MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-10-22 00:09:59+00:00
The trade-off depends on how your system is set up.

Eg Google used to (and perhaps still does?) run their servers without swap, because they had built fault tolerance in their fleet anyway, so were happier to deal with the occasional crash than with the occasional slowdown.

For your desktop at home, you'd probably rather deal with a slowdown that gives you a chance to close a few programs, then just crashing your system. After all, if you are standing physically in front of your computer, you can always just manually hit the reset button, if the slowdown is too agonising.
Did people in the 90s worry about the efficiency of the internet
by burgiee | 2025-10-22 00:10:33+00:00
“Efficiency” might be the wrong word. I can’t wrap my head around how “efficient” companies are/will be as a result of AI. In the 90s when the internet became broadly available, people became “concerned” but things were still on the horizon, like the concept of AI. Now? I don’t know what is beyond AI in terms of human productivity.

So I’m confused about what the future will look like. If this level of efficiency compounds, even for a few years, we would be required to spend a compounding amount of money to match it, right? The alternative is that we move to a 4 (or 3?) day work week, or UBI, or what? If we don’t match the spending, companies will consolidate - both in terms of personnel and competition.

What is going to happen? What is next? Was there any concept similar to this 30 years ago and I’m just worried for no reason?
by dlubarov | 2025-10-22 00:10:33+00:00
WMF only spends a couple million on essentials like hosting though. They have over 700 employees, and their budget is pretty bloated with thing that aren't really related to running Wikipedia, including sizeable grants to other organizations. See their org chart [1] or this classic essay [2].

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organiz...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
by wk_end | 2025-10-22 00:10:35+00:00
So what, in the analogy, would be the program? Surely it's not the printed rules, so I think you're making the "systems reply" - that the program that knows Chinese is some sort of metaphysical "system" that arises from the man using the rules - which is the first thing Searle tries to rebut.

> let the individual internalize all of these elements of the system. He memorizes the rules in the ledger and the data banks of Chinese symbols, and he does all the calculations in his head. The individual then incorporates the entire system. There isn't anything at all to the system that he does not encompass. We can even get rid of the room and suppose he works outdoors. All the same, he understands nothing of the Chinese, and a fortiori neither does the system, because there isn't anything in the system that isn't in him. If he doesn't understand, then there is no way the system could understand because the system is just a part of him.

In other words, even if you put the man in place of everything, there's still a gap between mechanically manipulating symbols and actual understanding.
by BadThink6655321 | 2025-10-22 00:10:39+00:00
Wnat about Gödel incompleteness? Comptuers aren't formal systems. Turing machines have no notion of truth. Their programs may. So a program can have M > N axioms in which case one of the N+1 axioms recognizes the truth that G ≡ ¬ Prov_S(⌜ G ⌝) because it was constructed to be true. Alternatively, construct a system that generates "truth" statements, subject to further verification. After all, some humans think that "Apollo never put men on the moon" is a true statement.

As for intentionality, programs have intentionality.
by kronodeus | 2025-10-22 00:10:54+00:00
The title itself is not the problem, although even that is sensationalized. I was referring to the contents of the article, which have statements like this:

"Is there a way for you to spin the top again so it ends up in the exact position it started, as if you had never spun it at all? Surprisingly, yes..."

Which, as an introduction, just misses the mark completely by highlighting the least surprising possible interpretation of the research.
by slg | 2025-10-22 00:10:57+00:00
Try reading the whole sentence next time. I specifically chose to not use the percentage of votes cast because inconsistent turnout changes the denominator in a way that can be misleading. The numbers you cited imply that Trump got more popular, but the actual reason he won in 2024 instead of losing like 2020 is because his opponent was less popular. If you look at the number of votes Trump received, his 2020 and 2024 totals are incredibly close after accounting for population growth. That is why I explicitly phrased my comment in terms of "The percentage of the US population that voted for Trump".
by midtake | 2025-10-22 00:11:28+00:00
Nice try. Maybe when Democrats decide to uphold their own values and defend the working class, people will come back in from the cold. Until then, burning it all down is perfectly understandable. Betrayal stings and vengeance sometimes takes the form of scorched earth. At least with the Republican Party people know what they're getting.

As long as the Democratic Party keeps its current shape, people will continue to distrust it.
Ask HN: Codex / Claude Code vs. Cursor?
by mholubowski | 2025-10-22 00:11:32+00:00
I’d really appreciate an explanation of this: How does Codex / Claude Code compare to working within Cursor with the chat and agents? Are they effectively the same thing? Is one significantly better than the other. Please share your experiences around this I’m trying to be ass effective of an engineer as I can be at our company. - Mike
by ricksunny | 2025-10-22 00:12:22+00:00
As it sounds like you know, it would be great if you can articulate the boundaries of a prototypical intelligence agency mandate. Because then it should be a cinch to describe why ‘communication from a foreign power of as-yet indeterminate technology advancment relative to modern day superpowers to (checks notes) members of any of the 200 some odd nation-states on the planet who can afford operating a radio telescope’ doesn’t fall within that mandate
by masswerk | 2025-10-22 00:12:40+00:00
> Cons: Slightly more memory per entry (each number is stored as 5 bytes internally).

Actually, integer arrays use just 2 bytes per entry (contrary to simple integer variables). And integers are really all what's needed here.

Therefore, using `DIM %R(RC,6)` should come with less overhead.

As for calculating overheads: String variables use 5 byte and the memory required for the actual string (one byte per character). Arrays use 2 bytes for the name and then 2 bytes for a length offset and 1 byte for the width/length per dimension, plus the space required for the individual entries (for integers 2 bytes per entry, for floating point 5 bytes and for strings 3 bytes). So a 2D array uses 2 + (2 + 1) + (2 + 1) = 8 bytes for the header plus the space for the entries.

Regarding performance, mind that arrays come after simple variables in memory and must be relocated (moved) each time, a new simple variable is defined (or used for the first time). So make sure to define simple variables before DIM-ing arrays. (As a lesser known feature, you can define simple variables by DIM as a list at once, where no dimensions parameters are provided, which should make this easier. E.g., `DIM A$, I%, X, Y`. Mind that this also defines the lookup order, so define often used variables before infrequently used ones. Add your array-DIMs after this.)
by BenjiWiebe | 2025-10-22 00:12:42+00:00
It was pretty frustrating to me when multiple services weren't working during the outage. I'm an end user; I don't use AWS, nor do I work on anything using AWS.

From my perspective, multiple unrelated websites quit working at the same time. I would rather have had one website down, and the rest working, than for me to be completely hamstrung because so many services are down simultaneously.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-22 00:13:01+00:00
I'm not sure which company you're referring to here but I do here this claim a lot about SpaceX and while i'm anti-rent-seeking I don't see SpaceX as a rent-seeking company. Yes it has gotten some grants to develop particular programs and promises from the US government to buy services but all up we're talking about (IIRC) $10-20 billion.

We just gave $40 billion to Argentina for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

Now the US government has spent a whole lot more on SpaceX but they're buying services.

SpaceX is an incredible bargain compared to the alternatives like ULA.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-22 00:13:20+00:00
Well, the resistance at his point is the Admiral in charge of Southern Command resigning.

Below is a video from an F-14 REO, and previous Fox News contributor, Ward Carroll. He explains exactly why Holsey resigned.

TL:DW; (But do watch!) Admiral Holsey protested to Secretary of War, Hegseth, that these killings broke all rules, and he would not stay on to follow illegal orders.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjtgDKmPvoU
by yalogin | 2025-10-22 00:13:51+00:00
I actually see the value but this is giving too much information about every single thing i do to these ai companies. I don’t mind just opening up the ChatGPT app to ask questions as needed. For me these are the same class of applications like the honey browser extension but way way worse in terms of loss of data. Don’t believe for one second that your data is private.
by BadThink6655321 | 2025-10-22 00:15:08+00:00
Only because "actual understanding" is ambiguously defined. Meaning is an association of A with B. Our brains have a large associative array with the symbols for the sound "dog" is associated with the image of "dog' which is associated with the behavior of "dog" which is associated with the feel of "dog", ... We associate the symbols for the word "hamburger" with the symbols for the taste of "hamburger", with ... We undersand something when our past associations match current inputs and can predict furture inputs.
Show HN: ProfiTree, Tax Optimization Tool for DIY Investors
by shahakshat609 | 2025-10-22 00:15:13+00:00
Hi HN, we’re Akshat and Dhruv, the founders of ProfiTree. We’re building an automated tax optimization platform that helps everyday investors save on taxes through tax loss harvesting, wash sale detection and cost basis optimization. These are the same tools usually reserved for financial advisors. Right now is the best time to look at tax optimizations for your portfolio as we're in the last quarter of the fiscal year.

Over the last few months, we’ve tested the product with about 55 early users, uncovering $300K+ in potential tax savings (roughly $6K per user on average). Here’s a short demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18fUeLGDU6cu22B2gMDmO3mUYqWR...

Why we built it: We’re both DIY investors who realized that while most brokerages show gains and losses, none proactively flag wash sales or tax loss opportunities in real time. Financial advisors and robo-advisors can do this, but only if you pay AUM fees or hand over full control of your account.

We wanted something different: 1. Full transparency into your data 2. No AUM fees, and you keep custody of your assets 3. Personalized alerts before trades trigger wash sales 4. Simple explanations of how much tax you could save by selling specific lots

How it works: You connect your brokerage securely through SnapTrade (similar to Plaid but for investment accounts). We pull historical transactions, process cost basis, and highlight: 1. Disallowed losses from past wash sales 2. Tax loss harvesting opportunities if you sold today 3. Optimal sale recommendations based on FIFO, LIFO, or High Cost basis 4. Estimated tax savings using your tax bracket

What we’re exploring next: We’re expanding the beta and would love input from this community before scaling up.

1. Tech employees with RSUs or stock options: Do you worry about concentrated positions or surprise tax bills? We are exploring ways to liquidate concentrated positions with minimum tax impact.

2. Active DIY traders: We’ve built daily wash sale detection and rebalancing logic. What gaps have you noticed in tax loss harvesting tools?

3. Mass affluent or FIRE minded investors: How do you currently manage taxes on brokerage accounts? What would make you trust an automated tax advisor?

Our goal: Just like Robinhood made trading accessible by removing commissions, we want to make tax intelligence accessible by removing complexity. We’re not selling anything. We are looking for feedback from technically minded DIY investors who care about taxes, automation, and transparency.

You can try the beta at https://profitree-tax.com. (Free during beta, and we do not store or sell data) Would love to hear your thoughts, both as builders and as investors.
by disambiguation | 2025-10-22 00:15:24+00:00
Semi off topic, but i always thought it would be cool if there was a kind of multiplayer for ebooks - threads and notes in the margins similar to how dark souls lets you write brief hints for other players that you can hide around the game world.

Its impractical due to the technical and legal challenges, but it would be neat to see the thoughts of other readers page by page.
by dang | 2025-10-22 00:15:52+00:00
We rate limit accounts when they're in the habit of breaking the site guidelines: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

While we do (usually) post a comment when we're banning an account, we don't post such a comment when we're rate limiting an account. The main reason is that we don't have the resources to do everything that way. It's on the list to build an automated feedback system, perhaps with some sort of probation, but that's not done yet.

We can argue about whether or not another comment was as bad as what you posted, but I think this misses the important point, which is that you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and we've already asked you many times to stop:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45647808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44141822

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861197

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43857426

Pointing a finger at someone else isn't a helpful way to respond to this, since we need you (I don't mean you personally, of course, but everyone) to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing or you feel they are.
by waterTanuki | 2025-10-22 00:15:53+00:00
My company uses a MSFT for domains, email, office work etc. but hands all the employees (not just engineers, HR as well) Macs. I don't know what kind of places you're working for but I'm not really interested in spending more time debugging your mattermost instance or email server instead of working on the core product I was hired to work on. I agree microsoft software is a plague but good luck convincing the people with the money to use something else lol
by Havoc | 2025-10-22 00:16:28+00:00
On software stack I definitely get the fear.

...but this CX33 "server" being discussed - is a 6 bucks a month VPS [0]

Normally you build a prototype on laptop and move it out to fat hardware when it outgrows that. Here they started with 3k infra and then later realized it runs on toaster. Completely back to front.

Maybe they just never iterated on a local version and nobody developed an intuition for requirements. Switched straight to iterating on a nebulous cloud where you can't tell how much horsepower is behind the cloudfunctions etc.

Presumably there is a perfectly reasonably explanation and it's just not spelled out, it just seems weird based on given info

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
by varenc | 2025-10-22 00:17:08+00:00
I agree with this sentiment, but besides Webkit/Chromium and Firefox's Gecko, there's not really any options. Ladybird is a new implementation gaining fast though don't think it's ready to replace everyday workflows yet. And Ladybird has been a huge undertaking of course.

Building a new browser engine is 99% of the work and slapping LLM features on it is the other 1% of it.
by delichon | 2025-10-22 00:17:19+00:00
I think we're at least near the point where it's better to get the text and feed it to an AI reader app, that can be customized in various dimensions, like actor(s) and pace.

I have some favorite audio book narrators, like Patrick Tull, Stephan Fry and Stefan Rudnicki. Sure I'd rather have them read for me, but I'm not going to be able to afford that. I maybe could afford for their licensed AI mimic to read it, and that is an improvement over many random amateur contributors. With AI "personalities" it may become as simple as "have personality X read me text file Y, moderato".

Also it would be great to be able to conversationally control the narration. "Pause, hey what does that big word mean, go back two sentences and restart, stop, who is this Watson guy?, ok keep reading but adagio."
by INGELRII | 2025-10-22 00:17:26+00:00
The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the business process analysis observation that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up. This observation has been firmly supported with empirical evidence from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

Before investment in IT became widespread, the expected return on investment in terms of productivity was 3-4%. This average rate developed from the mechanization/automation of the farm and factory sectors. With IT though, the normal return on investment was only 1% from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Measurement or Management?: Revisiting the Productivity Paradox of Information Technology. http://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/38739/v_00_4_9....

Then in the 2000 to 2020s productivity slowdown aka productivity paradox 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox#2000_to_2...
by testing22321 | 2025-10-22 00:17:26+00:00
> Literally every other nation is trying to catch up to Space-X and is nowhere close. An American company, based in American, primarily staffed by American engineers

The whole point of this article, and the NASA admin steps to open up the contract and all of Berger’s recent reporting is that it’s almost a certainty China will beat the US back to the moon.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-22 00:17:31+00:00
> What does it prove if you're able to repeat it fifty years later? You didn't have to invent anything new (obviously), and you're certainly not learning anything new.

Despite you throwing the word "obviously" at it, that is an extremely untrue claim. Even if we hadn't forgotten a lot of the details, we're solving new engineering challenges with modern material science and manufacturing, and learning a lot of new things about spacecraft design. There is a ton of invention in doing another landing after so long.
by kenjackson | 2025-10-22 00:18:16+00:00
I'd think you have to do product development. Unless you get to true SUPERintelligence, even getting to AGI by itself gives you very little. Imagine they got to true AGI, but with an IQ of 100 -- what does that open up for you? I can't think of much. You really need to start doing product development so that you can use the 100 IQ AI to do things like automate some processes or do web queries for you, etc... With today's LLMs we already get most of the value of 100 IQ AGI. Now if you give me 300 IQ super intelligence then that's a game changer.
by wk_end | 2025-10-22 00:18:58+00:00
> Gödel incompleteness

I agree with your comment, FWIW - I have no idea what OP is trying to demonstrate - but to maybe suggest some context: Gödel incompleteness is a commonly suggested "proof" as to why computers can't be intelligent in the way that humans can, because (very very roughly) humans can "step out" of formal systems to escape the Gödel trap. Regardless of your feelings about AI it's a silly argument; I think possibly the popularizer of this line of thinking was Roger Penrose in "The Emperor's New Mind".

I haven't re-read Searle since college but as far as I recall he never brings it up.
by floating-io | 2025-10-22 00:19:15+00:00
On launches, it's conceivable that they can do the launches in 20 days if they do one a day. I ignore reusability, because I don't see it as required to meet the need.

They're known for moving fast, and they're building multiple pads. They're also building enormous mass manufacturing facilities in the background of all this (Gigabay and whatever). Not sure how many ships they'll be able to produce per month once the design is nailed down, but I'll bet it will surprise everyone.

SH Boosters are already effectively reusable for the purposes of this discussion; a couple of them have already re-flown. That's half the battle right there.

Boiloff prevention is presumably one of the main modifications needed for the depot. I think it's supposed to be easier with methalox than with hydrolox (which BO is using), but I have no idea the particulars of what they'll have to do there to achieve effectiveness. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they try to cut that corner at least once; should be interesting.

The big risk that I see is neither launch nor boiloff, but rather simple fuel availability. Can they get that much methane and LOX shipped around the country that fast? I have no idea, but it seems concerning to me. Logistics...

Thing about the deadline, though, is who's going to do it faster? Blue has worse issues with their current crewed lander proposal. Nobody else has even started on one AFAIK.

My prediction is that nobody can build and fully qualify a safe moon lander with a more or less clean-sheet design in three years.

On the other hand, I can easily see Starship succeeding in a moon landing in three or four years if things go well with V3 and the refuelling research. It's a stretch -- things aren't likely to go completely smoothly -- but it's conceivable.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-10-22 00:19:28+00:00
It's likely I am not.

Links below, tldrs here: A heat pump does what the name suggests: it pumps heat. Resistive heating and burning gas is converting energy from one form into another. A heat pumps moves energy from A to B (making A colder and B hotter in the process) in literally the same way AC units

You get 5 J of heat out for every 1 J of electricity in because we're being funny with the units. You put in 1 J of electricity and the rest is put in as heat from your source (A) and then moved into B.

A good YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
by eru | 2025-10-22 00:20:01+00:00
Please do yourself a flavour and check the price of flour.

Water is cheap, yes. Salt isn't all that cheap, but you only need a little bit.

> [...] and I’ll never need bread on the kind of scale that would make it worth my time to do so.

If you need bread by hand, it's a very small scale affair. Your physique and time couldn't afford you large scale bread making. You'd a big special mixer and a big special oven etc for that. And you'd probably want a temperature and moisture controlled room just for letting your dough rise.
by bearjaws | 2025-10-22 00:20:20+00:00
That is assuming you need that 1 core 24/7, you can get 2 core / 8gb for $43, this will most likely fit 90% of workloads (steady traffic with spikes, or 9-5 cadence).

If you reserve that instance you can get it for 40% cheaper, or get 4 cores instead.

Yes it's more expensive than OVH but you also get everything AWS to offer.
by landdate | 2025-10-22 00:20:26+00:00
That's a different situation. Those urls weren't meant for public use, and provided private information on user devices.

Furthermore, on reading the wikipedia page, his conviction was vacated.

> On April 11, 2014, the Third Circuit issued an opinion vacating Auernheimer's conviction, on the basis that the New Jersey venue was improper,[60] since neither Auernheimer, his co-conspirators, nor AT&T's servers were in New Jersey at the time of the data breach.

> While the judges did not address the substantive question on the legality of the site access, they were skeptical of the original conviction, observing that no circumvention of passwords had occurred and that only publicly accessible information was obtained

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#Imprisonment