MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-16 00:08:28+00:00
> FCC regulates satellites launched from or communicating with the US

FCC is easier to deal with than multiple layers of environmental, planning, power, and water concerns at the local, state and federal levels.

> they're not obviously favourable compared with cold place on earth with clear skies and access to cold water

There are fewer of those places that can be developed than there is space. The bottleneck to space is launch. The bottleneck on the ground is power.

I don’t think anyone thinks the math works right now. But as OP showed, it’s surprisingly proximate in a way SBSP is not.
by codebje | 2025-12-16 00:08:33+00:00
Everything is lined up for sub-optimal play.

For a start, the setting is an emotive one. It's not just a numeric game with arbitrary tokens, it's about "the perfect romantic partner." It would take an unusually self-isolating human to not identify who they feel their perfect match should be and bias towards that, subconsciously or consciously. We (nearly) all seek connection.

Then, it's reality TV. Contestants will be chosen for emotional volatility, and relentlessly manipulated to generate drama. No-one is going to watch a full season of a handful of math nerds take a few minutes to progress a worksheet towards a solution each week coupled with whatever they do to pass the time otherwise.
by terminalshort | 2025-12-16 00:09:01+00:00
But space isn't actually cold, or at least not space near Earth. It's about 10 C. And that's only about a 10 C less than room temperature, so a human habitable structure in near earth space won't radiate very much heat. But heat radiated is O(Tobject^4 - Tbackground^4), and a computer can operate up to around 90C (I think) so that is actually a very big difference here. Back of the envelope, a data center at 90C will radiate about 10x the heat that a space station at 20C will. With the massive caveat that I don't know what the constant is here, it could actually be easy to keep a datacenter cool even though it is hard to keep a space station cool.
by baobun | 2025-12-16 00:09:07+00:00
> Yeah if you buy a number with Durov's TON shitcoin

Not even. If you actually try you will discover at the last step (after full KYC, signing some dubious agreements, and linking an existing TG account) that the Fragment "market" is actually fully centralized and has not been open for new buyers-users for a good while. No secondary markets out there (maybe not even possible on their network) afaik.
by bastawhiz | 2025-12-16 00:09:33+00:00
> Can they empower regular people to own their data

Unless they make their software fully open and make the devices hackable, no.

I'm glad to pay for cloud hosting because at least I know my money is getting me some degree of service in return. The risk that my iCloud data will be lost in the next five years is very low. The risk that this company will disappear in the next five years and I've got a $500 paperweight is exceedingly high.
by tptacek | 2025-12-16 00:09:46+00:00
If you have something to say, I think you should say it. This is vacuous. I understand why it's unpopular to relate the fact that applications for serious surveillance/espionage CNE work at NSA are competitive, and that the USG is very open about soliciting those applications. It remains a fact. Feel free to challenge me on that; we can go deeper.

What I'm not going to do is write you an apology for confronting you with that information.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-16 00:09:48+00:00
> How do you manage the key for encrypting IDs?

The same way we manage all other secrets in the application. (Summarized below)

> Is the ID encrypted using AEAD scheme (e.g. AES-GCM)? Or does the plain AES suffice? I assume that the size of IDs would never exceed the block size of AES, but again, I'm not a cryptographer so not sure if it's safe to do so.

I don't have the source handy at the moment. It's one of the easier to use symmetric algorithms available in .Net. We aren't talking military-grade security here. In general: a 32-bit int encrypts to 64-bits, so we pad it with a few unicode characters so it's 64-bits encrypted to 128 bits.

---

As far as managing secrets in the application: We have a homegrown configuration file generator that's adapted to our needs. It generates both the configuration files, and strongly-typed classes to read the files. All configuration values are loaded at startup, so we don't have to worry about runtime errors from missing configuration values.

Secrets (connection strings, encryption keys, ect,) are encrypted in the configuration file as base64 strings. The certificate to read/write secrets are stored in Azure Keyvault.

The startup logic in all applications is something like:

1: Determine the environment (production, qa, dev)

2: Get the appropriate certificate

3: Read the configuration files, including decrypting secrets (such as the primary key encryption keys) from the configuration files

4: Populate the strongly-typed objects that hold the configuration values

5: These objects are dependency-injected to runtime objects
by recursivecaveat | 2025-12-16 00:10:20+00:00
It's kind of like what's to stop you from stealing your neighbor's lawn gnome? You get a free gnome once and now neither of you can ever have anything on your property not bolted down ever again. Better to not hurt both of you by rocking the boat and instead slowly raise prices together. Cooperation is only hard when there's a lot of people involved.
by rascul | 2025-12-16 00:10:59+00:00
He's only comparing highway driving. As he notes, city driving (or really anything with a lot of accelerating) will see the impact of weight on fuel consumption. Seems like regen brakes can help mitigate that for electric vehicles.

Side note, if he set the parking brake when getting loaded then the second tailgate denting might not have happened. It'll also help save the transmission.
by exmadscientist | 2025-12-16 00:11:24+00:00
> Yamaha receivers

In my limited experience, Yamaha handles HDMI-CEC significantly better than Denon/Marantz. As evidenced by the fact that I currently own a Marantz receiver and am reading this page, but back when I owned a Yamaha receiver, I had no need to care about all of this crud. Things somehow worked on the first try! I did not expect that. However, it conditioned me to expect that again with a different receiver (the sources and sinks are the problems, right? the receivers are super well tested because sitting in the middle and passing these commands around is their entire job, right? right?) which was a mistake.

(The actual issue with the Marantz is that it seems to be eating some kind of power-on command from the source, and not passing it on, so the TV never turns on if you try to turn on the receiver or the source. I have no idea how to fix this, short of following in the path of this article.)
by daft_pink | 2025-12-16 00:11:25+00:00
Because wage growth is too low in the United States, but these other factors introduce weird effects that hurt the competitiveness of our companies and our industry.

I don’t think that work in the US in general is unsafe and things like OSHA and insurance really manage safety well. It doesn’t seem like unionized industries are any more less safe than non unionized industries.

I think most workers actually want wage growth. Things like hollywood writers banning ai or auto workers preventing plant closures just don’t make sense.
by daemonologist | 2025-12-16 00:11:34+00:00
> This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor; people are using back-of-the-envelope math, doing a terrible job of it, and only confirming whatever conclusion they already want. Calculating radiation and the cost of goods is not difficult. Run the numbers.

> References: Gemini, Gemini, ChatGPT, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini (There are sub-references from these services in the GitHub.)

I think, if you're going to make statements like this - especially from a position of expertise, you should be personally verifying the numbers and citing their sources directly. What good is asking the reader to trust an AI on your behalf? They should trust you.

(To be clear, I suspect the conclusions drawn are still correct.)
by johnwatson11218 | 2025-12-16 00:11:41+00:00
They talk about the specific systems in terms of legacy code and how far removed government agencies are from automated testing and other modern, best practices. It has been a couple of years since I read it but I recall a part about a business process at the IRS that that people don't start learning until they have been there for about 17 years - due to the complexity. It talks about how there had been failed attempts to migrate to a new database, some of the data is now duplicated but the upgrade is de-funded so all the new code has to be aware that data may be duplicated.

I'm not sure if this book got into it but I've also read that the IRS has assembly code from the 1960s that is very optimized and only a few devs can work on it. ChatGPT knows a lot about this history as well.
by JBiserkov | 2025-12-16 00:11:43+00:00
> An aerial refueler flying so close to Venezuela can't have been there with the best intentions. I don't think that they're too keen on advertising their presence or whereabouts.

Which is precisely why they should avoid flying INTO civilian aircraft.

Imagine if that refueler had stayed away from the JetBlue, we wouldn't be talking about it ;-)
by fivre | 2025-12-16 00:11:45+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46277687 mentioned Recoding America as "what you're up against", omitting the important "people had learned what they were up against and were well into the process of building collaborative effort between civil servants

the book _is_ good, but it's rather disheartening that all the people discussed (and many more that couldn't fit into the book) on the federal side were summarily fired to clear space for sycophants and toadies round one (the DOGE broccoli hair kids siphoning off sensitive data and doing some casual corruption) are putting out this as sycophants and toadies round two: _lasting_ corruption in partnership with the least scrupulous bits of private industry

the people in the book are https://18f.org/ and spent the last decade building useful relationships, familiarity with public sector quirks, and standard software toolkit items for government tech. they got tossed for the crime of working with the Biden admin and wanting to work towards building tech entirely for public good under the auspices of the law.

whatever branding and whatnot this comes wrapped in i don't trust this admin nor whatever bits of the private sector are looking to work with it in the slightest to not stand up something that works in the public interest. we're gonna get new and exciting forms of graft and revolving door exploitation of sensitive data
by K0nserv | 2025-12-16 00:12:08+00:00
That is indeed interesting.

I have slightly different goals for my version. I want everything to fit in 128 bits so I'm sacrificing some of the random bits, I'm also making sure the representation inside Postgres is also exactly 128 bits. My initial version ended up using CBOR encoding and being 160 bits.

Mine dedicates 16 bits for the prefix allowing up to 3 characters (a-z alphabet).
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-16 00:12:11+00:00
Not 100% related but not 100% not-related either: I've got a script that generates variations of the domain names I use the most... All the most common typos/mispelling, all the "1337" variations, all the Levenhstein edit distance of 1, quite some of the 2, etc.

For example for "lillybank.com", I'll generate:

llllybank.com liliybank.com ...

and countless others.

Hundreds of thousands of entries. They then are null-routed from my unbound DNS resolver.

My browsers are forced into "corporate" settings where they cannot use DoH/DoT: it's all, between my browsers and my unbound resolver, in the clear.

All DNS UDP traffic that contains any Unicode domain name is blocked by the firewall. No DNS over TCP is allowed (and, no, I don't care).

I also block entire countries' TLD as well as entire countries' IP blocks.

Been running a setup like that (and many killfiles, and DNS resolvers known to block all known porn and know malware sites etc.) since years now already. The Internet keeps working fine.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-12-16 00:12:59+00:00
I've operated things on the web that didn't use HTTP but used public PKI (most recently, WebTransport). But those services are ultimately guests in the house of public PKI, which is mostly attacked by people trying to skim financial information going over public HTTP. Nobody made IRC use public PKI for server verification, and I don't know why we'd except what is now an effectively free CA service to hold itself back for any edge case that piggybacks on it.

> and my IRC servers that don’t have any HTTP daemon (and thus have the port blocked) while being balanced by anycast geo-fenced DNS?

The certificate you get for the domain can be used for whatever the client accepts it for - the HTTP part only matters for the ACME provider. So you could point port 80 to an ACME daemon and serve only the challenge from there. But this is not necessarily a great solution, depending on what your routing looks like, because you need to serve the same challenge response for any request to that port.

> You might say “use DNS-01”; but thats reductive- I’m letting any node control my entire domain (and many of my registrars don’t even allow API access to records- let alone an API key thats limited to a single record; even cloud providers dont have that).

The server using the certificate doesn't have to be the one going through the ACME flow, and once you have multiple nodes it's often better that it isn't. It's very rare for even highly sophisticated users of ACME to actually provision one certificate per server.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-16 00:13:06+00:00
Starlink is however operating at ~500km where radiation is less of a concern, but where the lifetime of a satellite is only 2-3 years.

The unit economics of orbital GPUs suggest that we'll need to run them for much longer than that. This is actually one of the few good points of orbital data centers, normally older hardware is cycled out because it's not economic to run anymore due to power efficiency improvements, but if your power is "free" and you've already got sufficient solar power onboard for the compute, you can just keep running old compute as long as you can keep the satellite up there.
by zbentley | 2025-12-16 00:13:09+00:00
> a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee

It’s worth being specific about what is meant by “political appointee” here. That term has specific legal meaning in the context of federal staffing, and (as I understand it, not a lawyer) is not the same thing as “GS employee who was hired as part of an administration’s political agenda”.
by nospice | 2025-12-16 00:13:19+00:00
> The price isn't right for small businesses. These trucks are quite expensive

So are RAM trucks and I don't think they're hurting for customers.

I think there are two fundamental issues. One is that pickups are a weirdly-politicized lifestyle choice in the US - i.e., if you're progressive, you're supposed to hate them and see them as the symbol of the gun-totting macho redneck culture, and if you're conservative, you're supposed to love them because they're gas-guzzling freedom machines that "own the libs". An electric pickup straddles these political choices in a hard-to-market way.

The other problem is that electric pickups don't really solve any pressing problem for the buyer. They're more expensive up front, more expensive to keep running (unless you also invest a lot of $$$ into solar), and harder to repair, but they don't boast better specs... well, except for acceleration, which isn't a huge selling point for trucks.
by sharperguy | 2025-12-16 00:13:36+00:00
It's a little different to federated networks like GNU Social/Mastadon since the data and the relay are separate. You can post the same data to multiple relays and read from many relays simultaneously. Meaning you aren't tied to picking a single relay with network effects, and although a big relay going offline might cause temporary chaos, it's fairly easy for new ones to be set up and added to clients, without having to explicitly move things like accounts and so on.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-12-16 00:14:38+00:00
If the goal is to find the perfect matching in some maximum number of turns or less, it's possible to do even better by using a full game tree that minimises the maximum height of the tree ( = number of turns required), instead of using information/entropy as done here.

Basically, using the entropy produces a game tree that minimises the number of steps needed in expectation -- but that tree could be quite unbalanced, having one or more low-probability leaves (perfect matchings) many turns away from the root. Such a leaf will randomly occur some small fraction of the time, meaning those games will be lost.

For concreteness, a game requiring 6 bits of information to identify the perfect matching will take 6 steps on average, and may sometimes require many more; a minimax tree of height 7 will always be solved in at most 7 steps. So if you're only allowed 7 steps, it's the safer choice.
by tguvot | 2025-12-16 00:15:17+00:00
so it's going back to square 1: sweaty/grease/sticky matter not going to be picked up 100% by mop after it was diluted by water. distilled water or not distilled water.

this is why floor buffers exist. to buff the floor so it will be nice and shiny.

professional car cleaning usually made with deionized water. much easier than bringing distillery. but even with usual water on my car there will be usually no marks after wiping it with towel.
by protocolture | 2025-12-16 00:15:19+00:00
In my opinion, such as it is, the best "educational" application made in the entire history of computing is Age of Empires.

You can start a conversation with someone, and talk to them about say, the Saracens, and then have them start wondering how they came about their (small) understanding of them. When they realise it was AOE cutscenes, and that the whole project was a backdoor to deliver historical knowledge to people.

I feel like if you eschew gamification, your audience is largely only those with a deep interest of learning.

I used an app to do a security cert a while back, and it would bug me 3 times a day, and challenge me to test my knowledge. I think it really helped keep my focus on the challenge. Likewise, when I was doing my CCNA years ago, the In-30-Days gentleman, would subscribe you to 30 days of motivational emails to read his book and practice the skills. Not an app, but the same sort of thing.

Some people sell the motivation as the core product, some sell the game as the core product (to deliver motivation) and some people sell the knowledge as the core product. All are valid approaches just make sure you are happy with the market you are targeting.

One more thing: I have absolutely no idea how to obtain calm in todays environment. I dont see myself engaging with an app that requires me to be calm ahead of time, but if it somehow strengthened or created a sense of calm that might be a sufficient product differentiator.
by sebastos | 2025-12-16 00:15:58+00:00
Right - but coming back to the original question, if I'm not mistaken, the explanation is that the blogpost is measuring information gained from an actual outcome, as opposed to _expected_ information gain. An example will help:

Say you're trying to guess the number on a 6-sided die that I've rolled. If I wanted to outright tell you the answer, that would be 2.58 bits of information I need to convey. But you're trying to guess it without me telling, so suppose you can ask a yes or no question about the outcome. The maximum of the _expected_ information add is 1 bit. If you ask "was it 4 or greater?", then that is an optimal question, because the expected information gain is min-maxed. That is, the minimum information you can gain is also the maximum: 1 bit. However, suppose you ask "was it a 5?". This is a bad question, because if the answer is no, there are still 5 numbers it could be. Plus, the likelihood of it being 'no' is high: 5/6. However, despite these downsides, it is true that 1/6 times, the answer WILL be yes, and you will gain all 2.58 bits of information in one go. The downside case more than counteracts this and preserves the rules of information theory: the _expected_ information gain is still < 1 bit.

EDIT: D'oh, nevermind. Re-reading the post, it's definitely talking about >1 bit expectations of potential matchings. So I don't know!
by epolanski | 2025-12-16 00:16:08+00:00
Cars are not critical infrastructure, also, the idea that China would turn off their EVs or starting to use them as weapons from the other side of the world is borderline absurd.

Occam's razor suggests that the simplest solution is the most probable: they are scared of the competition, because they know that if those cars enter the market they will dominate it.
by WastedCucumber | 2025-12-16 00:16:13+00:00
For who might be pulled in by the vague title, not knowing what a nostr is, thinking this article has anything to do with evolution - it has nothing to do with evolution or nature. Not one example of nature trying to evolve a nostr is descibed.

Maybe like... the author thought a nostr is similar to, I dunno, a pack or tribe or something?
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-16 00:16:23+00:00
It's interesting that this is pretty much identical to the WHATWG/W3C situation: there is theoretically a standards body, but in practice it's defunct; the browsers announce what they will ship, and the "standards body" can do nothing but meekly comply.

The difference being that there's at least a little bit of popular dissatisfaction with the status quo of browsers unilaterally dictating web standards, whereas no one came to the defense of CAs, since everybody hated them. A useful lesson that you need to do reputation management even if you're running a successful racket, since if people hate you enough they might not stick up for you even if someone comes for you "illegally".
by recursive | 2025-12-16 00:16:35+00:00
The jack is not driving the bookshelf speakers. They're active. They have their own internal amps. It's simple if you use a receiver. If someone can point me to a receiver that's more like 4 inches than 18 inches, then I'd consider that a solution. Receivers are big boxes as far as I've seen. I don't have space. Or maybe I don't want to make space.
by toss1 | 2025-12-16 00:17:33+00:00
For sure! Every author should know their audience and write for that audience.

An author's word choices can certainly fail to convey intended meaning, or convey it too slowly because they are too obscure or are a mismatch for the the intended audience — that is just falling off the other side of the good writing tightrope.

At technical paper is an example where the audience expects to see proper technical names and terms of art. Those terms will slow down a general reader who will be annoyed by the "jargon" but it would annoy every academic or professional if the "jargon" were edited out for less precise and more everyday words. And vice versa for the same topic published in a general interest magazine.

So, an important question is whether you are part of the intended audience.
by dspillett | 2025-12-16 00:17:36+00:00
> Do not assume that UUIDs are hard to guess; they should not be used as security capabilities

It is not just about being hard to guess a valid individual identifier in vacuum. Random (or at least random-ish) values, be they UUIDs or undecorated integers, in this context are also about it being hard to guess one from another, or a selection of others.

Wrt: "it isn't x it is y" form: I'm not an LLM, 'onest guv!