MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isodev | 2025-11-29 14:50:32+00:00
> about Netflix doing it, but they did and the world just moved on

I think the main challenge here is that Netflix works around one of many ways to access entertainment. So if one service starts to show recommendations in that limited context of user data they collect - it's still has negative potentials but it's easier to regulate and there are alternatives.

In the case of LLMs, we have service that are aiming to replace both the browser and the search engine. This means ending up in a situation where your entire access to knowledge and the world takes place via "AI". And the result is: ad-infused, tweaked to align with investor priorities, censored by the current politics of wherever the company is based service machinery that's constantly extracting personal information so it can learn better ways to refocus its priorities. I've read and seen a lot of sci-fi and dystopian history novels (actually read, not LLM-summarized for me) to know this is a very end-game kind of situation.
by asim | 2025-11-29 14:51:13+00:00
Yes, so I won't apologise for it but I spent a lot of time trying to build something where I was getting a reminder for verses of the Quran. I think the home screen will be customisable soon enough for anyone who wants to see things differently or organise differently but I guess it was important to me. Maybe not to others, who knows.

Edit: I should say there's a configuration json in home/cards.json but I haven't documented the various settings for cards, RSS feeds, YouTube channels yet.
by codyswann | 2025-11-29 14:52:02+00:00
It's very problematic for companies, mainly because of the tooling. Large companies are equating lovable, replit, bold, V0 with Claude Code, Codex, etc all under the "Vibe Coding" banner.

I try to fit the former under the banner of "Prompt-to-app Tools" and the latter as "Autonomous AI Engineering"
by jmyeet | 2025-11-29 14:52:04+00:00
So there are two broad models for ad monetization:

1. In-result or first-party ads; and

2. Display or third-party ads.

In Google terms, (1) is SERPS ads and (2) is DoubleClick/AdSense. (1) is still ~10x the size of (2) for Google.

I'm skeptical of the effectiveness of inserting ads into an AI chat mode. I think this will be a terrible user experience and will cause people to really dislike AI assistants. Part of the problem here is that conversation isn't a great medium for conveying ads. If you look at a Google search result, there are ads strategically placed on the top and side but they don't waste that much time because you can scan with your eyes to the organic search results.

So would OpenAI ads be part of the conversation or would there be a sidebar? If it's a sidebar, what happens when the interface inevitably switches to voice-first?

To be clear, I'm not anti-ads on Google search results. If I search for "Ryzen 9800X3D" a site selling CPUs is a relevant result, for example.

Intent here is the biggest part of ad effectiveness. By doing a search the user wants to know or get something. That's huge. But another part is all the context and behavioural information. Where you are, inferred demographics and interests, etc.

People will say OpenAI knows a lot about you but I'm not sure that's true. For a start, LLMs have a context window beyond which they remember nothing. I'm sure people are working on taking that context and summarizing it down into base knowledge for the LLM a bit like what happens with your Google activity. I would guess this approach has a long way to go.

So this brings us to display and having essentially an OpenAI pixel. This has the same issue of compressing your context down into characteristics but I actually think this could be pretty successful but it would still have to compete with Google. And that's not easy to do. Google has significant ad buying and selling infrastructure and a deep marketplace.

But remember too that display ads are a fraction of Google's other markets and I don't htink you get to the required revenue OpenAI needs on display alone.

Of course it's worth adding that with unlimited money and the brightest minds of our generation all we can come up with for monetization is advertising.
by RugnirViking | 2025-11-29 14:52:12+00:00
if you believe that you haven't been paying attention. Have you actually used AI much? Current ones couldn't subtle their way out of a paper bag. I have no real reason to believe anything in future would be different.

In general, any textual embedding in the ad or system prompt would result in an abjectly terrible user experience. I must assume it will just be banner ads etc
by rflrob | 2025-11-29 14:53:21+00:00
I’m curious how you came to that conclusion. While he’s certainly not in the pantheon of best presidents, he ends up around the 75th percentile in rankings by historians. Even subtracting a few spots, he’s nowhere near close to “one of the all-time worst“. Or are you faulting him for not resigning when incapacitated by a stroke?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_preside...
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-29 14:53:37+00:00
It always seemed weird from Day 1 when I reviewed Monero vs Zcash to rely on anonymization that depends on other nodes and number of honest peers, instead of relying on technical anonymization that Zcash does, seems much more reliable and long-term workable, even though it was much harder and took them longer to arrive at good solutions.
by adriand | 2025-11-29 14:54:10+00:00
These stories never fail to astonish me. Why the same deity? It’s so interesting.

The fact the mind is able to create these powerful visions and patterns and other realities is really incredible. We have this machinery for perceiving the world and moving though it, but that machinery is capable of so many other insane and beautiful and terrifying things - capabilities which are inaccessible except in rare instances.

It’s really quite remarkable. Underneath our prosaic experience of consciousness is something that can generate infinite fractals, awe-inspiring visions of otherworldly creatures, dream landscapes of colour and shape. Why? Where does it all come from? Is this what life would be like all the time without us filtering the information coming into our senses?
by djtango | 2025-11-29 14:55:37+00:00
Doesn't it really depend? Like I recall Oxford Street in London at one point was notoriously bad because it was a bottleneck for a lot of slow moving traffic so that one length of road was especially bad. 10x bad I don't know... But it's not hard to imagine some of the quieter roads filtering off like Berwick St or Dean St would be considerably better
by yardie | 2025-11-29 14:56:21+00:00
I asked Google for more information about AI datacenter in space. This was the first sentence, 'AI data centers are being developed in space to handle the massive energy demands of AI, using solar power and the vacuum of space for cooling.'

> After laughing at "the vacuum of space for cooling" I closed the page because there was nothing serious there. Basic high school physics student would be laughing at that sentence.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-11-29 14:57:24+00:00
I can't wait for the instructions to start having ads embedded.

2. Place the turkey in your GE Two in One Oven set to 350, cooking for 10 minutes a lbs.

3. While waiting for your Turkey to finish cooking, why not have an ice cold Coke Zero? Click here for nearby locations.

4. Remove Turkey from the oven, let rest for ten minutes while listening to Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars sing "Die with a Smile" on Spotify.
by fzeroracer | 2025-11-29 14:58:28+00:00
ICE's actions in Chicago were pretty across the board horrific. They frequently lied about their actions, sometimes even directly to judges. They harassed both US citizens and immigrants. They executed vast sweeps and destroyed people's property just because they could. That's not immigration enforcement, that's gang behavior sanctioned by the federal government.

Frankly if anyone looks at their actions in Chicago and thinks that what they did is anywhere near acceptable then they're a lost cause. The only reasonable recourse is that when and if we get a new president every single person involved with ICE is persecuted, funding confiscated and recompense paid to all of the folks harmed by said organization. There's no other decision I'll accept.
by Sesse__ | 2025-11-29 14:58:55+00:00
> This proof assumes that the area a triangle is some function k c^2 of the hypotenuse c where k is constant for similar triangles.

It is elementary to show that the area of a triangle is base * height / 2. (It follows from the fact that you can make a rectangle out of it using two identical sub-triangles. I assume you're willing to concede that the area of a rectangle is base * height.) If you scale your triangle by c, both base and height will be multiplied by c, and 2 will not.
by tuetuopay | 2025-11-29 14:59:17+00:00
I had a similar story on my NAS that got one btrfs path corrupt. Plopped in on the btrfs IRC, one of the devs noticed the inconsistency was one bitflip away from the right value. Incredibly they were able to give me the right commands to fix it! Got to give credit where it is due, btrfs took the safe path and refused to touch the affected directory until fixed, and has enough tooling to fix this.

I won’t blame cosmic rays but more likely dying RAM. The NAS now runs ECC memory.
by globnomulous | 2025-11-29 14:59:21+00:00
Likewise. I don't always do this, but for problems that cost me much time or effort, I like to try to make sure that, if I wanted to reproduce a bug or problem, I'd know exactly how to write it.

Writing and understanding working correct software is, it turns out, a rather different skill from that of writing and understanding broken (or confusing) software. I'd also wager good money that the latter skill directly builds the former.
by kevdev | 2025-11-29 15:00:24+00:00
As someone with a similar background to the writer of this post (I did avionics work for NASA before moving into more “traditional” software engineering), this post does a great job at summing up my thoughts on why space-based data centers won’t work. The SEU issues were my first though followed by the thermal concerns, and both are addressed here fantastically.

On the SEU issue I’ll add in that even in LEO you can still get SEUs - the ISS is in LEO and gets SEUs on occasion. There’s also the South Atlantic Anomaly where spacecraft in LEO see a higher number of SEUs.
by legitster | 2025-11-29 15:01:46+00:00
> Quebec’s secularism minister, Jean-François Roberge, said the controversial new provisions were the latest steps in a province working towards full secularization. He criticized previous accommodations by post-secondary institutions, including prayer rooms, telling reporters the schools “are not temples or churches or those kinds of places”. The ban on public prayer comes after the group Montreal4Palestine organized Sunday protests outside the city’s Notre-Dame Basilica that included prayers.

> The province will also limit the offering of kosher and halal meals in public institutions. “We think that when the state is neutral, Quebecers are free,” said Roberge, rejecting allegations the law disproportionately affects minorities. “We have the same rules applying to everyone,” he said.

TIL: Quebec has a secularization minister.

This is all pretty horrific stuff. Does accommodating someone's diet really offend you this much? This is squarely an anti-diversity and anti-inclusion movement with a scoundrel's veneer of equality.
by Simulacra | 2025-11-29 15:01:47+00:00
I think the concept of banning prayer in public is bonkers, but I see the logic in banning non permited, short notice prayer in the middle of the street that blocks traffic.

If people want to have a large gathering in the park to pray, they should, but with the permit because your occupying a large portion of a public space.

But as it pertains to suddenly kneeling in traffic and praying, I'm in full agreement. That should not happen. I'm open to people praying wherever they want, but it should not and it cannot arbitrarily inconvenience others specifically to block a road.

Why can't they step across to the sidewalk? Why must they be in the center of the road. This is not a rare occurrence, but I think it's the heart of what is being addressed. Even though they may be going at it badly.
by fluoridation | 2025-11-29 15:01:50+00:00
>Courts, law enforcement and contract law.

That's the wrong answer. The existence of tokens predates the existence of government. It's the next step after barter. The correct answer is reputation. A vendor who cheats his customers builds up a bad reputation, and the only way he can keep doing it is by changing customer bases, for example by moving to a different town. Think of the traveling snake oil salesman who moves on once people realize his remedies don't work.
by freehorse | 2025-11-29 15:02:39+00:00
In most europeans countries afaik most (known) universities are public ie state-owned, with few exceptions. Big part or most of the funding is public too. Regardless of whether they are state-owned, the states usually set up the framework the universities operate in. How loose or tight is the state control varies from country to country. But there is always some way to meddle into university affairs and very often they do, in the context of public policy. Eg in the recent years universities tend to get very specific directives about from which countries they can freely form collaborations with academics and from which not, depending on the foreign policy of a country. A lot of stuff eg if and how a university can own property is also regulated depending on the country. It varies a lot, but I see no reason to set up some stricter framework wrt data sovereignty. Ime the supposed autonomy of the universities here is only on paper.
by Swizec | 2025-11-29 15:02:42+00:00
> When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market.

You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.

But here’s the catch: You choose the market.

To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
by api | 2025-11-29 15:02:45+00:00
What about on the Moon? My understanding is that heat is the killer. There you could sink pipes into the surface and use that as a heat sink. There are “peaks of eternal light” near the poles where you could get 24/7 solar power.

Latency becomes high but you send large batches of work.

Probably not at all economical compared to anywhere on Earth but the physics work better than orbit where you need giant heat sinks.
by tarsinge | 2025-11-29 15:03:18+00:00
I’m actually one of the people that continue to say even with this list they have no moat, because Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. can just embed a chatbot in their existing products or social network and make ChatGPT irrelevant overnight. Non tech users will chat through their browser, OS, Apps, website, that’ll be served by any model provider. The only moat of OpenAI is investor money to burn so that they can offer it for free.

Also 20 billions of revenues, not profits, is orders of magnitude too low compared to their expenses. Their only path to survival is a massively downgraded free tier ridden with ads. Nobody will use an app like this when they can have a better more integrated experience directly in their other apps.
by RealityVoid | 2025-11-29 15:03:57+00:00
Since the new versions of the same ADIRU have EDAC, they have been using it on planes since 2002 and they have been putting the EDAC variant in whenever an old one was being returned for repairs, I don't think this is the reason. I think the reason is that they had 3 ADIRU's and even if one got wonky, the algorithm on the ELAC flight computer would have to take the correct decision. It did not take the correct decision. The ELAC is the one being updated in this case.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-29 15:03:59+00:00
Yes, just as it always does, and it very very rarely goes anywhere, and never involves the council. Isn't the last time the council acted like this the Treaty of Lisbon/EU constitution?

I mean, only if you want to make an incredibly, extremely generous interpretation of what's happening, but sure, what you're saying is a nanometer within what is theoretically possible. Incredibly, incredibly unlikely but possible. It doesn't explain why the commission acts at all in this case, when they almost never act after rejection, and it doesn't explain at all why the most powerful EU institution is suddenly involved. You would need to explain why this justifies the same amount of attention that the Treaty of Lisbon got (you know, when French and the Netherlands' voters rejected what could be interpreted as the existence of the EU, that's certainly how a bunch of political parties saw it)

But is it possible? Yes. Procedures allow this. Sure.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-11-29 15:04:18+00:00
Can anyone explain to me what ChatGPT does that traps people? I get the value as tools, I like using copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't offer me value that any other LLM can't. Given that everyone is quickly rolling "AI" into their own stuff, I don't see what's ChatGPT's killer app. If anything, I think Gemini is better positioned to capture the general user market.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-29 15:04:28+00:00
Sure. But if you have reasonably small files just compress the whole file, like MS Office or EPUB files do.

Or if your files are large and composed of lots of blobs, then compress those blobs individually.

Whereas if your files are large and truly database-y made of tabular data like integers and floats and small strings, then compression isn't really very viable. You usually want speed of lookup, which isn't generally compatible with compression.
by awei | 2025-11-29 15:05:06+00:00
The one thing that space has going for itself is space. You could have way bigger datacenters than on Earth and just leave them there, assuming Starship makes it cheap enough to get them there. I think it would maybe make sense if 2 things: - We are sure we will need a lot of gpus for the next 30-40 years. - We can make the solar panels + cooling + GPUs have a great life expectancy, so that we can just leave them up there and accumulate them.

Latency wise it seems okay for llm training to put them higher than Starlink to make them last longer and avoid decelerating because of the atmosphere. And for inference, well, if the infra can be amortized over decades than it might make the inference price cheap enough to endure additional latencies.

Concerning communication, SpaceX I think already has inter-starlinks laser comms, at least a prototype.
by hylaride | 2025-11-29 15:05:11+00:00
Years ago, I watched a documentary called "Cocaine Cowboys". It was about how Florida went from a sleepy state to a drug-fuelled boom as cocaine started to show up and bring in tons of money over the 1970s and 1980s. They interviewed police, drug dealers, reporters, etc from the era.

Anyways, part of the documentary was how the police in Miami needed to expand quickly to deal with the rise in violence and crime and part of that was the necessity of lowering hiring standards that, combined with hiring fast, meant that corruption and bad actors permeated into the police force. At one point the entire graduating class in one year were eventually all arrested for varying levels of nasty stuff.

I think about that a lot when I see how fast they've expanded ICE, on top of the militarization of the force and lack of accountability.
by ifwinterco | 2025-11-29 15:05:31+00:00
Right yep, I understand what you mean. Yes, ultimately you need some kind of dispute mechanism that probably requires actual human intervention.

A good example is how disputes work on P2P crypto exchanges like bisq - you have a crypto contract of some kind that holds funds in escrow, but ultimately disputes are resolved by a team of actual humans who look at the facts and make a decision, not everything can be "code is law"
by nunobrito | 2025-11-29 15:05:32+00:00
The point is being like a submarine: nobody really knows where you are moving (transactions) and where you will surface (which other crypto or fiat).

On the example you give, large majority of people just pay and accept payments using monero natively. When you are talking about large amount of money, then it is worth a visit to places like El Salvador where you have a bank account with BTC. The conversion tends to take place in exchanges outside 1st world supervision and from El Salvador you can convert BTC to other currencies according to the exchange values or just use it with a credit card.

If you want to convert smaller amounts in Europe without tracing, mostly a matter of settling the transactions with small providers albeit you should be prepared to pay a fee between 20% to 30% as commission for the service.
by ADCXLAB | 2025-11-29 15:06:34+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a stateless blockchain compliance API as a solo developer. Most compliance tooling in the crypto/fintech space is either enterprise-only, closed, expensive, or requires storing user data. I wanted to see how far a fully stateless model can go.

What it does: • AML / sanctions check (advisory only) • ISO20022 XML validation (pacs.008/pain.001) • Cross-border payment rule checks • RWA attestation • Multi-chain wallet validation (BTC, ETH, MATIC, XLM, XRPL, HBAR)

Architecture: • AWS API Gateway + Lambda (Python) • No PII stored • External RPC reads • Single-region deployment • DynamoDB used only for rate limits / usage • No multi-region failover yet

What it does not have: • No SOC2 / ISO27001 • No enterprise SLA • No deterministic RPC fallback yet • Sandbox depends on public RPC stability

Why I’m posting: Looking for technical feedback on: 1. Whether stateless design makes sense for compliance 2. RPC reliability strategies 3. Minimum viable SLA devs expect 4. Anything obviously insecure or naive

Links: Docs: https://zkorigoplus.com/architecture.html Sandbox (no signup): https://zkorigoapi.com

Happy to answer questions.
by moffkalast | 2025-11-29 15:09:14+00:00
Launching a datacenter like that carries an absurd cost even with Starship type launchers. Unless TSMC moves its production to LEO it's a joke of a proposal.

Underwater [0] is the obvious choice for both space and cooling. Seal the thing and chuck it next to an internet backbone cable.

> More than half the world’s population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting datacenters underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel

> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
by cuuupid | 2025-11-29 15:09:24+00:00
I don't agree with the logic that "something is hard/can't be done right now" is equivalent to "this is a terrible idea and won't work."

There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.

From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.