MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Arathorn | 2025-10-06 21:42:06+00:00
nope, Matrix has zero code or philosophy in common with Amdocs UC (which was proprietary, centralised, unencrypted XMPP + SIP held together with HTTP). Instead, after we gave up on trying to persuade telcos to roll out OTT messaging apps built on the Amdocs UC stack, we started Matrix as an new project to instead try to disrupt the PSTN (decentralising & disrupting it much as cryptocurrencies try to disrupt legacy payments networks). The reason Amdocs funded us to do it was in case we were successful enough that Amdocs could then sell Matrix solutions alongside PSTN solutions in the long term future.

In other words, this wasn't really a "hey we need to sell messaging apps to telcos" play - it was a long-term R&D experiment, more like Bell Labs funding UNIX.
by Fischgericht | 2025-10-06 21:43:36+00:00
I guess we can agree that the comparison between Sat internet and physical links depends a lot on the physical situation in the target region, and the regulatory frame work.

And please keep in mind that while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink. It's worth remembering here that all Sat Internet companies prior to Starlink had failed and needed to be rescued with tax payer money.

I don't have exact numbers, and it's a bit muddy due to state subsidiaries, but in Germany the average cost to connect a subscriber in a medium density town with fiber, with given that nothing was prepared and you have to open the street etc appears to be in region of €/$ 2,000 or so.

I don't know if that is done in the US, but also in Europe we now do "trenching". It has some downsides and pitfalls, but this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-06 21:43:36+00:00
> Do you have a link to a blog or writeup regarding the inter-links not working?

The simpler answer is intra-constellation communication is a bleeding-edge technology. It's an extraordinary challenge for which extraordinary proof is needed to show success, not the other way around. SpaceX has solved most of the gating technical problems. But getting it to work reliably enough that it becomes more economic than ground-based backhaul will take time.
by bediger4000 | 2025-10-06 21:43:36+00:00
You'll excuse me if I don't believe Ray Dalio, or give him any credit. When you hear an interview with him, he doesn't come off as anything other than ordinary. His other writing hasn't seemed stellar, either.

Dalio is also a billionaire. His economic interests do not align with mine, or with the enormous bulk of other US citizens and taxpayers. In combination with my impression of him as intellectually ordinary, the undeniable misalignment makes me think this book is rubbish.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-10-06 21:43:45+00:00
> Just on an economic basis we can bound the energy payback time to about four years

If you use electricity prices to make that calculation, you need to take in account that solar panels are produced in China off cheap coal-based electricity. If you produce a panel in Germany it would take much longer to break even economically (if ever). That's what I mean by "enabled by economical disbalances around the world".

> we found a Fraunhofer report by Simon Philipps and Werner Warmuth with a more detailed estimate arriving at a 1.1-year energy payback time in Northern Europe, 0.9 years in Southern Europe

This article doesn't explain how they make their calculations and I struggle to replicate them. The usual estimate to produce a PV panel is 600-1000 kWh per 1sqm. Measured (not projected) yield in Germany is 160-180 kWh per 1sqm per year. A balcony solar panel will yield even less than that because it's not positioned optimally. Then you won't consume all that it produces because you're at work during the day and there are no appliances running except the fridge maybe. In the end you may get anywhere between 10 and 100 kWh per 1sqm per year (would love to see some real measurements by the way, not projected ones).

So my view is very simple: these balcony panels make sense economically because German economy is cooked. However from the physics/ecology perspective they make no sense at all and many of the panels installed today will never recoup the electricity used to produce them, making them a net-negative impact for the environment. Which by the way could be a reasonable price to pay for autonomy in case of power failure but these balcony setups can't run when the grid is off.
by jcelerier | 2025-10-06 21:44:07+00:00
> preferably well abstracted from the underlying OS?

you can't do that as soon as you start thinking about embedding non-code resources in your binaries, etc. #embed / std::embed is finally solving this though. You also usually have to think a lot about linking, symbol visibility & various other compiler-specific attributes in such files if you're doing non-trivial work.

> Or is your concern about integration into the build system of any prebuild-events or similar logic that need to be run in addition to compiling and linking? This integration may require separate efforts for each platform.

Exactly, and my experience is that it is always not worth it. For example I ported all my Qt code so that it doesn't use moc (external code generator) and uses instead verdigris (same thing with slightly more complex macros but no need for anything else than a c++ compiler for building my code) and that instantly solved so many problems it's not even funny - something that required maintenance multiple times a year (pretty much every time you want to use some new C++ feature and the code generator does not know yet how to parse a source file that contains this feature - I have issues open on the Qt bug tracker that are now well into their first decade) had its operational cost fall to 0. And moc is by far one of the most well-developed code generators I've had to use, so many others just fail on anything other than the "happiest path".

The only vaguely tolerable experience I had was using CMake as a code generator as cmake works portably-enough on the platforms it supports (though there are oddities to take care of between MSYS2 CMake and MinGW CMake and MSVC CMake) but then there's a lot of people who will absolutely never ever want to touch this (https://github.com/ossia/score/blob/master/cmake/GenerateLic...) or this (https://github.com/ossia/score/blob/master/cmake/ScoreFuncti...) with a ten foot pole. If I could replace all this today with normal C++ code I absolutely would in a heartbeat, it would be an undebatable improvement even if it took three times as many LoC / tokens / cyclomatic complexity / whatever measure you want to use.
by kjellsbells | 2025-10-06 21:44:12+00:00
Looks elegant, but make sure to really focus on the specific pain point you think you need to address rather then the generic one of "LaTeX is hard".

Optimize for that very strongly, or else you'll be a solid 60% of everything (after years of effort...) but you won't ever get the critical mass of switchers. Whereas being 95% for one thing almost guarantees you'll get the people whose problem you solve thoroughly.

For example, and not to toot my own horn, I wrote some notes for people who have only ever used Word and need just enough LaTeX to understand how to get started[0]. Nothing more.

https://sgurungp.github.io/2024/08/14/LaTeX-for-Word-users-p...
by darajava | 2025-10-06 21:44:15+00:00
I don't understand, what could be built with this platform that wouldn't be made obsolete by conceivable updates to ChatGPT?

Another commenter suggested a hotel search function:

> Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night

ChatGPT can already do this. Similarly, their own pizza lookup example seems like it would exist or nearly exist with current functionality. I can't think of a single non-trivial app that could be built on this platform - and if there are any, I can't think of any that would be useful or not in immediate danger of being swallowed by advances to ChatGPT.
by piva00 | 2025-10-06 21:44:35+00:00
Let them get richer, the same people who talk with these threatening remarks also talk how capitalism isn't a zero-sum game, someone else becoming richer doesn't mean someone else getting poorer, right? Just means getting richer at a slower rate, Europe is pretty rich on global standards, let's keep getting a bit richer while others get the chance to reach these levels.
by mappu | 2025-10-06 21:45:46+00:00
precomp/antix/... are tools that can bruteforce the original gzip parameters and let you recreate the byte-identical gzip archive.

The output is something like {precomp header}{gzip parameters}{original uncompressed data} which you can then feed to a stronger compressor.

A major use case is if you have a lot of individually gzipped archives with similar internal content, you can precomp them and then use long-range solid compression over all your archives together for massive space savings.
by modeless | 2025-10-06 21:45:51+00:00
It probably does have different modes that it selects based on the input data. I don't know that much about the implementation of image compression, but I know that PNG for example has several preprocessing modes that can be selected based on the image contents, which transform the data before entropy encoding for better results.

The difference with OpenZL IIUC seems to be that it has some language that can flexibly describe a family of transformations, which can be serialized and included with the compressed data for the decoder to use. So instead of choosing between a fixed set of transformations built into the decoder ahead of time, as in PNG, you can apply arbitrary transformations (as long as they can be represented in their format).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-06 21:45:54+00:00
> while you are right that there is a risk investing into physical infrastructure also applies to Starlink

Absolutely. It's why I think assuming the WACC of a highly-leveraged telecom (around 10%) is appropriate.

> this reduces the upfront infrastructure cost for fiber massively

Fibre makes sense where there is density. It's higher capacity and cheaper. That doesn't mean it makes sense everywhere. And a lot of that everywhere will pay a lot of money for connectivity.

The global telecom market generates trillions of dollars of annual revenue [1]. There is a lot of fruit for the picking.

[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/global-t...
by joenot443 | 2025-10-06 21:46:48+00:00
Fully anecdotal, but nearly every knowledge worker I know has Copilot or ChatGPT or some kind of corporate LLM subscription included in their job now. I don’t think the majority use it very well, but I know at least a handful who do.

Corporate America seems ready to spend real money on AI, at least for now. This money being spent today doesn’t come close to recouping the investment OpenAI et al have made, but the trickle’s begun. The money’s not all imaginary.
by titusjohnson | 2025-10-06 21:46:54+00:00
Emoji, Emoticon, Smiley, to the average user these are all the exact same thing. They mean "fun inline image in my text". Technical people dismissing the Robber or Seahorse emoji as a Mandala Effect is actually a great example of not diagnosing the root problem, aka _not listening to the customer_.

I had massive, massive packs of custom icons installed into my Trillian client going all the way back to the early 00's. So did my friends, and we all knew it. Anyone new to the friend group was installing packs right away too so they could get all the fun jokes that were only applicable if you had the right emoticons installed. Here's [1] an example of a phpBB board distributing their custom icons as Trillian emoticons, so their members can keep the vibe going no matter how they are chatting.

The whole world did not fantasize a Robber emoji. We sent robber smileys. We sent and received gun emoticons, seahorses, aliens, etc. What changes is how those symbols are communicated. The feature shifted from being a local-only token-to-img replacement operation to being encoded in the character set that is delivered, and in that version rev of the "Fun images in text" concept, commonly used pictographs were left behind.

[1] - https://www.nightscrawlers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9745
by kragen | 2025-10-06 21:48:34+00:00
Just for the record, that seems to be an 860Wp "Schwaiger Balkonkraftwerk 860 Wp Wifi fähig" for €325, "inkl. gesetzl. MwSt.", but not including "Versand- & Lieferbedingungen + 99,99 € Versandkosten". So it's €424.99, which is €0.494 per peak watt, about five or ten times the wholesale price of just the solar module.
by tempestn | 2025-10-06 21:48:44+00:00
I agree with using a TSM fund rather than an S&P 500 index, but be aware that you're still mostly holding S&P 500 companies. The S&P 500 covers about 80% of the total market cap of US public companies, whereas the Russell 3000 is 98%. (This is, of course, because the 500 largest companies are so much larger than the median.)

If you really want to diversify away from the biggest growth companies you could try a value and/or small/value tilt. Those might all be good advice, but they do come with their own caveats, whereas using TSM instead of an S&P 500 fund is just good advice in general.
by drillsteps5 | 2025-10-06 21:48:51+00:00
I've been tracking my personal finances with a simple spreadsheet (ODS, with LibreOffice) for almost a decade at this point. It's backed weekly to couple locations (not in the cloud). I add more sheets as I need them if I want more info (trends, averages, important events, etc). Why would anyone put their personal finances on Google sheet? All that data is now tied to Google account associated with physical identity through cell phone #. Just... why?
by citizenpaul | 2025-10-06 21:49:03+00:00
I said if it was a person.

If I give my brother/neighbor 100k and tell him to spend it at my business then I go to a bank citing huge demand for my business and get a loan for 10 million based on that it is called fraud and the bank would spare no expense to send me to jail and get their money back. The Judge would with 100% certainty send me to jail and give me a lecture about how we live in a society and I broke that trust to take advantage of that society. That they are absolutely disgusted by my lack of ethics and morality.

When these companies do it apparently its just good business.
by lostapathy | 2025-10-06 21:49:05+00:00
Perhaps if we didn't expect superhuman schedules from doctors, doctors wouldn't command as much of a cost as they do now.

From the doctors I know, it seems like most don't get into it for the money, but they put up with it long-term because of the money. If we treated them better and increased supply, they would almost certainly cost less.
by ofalkaed | 2025-10-06 21:49:23+00:00
Audacity is a linear audio editor and you sound like you were trying to use it as a non-linear DAW, which feature bloat and undo/redo sort of but not really lets you do. A media manager does not really help in this sort of editor, your timeline is not an arrangement of files as it is in a daw but the actual audio file you are arranging and changes are destructive. Linear editing is like working with tape, your changes are permanent, every change alters the medium (the destination audiofile held in memory in this case); non-linear is like a sampler on steroids and is how DAWs function, you arrange the samples (files) in time and then record them out to a file when things are how you want it.
by pkulak | 2025-10-06 21:51:16+00:00
Also very difficult because:

- direct connections are really hard (Tailscale built a whole company on solving this one problem)

- even Tailscale can't establish direct connections without a coordination server

- even if you can reliably, and always, establish direct connections, it doesn't matter if someone is offline

- push notifications don't work without a server, on Android or iOS, so even if you're online, you're out of luck (won't ever get a new message because there's no push notification to tell the client to connect, and you can't just leave a TCP connection open forever on a mobile phone)

My take is that it's fine to have a server in the middle with E2EE. That's the whole point of E2EE.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-10-06 21:51:22+00:00
We have precedent of exactly this.

Pidgin implemented support for various networks under an abstraction layer and had a unified UI for all of them.

XMPP implements this via gateways. I used to talk from XMPP with folks who used MSN or Yahoo on their end. We have gateways for Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal nowadays.

The Nokia N900 used the Telepathy framework to expose a local D-Bus messaging service which itself connected to various networks (SMS, MSN, XMPP, etc). The UI was a single unified one for all these networks.
by observationist | 2025-10-06 21:51:37+00:00
Depending on the use case, a hot-air balloon sized parachute to safely drop a person might be perfectly acceptable.

It looks like adding flexible ailerons or whatever they'd be called could give a big advantage in precision landing, with slower forward/sideways speeds but much better control.

Making it modular, with interlocking but separate parts, might make great sense for repairability and safety for skydiving? From the little I know of the sport, things tend to fail catastrophically, going from perfect condition to total disaster without a whole lot of graduated steps in between. I also wonder if there's some utility in paramotoring - multiple kirigami stabilizers, maybe, with a central parafoil, or one big kirigami rig with the fan blowing straight up its skirt?

This is awesome research. Paper drone-delivery parachutes are definitely a use case, but maybe some of the more dangerous flying sports could be made much safer, as well.

edit: Apparently no, 100 meter radius kirigami chute would be needed for a single person parachute, not exactly practical. Apparently it's just really, really good at ensuring things drop straight down with a lot of drag.
by saurik | 2025-10-06 21:51:45+00:00
Spinning up a Docker container the way I'm kind of assuming you are talking about is going to involve running the compiler in there, which is super annoying -- and extremely limited, as you often are going to get stuck with old versions of all of your toolchain components as well -- and certainly way more difficult than just extracting the distribution to disk and using gcc --sysroot=/path/to/glibc-2.31.
by terrelln | 2025-10-06 21:52:23+00:00
You'd have to tell OpenZL what your format looks like by writing a tokenizer for it, and annotating which parts are which. We aim to make this easier with SDDL [0], but today is not powerful enough to parse JSON. However, you can do that in C++ or Python.

Additionally, it works well on numeric data in native format. But JSON stores it in ASCII. We can transform ASCII integers into int64 data losslessly, but it is very hard to transform ASCII floats into doubles losslessly and reliably.

However, given the work to parse the data (and/or massage it to a more friendly format), I would expect that OpenZL would work very well. Highly repetitive, numeric data with a lot of structure is where OpenZL excels.

[0] https://openzl.org/api/c/graphs/sddl/
by varispeed | 2025-10-06 21:52:24+00:00
> initially his own, but eventually others—by paying themselves a market hourly rate

This is massively flawed thinking. So called "market rate" is actually a tool for value extraction from the workers and is not connected in any shape or form with what they create for company they work at. As corporations refer to this as if it was a consensus (as in developer should earn $x an hour), they pay this much and workers have no choice but to accept (if someone has working class background and no trust fund, it is rather impossible to throw the towel and start own business, sometimes there are even regulations designed to keep workers captive).

In such a project, "founder level" people should pay themselves as much as they think their worth is. Simple as that.

I often hear VC talking that if founder takes too much money, it's a bad look. They just want to shame people into not taking the slice they deserve.

It's interesting that IT is full of intelligent people, yet they can't grasp how they are being played by the market frames set by the rich.
by tguvot | 2025-10-06 21:52:57+00:00
ok. now i remember things better let me rephrase it. matrix was initiated by/inside amdocs. it (given that it was amdocs) was meant to be sold to telecoms to compete with OTT offerings (open source wording, etc - amdocs was adding it to everything back in this timeframe as it was trendy).

I was sufficiently "high up" in organization to hear this pitch. For record I said that they (telecoms) won't buy it and I didn't like project technically

Later when Amdocs saw that it's a no go they span you outside and later cut the funding.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-10-06 21:53:08+00:00
Apex Legends is at 20 IIRC (My memory is from 2-3 years back on this one tho)

CSGO was at 64 for the standard servers and 128 for Faceit (IIRC CS2 is doing some dynamic tick schenanigans unless they changed back on that)

Overwatch is I think at 60
by bcrl | 2025-10-06 21:53:17+00:00
Ethics is applicable to many situations outside of life critical systems. Engineers take ethics very seriously because it is important, and I think it is important for software developers as well. The first time I worked closely with a Professional Engineer on a project, it was eye opening as to how the concern of doing things the ethical way shaped the interaction... Everything from identifying potential business conflicts to ensuring data collection for inputs to the design process was done correctly and traceable.

Corporations already push enough random HR requirements on tech employees. I can't see how having a semester or 2 of ethics courses is particularly onerous.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-10-06 21:53:35+00:00
I was watching a video the other day which happened to mention that sodium lasers are used to create artificial stars, used for calibration of adaptive optics in ground based telescopes. This works because one particular layer of the upper atmosphere is rich in sodium due to impact with sodium rich debris.

Obviously it requires a more scientific analysis but it does seem to me that burning a lot of shit on the atmosphere might be problematic.
by piva00 | 2025-10-06 21:53:41+00:00
Median wages while prices are higher doesn't mean much, Americans earn more but also pay quite a bit more in most products and services needed for living: housing, healthy food, transportation, healthcare, etc.

After experiencing the American work life I'd never trade my life in Sweden to earn 2-3x more in California, I'm sorry to say but it wasn't better to earn more in the USA, I could buy more trinkets but daily life was just not better.

There's a point where you should look past wages, what's the overall quality of life of living in a place where workaholism is rampant, stress from financial anxiety is constant, having to hedge for potential catastrophic events such as a health scare putting oneself into massive debt, losing your job in a downturn (or simply due to an industry going into herd mode and colluding on layoffs), so on and so forth.

Or you can keep using wages and money as your only guidance in life, I understand that's the only way most Americans can think about life. It's rather puerile though, as if simple metrics are the determining factor of a good life.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-06 21:54:22+00:00
OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness."

These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or geographic, putting more observatories are higher latitudes. Or even statistical, by launching space-based calibration telescopes, or building more array-based observatories.)