MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-10-22 04:14:33+00:00
This is a common misconception. The total amount spent on the Apollo program over its 13 year time span (1960-1973) was $25.8 billion as reported in 1973, around $240 billion inflation adjusted. That's around $18.5 billion per year, distributed on a bell curve. NASA reached it's minimum post-apollo budget in 1978 at $21.3 billion per year! Their current budget is $25.4 billion. [1] So based on current (and historic spending) NASA could have been constantly doing Apollo level programs, on loop, as a 'side gig' and still have plenty of money for other things.

The modern argument is that we spend less as a percent of the federal budget, but it's mostly nonsensical. The government having more money available has nothing to do with the amount of money being spent on NASA or any other program. It's precisely due to this luxury that we've been able to keep NASA's budget so high in spite of them achieving nothing remotely on the scale of the Apollo program in the 50+ years since it was ended.

The big problem is that after Nixon defacto ended the human space program (largely because he feared that an accident might imperil his reelection chances), NASA gradually just got turned into a giant pork project. They have a lot of money but it's mostly wasted on things that people know aren't going anywhere or are otherwise fundamentally flawed, exactly like Artemis and the SLS.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
by csnover | 2025-10-22 04:14:55+00:00
Oh, how frustrating. I have no idea how I missed that since I feel like I spent quite a while looking for some later update that included the source. Well, thank you for making sure to release it! I did rewrite most of the Retro68 CMake code too, perhaps for similar reasons, so I can understand how that could have been a problem. At least the newer versions of GCC do not have race conditions in their Makefiles, unlike prc-tools-remix. :-)

The work I did was intended to eventually merge and live alongside the existing stuff in Retro68 instead of just blowing it away, with the hope that nothing like this would ever happen again to anyone else, but of course I failed to actually finish the work.
by m-ee | 2025-10-22 04:15:31+00:00
There was a Rohde and Schwarz rep that was pretty active on those forums when I still paid attention to it, might count for something.

Hard to justify going with the legacy brands as hobbyist with what comes out of China these days. Rigol and Sient make very capable hardware although h the UI can be a bit painful if you’re used to something else. Micsig produces very capable probes for a small fraction of the cost of the legacy players even high end specialty stuff like optically isolated probes. Those are still thousands but try pricing the equivalent from tek or Agilent, it would buy you a sedan.
by Larrikin | 2025-10-22 04:15:40+00:00
Don't treat an anecdote on the Internet like it actually happened. There have been people posting that they had friends of friends in college do this for twenty years. OP never did it but it definitely happened.

In this case it's high schoolers, half of whom most likely have no sexual experience but are fully willing to explore their anal cavity, having access to alcohol but not that much access.

They can get drunk off small amounts of alcohol, but it's such a small ration that they are freezing and destroying their limited amount of beer (which most high schoolers hate) to shove up their butts, to get drunk slightly faster? How much frozen beer can one butt fit? Is it really that much better than holding your nose and pounding it in front of your friends? Are high schoolers really going to parties with beer in their butts to maybe get a buzz of two beers from one butt beer because they only have access to one twelve pack, instead of just telling everyone how they are so wasted instead?
Show HN: Microphone Test
by nadermx | 2025-10-22 04:15:54+00:00
Hey HN, I vibe coded this in a day last time https://johnathannader.com/my-microphone-didnt-work/ and launched it; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37503569, now that the coding para-dime has gotten better, decided to spend another day updating it, this is the result
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-22 04:16:20+00:00
Sycophancy was actually buffed again a week after GPT-5 released. It was rather ham-fisted, as it will now obsessively reply with "Good question!" as though it will get the hose again if it does not.

"August 15, 2025 GPT-5 Updates We’re making GPT-5’s default personality warmer and more familiar. This is in response to user feedback that the initial version of GPT-5 came across as too reserved and professional. The differences in personality should feel subtle but create a noticeably more approachable ChatGPT experience.

Warmth here means small acknowledgements that make interactions feel more personable — for example, “Good question,” “Great start,” or briefly recognizing the user’s circumstances when relevant."

The "post-mortem" article on sycophancy in GPT-4 models revealed that the reason it occurred was because users, on aggregate, strongly prefer sycophantic responses and they operated based on that feedback. Given GPT-5 was met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception, I suppose they determined they needed to return to appealing to the lowest common denominator, even if doing so is cringe.
by citbl | 2025-10-22 04:17:33+00:00
hmmmmm youth.

I remember running windows95 overnight so that it could be a "server".

The next morning, moving the mouse was making the harddrive go nuts, it was paging just by moving the cursor!

Memory leak galore.

This makes me want to run linux as my daily driver! [1]

[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95/blob/master/Screensho...
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-22 04:18:22+00:00
meaning is an illusion? That's absurdly wrong, it's a performative contradiction to even say such a thing, you might not like semantic meaning but it, like information, physically exists, and even if you're a solipsist you can't deny state change, and state change is a meaning primitive, meaning primitives are one thing that must exist.

this isn't woo, this is just empirical observation, and no one is capable of credibly denying state change.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-22 04:19:07+00:00
Do the Chinese view this as a race...?

I've seen no indication that they see it in these terms. They've been pretty low-key about their progress.

To me it looks like the US obsession with reframe everything in terms of a "new cold war". From the US perspective, in end you look stupid if you lose, and you look stupid if you just spend a ton of money to repeat what you did last time
by RulerOf | 2025-10-22 04:21:05+00:00
> An AppleTV, Chromecast, or NVIDIA Shield can easily fit within the envelope of PoE+

I ended up buying a PoE extractor and barrel plug adapter for my Roku, and another extractor for my HDHomeRun.

It annoyed the heck out of me that they had PoE running to them and still had to be plugged into a separate transformer.
by robocat | 2025-10-22 04:21:23+00:00
Small sample, but in New Orleans, the US isn't even capable of maintenance.

I'm a tourist at the moment and everything looks like it is falling apart. The existing roading infrastructure is crumbling (apparently there's an Instagram about the worst examples). Everywhere I've driven, the roads are worse than earthquake hit Christchurch. Yet there is so much amazing old infrastructure that reeks of massive past investment.

Commonly I see power poles listing tipsily (or even broken); cable wires loose or hanging.

One bridge over the Mississippi has rust patches everywhere and needs a paint.

Is it just New Orleans, or a more general issue across the US?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-22 04:21:28+00:00
> Salt isn't all that cheap

Wait, what? Salt is literally one of the cheapest of all materials per kilogram that exists in all contexts, including non-food contexts. The cost is almost purely transportation from the point of production. High quality salt is well under a dollar a pound. I am currently using salt that I bought 500g for 0.29 euro. You can get similar in the US (slightly more expensive).

This was a meme among chemical engineers. Some people complain in reviews on Amazon that the salt they buy is cut with other chemicals that make it less salty. The reality is that there is literally nothing you could cut it with that is cheaper than salt.
by RandomBacon | 2025-10-22 04:21:38+00:00
Question for anyone who might have a suggestion:

I have a Ring home security system. I would like to get an offline home CCTV that only records when the alarm is set (either in Home or Away).

A quick internet search does not show an API. I'm not sure Ring has a device that I could wire a relay (if that's the right thing) to.
by akerl_ | 2025-10-22 04:22:20+00:00
If your memory usage is creeping up, the way you'll find out that you need more memory is by monitoring memory usage via the same mechanisms you'd hypothetically use to monitor your swap usage.

If your memory usage spikes suddenly, a nominal amount of swap isn't stopping anything from getting killed; you're at best buying yourself a few seconds, so unless you spend your time just staring at the server, it'll be dead anyways.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-10-22 04:23:51+00:00
A browser? They're overextending themselves. Rather than fix all the bugs in their chat interface, or finding ways to make the model suck less, they're throwing every random project at the wall, hoping to justify their insane spend.

Every day I use an AI company's chat interface. Every day I report bugs that go into oblivion. Every day I wonder why the interface has no useful features to manage my data, and the ever-increasing collection of giant chat windows I'm never going to manually search through. I wonder why all the connectors are proprietary, and there isn't one just called "IMAPv4", "CalDAV", "S3", "SFTP".

I don't think these companies are after a user. I think they're after "the big money" - advertisements, contracts. No need to make it user-friendly if the enterprise sales team is kicking ass. The product is the shiny box you sell to executives, and inside is "total number of new eyeballs", "engagement trends". Everything new is old again.
by eru | 2025-10-22 04:23:57+00:00
Yes, there has been some movement. But even an 8 fold increase (128/16) over a decade is nothing compared to what we used to see in the past.

Oh, and the new machine has unified RAM. The old machine had a bit of extra RAM in the GPU that I'm not counting here.

As far as I can tell, the new RAM is a lot faster. That counts for something. And presumably also uses less power.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-10-22 04:24:47+00:00
You're mixing up completely different assets. Gold and land are scarce resources that have value that goes up when more people need it. The buildings on top of the land depreciate. Bitcoin is just a beanie baby that is easier to steal without recourse that you can't even sell for the materials used to produce it.

The thing with a speculative bubble is that as soon as the value stops going up, there is no reason anyone would want to buy it instead of shares in a company or land producing valuable goods and services, so people will sell it off. There is no floor on Bitcoin, so it will go to 0 when that happens. You don't want to be the last fool holding.
by westurner | 2025-10-22 04:27:07+00:00
What is possible by integrating chat into Zotero (is it XUL?) that's not yet possible with e.g. pyzotero?

pyzotero, paperqa.contrib.ZoteroDB,

Paperai supports "Report Schemas" in YAML that could be useful for systematic reviews

IIRC the Zotero Connector doesn't work on students' Chromebooks.

Tabulator was a cool extension. A clone of Tabulator as a Web Extension that has local storage with a remote sync option would be useful.

Zotero does bibliographies with CiteProc and CSL Citation Style Language;

CiteProc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteProc
by godelski | 2025-10-22 04:27:16+00:00
> would you feel common ground with a predatory fish? Or a plant? An insect colony?

Yes.

Humans famously show compassion for all of these. I don't think alligators co-evolved with Steve Irwin.

Humans even show compassion for rocks and non-living things. We show compassion for the literal ground. We anthropomorphize it. Is this anthropomorphization not an attempt to understand and have compassion.

Regardless, you just asked how OP feels. I don't know how they do, but I can say how I do. "Yes"
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-10-22 04:27:47+00:00
Honestly, it's because of what Sun's innovations in systems software that I look so fondly on their work.

I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.

Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.

[1] https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...

[2] https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
by omgwtfbyobbq | 2025-10-22 04:29:03+00:00
It's seldom invisible, but in my experience how visible it is depends on the size/modularity/performance/etc of what's being swapped and the underlying hardware.

On my 8gb M1 Mac, I can have a ton of tabs open and it'll swap with minimal slowdown. On the other hand, running a 4k external display and a small (4gb) llm is at best horrible and will sometimes require a hard reset.

I've seen similar with different combinations of software/hardware.
by pedrosorio | 2025-10-22 04:29:05+00:00
> Is there a human out there who would just magically type all the right things - no errors - first try?

If they know what they're doing and it's not an exploratory task where the most efficient way to do it is by trial and error? Quite a few. Not always, but often.

That skill seems to have very little value in today's world though.
by godelski | 2025-10-22 04:29:43+00:00
If they were to visit us then they would be de facto technologically superior to us. But I'm sure we'd figure out a way to feel superior to them.

And what's it matter? There's lots of people superior to me. I'm not really concerned unless they're trying to do me harm. But that anger isn't due to their superiority, it is due to their harm.
by avadodin | 2025-10-22 04:30:02+00:00
SEV and CC in general looks interesting seeing the slides. I hadn't heard of it yet. Someone more knowledgeable than me will say if these encrypted VMs are also protected from bugged modules within the SoC or on the bus besides being protected from the hypervisor.

It also seems that they are adding inter-core features but I don't know whether they are related to removing locks within the kernel, embedded applications, or if they are moving to micro-kernel internally.
by dang | 2025-10-22 04:30:35+00:00
You can't attack others like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Btw, it's particularly important not to do this when your argument is the correct one, since if you happen to be right, you end up discrediting the truth by posting like this, and that ends up hurting everybody. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by dmitrygr | 2025-10-22 04:31:51+00:00
I never submit to OSS. It is the same as editing wikipedia -- every time I try, it is a political mess and nonsense galore. (My reasoning: If you are paying me for work, you are welcome to criticize, request amendments, etc. If you are not paying me for work, you thank me profusely for the free work I offered and take it...or don't. I am uninterested in your opinions in that case, or requests for changes unless they are bugs). Anyways, I never had goals of upstreaming anything. I was just trying to help others who wanted a working toolchain. My patches work well. People (not just me) have used them. There are also patches to PilRC i released that add some more bitmap compression modes and fix bugs with multi-depth fonts.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-22 04:32:28+00:00
> The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.

This is inaccurate. Here [1] is a nice table showing US military spending over time, inflation adjusted. Up, up, and away! And it's made even more insane because what really matters is discretionary spending. Each year lots of things are automatically paid - interest on the debt, pensions, medicare, social security, and so on. What's left over is in those giant budgetary bills that Congress makes each year that cover all spending on education, infrastructure, and all of the other things people typically associate government spending with.

And military spending (outside of things like pension) is 100% discretionary, and it consumes about half of our entire discretionary budget! And this is again made even more insane by the fact that discretionary spending, as a percent of all spending, continues to decline. This is because we're an aging population with a terrible fertility rate. So costs for social security, medicare, and other such things are increasing sharply while new revenue from our children is barely trickling in. Notably this will never change unless fertility rates change. Even when the 'old people' die, they will be replaced by even more old people, and with even fewer children coming of age.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
by CGamesPlay | 2025-10-22 04:33:14+00:00
"earlyoom is just polling"?

> systemd-oomd periodically polls PSI statistics for the system and those cgroups to decide when to take action.

It's unclear if the docs for systemd-oomd are incorrect or misleading; I do see from the kernel.org link that the recommended usage pattern is to use the `poll` system call, which in this context would mean "not polling", if I understand correctly.
by hinkley | 2025-10-22 04:34:08+00:00
I think I’ve heard three different comedians make a joke out of this saying if we just gave all the kids peanut butter the problem would eventually take care of itself.

But it’s not actually a joke.

I guess that’s the weird thing about jokes. They often get very close to something that is true but they come at it sideways, so it’s funny instead.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-22 04:34:27+00:00
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this. I have personal opinions/biases on all of this, and it seems to be the issue of our time.

There was a quote from a Montenegrin political blog-spammer back in 2015-2016 that has been stuck in my mind ever since. He lived in this village full of other nerds, and they made money by getting clicks based on political posts aimed at the USA, as that was where the adsense money was best. The village had a crazy amount of nice cars, and that brought international journalist interest. In an interview, the guy said "The Trump people are great, they will literally believe anything. The Sanders people are annoying, because they always want sources." Don't shoot the messenger, that was the reporting.

Back then, I was not very charitable on the topic. Later, I saw this happen in my own family. Even later, on the other side, I saw "genocide Joe" people on the left, under utterly insane banners like "trans jihad." I then became more charitable towards all people who had fallen under the spell of propaganda.

The right in the USA is objectively entirely off the rails, 100% vibes, no sources. Every single talking point turns out to be a lie after you do 5 seconds of research. But the voters believe that they are protecting their families, maybe they are fed shit like "Haitians are eating your pets," but they are being played by assholes appealing to their misguided protective instincts.

But, even young trans Americans can get talked into thinking that they support "jihad" by some Twitch streamer, and not vote at all...? That's the kind of anti-self interest voting pattern that I had always only assigned to to right! Except in the Genocide Joe/Trans Jihad case, it's far worse!

Well, that's when I affirmed my belief that we are all easily programmed meat machines, across the board. Some more easily than others, some for noble reasons (based on my beliefs), and many more for dark reasons... but man, I am going to try to bring us all back together every chance I get. I won't get everyone, I might not get anyone, but even getting a single person to stop and think is worth a thousand typed comments.
by lgleason | 2025-10-22 04:35:13+00:00
Actually, electricity production has gone down, while the price continues to outstrip inflation.

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

Because of this many companies are reducing staff or pulling out. https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/837719/important-busi...

....and that's before we get into things like Transnet and SA Air. I'd love to see the country succeed, but putting your head in the sand and denying that there is a problem will not fix things.
by wraptile | 2025-10-22 04:35:28+00:00
bit off topic but openai seems to be focusing completely on Apple's ecosystem now, particularly for the US market too and as non-apple user outside of the US I feel completely left out.

Half a trillion dollar company not being to produce multi-platform software when it has never been as easy as it is today is a really bad look. I genuinely don't understand how they could ever fulfill their claims of being good AGI stewards with this product track record that leaves out big majority of humanity.
by eru | 2025-10-22 04:36:01+00:00
You should adjust for GPD, not for inflation.

Perhaps I wasn't quite clear when I said "spends less of its total income". I meant as as a proportion of GDP.

I agree that the US has some weird distinction between discretionary and mandatory spending. And I also agree that much of the 'mandatory' spending needs a reform, and should probably not be on the government's balance sheet at all. Eg a fully funded pension system that invests globally is both off the government's balance sheet, and doesn't care about domestic fertility.

(Of course, you still want to have a means tested welfare system to catch those people who couldn't earn enough for retirement and other poor people in general.)
by wolrah | 2025-10-22 04:36:28+00:00
> Ubiquiti has stopped selling anything with passive 24V PoE

In their consumer "UniFi" product line. Pull up their store and switch over to the "UISP" product line. Most of the smaller wireless devices and consumer-tier CPE are 24v passive, most of the larger wireless devices, 60GHz bridges, etc. are 48v passive, a few devices in the middle support both, and standard "active" PoE is almost nowhere to be found. Even on product lines that weren't even dreamed up when modern standard PoE was ubiquitous.

They say it's because the WISP crowd loves passive PoE as it can easily be wired to batteries on towers, and I get that, but that's no excuse for not also supporting standard-based PoE on the device end. There's no good reason for a product designed in the 2020s to force the installation of passive PoE where there was none prior.

They demonstrated they can do both with most of the transition-era UniFi products. Support and encourage the use of standards, allow the use of non-standard but common alternatives where they make sense.