MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glenstein | 2025-11-26 19:42:59+00:00
Thoughtful intuitions all around. My understanding is that lasers don't necessitate the big reception dish, but instead have a 1m or smaller reflective telescope. The laser setup is lighter, lower power and gas precedent in modern space missions.

Probes I suspect would realistically have to be large enough to send strong signals over long distances, so weightier than a few grams.

I think 99% downtime is an existing paradigm for lots of space stuff, e.g. NASA's DSOC and KRUSTY, so room for optimism there.

Though I think I agree with you that an energy payload as well as general hardware reliability are probably the bottlenecks over long distances. I have more thoughts on this that probably deserve a seperate post (e.g. periodic zipper-style replacements that cascade through the whole relay line) but to keep this on honoring the Voyager, I will say for the Voyager is at least for me huge for opening my imagination for next steps inspired by it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-26 19:43:13+00:00
It isn’t lost. But it’s decaying.

I remember picking through an aerospace scrapyard in North Hollywood a decade ago with extremely-talented launch engineers (and entrepreneurs). The aim was to look at parts, measure them and figure out why they were built like they were. We looked, a little, at stuff like nozzles. But mostly we focussed on bolts, joiners, turbine blades and the like.
by altairprime | 2025-11-26 19:43:17+00:00
They’re rational actors, though, right? So one can assume that they wouldn’t put a billion dollars of revenue at risk if they didn’t have a plan for replacing the efforts of those workers — and since they’re a publicly traded company, and this is a material forward-looking statement, there would be SEC penalties if they don’t truly mean what they said about AI replacing the workers. Any rational company would take care not to knowingly lie here without having done enough due diligence to have plausible affirmability of what they claim.

(If they’re behaving irrationally, then of course all interpretations are void, but that would invalidate the rationality basis of the comment thread I’m responding to, so I’m not considering that branch of possibilities in this specific thread.)
by mbesto | 2025-11-26 19:43:24+00:00
> OpenAI has branding power

With consumers right now? Sure, but so does WhatsApp and IG, both Meta properties. Meta and Google also WAY better brand power with advertisers. So there's that.

> I can easily see them with $1 trillion in valuation and raise the a record amount of money in an IPO.

They have agreements of roughly in $1.5T infra spend (and that doesn't include their own S&M and R&D spend) for the next 5 years. They have to have a combined amount of cashflow to cover that $1.5T (mix of income, debt financing, and stock financing) + all their other spending. The CFO admitted that they may need to bail out data centers to cover this to stay solvent in the long run.

> Y Combinator literally teaches their companies that they can beat incumbents using focus and speed.

YC is literally not God when it comes to advice, so this point is moot. Meta and Google didn't come out of YC and yet still beat incumbents.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-11-26 19:43:29+00:00
That’s a thing, but not the thing I was talking about.

I was talking about the existence of people who are just nice and pleasant in the normal healthy manner in their ordinary lives, except they hold some opinions that you (or I, and possibly even not both of us) would find horrifying.

(That description actually applies to most people who have ever lived, but that they exist among our contemporaries is both more stark and more important. It makes me much more averse to being $NOTNICE to people who are $WRONG, because I don’t think I would want to live when people habitually were, and perhaps even thought it was virtuous to be, not nice to those they know are in some way morally wrong.)
by cma | 2025-11-26 19:43:33+00:00
Stock market isn't the economy. If wages are largely stock comp at high valuation they get clawed back in a crash. Infrastructure spend is massive but at 70-80% margins for nvidia real cost to economy is cut by that much, aside from the datacenter and power build out which is definitely a big portion.

It could unwind cleanly as long as we don't let it infect the banking system too much, which it has started somewhat doing with more debt financed deals instead of equity financed and probably book values making it into bank balance sheets.

Truck driver wages are $180-280 billion annually and seems like something that will get replaced and should justify $1 trillion of the spend or more, economically. I think Tesla for instance only spends single digit billions in R&D most years though, so the spending may not be going to where the most immediate solid/lasting economic impacts will come from. I'm not sure what Waymo's spend is.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-26 19:43:54+00:00
I accept that criticism. It's just that it makes things more complicated and harder to argue about (and I couldn't remember the exact boundaries). I was making the distinction earlier but dropped it for the sake of explaining the point of safe/unsafe.

So the categories of code: the unsafe block, the friend code that shares responsibility for invariants, the outside world code

Capricorn2481's mistake is putting the entire program in the second category, when only code in the same module is supposed to be there.

If a memory violation happens, you know you have a bug in a module containing unsafe blocks, which helps a lot. Those modules should be relatively rare and as small as possible.
by bigcloud1299 | 2025-11-26 19:44:25+00:00
I have never had a luck with using Gemini. I had a pretty good app create with CODEX. Due to the hype I thought let me give Gemini a try. I asked it find all way to improve security and architecture / design. sure enough it gave a me a list of components etc that didn’t match best patterns and practices. So I let it refactor the code.

It Fucked up the entire repot. It hard coded tenant ids and used ids, it completely destroyed my UI. Broke my entire grpahql integration. Set me back 2 weeks of work.

I do admit the browse version of Gemini chat does much better job at providing architecture and design guidance time to time.
by benrutter | 2025-11-26 19:45:00+00:00
> I could not tell the real from fake music at all.

Not sure if it's in my head (haven't done a blind test or anything) but all AI music I've heard has painfully bad drum acoustics (very clicky). Seems like the most tell tale marker, although would love to make a "spot the AI song" game to prove myself right/wrong.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-26 19:45:34+00:00
> the use of a mascot character isn't a kink that I am aware of.

Ceren era of the FreeBSD mascot?

Not going to link to it, because while it was all in good fun back then, it's not the sort of thing people do now.

Edit: Also before anyone gets sniffy about it, Ceren is actually fucking God-tier technically, and a great person.
by BizarroLand | 2025-11-26 19:45:46+00:00
I think your opinion is valid from your point of view but missing an important part of the bigger picture.

Obese people typically do not try to become obese. Most obese people have tried to lose weight and find that they lack the tools and skills needed to succeed, and many of the ones that do succeed only do so temporarily.

Why is that?

It's a question with no simple answer, and no single answer.

Evolutionary biological drive to acquire calories.

Psychological dependency on food.

Inability to differentiate satisfaction from "being stuffed", likely due to environmental factors like negative education as a child or poverty mindset in parents.

The perceived difficulty of altering diets for longevity.

Self-hate.

I'm sure there are scores more reasons for this, and no single concept or mindset is large enough to fully accurately embody the breadth of reasons why people remain obese in a world that actively disincentivizes obesity in every measure of life satisfaction.

People outside of that fail to empathize with the plight of obese people. They blame them for living a life that is generally unintentionally thrust upon them.

They do not see obesity as a disease but as a choice and then mock or dismiss them for being obese, even though by all metrics it is a disease.

People tell obese people to diet like they tell alcoholics to quit drinking or drug addicts to quit using drugs and honestly believe their words have contributed value to humanity, but unlike drug addicts or alcohol, there is no cold turkey for obesity other than death.

People must eat. That includes obese people.

If you can figure out a way for a crackhead to smoke crack 3 times a day until they feel satisfied with how much crack they have smoked without remaining a crackhead, then you might be able to figure out how to get an obese person to eat 3 meals a day until they feel satisfied without remaining obese.
by sc68cal | 2025-11-26 19:46:21+00:00
> The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.

I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
by mothballed | 2025-11-26 19:46:28+00:00
Colleges are [often] public property unlike all the rest of what they mentioned.

If you go with your own microphone you can shout out and shut down the competition and game your own youtube clips, while the competition can't trespass you from the property.

It's really the ultimate cheap shot.

You basically have to be a moron to debate someone like Charlie Kirk in the first place because the game is rigged; he has the table, the microphone, the editing, the security and if you object to the rules there's nothing you can do but walk away. The moment you get the upper hand he can simply kill the mic, stop recording, and move on to the next guy and all the meanwhile claiming he's doing it on neutral terrain.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-26 19:46:40+00:00
The big trick is - as far as I understand it - to acknowledge that systems fail and to engineer for dealing with those failures.

I support your efforts downthread for at least knowing whether or not underlying abstractions are able to generate a panic (which is a massive side effect) or are only able to return valid results or error flags. The higher level the abstraction the bigger the chance that there is a module somewhere in the stack that is able to blow it all up, at the highest level you can pretty much take it as read that this is the case.

So unless you engineer the whole thing from the ground up without any library modules it is impossible to guarantee that this is not the case and as far as I understand your argument you at least want to be informed when that is the case, or, alternatively, to cause the compiler to flag the situation down from your code as incompatible with the guarantees that you are asking for, is that a correct reading?
by thisisit | 2025-11-26 19:46:42+00:00
This is so difficult to read that I was tempted to just throw it into a chat model and let it summarize from me. Still tried to make sense between all those furry images.

Now from what I understand the company rode the pandemic wave and over hired and over spent. Their VC funded competitors out market and out sold them.

The plan was to exit gracefully once a certain number was hit and return money to investors. But then investors decided to bet on a SaaS.

As revenue went down and teams were cut down. With no revenue to support the engineering team. Investors/leadership are now taking a bet on the vibe coded SaaS.

Rest of the post is lamentation about this badly written SaaS and its vibe coded nature. There seem to be no formal contract with this SaaS but people are already being laid off and the non-American app developers seem unaware of local laws etc etc.

As much I feel for the writer I don't think the title is apt. It isn't as much as Vibe coding which killed the team, as it was bad financial decisions. Surely this vibe coded app hastened the demise and much could be said about the terrible decision to go with a vibe coded app.
by Pwntastic | 2025-11-26 19:47:05+00:00
I have a feeder right outside my home office window, next to where my desk is. I see them all day and it makes me happy.

I actually put up one-way/reflective film on the window to block some harsh light that was being reflected straight into my face and it had the great side effect that the hummingbirds can't see me watching them. So now I can get right up to the window and watch them hang out.
by codelikeawolf | 2025-11-26 19:47:22+00:00
> A horrible, horrible hack solution. But it worked!

I ended up building an Access app at an enterprise-y company I used to work at because it would have taken years for IT to build it. The app did something super specific and kept needing super specific additional features, and there wasn't anything on the market that met our needs. The Access UI talked to another Access database on a shared network drive. I just found out that it's still being used heavily by several people every day, 17 years later. You pretty much nailed it, Access is hacky, but it works!

Edit: grammar
by Animats | 2025-11-26 19:47:22+00:00
> "Anthropic projects as much as $26 billion in annualized revenue in 2026".

Anthropic projects a lot. It's hard to get actuals from Anthropic.[1] They're privately held, so they don't have to report actuals publicly. [1] says "Anthropic has, through July 2025, made around $1.5 billion in revenue." $26 billion for 2026 seems unlikely.

This is revenue, not profit.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/howmuchmoney/
by arjie | 2025-11-26 19:47:54+00:00
Well, that depends on the effect size etc. right? There's a chocolate bar in front of you and your two buddies. You split it in thirds. As soon as one of your buddies eats his, he drops dead. Your other buddy says "Sample size of 1. Psh. Billions have eaten chocolate.". He eats his. Drops dead. The sample size is now 2. You eat yours or not?

If the answer is yes, well all right.

If the answer is no, weaken the effects until you see what crosses the threshold of "should we study this more?".
by abir_taheer | 2025-11-26 19:48:14+00:00
hi! we actually built a service to detect indirect prompt injections like this. I tested out the exact prompt used in this attack and we were able to successfully detect the indirect prompt injection.

Feel free to reach out if you're trying to build safeguards into your ai system!

centure.ai

POST - https://api.centure.ai/v1/prompt-injection/text

Response:

{ "is_safe": false, "categories": [ { "code": "data_exfiltration", "confidence": "high" }, { "code": "external_actions", "confidence": "high" } ], "request_id": "api_u_t6cmwj4811e4f16c4fc505dd6eeb3882f5908114eca9d159f5649f", "api_key_id": "f7c2d506-d703-47ca-9118-7d7b0b9bde60", "request_units": 2, "service_tier": "standard" }
by tarruda | 2025-11-26 19:49:12+00:00
I had a terrible first impression with Gemini CLI a few months ago when it was released because of the constant 409 errors.

With Gemini 3 release I decided to give it another go, and now the error changed to: "You've reached the daily limit with this model", even though I have an API key with billing set up. It wouldn't let me even try Gemini 3 and even after switching to Gemini 2.5 it would still throw this error after a few messages.

Google might have the best LLMs, but its agentic coding experience leaves a lot to be desired.
by godelski | 2025-11-26 19:49:13+00:00
They said that the team they work with is being replaced by a vibe coded SaaS product and that when they look at the product it only looks like it could replace the actual engineers from a very surface level.

> It's like someone took some screenshots of a competitor

This line stood out to me. I think it's something any of us who've tried to end to end vibe code something have experienced. The result is pretty (sometimes) but not functional.

> At the shallowest depth, I can see how a CEO got bamboozled. The happiest path is implemented. The second happiest path is rough. The third happiest path is unhinged.

If I'm understanding them, they're saying on the surface (the "happiest path") is correct, but everything underneath isn't. That the stuff underneath is harder. So only the easiest part was shown and the leadership was happy to move forward because they wanted to believe. It promised they could reduce costs by laying of expensive developers but the decision was unjustified considering the product didn't work as advertised.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-11-26 19:49:52+00:00
Continuing to act like these ugly hacks are a normal way of doing business, is a continual signal to Apple that they don't need to build a rack-mount PC or server ever again.

If their developer community grew a pair and made themselves heard, then maybe the billion dollar company would do their effing job and provide a proper rackable development platform.

Which they had many years ago, before they morphed into a company that builds telephones and furniture that occasionally functions as a computer.

Instead we pretend like extension cords and gluing Raspberry Pi's together is totally ok for professional purposes.
by ffsm8 | 2025-11-26 19:50:00+00:00
I do not have any particular insight into the market, I was just extremely confused reading this in particular

> Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative.

Given this first statement, the last one makes no sense.

Either the demand is limited, giving sellers that undercut the ability to move more products... Or the demand is higher then production, making it nonsensical to undercut anyone, because you'll sell out anyway, no matter if you're cheapest or not
by camgunz | 2025-11-26 19:50:00+00:00
Dunno if you listen to Ezra Klein but he had an anthropologist on once who described this tribe of humans who when someone came back having bagged big game, they had to run a gauntlet of everyone else downplaying their accomplishment like "that's not that big, your father caught bigger", and "maybe one day you'll bring down an adult deer" etc. The whole idea was like, egomaniacs are pretty bad, and they had a cultural defense against it.

I often think a weakness of liberal, western society is the insistence on rationality, that like the hunter in question could just easily put their abilities and accomplishments alongside those of others and get a pretty accurate picture. This is super untrue; we need systems to guard against our frailties, but we can't admit we have them, so we keep falling into the same ditches.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-26 19:50:29+00:00
Musk is now talking about near term putting servers in space, because that's where power will be cheapest.

Should this happen, we'll see many gigawatts of power in space. A spinoff of this would be large solar-electric spacecraft, or even large lasers for beam powered spacecraft. Either case should allow considerably higher delta-V than chemical rockets.
by echelon | 2025-11-26 19:50:34+00:00
Not really. Handler and middleware can handle this without much ceremony. The user gets to, and is informed of and encouraged to, choose.

We also don't get surprised at runtime. It's in the AST and we know at compile time.

The right API signature helps the engineer think about things and puts them in the correct headspace for systems thinking. If something is panicking under the hood, the thought probably doesn't even occur to them.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-26 19:51:03+00:00
> Saying that the men's vitality clinic "pushed you" into a treatment protocol is like saying that a fertility clinic pushed you into getting pregnant.

No, it isn't. “Men’s vitality” doesn’t mean “getting pumped with testosterone regardless of indications” the way “fertility” means “getting pregnant” in either literal denotation of words or the understanding of the general population.

> Sure, it's a common outcome, but you had an idea of what you wanted out of it before you walked in the door.

Yes, but in the case of fertility clinics, getting pregnant aas definitely the outcome beinf sought. Being pumped with testosterone isn’t the outcome being sought from a men’s vitality clinic, it is (even for the people who are actively thinking about it) a mechanism (and not an appropriate one for every patient) for atteempting to acheive the desired outcome.

If you go to a fertility clinic and they don't attempt to identify the source of your fertility issues and just pump you with hormones not indicated for your specific issue, that would be wrong, too.
by moron4hire | 2025-11-26 19:51:21+00:00
To be fair to our generation, people didn't build so much stupid shit in the 60s not because they weren't interested in stupid shit but because the whole world was too poor to be able to afford it. Our generation created the economic conditions in which people could have the spare cash to spend on stupid shit.

I would put good money on a bet that there are more people today who deeply care about the long-term horizon than did in the 60s. I don't think we spent money on long-shots in the 60s because people cared more. I think we did it because it was relatively low-hanging fruit in a gigantic culture war between US-centric Western powers and USSR-centric Eastern powers. We don't have that kind of "most people agree it's an existential threat" level of cultural difference anymore. China? They sell us most of our stuff. We don't hate China, not really. But we hated the Soviets.
by skalda | 2025-11-26 19:51:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been building SKALDA, a set of browser-based tools that run entirely on the client. So far I’ve shipped two ecosystems:

• UNITS – 500+ unit conversions with bulk tables and calculators • FLINT – file tools (converter, PDF organizer, metadata cleaner, subtitle tools)

Everything runs in the browser: no uploads, no logins, no tracking, no file-size limits beyond what your hardware can handle. For file conversion and PDF/subtitle work I’m using WASM and client-side libraries instead of server pipelines.

Current features: – File converter across major image, audio, video, document, archive and other formats – PDF merge/split/reorder/rotate/crop/watermark – Metadata viewer/cleaner for images, PDFs and other files – Subtitle timing/format fixes (SRT/VTT) – Units: smart tab, bulk converter, timelines, 62+ languages including RTL

Stack: React + TypeScript + Vite, all hosted on Cloudflare Pages with a strict privacy-first approach.

I’d appreciate feedback on: – Performance and UX of the tools – Any obvious missing formats or workflows for devs and power users – Concerns you see with the privacy model or technical approach

Thanks for taking a look
by bruce511 | 2025-11-26 19:52:31+00:00
You're sensitive to your passport information being stolen. You don't trust their security. That's all perfectly OK.

Fortunately they offer other option(s), which it seems you made use of. So you're all good.

A different user may have different priorities, and may choose a different option.

Which is fine. Options are good. There's no requirement that you have to like the ones you don't use.
by mbesto | 2025-11-26 19:52:33+00:00
> All indications are that selling tokens is a profitable activity for all of the AI companies - at least in terms of compute.

We actually don't this yet because the useful life of the capital assets (mainly NVIDIA GPUs) isn't really well understood yet. This is being hotly debated by wall st analysts for this exact reason.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav...