MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Coffeewine | 2025-11-30 12:37:33+00:00
I was very interested to see in that rebuttal that they explicitly called out ‘datacenters in space’ as a means of ‘exporting’ solar power to the earth.

> As the Weinersmiths point out, the ease of generating solar electricity in space is foundational to space development. They focus on the challenges in beaming power back to the Earth, but the “power” could be returned to the Earth in other ways, such as by doing energy intensive manufacturing in space, with the result that we do not need the power on the Earth itself. One modern idea that O’Neill did not consider is to move server farms in space, where power is cheap and you can dump heat into space with a black piece of metal. If this was done on a large scale, the carbon impact of data services on the Earth would drop greatly even if power is not beamed back to the Earth. There are almost certainly other ways we can use power in space to do things in space that benefit people on the Earth.

So the original article seems to think that cooling is a significant challenge and that solar power in space is not ‘that much’ more effective than on the earth, and the other that cooling is trivial and that solar power is easily obtained. I’m inclined to go with ‘space is hard’ as that seems to comport with my other readings, but obviously the critique of ‘a city on mars’ is advocating for space exploration and is so motivated to minimize the difficulties.
by ilitirit | 2025-11-30 12:38:14+00:00
> People need to stop making Meme distributions.

Heh. I've been saying that since I was on Mandrake in the early 2000s. This is just what the Linux landscape is like.

That said, I'm generally not easily impressed, especially by random *nix distro 347, but CachyOS is surprisingly good. I've finally switched full time from Windows. I don't even need VS anymore because Rider is x-platform.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-11-30 12:38:24+00:00
The article says that Grok is "writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945."

Wikipedia page on Hitler says that he "took the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934".

What is tendencious about either? It is right to report the titles in German, not least because Hitler is known for his title "Führer" pretty much universally so that it is an important keyword to include. It does not imply anything.

This all sounds like trying too hard to find "dirt", frankly.
by Fnoord | 2025-11-30 12:38:42+00:00
The proof is in the pudding:

> PikaOS Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian's cutting-edge "Unstable" branch [...] [1]

Trademark and reach.

Gaming distributions don't run a stable version of Linux distributions. They're always a spin-off from one of the popular Linux distributions (rebasing every once in a while), with additional changes tailored towards gaming.

Now, you cannot just say I call my distribution Debian GNU/Linux Gaming Edition. If you would, you'd need to work under the umbrella of Debian. With a different name, you differentiate from Debian, while you can keep the advantages of their framework (hello Ubuntu).

[1] https://distrowatch.com/pikaos
by voxadam | 2025-11-30 12:38:45+00:00
I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and Linux almost exclusively for the last couple decades and I have only one question, aren't most Linux distros fully customizable? I currently run Fedora on my desktop but I've run everything from Slackware to Red Hat to Debian to Knoppix to Corel to Suse to Arch, you get the idea, and I've found all of them nearly equal in the customizability department. Is there a distro out there that actively fights customization?
by roscas | 2025-11-30 12:38:57+00:00
On LibreWolf 145.0.1-2 those options are still available. I set all to false. But for these AI options and many others and also not only for Firefox/LibreWolf, you do need to block the connections. Don't rely on disabling options because most will not respect that. If Firefox goes this path and break LibreWolf, we need to switch to a decent browser and there are a few, still blocking connections for Google and Mozilla, etc. If you're not able to block connections with a firewall, at least install a Pi-Hole so you can block ads and custom domains like Google and Mozilla and Fakebook crap.
by anthk | 2025-11-30 12:39:17+00:00
Nomadnet it's really bad; it doesn't properly work with a 80x24 terminal and 16 colors.

Also, it uses tons of CPU on legacy machines. It needs some rework. Not everyone it's a hipster with 256 or 32 bit colour terminals, shitty NerdFonts (nonstandards) and big displays.

And being written in Python3 makes it dog slow. Being rewritten in Go would get a few performance tweaks, (networking and GC there it's ideal), security and portability. But, please, no BubbleTea unless you can be sure it can work on a plain XTerm with 16 colors (I use Tango for readability, but 16 colors FFS). Keep 256 colours as an option.
by thegaitlessgate | 2025-11-30 12:39:58+00:00
Fedora has been rock solid for a few years (minus Zoom + Nvidia), as my primary work OS. I'm always nervous to jump to an Arch-based distro as my daily driver, for fear of having to regularly fix issues. Is this a legitimate concern in 2025? Would my experience (especially with graphics) be improved on something like Cachy?
Show HN: SolveMyPainPoint – A single place to post and discover real problems
by Chrizzby | 2025-11-30 12:41:51+00:00
It’s obviously easier to start a venture when you already have a clear idea in mind. But in reality, a lot of people that want to be founders are the opposite: they’re eager to start something new, and only then go looking for a real problem to solve. I’ve been asked many times by friends: “I want to build a startup, but I don’t know what problem to solve.”

Yes, there are ideas and complaints scattered across Reddit, Twitter, forums, etc., but there doesn’t seem to be one focused place where pain points and solutions directly meet.

So I built a small MVP: https://www.solvemypainpoint.com/

SolveMyPainPoint lets you: • Submit a pain point in a structured way (what’s the problem, how painful, which category). • See if others share the same issue and how they experience it. • Add or discover existing solutions/products when they exist. • Spot unsolved problems that might be worth building for.

It’s a scrappy side project (white-coat MVP, far from perfect), but I’d love feedback from both people with real frustrations and builders looking for something useful to work on.

If you have a pain point you keep ranting about, please try submitting it. And if you’re a builder, I’d really appreciate thoughts on what would make this genuinely valuable for you (better discovery, tags, subscriptions to topics, etc.).

Happy to answer any questions and very open to criticism and feature suggestions.

Many thanks!
by ForHackernews | 2025-11-30 12:42:22+00:00
Matt Levine once wrote about OpenAI's business model:

------------------------------------

There’s a famous Sam Altman interview from 2019 in which he explained OpenAI’s revenue model [1] :

> The honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue. We have made a soft promise to investors that once we’ve built this sort of generally intelligent system, basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. [audience laughter] It sounds like an episode of Silicon Valley, it really does, I get it. You can laugh, it’s all right. But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.

It really is the greatest business plan in the history of capitalism: “We will create God and then ask it for money.” Perfect in its simplicity. As a connoisseur of financial shenanigans, I of course have my own hopes for what the artificial superintelligence will come up with. “I know what every stock price will be tomorrow, so let’s get to day-trading,” would be a good one. “I can tell people what stocks to buy, so let’s get to pump-and-dumping.” “I can destroy any company, so let’s get to short selling.” “I know what every corporate executive is thinking about, so let’s get to insider trading.” That sort of thing. As a matter of science fiction it seems pretty trivial for an omniscient superintelligence to find cool ways make money. “Charge retail customers $20 per month to access the superintelligence,” what, no, obviously that’s not the answer.

------------------------------------

I agree with the sibling commenter that this move is a sign of OpenAI's weakness. If you really believe you have a superintelligent machine-god (or will have one soon) then "run ads when people talk to it" is not the business model you pick.
by ho_schi | 2025-11-30 12:42:55+00:00
Because there is no need. It just the usual trend/hype.

* Manjaro is Arch. * Cachy is a patched Arch (exactly what Arch avoids, heavy patching). * SteamOS is Arch. * Arch is Arch.

Any useful and stable patch will be merged by upstream. That is why using CachyOS or ClearLinux isn’t beneficial in long term. When the patch works it will finally land even in Debian Stable.
by sixtyj | 2025-11-30 12:43:13+00:00
Yup. Exactly. Most people including me have (had) to learn how to not being afraid speak up.

Otherwise unresolved issues catch up with a person until the end of life.

So everytime someone tells that I am too much activist I answer “yes, because I think I need to speak up so I don’t have to have unfinished stuff in my head”. And after ten years when we meet they ask me if I remember …something… And I tell them I don’t as it was finished and I don’t live in the past.

Ram Dass would appreciate it. Be here and now.
by FlyingSnake | 2025-11-30 12:43:20+00:00
I’m running CachyOS for a year now as my daily driver (non-work) on my ancient desktop from 2019 and ancient Nvidia card. It is very fast and smooth. I mainly use it to development using LLM sidekicks and it doesn’t break sweat. I use XFCE and just love how fast the experience is.
by macleginn | 2025-11-30 12:43:24+00:00
In the limit, the "happy" case (positive reward), policy gradients boil down to performing more or less the same update as the usual supervised strategy for each generated token (or some subset of those if we use sampling). In the unhappy case, they penalise the model for selecting particular tokens in particular circumstances -- this is not something you can normally do with supervised learning, but it is unclear to what extent this is helpful (if a bad and a good answer share a prefix, it will be upvoted in one case and penalised in another case, not in the same exact way but still). So during on-policy learning we desperately need the model to stumble on correct answers often enough, and this can only happen if the model knows how to solve the problem to begin with, otherwise the search space is too big. In other words, while in supervised learning we moved away from providing models with inductive biases and trusting them to figure out everything by themselves, in RL this does not really seem possible.
by lapcat | 2025-11-30 12:43:38+00:00
> But if you reran the 2024 election today you'd likely get the same result. Nothing has happened to change anyone's mind.

I don't think this is true. Trump's approval rating among independents has dropped 20%+. There's a reason he lost the 2020 election, but voters had 4 years to forget those reasons and look back with rose-colored glasses. Now they remember.

> They were very clear about their priorities, and those who voted for it accepted that.

I don't think this is true either. (I did not vote for Trump, to be clear.) Project 2025 were very clear about their priorities, but before the election Trump tried to pretend that he had no knowledge of or involvement with Project 2025. After the election, he changed his tune.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-30 12:44:53+00:00
I'm not impressed by these arguments.

(1) Solar panels can be made much lighter in space. On Earth, panels have to withstand wind and gravity loads, flying debris, and precipitation including hail. The PV material itself doesn't have to be thick: thin film CdTe cells can be ~1 micron thick (the absorption length of the relevant photons in CdTe is something like 0.1 microns.) There has to be a protective layer to prevent solar wind ions from degrading the cells but this doesn't have to be very thick. It's not like shielding against high energy particles.

(2) Heat dissipation can be addressed by refrigeration. Yes, this takes energy, and yes that extra energy also has to be radiated. But the area of the radiator goes down as the fourth power of its absolute temperature. If you radiate 2x as much heat but at 2x the absolute temperature, the area of the radiator declines by a factor of 8. Even with inefficiencies one should be able to come out ahead by pumping the waste heat to higher temperature before radiating it.

(3) Ionizing radiation is dealt with by shielding. The amount of shielding per unit of capacity declines as you make your installation larger, by the square cube law. So this is really just a matter of scale. We're talking about potentially enormous amounts of capacity here so shielding shouldn't be a problem at scale.
Show HN: OgBlocks – It lets anyone create beautiful UIs with just copy and paste
by thekarank | 2025-11-30 12:45:03+00:00
Hello Everyone,

My name is Karan, and I'm a Frontend Developer, but I feel like I'm more of a Design Engineer because of my love for creating UIs

When I started my development journey, I fell for frontend development and stuck with it ever since

But I noticed that many of my friends hated writing CSS because creating UIs is a very tedious and time-consuming process, and you have to be pixel-perfect

But at the same time, they also wanted their project to look premium with beautiful animations and a world-class user experience

That's when I thought

"What if anyone could integrate beautiful animated components into their website regardless of their CSS skills?"

And after six months of pain and restless nights, I finally built ogBlocks to solve this problem.

It is an Animated UI Library for React that contains all the cool animations that will make it look premium and production-grade

ogBlocks has navbars, modals, buttons, feature sections, text animations, carousels, and much more.

I hope you'll like it

Best Karan
by blandflakes | 2025-11-30 12:47:38+00:00
> However, now that Java is making strides in the language features, as compared to historical improvements at the VM level, I’m curious to see how the market share for Kotlin outside of android is going to be affected.

My employer has decided to abandon Scala, and they proposed Java as the language to head toward. I don't think Java's strides are fast enough to provide modern table stakes. In 2025, the big ones to me are:

1. null handling at the cultural and language level

2. abstractions over concurrency

For null handling, Java has Option, but you're just going to have to deal with the fact that basically any API or caller can give you null. This is not good enough in 2025.

For concurrency, Java has an excellent java.util.concurrent package (and the JVM is very good at concurrency in general). However, I've come to believe that it's a losing proposition to expect the average programmer to use concurrency primitives correctly, even at that level of abstraction. Every Java PR I review I have to add 20-30 comments about thread interruption, memory barriers, etc.

Structured Concurrency helps, but is new/in preview, and hardly helps with actually providing safer concurrency operations.

I think Java is doing the right things and the glacial pace of innovation at the language level is correct for protecting their users (contrast this with Scala 3...), but on the flipside I just think that it is hard to recommend Java vs C#/Kotlin.
by zoobab | 2025-11-30 12:47:45+00:00
Found some press releases from 2005/6:

https://ffii.org/ffii-asks-meps-to-reject-big-brother-direct... https://ffii.org/eu-law-making-process-cracking-under-pressu... https://ffii.org/eu-adopts-big-brother-directive-ignores-ind...
by tovej | 2025-11-30 12:47:57+00:00
Centrally planning? My guy, the EU is not founding companies, it is giving existing companies subsidies. The profits of those companies will not be public, they are private.

Nationalization and regularization are both on the decline. The opposite has happened: privatization of state monopolies and deregulatization.

I also think it's hilarious that you think a) the EU is feminist, and b) that feminism is leftist. What you are describing is liberalism, a right wing political position.

And even the liberal right is losing ground to the conservative right. The EU commission is far more conservative than it ever has been, and hard-right parties are in government in at least six EU countries (see e.g., https://www.politico.eu/article/mapped-europe-far-right-gove...), with conservative governments elsewhere. This is a strict break with tradition, where the extreme right has been excluded from European governments by consensus of other parties ever since the second world war.

Your beliefs are not aligned with reality. I am also personally in the middle of this research money refunnelling, I can vouch forst hand that research money is being funneled to startups and other private companies, while austerity measures are hitting hard across the EU.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 12:48:22+00:00
> Is this a legitimate concern in 2025?

I've used Arch Linux (always with a nvidia GPU no less!) since 2017 sometime, moved over to CachyOS just this year, and had no issues that weren't caused by myself in all this time.

I initially moved away from Ubuntu at that time, as I got so tired of dist-upgrade breaking my system every single time I tried to upgrade, so figured I'll at least understand the breakages better when they happen with Arch. But I never got Arch to break something by itself, it always end up being my fault.
by ndr | 2025-11-30 12:48:39+00:00
For any nix-curious person out there check out Julia Evans posts [0]

But also note that she eventually moved out of it > (note from 18 months later in August 2024: I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me)

[0] https://jvns.ca/categories/nix/
by thelastgallon | 2025-11-30 12:50:15+00:00
>The first reason for doing this that seems to come up is abundant access to power in space. This really isn't the case. You basically have two options: solar and nuclear.

I guess that rules our any funding from US govt or Saudi money. Unless someone figures out a way to use fossil fuels to run the data centers! It has to be private equity or a new data center coin offering. Offered to the public and take away the pain and suffering of carrying their current paper currency. We need a new messiah (SBF + Musk + WeWork guy) to craft this narrative.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 12:50:31+00:00
As shared elsewhere, I've used Arch Linux since 2017 sometime, and this year I replaced it with CachyOS as I was changing disks anyways and wanted to see what all the noise was about.

It's like a Arch brother that holds your hand slightly more, and have some "defaults" they nudge you towards in the docs, and some number-heavy software is slightly faster, maybe 10-15%, but overall it feels and works just like Arch Linux. To be honest, I don't notice a lot of difference and I think I'm as fine with Arch as with CachyOS, that's how little different there is between them.
by mystraline | 2025-11-30 12:50:41+00:00
When was Pearl Harbor attacked by Japan?

Now, when did Hawai'i become a state?

And when and by whom was their king deposed?

> Pearl Harbour was the only time the country got directly attacked.

Uh, which country again was it?

(Edit: -4, really? Damn, people are salty about actually knowing history versus going against the US public school system's propaganda that "We (royal) were attacked". In reality, the occupier forces, the US military, were attacked, having deposed the government at the behest of Sanford Dole, of pineapple infamy.

But the simple bumper sticker slogan "Remember Pearl Harbor", short circuits and somehow gets people to ignore history at the behest of ruthless hegemonic expansion and irrational patriotism.)
by lumb63 | 2025-11-30 12:50:52+00:00
I believe we all intuitively push whatever our advantages are, often without even knowing it. The advantage that the wealthy have are connections, capital, and familial support. These advantages lend themselves to activities such as starting businesses with high capital requirements, accumulating assets (“investing”), working through elite colleges to land a prestigious position, heading a philanthropy or charity, etc.

That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc.

Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income.

When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that.

That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc.

These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
by 59nadir | 2025-11-30 12:51:15+00:00
> In a follow-up discussion, I committed the "sins" of referring to him as a man, and saying things like he is not a woman, and there are only two sexes.

Sincere question: Why were you not able to just think "Oh, ok, some people do this and feel this way." and then just move on? I'm not sure why these particular things needed to be discussed.
by probably_wrong | 2025-11-30 12:51:54+00:00
First, I feel the implication that "if you aren't reassured is only because you're dumb" is unwarranted.

With that out of the way, being expensive does not preclude shoddy work. At the end of the day, the only difference between "they are so concerned about security that they are willing to lose millions[1]" and "their process must be so bad that they have no other choice but to lose millions before their death trap cost them ten times that" is how good your previous perception of their airplanes is.

I think that, had this exact same issue happened to Boeing, we would be having a very different conversation. As the current top-comment suggests, it would probably be less "these things happen" and more "they cheapened out on the ECC".

[1] Disclaimer: I have no idea who loses money in this scenario, if it's also Airbus or if it's exclusively the airlines who bought them.