MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JCM9 | 2025-10-21 14:33:23+00:00
Interesting. The “big sky” theory has its limits.

Curious too to learn more about what data, if any, is shared with ATC on the location of these balloons. Airspace is regularly blocked off for rockets and other use, but for many weather balloons the theory is 1) the sky is big, and 2) designs are meant to be that a strike with an aircraft wouldn’t cause significant damage. If this was an impact with a balloon payload then “2” looks problematic.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-10-21 14:33:54+00:00
Repeated success along multiple businesses is an objective measure. There is a chance he lucked into paypal, tesla, spaceX, and starlink, but it seems reasonable to assume he is contributing (and detracting simultaneously) something to score 4 successess, even if that is just hiring the right people and making big bets.

These are also hard businesses, dealing with physics, chemistry, and regulations. Unlike SaaS businesses one spins up on cloud services. Which lends some more credence to not just being lucky.

Obviously, he has a reprehensible agenda, but there is clearly a case to be made about his ability to execute.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-10-21 14:35:01+00:00
Cold brew is weak coffee. The hot water extracts more, faster, from the grounds. Cold brew doesn't pull as much, even overnight. You get a smoother, sweeter drink, but far fewer compounds than heat or pressure (espresso) get you.

(This is not a slam on cold brew. If that's what you like, more power to you. It's great for a make-now-drink-later approach.)
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-21 14:35:07+00:00
My favorite example of redundancy is the US requirement to have two staircases in an apartment block for the case of fire.

Most other developed nations do not mandate this, one staircase being considered enough. And they don't have an epidemics of fire deaths either. In general, frequency of fires in domestic settings is a fraction of those 100 years ago.

If Switzerland or Czechia can live with one staircase per building, so can the US. This alone would reduce costs of construction somewhat, and make some currently illegal construction projects legal.
by nic_du | 2025-10-21 14:35:13+00:00
I agree. I would love to see AI come up with novel theories like quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity. They don't feel like a remix of previous things that happened in the past to me... He could test that theory himself by training an AI model with data that predates these theories and ask the AI to come up with a theory explaining the results observed during a double slit experiment.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-21 14:36:19+00:00
> You still can’t become a Chinese citizen.

This is untrue.

This Wiki page says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_nationality_law

> Foreign nationals may naturalize if they are permanent residents in any part of China

More specifically: I recall living in Hongkong and learning about non-ethnic Chinese people (usually South Asians) who became Chinese citizens to acquire a Hongkong passport. The process required them to denounce all existing citizenships. In the eyes of HK and mainland gov'ts, those people are Chinese citizens with HK PR and carry HK passport. The candidates needed to demonstrate sufficient language skills in either Cantonese or Mandarin. (I'm unsure if other regional languages were allowed.)

> You can come to USA or Europe and build a life for yourself.

There is a tiny minority of foreigners who do this in mainland China, as well as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Usually, they come to teach English, then marry a local and "build a life". Some also come as skilled migrants.

> Yeah they can exploit cheap labor from the poor interior. But the US is doing something similar in some ways with central/southern America.

I don't follow the part about the US exploiting LATAM labour. Can you explain more?
by HardCodedBias | 2025-10-21 14:36:50+00:00
Many people have difficulty processing or even finding the information on the polices of candidates. It seems reasonable to use LLMs to get that information and summarize so that the individual voter can process it.

I have no problem with people deciding, on their own, how much help they want/need to make their voting decision.

Newspapers in the Netherlands give endorsements.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-21 14:36:53+00:00
Self-checkout is a system where you as a honest person are paying so that other people can steal goods.

Owners of supermarket have calculated that the increase in theft is off-set by the savings of not paying wages to cashiers. But those losses have to be paid by somebody, and that somebody is of course the customers who don't steal goods.

I'd rather not be the person who has to pay extra so that another person can steal. That's an undignified existence, and hence why I also boycott self-checkouts. I don't care what "rationalists" say.

Also, a store with a lot of self-checkout lanes and few cashiers will attract thieves and repel honest customers who want good service. The result is a worse store in every way, until it folds and closes - as owners have probably planned for a few years.
by panick21 | 2025-10-21 14:36:59+00:00
Its an incredibly complex ever evolving situation.

Basically, originally Starship has entered development for SpaceX had nothing todo with any of this. SpaceX started to spend on Starship for their own reasons.

Then in Trump 1, he simply inveded a super agressive 'get to the moon' goal. 'Moon 2024'. This was mostly a fantasy goal but it sounded good politically. NASA for various reasons, had aboslutly no money to fund a moon lander. But if the president asked, they have to do it. So they threw out very opened ended ask for a moon lander, and a single moon landing.

There wasn't the kind of question asked like, what kind of system should we use for moon exploration in the next 2 decades. Or anything like that. It was more like 'how can we land on the moon once in 2024 and then we do new contracts after that'.

SpaceX, naturally justed adopted their existing Starship platform. But to make that work, they would need to figure out many things beyond just a 'lander'. And SpaceX bid was wildly to ambitious. It in many cases provided far, far more then NASA asked for. But NASA doesn't care about the capability, only if the bid can do the minium they asked for.

SpaceX won because they were willing to pay for almost all of it themselves, only asking for 2.3 billion $. And that included a test moon landing before the real one.

This is of course only a fraction of the cost for the whole Starship program.

So Space didn't spread themselves to thin, they are all in on Starship, but the simple reality is, its an incredibly difficult wide reaching program. And the moon lander part is just a little add on to that larger project. And that's the only reason 2.3 billion $ would be acceptable to SpaceX.

The simple reality is, nobody on the planet knows how to do a moon lander for 2.3 billion $, literally nobody.

So the time table way always fantasy and literally everybody knew that as soon as it was announced. Nobody was to public about it because offending Trump is bad, so lets all just collectivly pretend its real.

The government contract was unfocused and short term focused, without a larger strategy for moon exploration.

The real issue however isn't with this one contract, but the how the whole NASA Human Spaceflight program is organized.
by bob1029 | 2025-10-21 14:37:59+00:00
> throwing away information that our hearing systems can't process very well is not particularly useful if your goal is speech (or more generally, audio) synthesis from scratch.

I'm not sure I follow. If there is a set of tokens that the average human cannot perceive, why wouldn't we want to eliminate them from the search space? Who is the target audience for this model?
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-10-21 14:38:23+00:00
I started in music but have since edited thousands of hours of podcasts. I cannot transcribe a track by looking at the waveform, except the word "um" haha. But without playing the audio I can tell you where words start and end, whether a peak is a B or a T or an A or an I sound... And melodyne can add layers to that and tell me the pitch, formants (vowels), quantize the syllables etc. If I can do all this, a computer ought to be able to do the same and more
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 14:38:24+00:00
There is still a lot of work to be done on Starship before it is going to be useful for going to other bodies. The entire interior/cabin/life-support system, for example. This is years away from hitting factory tooling.

This work could revolutionise America's manufacturing/industrial base, if there was someone around who could direct the ship in that direction.

I could imagine, given a bit of funding bump, the van-lifers and the earthship folks could find themselves with a life-support-system revolution to participate in .. especially if it were oriented not just towards starship interiors, but life-on-the-streets/in-the-woods/on-mars solutions .. the good ol' USA has tons of test monkeys for that scenario.
by smoe | 2025-10-21 14:38:47+00:00
I agree that people shouldn’t rely solely on AI to decide how to vote.

Unfortunately, given the sorry state of the internet, wrecked by algorithms and people gaming them, I wouldn’t be surprised if AI answers were on average no more or even less biased than what people find through quick Google searches or see on their social media feeds. At least on the basics of a given topic.

The problem is not AI, but that it takes quite a bit of effort to make informed decisions in life.
by jdross | 2025-10-21 14:38:55+00:00
I'm a 2024 Tesla Model 3 owner and my car drives me everywhere nearly flawlessly, thousands of miles. For all this I pay something like $500 per month for the lease, including FSD.

It's a miracle product to me, and the comments here about Tesla (not the ones about the story, which are reasonable!) are just so far removed from my personal experience with the product.
by TheEdonian | 2025-10-21 14:39:05+00:00
Here's a pattern I see destroying technical decisions: we've turned meetings into gladiatorial contests of quick wit instead of deliberate problem-solving. Nemawashi, "turning the roots", is a side-step to that.

Pre-socialize decisions through 1-on-1s. Let people think privately, examine data, and reach consensus before the formal meeting. People think better in private, not when they’re performing in front of others.

Since then, I’ve stopped seeing meetings as places for quick wit and started valuing the prep work. The coffee chats, the shared data, the quiet thinking. It’s slower, but it leads to better decisions and fewer grudges.
by ben_w | 2025-10-21 14:39:15+00:00
> Almost everyone else in the industry is predicting AGI "soon", i.e. in 1 or 2 years.

I've not read any original quote from anyone saying that, either. Closest things I have seen were people doing a game of telephone with Altman's "thousands of days" ending up as that, and the 2027 paper which was predicated on the USA systematically deleting every obstacle rather than vibe-coding a tariff policy and having ICE mass-arrest people building relevant factories, and even then the authors indicated 2027 was on the optimistic side.
by sbrother | 2025-10-21 14:39:30+00:00
I don't think it's just safeguards; they really don't seem to understand pitch at all. I tried asking ChatGPT's advanced voice mode to recognize a tune I was humming, and it insisted it was Beethoven's 5th -- multiple times. I think it must have basically tokenized my humming to "dun dun dun duuun".
by slicktux | 2025-10-21 14:39:32+00:00
The difference is there’s two options; to scan and bag your own stuff or go to a human(s) that can scan and bag your stuff. If the former catches on then we/you will be doing the “menial job” of bagging and scanning our own stuff all the time… and then some self checkout attendant will have the “menial job” of supervising the checkout and resetting it when it errors out.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 14:40:57+00:00
Not always, they can be configured to behave as photodiodes, too:

https://www.codrey.com/electronics/the-led-photodiode-trick/

This is also in my "TODO" list, maybe with the next magicShifter revision, or possible once I get the current new design booted and refactored, a bit ..

https://www.instructables.com/LEDs-as-light-sensors/
by blululu | 2025-10-21 14:41:03+00:00
This is getting off topic but I do not believe that the Commonwealth of the Philippines was legally/formally a US territory in 1939. It was a protectorate whose foreign affairs were administered by the United States, but it had its own government/constitution that was formally independent and administered by Filipinos. It was more like Cuba than Puerto Rico in the context of the Spanish American war.
by jcgl | 2025-10-21 14:41:08+00:00
I don't need software freedom preached to me, thanks. And I'm not going to waste time trying to prove my free software bona fides to you.

Suffice it to say: at the time I bought this iPhone 12 mini, there weren't really good options when prioritizing {small form factor,good privacy posture,good security posture,software freedom}.
by _fat_santa | 2025-10-21 14:41:16+00:00
I was curious how AI would respond in this scenario so I posed this question to ChatGPT:

> lets say in the 2028 US presidential election we have Gavin Newsom running against JD Vance in the general election. who should I vote for?

This is the response: https://chatgpt.com/share/68f79980-f08c-800f-88dc-377751a963...

Reading the bullet points I can see it skew a little toward Newsom in the way it frames some things though that seems to be mostly from it's web search. I have to say that beyond that it seems that ChatGPT at least tries to be unbiased and reinforces that only I can make that decision in the end.

Now granted this is about the US Presidential election which I would speculate is probably the most widely reported on election in the world so there are plenty of sources, and based on how it responded I can see how it might draw different conclusions about less reported on elections and just side with whatever side has more content on the internet about it.

Bottom line, the issue I see here is not really an issue with technology, it's more an issue with what I call "public understanding". When Google first came out, tech savvy folks understood how it worked but the common person did not which led to some people thinking that Google could give you all the answers you needed. As time went on that understanding trickled down to the every day person and now were at a time where there is a wide "public understanding" of how Google works and thus we don't get similar articles about "Don't google who to vote for". What I see now though is AI is currently in that phase where the tech savvy person knows how it comes up with answers but the average person thinks of it in the same way they though of Google in the early 2000's. We'll eventually get to a place where people don't need to be told what AI is good and what it's bad at but were not there yet.
Show HN: Toffu – AI marketing agent that executes campaigns through chat
by orarbel1 | 2025-10-21 14:41:34+00:00
I built Toffu after getting frustrated juggling 20+ marketing tools.

Instead of logging into Google Ads, opening GA4, checking Meta dashboards, and writing reports, you just chat:

"What's my ROAS this week?" "Pause underperforming ads" "Create a competitor analysis" "Increase budget on winning campaigns"

The AI executes everything – not just recommendations.

Connects to: Google Ads, GA4, Meta Ads, LinkedIn, Reddit, Search Console, Webflow, HubSpot, and more.

SOC2 certified for enterprise use.

Free tier available. Happy to answer questions or hear feedback.
by pinkbanana21 | 2025-10-21 14:41:52+00:00
I found using z.ai a performant and cheap alternative for some tasks: https://z.ai/subscribe?ic=VWKNBI8LR8

Costs are 6x cheaper and it's way faster and good at test writing and tool calling. It some times can be a bit messy though so use Gemini or Claude or codex for that hard problems....
by frenchmajesty | 2025-10-21 14:42:07+00:00
Hey OP here. You're not wrong! Leaving aside the philosophical debate (isn't all form of capitalist participation selfishly motivated?), the main motivator was to help me and my friends with a problem we struggled with.

Many solo Entrepreneurs you see on Twitter with large audiences are busy people so they have hired cheap labor from India / Philippines to be the social media manager. They often take on the task of keeping up with the niches and drafting post ideas. The big issue is that the variance in quality of who you hire is very high, and it's also a mental and energy toll to manage an employee who works on the other side of earth.

So the AI helps to scours "here is what all the tech bros are talking about since 3 days ago" and then drafts 3-5 posts and shows them to me so I can curate. I get to keep my page and audience engaged while protecting my time from actual deep work instead of scrolling the feed all day.
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-10-21 14:42:16+00:00
Hi there, Can you be clearer with what you mean with you "get stuck in EU only servers"? Do you mean that something seems to go technically wrong on our website or user interface Hetzner Console? Or do you get personally distracted? As someone else wrote below, we have Cloud servers on both the US East and West coasts (and Singapore). https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/general/locations --Katie, Hetzner
by Bender | 2025-10-21 14:42:22+00:00
Probably something like the NTP pool [1] model could work but I can also see people abusing that by adding nodes that rewrite zones or specific records to MitM people. I only mention this model because it scales very well and people can contribute resources they can afford but they can also withdraw from the pool without harming the community [2] in regards to funding resources at least. Some type of automation would have to continuously validate each pool member and use a unique assigned NSID or id.server that maps to an operator account.

Each person just runs a node with a specific Unbound [3] configuration and pulls filter lists from community approved repositories. I mention Unbound as it is one of the most flexible and powerful recursive DNS options and many here are already using it. Bootstrapping could come from a static updated file in a repository that gets refreshed via cron.

[1] - https://www.ntppool.org/en/

[2] - https://community.ntppool.org/c/server-operators/6

[3] - https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/
by stavros | 2025-10-21 14:42:24+00:00
I think the thing that fools us here is the fact that we're used to pixels being discrete, so it doesn't "look" low-res because the colors blend into each other. If you imagine that each LED produces a small circle onto the diffuser, and that this circle overlaps the ones around it a bit, it gets easier to see through the illusion.

It's much easier to understand when you can change the distance of the diffuser to the panel (which I did when testing), because then you can see the lights go from little squares with lots of dark space around them, to this, to big blobs of one color.
by veidr | 2025-10-21 14:43:00+00:00
Me too, but I know it's not just people shilling, or on the take, because a bunch of people I know personally have moved from Claude Code to Codex, and say it's better.

For me, though, it's not remotely close. Codex has fucked up 95% of the 50-or-so tasks I asked it to do, while Claude Code fucks up only maybe 60%.

I'm big on asking LLMs to do the first major step of something, and then coming back later, and if it looks like it kinda sucks, just Ctrl-C and git revert that container/folder. And I also explicitly set up "here are the commands you need to run to self-check your work" every time. (Which Codex somewhat weirdly sometimes ignores with the explicit (false) claim that it skipped that step because it wasn't requested... hmm.)

So, those kinds of workflow preferences might be a factor, but I haven't seen Codex ever be good yet, and I regret the time I invested trying it too early.
by chasd00 | 2025-10-21 14:43:06+00:00
late reply but, no, i really needed to hit the button but didn't have valid ID at the time. My driver's license was expired and i couldn't get it renewed because of a outstanding tickets iirc. I was able to talk my way in and had been there many times before so knew my way around and what words to say. I was able to do what i needed before another admin came up and told me that without valid ID they have no choice but to ask me to leave (probably like an insurance thing). I was being a bit dramatic when i said "getting thrown out" the datacenter guys were very nice and almost apologetic about asking me to leave.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 14:43:13+00:00
>So an AI trained on the campaigns materials wouldn't do an accurate job of portraying what that politician will attempt to do.

Yes, this is why its so useful to use AI to discover these cases, and make the actual details of the politicians lies and subterfuge fully exposed.

For other materials - such as the 1,000-page bills 'o fat and so on - I can also imagine seeing AI give me, very specifically, details of the politician-in-targets' betrayal of an electorate.

This, more than ever, compels an aggressive stance vis a vis AI in politics. Anyone telling you not to do it, for any reason, is probably doing it.
by deaux | 2025-10-21 14:43:46+00:00
Strangely enough this is one of the first times here I see someone with the exact same experience. GPT-5 is very prone to a style that would for most codebases be overengineering. I think as a large part of HN works on huge enterprise FAANG-like code, this is where it shines, so here it gets rave reviews of just being the best overall. But globally, for most developers, it's overengineering and adds a lot of unnecessary code to maintain. Sonnet in that sense remains "every man's coder". I've gone back from 4.5 to 4 now, having spent a good chunk of time with 4.5 it just seems like a slight overall regression with no real upsides besides being a little faster than 4.
by modeless | 2025-10-21 14:43:53+00:00
> The system is designed to not pose a risk to human life in the worst case event of a collision. This is what the FAA 101 and ICAO weight limits are for. And indeed, there were no serious injuries and no depressurization event to my knowledge as a result of the collision.

This seems close to a worst case scenario for this failure mode, and everyone is still OK. I consider that good engineering.
by Mistletoe | 2025-10-21 14:43:55+00:00
I've always found this fascinating. Even with completely random events, you get big winners and losers. I wonder how many of the rich realize their wealth could be more dice roll than their actions?

The enhanced version that tries to model debt and other basic economic functions like investments that are proportional to the respective wealth, gets even further from equality.

https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/2.html
by mhb | 2025-10-21 14:43:59+00:00
It's unclear what you're arguing. The leading experts (Fauci/CDC) who most Americans were paying attention to were not providing this shading of meaning which you are trying to impute to them. That would be the case if they said something like N95 masks will provide excellent protection for you from the virus if worn correctly, but we have a shortage, so please make do with alternatives so that health care workers have access to them. That is not what they said. Instead they sacrificed credibility at the altar of expediency to the detriment of future trust.

What's reductive is assuming that people are motivated exclusively by self-interest instead of trusting them to make good decisions when told the truth.