the far crosswalk when crossing a 5 lane road.

Putting this level of performance (and better) into boring suburban SUVs bought by ambivalent consumers is negligence.
by majorchord | 2025-10-06 02:40:50+00:00
Not going to lie, I have always been fascinated by the fourier transform, but I had to stop this video after less than 2 minutes in because it went way over my head... "a context you are all familiar with: polynomial multiplication"... um no, I have zero clue what that is, sorry. Also the speaker seems to have some sort of speech pathology that unfortunately bothers me.
by jeena | 2025-10-06 02:41:36+00:00
I've been working for a Korean Hyundai supplier for two years training them in modern software development processes. The programming part is not a problem, they have a lot of talented people.

The big problem from my point of view is management. Everyone pushes responsibility and work all the way down to the developera so that they do basically everything themselves from negotiating with the customer, writing the requirements (or not) to designing the architecture, writing the code and testing the system.

If they're late,they just stay and work longer and on the weekends and sleep at the desk.
by kragen | 2025-10-06 02:42:11+00:00
When I buy food, the marginal cost of a bite from the food is very close to the average cost of a bite, because if I eat 5% more food this week, I have to buy 5% more food next week.

Contrast this with the case of listening to music on my stereo: if I listen to 5% more music on the stereo, I don't have to buy 5% more music, and I don't have to replace the stereo 5% sooner. The marginal cost is near zero: just the small amount of electricity the stereo uses, plus a tiny amount of wear and tear. Maybe I only listen to music three hours a week and the stereo cost me $313 and lasts for 20 years, so the average cost per hour is $0.10. But the marginal cost of listening for an additional hour this week is much lower than that.

Utility-scale batteries are more like the stereo than the food.
by technofiend | 2025-10-06 02:42:21+00:00
As a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, I liked to understand as much as I could about the tech that supported the systems I supported. All my clients used NFS so I dug into the guts of RPC until I could write my own services and publish them via portmap.

Weirdly that nerd snipe landed me two different jobs! People wanted to build network-based services and that was one of the quickest ways to do it.
by rmunn | 2025-10-06 02:42:35+00:00
Best use for location sharing I can think of is traveling in a convoy of more than one vehicle, when you plan to meet up for lunch somewhere along the way. At least one person in each car shares their location with each other during the trip, so you can tell that car B is 20 minutes away from the restaurant while car A is 30 minutes away, so car B can afford to stop for a bathroom break.

Then you turn off location sharing after the trip, because you don't actually want to share your location with casual acquaintances all the time. At least, I certainly don't.
by Mistletoe | 2025-10-06 02:42:57+00:00
I think you are confusing optimal design for the design that makes them the most money by appealing to the maximum amount of people. It’s why all of our cars are now black, white, or silver/gray. Don’t you dare waste a bit of money on red paint someone might not want! So everything around us turns into gray goo that takes no chances at all so it can make the most money. Then it becomes a worse and worse feedback loop.
by rajasekarm | 2025-10-06 02:43:19+00:00
The Problem

When you automate web tasks with scripts, actions happen instantly - forms fill in a split second, clicks happen without cursor movement. It's:

Hard to demonstrate what's happening Looks robotic/unnatural

The Solution: AgentCursor

A lightweight library that creates a visible, animated cursor that:

Moves smoothly between elements Types text character-by-character Shows click animations
by firesteelrain | 2025-10-06 02:43:41+00:00
I know there is a belief that Rust/Ada etc is safer than C/C++ and in some cases that is true. I know of multiple, airworthy aircraft that are flying with C++ code. I also know of aircraft flying with Ada. The aircraft flying with Ada is hard to maintain. There is also a mountain of testing that goes into it that is not just unit testing. This mountain of integration, subsystem and system level testing is required regardless
by commandersaki | 2025-10-06 02:43:52+00:00
This is exactly why I only trust myself to do it.

In theory that makes sense, one thing I specifically omit as to why I stopped running my own service is in the past in a bout of paranoia due to the onset of a mental condition, I literally rm -rf'd my laptop, including a lot of files that were unrecoverable. Thankfully I didn't do this to my server at the time. Even though I've been stable for a long time, all it takes is a relapse (or even just a lapse of judgement) and boom your servers (and backups) become vulnerable.

I also don't trust that I can secure my systems and backups better than a company that dedicates itself to running a service for multiple users and have dedicated security/infrastructure teams. Sure I've never actually had an issue, but as with the anecdote of my friend, it just takes one failure. Also economies of scale helps with security; it is easy for an attacker to exfil or do damage to a smaller corpus of data (few to no customers [users]), than a large corpus of data across 1000s of customers.

I wouldn't trust a free service or a service that doesn't provide adequate support such as Microsoft or Google, but there's obviously a good selection of email providers out there that do an excellent job, much better than those self-hosting because they work with economies of scale.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-06 02:45:24+00:00
Ah ok, clear. Thank you for the clarification. Some more interesting details: the initial fault was triggered by a test of a fire suppression system, that would have been recoverable. But someone thought they were exceedingly clever and they were going to fix this without any downtime and that's when a small problem became a much larger one, more so when they found out that their backups were incomplete. I still wonder if they ever did RCA/PM on this and what their lessons learned were. It should be a book sized document given how much went wrong. I got the call after their own efforts failed by one of their customers and after hearing them out I figured this is not worth my time because it just isn't going to work.
by slow_typist | 2025-10-06 02:45:40+00:00
585 kWh/m^2 median energy consumption for production according to a 2013 study cited on the Wikipedia article on energy return on investment. 440 W panel has about 2 m^2. It is probably a tad better now, because lower mass of silicon per meter squared. That translates to roughly 2.5 years of energy payback time in Germany under good conditions (azimuth SE to SW and elevation about 30 to 60 degrees, no shadow). Give a few extra months for the inverter and system losses. If you want to know exactly there are commercial databases used for LCA calculations.

The carbon emissions depend on the energy mix of the supply chain (which is mostly in China, since Germany totally butchered domestic production). And the total climate effect is amplified by other emissions (leaking of technical gases in silicon production? But now I am way out of my field of expertise.)

OTOH hand to calculate the offset of emissions you need to know what is going on in the grid. If windmills are shut down around noon to make room for PV, the offset is zero.
by 65 | 2025-10-06 02:46:49+00:00
Yep, I've always had a really easy time making ambigrams because of my (natural) mirror writing ability. As in, one day I tried mirror writing and I could just... do it without hesitation.

I have asked a few left handed and right handed friends of mine to make ambigrams, or do mirror writing, and it's quite interesting how easy it is for left handed people compared to right handed people.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-06 02:46:57+00:00
Obviously getting meters updated & letting folks push power to the grid is better. But there's also neat solutions showing up like the Zoltux, which is an 800w solar+inverter kit that also monitors the power feed to the home, and never nets power to the grid, only offsets power you're using. For markets where there's encumbrances to solar its an interesting technical option, since no net metering infrastructure is needed (and you don't have to rewire your home like this submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45476820)

It's also slick as hell seeing DJI for example add grid-tie capabilities to their Power 2000 power station/ battery. Capable of 1800W solar, but gained grid tie after the fact. https://dronedj.com/2025/09/01/dji-power-2000-energy-grid/
by HaZeust | 2025-10-06 02:47:10+00:00
>"Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate."

Although I'm roughly half the age of the median HN user, and don't have a lot of life experience, one thing I've learned over the last few years - particularly during covid - is that people will accomplish success after a difficult circumstance, and will come out one of two ways (which often decides their core values, political leaning, empathy towards people in other difficult situations, etc.):

1. "I got through it, so anyone else can, too"; or

2. "I got through it, and believe no one else should need to".
by jerrythegerbil | 2025-10-06 02:48:31+00:00
And its lesser known component, the mailbox server used for signaling to connect the two computers. If you’ve ever installed and used magic wormhole, you’ve likely used the default public mailbox server unless you configured and set up your own.

https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole-mailbox-ser...