MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggreer | 2025-10-17 18:24:50+00:00
5G fixed wireless makes sense in urban and suburban areas because a single tower can serve many customers. But in rural areas, the number of customers per tower is much lower. To be profitable, the cost to build & maintain the tower must be covered by the customers in the area. Google says a 5G tower can cost anywhere from $150k-$300k, with maintenance costs being around 10% of that per year. In rural areas, the cost is likely on the high end because power and fiber lines will be longer. Each 5G tower has a range of 5ish miles, meaning it can serve an area of 75-80 square miles. A rural county like Ferry County, Washington has 2 households per square mile. So in that county, a tower can serve 150-160 households. Assuming 100% of households are customers, that means each must pay $200-400 per year for the tower to break even after a decade. The actual numbers are fuzzier. Obviously you won't have 100% adoption, but cell towers also serve cell phones.

In comparison, each Starlink satellite costs around $1 million to manufacture and launch, and each satellite lasts at least 5 years. So cost per satellite per year is $200k. They currently have 7,600 satellites serving 7 million customers, meaning on average, each satellite serves almost 1,000 customers. At $200k per satellite per year, each customer needs to pay $200 per year for them to break even. It seems likely that launch costs will go down in the future, meaning this number will decrease.

There's also the complication that each new Starlink satellite improves coverage & bandwidth for the entire globe, while each new 5G tower improves coverage & bandwidth in a specific area. A county may have a population density of 2-4 households per square mile, but many of those households are clustered together. The less dense areas are not likely to be covered by cell towers any time soon, as it's less economically viable. Another disadvantage of cell towers is service failures. A single Starlink satellite failure means a slight degradation of service, while a single cell tower failure means everyone in the region is taken offline. In areas where both services are available, people would be likely to prefer the more reliable option.
by mothballed | 2025-10-17 18:25:18+00:00
The period from 1776-1913 arguably had as many changes as the period from 1913 to 2025.

In the first 130 years of the US, the value of the dollar didn't change, as far as I can tell, more than 50% from the starting point.

From 1913 to 2025, the dollar lost 96+% of its value. The difference between a ratio of 2:1 and a ratio of more like 30:1.
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-10-17 18:26:05+00:00
I'm not posting this to advance a political agenda, but more because with recent protests, Chenoweth's text is getting more mentions recently. Agree or disagree, people around me are definitely talking about it. Mostly talking about the 3.5% of the population figure that if they're on the streets in protest, it's an indicator that the establishment is on shaky political grounds.

Here's the WorldCat reference: https://search.worldcat.org/title/660804982

Anyway... just passing it along since I figured it might be interesting to a non-zero percentage of the people here.

Also... someone posted this related TEDx video several years ago. Adding it as well in case you can't get to your local library:

https://cinemaphile.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w

And if you like to buy books, here's the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231156839/

And the intarwebs archive has it available for people with print disabilities: https://archive.org/details/whycivilresistan0000chen_f8y4
by bbor | 2025-10-17 18:26:06+00:00
To paraphrase the great Noam Chomsky: cognitive science is in a pre-Gallilean stage.

Many thousands of incredible scientists have done amazing work over the past ~century, but cutting-edge neuroscience still doesn't have the conceptual tools to go much farther than "when you look at apples this part of your cortex is more active, so we'll call this the Apple Zone".

Sadly/happily, I personally think there's good reason to think that this will change in our lifetime, which mean's we can all find out if trading the medicalization of mental health treatment (i.e. progressing beyond symptom-based guess-and-check) for governmental access to actual lie detecting helmets (i.e. dystopia) is worth it...
by nopinsight | 2025-10-17 18:26:14+00:00
A definition of AGI: https://www.agidefinition.ai/

A new contribution by quite a few prominent authors. One of the better efforts at defining AGI *objectively*, rather than through indirect measures like economic impact.

I believe it is incomplete because the psychological theory it is based on is incomplete. It is definitely worth discussing though.

—-

In particular, creative problem solving in the strong sense, ie the ability to make cognitive leaps, and deep understanding of complex real-world physics such as the interactions between animate and inanimate entities are missing from this definition, among others.
by blobbers | 2025-10-17 18:26:31+00:00
Yeah - it's basically like the days when everyone added "Deep" to their name to get an extra 0 on their valuation.

What do you do? Oh we do DeepCoffee brewing. It's a coffee machine powered by Deep Learning to brew the perfect cup. Keurig and Starbucks are Yahoo, and we're Google. (now people probably say those guys are google and we're openai but I digress)
by meowface | 2025-10-17 18:27:07+00:00
Eh, Dwarkesh has to market the podcasts somehow. I think it's fine for him to use hooks like this and for HN threads to respond to the hooks. 99% of HN threads only ever reply to the headline and that's not changing anytime soon. This will likely cause many people (including myself) to watch the full podcast when we otherwise might not have.

The criticism that people are only replying to a tiny portion of the argument is still valid, but sometimes it's more fun to have an open-ended discussion rather than address what's in the actual article/video.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-17 18:27:10+00:00
to understand that nano tubules interact with microtubules is part of the answer to your question.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221137971...

And you’re talking about transporting “things” and microtubules are not about transporting things in Penrose theory, but rather serving as quantum machines that are linked across the brain.
by Bender | 2025-10-17 18:27:13+00:00
'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; crawler)'

Assuming one trusts the user-agent in this case one could reduce the traffic reply to them and avoid touching the disk or any applications in Nginx with something like:

if ($http_user_agent ~ (crawler|some-other-bot) ) { return 200 '\n\n\n\nBot quota exceeded, check back in 2150 years.\n\n\n\n'; }

There are other variables to look for to see if something is a bot but such things should be very well tested. $http_accept_language, $http_sec_fetch_mode, etc...

I don't use CF but maybe they have a way to block the entire ASN for AWS on your account assuming one does not need inbound connections from them. I just blackhole their CIDR blocks [1] but that won't help someone using a CDN.

[1] - https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
by emmelaich | 2025-10-17 18:27:17+00:00
You are spot on. New car EV prices are dropping and tech is advancing.

EVs inherently depreciate less; they're simpler, few moving parts. The motor is sealed. Batteries are lasting longer than expected.

So 'depreciate' in the title is misleading. It may be technically true in that they lose resale value, but they are definitely not less road-worthy than a similarly aged combustion vehicle.

I would absolutely buy a second hand Tesla, they're great value. Probably other EVs too.
by ecocentrik | 2025-10-17 18:27:18+00:00
LLMs are close enough to pass the Turing Test. That was a huge milestone. They are capable of abstract reasoning and can perform many tasks very well but they aren't AGI. They can't teach themselves to play chess at the level of a dedicated chess engine or fly an airplane using the same model they use to copypasta a React UI. They can only fool non-proficient humans into believing that they might be capable of doing those things.
by tamimio | 2025-10-17 18:27:52+00:00
From https://prestonbyrne.com/2025/10/16/the-ofcom-files/

> consistent with the UK legal doctrine known as parliamentary supremacy, which holds that the UK Parliament has theoretically unlimited power

This is also true in Canada for the most part, while in theory with the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as part of the Constitution Act, 1982. This Act prescribes that “the Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada” (s.52), Thus constitutional supremacy replaced Parliamentary supremacy in Canada, in reality, the parliament can invoke s. 33 of the Charter, the notwithstanding clause, allows Parliament and the provincial legislatures to override certain provisions of the Charter, Canadian legislatures are still partially supreme. Which means the law can stand even if it violates those rights. This clause, which can only be used for a five-year term that is renewable, applies to specific sections of the Charter, including fundamental freedoms, legal rights, and equality rights, but not democratic, mobility, or Aboriginal rights.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-17 18:28:11+00:00
I lost all respect for him after reading about his views on medical immortality. His argument is that over time human life expectancy has been constantly increasing * and he calculated that based on some arbitrary rate of acceleration, that science would be expanding human life expectancy by more than a year, per year - medical immortality in other words, and all expected to happen just prior to the time he's reaching his final years.

The overwhelming majority of all gains in human life expectancy have come due to reductions in infant mortality. When you hear about things like a '40' year life expectancy in the past it doesn't mean that people just dropped dead at 40. Rather if you have a child that doesn't make it out of childhood, and somebody else that makes it to 80 - you have a life expectancy of ~40.

If you look back to the upper classes of old their life expectancy was extremely similar to those of today. So for instance in modern history, of the 15 key Founding Fathers, 7 lived to at least 80 years old: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, John Jay. John Adams himself lived to 90. The youngest to die were Hamilton who died in a duel, and John Hancock who died of gout of an undocumented cause - it can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

All the others lived into their 60s and 70s. So their overall life expectancy was pretty much the same as we have today. And this was long before vaccines or even us knowing that surgeons washing their hands before surgery was a good thing to do. It's the same as you go back further into history. A study [1] of all men of renown in Ancient Greece was 71.3 [1], and that was from thousands of years ago!

Life expectancy at birth is increasing, but longevity is barely moving. And as Kurzweil has almost certainly done plentiful research on this topic, he is fully aware of this. Cognitive dissonance strikes again.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/
by jqpabc123 | 2025-10-17 18:28:23+00:00
In 2010, China weaponized rare earths against Japan.

Last week Trump said, Nobody has ever seen anything like this.... But he says this a lot. What it really means is, don't blame him for screwing up.

Somebody wasn't paying attention. And unfortunately for the USA, somebody started a trade war without being adequately prepared or fully considering the repercussions.

Now somebody is most likely going to have to surrender and declare victory.
by jaccola | 2025-10-17 18:28:23+00:00
I think this quote is often misapplied. The question "can a submarine safely move through water" IS a very interesting question (especially if you are planning a trip in one!).

Obviously this quote would be well applied if we were at a stage where computers were better at everything humans can do and some people were saying "This is not AGI because it doesn't think exactly the same as a human". But we aren't anywhere near this stage yet.
by Analemma_ | 2025-10-17 18:28:24+00:00
Huh, my read is exactly the opposite: Altman wants to be a trillionaire and isn't picky about how he gets there. If AGI accomplishes it, great, but if that's not possible, "just" making a megacorporation which permanently breaks the negotiating power of labor is fine too. Amodei is the one who I think actually wants to build AGI.
by florkbork | 2025-10-17 18:28:40+00:00
No, no, no, this isn't the open source way at all! I can't believe you aren't getting it still!

Because I once installed your project, I need to:

- Take over all of the accounts/access you AND all of your friends/co-maintainers used in connection with it

- Tell you it was a mistake, give back access temporarily

- Do it again!

- Have one of my board members who happens to be the treasurer say it was about the $

- Make a straight to camera YouTube post Addressing The Concerns

- Make a first "continuing our series of transparency" blog post a week later, where I use a dense corporate laden dialect to claim it was for the betterment of all mankind and definitely not about the $; because I need you to understand Where We Are Now; What This Is and What This Isn't.

- Open a Google forms question submission box.

- Smear your reputation, because you had an idea once about tracking which packages go to which companies; so I'll insinuate that you want to read everyone's mail and snoop through their undergarments drawer. What's that? My actions affected much more than just you? Quiet now, we're reshaping the narrative to smear you.

- Answer no questions, explaining that we chose to give you a regular series of Friday updates; but also We Want to Move On from the back and forth but also in that same publication have another go at the smear, because it partially worked.

- Donate the project to my state library, to take some of the heat off of me

Isn't that so much easier than typing "git clone" and "git remote add"?

(I am consistently flummoxed that a handful of people here are buying this narrative; instead of as you point out... Just applying a smidgeon of critical analysis about the usage of tools that the majority of us must use day to day and coming to the conclusion you do. Instead of doing this or accepting this conclusion, there's a frothy passion it seems for Appeal to Authority/Argument from Authority where any excuse, flaw, etc on the part of the maintainers is used to justify the whole chain of events.

It seems like it hits 5-7 facts and people can no longer manage them in short term memory, go and look at more than what is presented to them by a single party, etc; so they just default to the easiest mental shortcut.

For some reason I keep falling into the trap that "people are more educated, capable of critical thinking, and have easier access to data than ever before in history"; which I rationally know is not true)
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-10-17 18:28:51+00:00
The interview which I've watched recently with Rich Sutton left me with the impression that AGI is not just a matter of adding more 9s.

The interviewer had an idea that he took for granted: that to understand language you have to have a model of the world. LLMs seem to udnerstand language therefore they've trained a model of the world. Sutton rejected the premise immediately. He might be right in being skeptical here.
by drbragg | 2025-10-17 18:28:56+00:00
This isn't true according to this article: https://www.404media.co/how-ruby-went-off-the-rails/. Joel has a terrible habit of not citing his sources so I'm not sure if the post in question is the same but this seems to nullify that argument. TBF I do think there was pressure from Shopify to get compliance and security in order but saying "Shopify demanded that Ruby Central take full control of the RubyGems" is just plain not true.
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-17 18:29:14+00:00
Not a decade. More like a century, and that is if society figures itself out enough to do some engineering on a planetary scale, and quantum computing is viable.

Fundamentally, AGI requires 2 things.

First it needs to be able to operate without information, learning as it goes. The core kernel should be such that it doesn't have any sort of training on real world concepts, only general language parsing that it can use to map to some logic structure to be able to determine a plan of action. So for example, if you give the kernel the ability to send ethernet packets, it should eventually figure out how to talk tls to communicate with the modern web, even if that takes an insane amount of repetition.

The reason for this is that you want the kernel to be able to find its way through any arbitrarily complex problem space. Then as it has access to more data, whether real time, or in memory, it can be more and more efficient.

This part is solvable. After all, human brains do this. A single rack of Google TPUs is roughly the same petaflops as a human brain operating at max capacity if you assume neuron activation is a add-multiply and firing speed of 200 times/second, and humans don't use all of their brain all the time.

The second part that makes the intelligence general is the ability to simulate reality faster than reality. Life is imperative by nature, and there are processes with chaotic effects (human brains being one of them), that have no good mathematical approximations. As such, if an AGI can truly simulate a human brain to be able to predict behavior, it needs to do this at an approximation level that is good enough, but also fast enough to where it can predict your behavior before you exhibit it, with overhead in also running simulations in parallel and figuring out the best course of actions. So for a single brain, you are looking at probably a full 6 warehouses full of TPUs.
by input_sh | 2025-10-17 18:29:59+00:00
Another way to put it is that it writes, sounds and paints as the Internet's most average user.

If you train it on a bunch of paintings whose quality ranges from a toddler's painting to Picasso's, it's not going to make one that's better than Picasso's, it's going to output something more comparable to the most average painting it was trained on. If you then adjust your training data to only include world's best paintings ever since we began to paint, the outcome is going to improve, but it'll just be another better-than-human-average painting. If you then leave it running 24/7, it'll churn out a bunch of better-than-human-average paintings, but there's still an easily-identifiable ceiling it won't go above.

An oracle that always returns the most average answer certainly has its use cases, but it's fundamentally opposed to the idea of superintelligence.
by nradov | 2025-10-17 18:30:20+00:00
The big limitation of autopilots is that they can't handle emergencies. By their nature emergencies are unpredictable so programmers can't reliably code for emergency situation handling in advance. An experienced human pilot at least has a chance to figure out a solution by reasoning from first principles and reacting intuitively to novel situations. These new eVTOL aircraft have a certain amount of redundancy built in but realistically if anything goes seriously wrong they're just going to spin and crash (or maybe pop a recovery parachute if so equipped and within the flight envelope for those to work).

Autopilots also can't handle VHF voice comms (with a very narrow exception for the Garmin Autonomí system in certain situations) or perform "see and avoid" traffic management in VFR.
by parliament32 | 2025-10-17 18:30:51+00:00
In the complaint[1], they explicitly state "4chan has no presence, operations, or infrastructure outside of the territorial limits of the United States." So, no, 4chan is not bringing their services into the UK: UK users send requests that travel to the US and hit 4chan servers/CDNs there.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/71209929/1/4chan-commun...
by renewiltord | 2025-10-17 18:30:51+00:00
Environmentalists usually are pro-sprawl because they mistakenly think that if they’re near trees they’re good for the environment. It’s why everything from the Sierra Club in the US down to environmentalists associated with socialist groups opposes infill housing and renewable energy.

So yes, mostly the NIMBY shit you refer to. Though apparently the other chap lives in a place where they managed to solve that so we will see soon enough how they did when he says where.
by dunkvg | 2025-10-17 18:31:12+00:00
The point is when microtransactions are involved, the gameplay and overall quality of the game suffers, because they are no longer the priority, the microtransactions become the priority. Decisions will be made by the game developers to increase the spending on microtransactions with less regard to the effect on gameplay, and from the studio perspective, this is fine as long as its profitable. In the short term this could be true (despite bad reviews these games tend to still be profitable), but in the long run this is rarely true as they end up milking the loyal fanbase for as much money as possible with the mtx, until there is no one left to milk and hence the IP dies.

This approach doesn't look to add value to the existing IPs, it looks to drain as much money as it can out of whats left of the IP, before shelving it completely (and then coming up with remakes of the old games after 10 years etc.)
by bcrl | 2025-10-17 18:31:44+00:00
*If the bandwidth of the Analog Front End (AFE) and Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) / Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) doubles as well. In the real world the AFE of any wifi radio has a fixed bandwidth, with the ADC sampling rate and accuracy being fixed as well. The end result is that doubling the channel width in a wireless network requires a received signal strength that is roughly 3 dB more in real world devices. This constraint is quite visible in data sheets for most wifi cards like here: https://compex.com.sg/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/wle7002e25-...
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-10-17 18:32:11+00:00
Strangely, a previous version of this post was silently deleted. I suspect "Civil Resistance" or "worldcat.org" are triggering some sort of moderation hold.

With tech execs trying to walk a difficult road of doing business in what some are suggesting is an increasingly authoritarian political environment, and trying to avoid Disney or Target like boycotts, seems it's relevant to this community.

Like I said, I'm not trying to advance any agenda other than "maybe it's a good idea to know what people are talking about."

It would be great if we could discuss it without name-calling or invective. Maybe that's too much for parts of this community at this time. Things do seem to be heating up a bit politically.
by blamestross | 2025-10-17 18:32:13+00:00
Yeah, "cargo cult" is abused as a term. Those islanders were smarter than what is happening here.

We use it dismissively but "cargo cult" behaviour is entirely reasonable. You know an effect is possible, and you observe novel things corellating with it. You try them to test the causality. It looks silly when you know the lesson already, but it was intelligent and reasonable behaviour the entire way.

The current situation is bubble denial, not cargo culting. Blaming cargo culting is a mechanism of bubble denial here.