MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doctorwho42 | 2025-12-15 23:10:25+00:00
Dude, seriously. I'm a citizen and work in a lab, and I have a world expert in my lab... One of maybe 5 in the world, Canadian... And the difficulty for him to stay is insane.

If you asked any American how hard he should have it, they'd probably expect he just needed to fill out a form, pay $150, and wait 1-2 years.
by omnimus | 2025-12-15 23:10:38+00:00
I mean the biggest issue is that “trucks” like F-150 are actually used because of US tax system that exempts such massive vehicles from emmision taxes because they are work trucks. They are pretty ineffective work vehicles but some people just love them as a symbol.

That symbolism goes completely against electric/green vehicles. In other words - people who buy F-150 would never buy electric vehicle and people who are looking for electric truck for work wouldn't buy F-150.
by nunobrito | 2025-12-15 23:11:08+00:00
Nowadays a NOSTR "relay" isn't exactly a relay any longer, is it?

Should likely be called a "database server" since it's main purpose is to host user data and perform queries over it. A relay is something connecting two devices and makes a best effort to get out of their way.

Nevertheless: NOSTR is the most exciting social network that I've seen in the past 20 years. The concept of owning the keys without a blockchain associated enables not just decentralization, it also permits a complete offline functioning to login, view private messages and so much more that isn't possible from any other popular social network predecessor.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 23:11:19+00:00
I set it up ages ago, maybe before they even had a script. My setup is dead simple: A crontab that runs monthly:

0 2 1 * * /usr/local/bin/letsencrypt-renew

And the script:

#!/bin/sh certbot renew service lighttpd restart service exim4 restart service dovecot restart

... and so on for all my services

That's it. It should be bulletproof, but every few renewals I find that one of my processes never picked up the new certificates and manually re-running the script fixes it. Shrug-emoji.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-15 23:11:25+00:00
It is harsh to say, but we need to increasingly recognize that if your writing is largely indistinguishable from the (current) output of e.g. ChatGPT on default settings, it doesn't matter if you used ChatGPT or not, your writing is overly verbose, bad, and unpleasant to consume, and something you most certainly need to improve. I.e. your colleague needs to change his style regardless.

This sucks, but it needs to be done in education, and/or at least in areas where good writing and effective communication is considered important. Good grades need to be awarded only to writing that exceeds the quality and/or personality of a chat-bot, because, otherwise, the degree is being awarded to a person who is no more useful than a clumsy tool.

And I don't mean avoiding superficialities like the em-dash: I mean the bland over-verbosity and other systemic tells—or rather, smells—of AI slop.
by mopsi | 2025-12-15 23:11:37+00:00
That's what I said: the present-day totalitarian dictatorship in Russia was born out of foreign disregard for the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia, willful ignorance of the usurpation of all formal and informal power structures by KGB old-timers, and indifference to the legitimate security concerns of Eastern Europe. Global big businesses in major countries such as the US and Germany were so eager to cooperate on oil and gas extraction that they ignored how a new Hitler was rising as a result of this short-sightedness.

Russia grew into the cancer that it is today not because it had been under imagined attacks from all sides for decades as you claimed (a favorite trope of many dictators), but because of the opposite: Russia was treated like a savage and uncivilized land from which respect for even the most basic human rights was not demanded as a prerequisite for cooperation. Global big businesses were given access to Russian natural resources at below-market rates, and in return Russian kleptocrats were allowed to skim off the top with impunity and park their loot in NYC penthouses.

We can see the same pattern in the current "peace negotiations": Putin is offering Trump and his business partners a chunk of frozen Russian assets and access to natural resources in occupied parts of Ukraine in exchange for the US pressuring Europe to unfreeze the funds and coercing Ukraine to surrender. Big business gets cheap resources and Putin takes another step toward his dream of an empire. What a lovely alliance of big business and Russian imperialism.
by amichal | 2025-12-15 23:11:37+00:00
Yeah, as a salty greybeard i tried to tell our FE tech-lead to just render the proper HTTP Cache-Control headers in the Next.js site we recently built. He tried and then linked me to https://nextjs.org/docs/app/guides/caching and various version of their docs on when you can and cannot set Cache-Control headers (e.g. https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/config/next-config...) and I got several hours of head-ache before calling it a problem for another day. That site is not high traffic enough to care but this is not the first time that i've gotten the "not the Next.js way" talk and was not happy.

I obviously can be done but clearly is not the intended solution which really bothers me
by mmooss | 2025-12-15 23:11:49+00:00
> Any normal human being would retire and hang out on the beach with supermodels after all the abuse he has taken.

First, he seeks and creates conflict. He isn't 'taking' abuse, except in the sense that he is reaching out and grasping at it.

Everyone in that position takes lots of abuse. If they built their own fortune, they generally don't retire to the beach or they would have long ago.
by codingdave | 2025-12-15 23:12:02+00:00
> But what if we've been wrong about what matters?

Still wrong, though. Does the final product solve the problem it set out to solve? Because that is what matters. Specs and code are both tools to achieve that. So while this article is a good start... if you think that AI has changed what matters, not only were you wrong about it before, but you still are.

The idea of just re-building a whole app via LLMs when changes are needed is cute. But then you are also going to have a whole new set of bugs and UX changes. For anything non-trivial, documentation will be wrong, training will be wrong, people's experience will shift and complaints will ensue. Sure-fire way to increase churn, which is a bad thing.
by sc68cal | 2025-12-15 23:12:12+00:00
When Starcloud put together that whitepaper the first thing I looked at was the launch costs[1]. It references a $5M cost to launch, which right away made absolutely no sense to me. Just a cursory search shows launch costs are around $50M per launch, if not more.

It's great that this site drills down even further to demonstrate that there is absolutely no point at which the launch costs ever make this economical or viable, so I really don't understand what people are doing.

Especially because this site was harping for years about the cost of launches and putting things in to orbit, the whole reason why SpaceX got started and has grown as it has. As soon as that became an inconvenient number, we now just make things up (Just pretend that launch costs are 10% of what they actually are to get people to invest?).

[1]: https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf
by alex-moon | 2025-12-15 23:12:14+00:00
https://joyus.ajmoon.com

This is actually pretty much as done as it's going to be (could use some nicer UI feedback, i.e. how you actually use the app) - it is actually just a demo for an effort I undertook to mod Datastar to support nested web components. I am writing it up as we speak!

Instructions: you have to answer three questions; each one will auto-submit once your response goes over 100 characters; the answer to the third question is your "post". It's a proof of concept of a friction intervention for social media to encourage slow thinking before posting (and hopefully reframing negative experiences in the mind, it's kind of dual purpose).
by nickff | 2025-12-15 23:12:15+00:00
>”we should encourage all of them to spend their money. Even buying a superyacht is a benefit to the economy.”

You’re falling victim to the ‘broken windows fallacy’ here; money which is invested is actually more productive in improving medium and long term economic productivity than ‘consumption’ goods. Even ‘retained’ money (under one’s mattress) is not net-negative, as it increases the value of its circulating counterparts.
by patmorgan23 | 2025-12-15 23:12:28+00:00
Nginx and Apache are free and both can be trivially automated with ACME bot. Both can be used to set up a reverse proxy in front of legacy sites or applications.

This is not centralizing everything to Let's Encrypt. it's forcing everyone to use ACME, and many CAs support ACME (and those that don't probably will soon due to this change).
by kragen | 2025-12-15 23:12:41+00:00
Those are reasonable questions, but they suggest that you don't understand the landscape very well.

The user's device has to do the computation for it to be effective. How long does it normally take to sign up for a new messaging service like WhatsApp? Five minutes? You should burn the user's cellphone battery for about half that long, 150 seconds, 50 times more than you were thinking. Plus another half-minute every time you add a new contact. Times two for every time someone blocks you, up to a limit of 150 seconds. Minus one second for each day you've been signed up. Or something like that.

The value of signing up for Signal is much higher to a real user than it is to a spammer, so you just have to put the signup cost somewhere in the wide range in between.

LLMs didn't exist when Signal was designed, and Captchas still seem to be getting a lot of use today.

Invite codes worked fine for Gmail, and would work even better for any kind of closed messaging system like Signal; people who don't know any users of a particular messaging system almost never try to use it. The diameter of the world's social graph is maybe ten or twelve, so invite codes can cover the world's social graph with only small, transitory "out of invites" problems.

The "industry" had "established" that they "should" gather as much PII as possible in order to sell ads and get investments from In-Q-Tel.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-15 23:12:43+00:00
> To me, what your example really shows is the problem with incorrect default values, not a problem with encoding data into a key per se. If they'd chosen a non-date for unknown values, maybe 00 or 99 for day or month components, then the issue you described would disappear.

well, till you run out of numbers for the immigrants that don't have exact birth date
by godelski | 2025-12-15 23:12:53+00:00
> I'm always tired of the anti-nuclear zealots that make it look like it's an either/or situation.

Same BUT I'm also tired of pro-nuclear zealots doing the same thing. There's a lot of armchair experts on both sides and neither are helping us solve the climate problem. They just cause fighting and ignore the complexities of the situation. It should not be controversial that climate change is one of the most complex problems humanity has ever faced, yet it is. We have tons of issues about the climate, tons of issues about the environment, tons of issues about each technology, tons of issues with manufacturing, and so on. It is mind boggling how complex this all is if you just start to build out the graph of dependencies.

Unfortunately public opinion matters, as every one of these power sources needs government subsides and funding to progress. From direct construction to funding of further research. *That is political*. It shouldn't be, but is because we decide where money gets allocated and with any complex issue it is easy to oversimplify and create malinformation to portray spending as wasteful when it isn't.

I'll make an analogy to programming since we're on HN. People are posting as if they have read all the code their computer is running. There simply isn't anyone that has done that, even the experts. We can only have a narrow understanding and hope that there's an overlap of people who have complete coverage over all the code. So we need to stop arguing "facts" and instead argue "my understanding" as it is just too fucking complex. I mean how many people have even run a very basic weather simulation?

It's totally fine to have opinions. I want people to have opinions! But I want the passion of peoples opinions to be directly proportional to their passion of understanding the things they're talking about. The worst fucking thing we can do is have very strong opinions on things we are not making an integral part to our lives. By having unsupported strong opinions we just drown out the real experts. The opinions that matter the most. For the love of god, it is absolutely apparent with the issue of climate as we're constantly raising voices that have no legitimate experience in the field and calling them experts. We've seen such disinformation campaigns happen for decades! Yet we're still here and we do the same fucking thing with a million topics. I'm just pissed off at everyone having strong opinions about everything. I'm pissed off at everyone wanting to be a know-it-all. Get your passions and dive into them, but recognize your own limits. You're not dumb for not knowing something and your opinion isn't a reflection of you, but rather the information you have. We don't have to waste so much time with all these dumb fights.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-12-15 23:13:08+00:00
I learned about Chafa when I found a video editor that runs in the command line with keyboard control - vic - it just lets you insert split markers and when you exit the video is sliced up into the portions. I really like the low-fi nature of scrobbling through the video, it has low brain overhead.

https://github.com/wong-justin/vic
by guywithahat | 2025-12-15 23:13:22+00:00
Well the argument some of these companies are making is that it would be cheaper over 10 years (some things like power can be cheaper in space, and you can get it from solar nearly 24h a day). It seems likely to me (as it does many other people) that it won't be cheaper, but if it's the same price or mildly more expensive there might be a regulatory incentive to train a ML model in space instead of a place like the EU
by bflesch | 2025-12-15 23:13:28+00:00
Not really convinced by your argument. If you want to achieve your scenario you just take a sysadmin from the Tesla shanghai plant and next time they go to the US HQ they gain access to a coworkers laptop and deploy an OTA update to the tesla fleet. And this is assuming that the Tesla OTA update deployment mechanism is actually separated between countries, and not simply accessible from the Tesla intranet.

No need to design & ship another low-cost car model for this.
by efitz | 2025-12-15 23:13:58+00:00
I don’t know what you build, but I’ll share some thoughts from the other side (customer):

Many SaaS products I am interested in have very little “moat”. I am interested in them not because I can’t build them, but because my limited engineering time is better spent building business specific stuff.

Many products with product management teams spend a lot of their effort building functionality either to delight their highest paying customers, or features that are expected to be high-revenue.

I’m never going to be your highest paying customers, so I’m never going to get custom work from you (primarily orienting workflows to existing workflows inside your customers).

What everyone wants when they buys SaaS is to get value from it immediately without having to change our internal processes, broken as they are. But your model of feature prioritization is antithetical to this; you don’t want to build or support the 5-10 integration points I want; because that would allow me to build my own customizations without paying for your upsells.

You aren’t at immediate risk from agentic Ai from losing your big customers. But Agentic AI is enabling me and thousands of others to build hobby projects that deliver part of your core value but with limitless integration. I expect that you’ll see bleeding from the smallish customers way before you see hits from your whales.

However in a couple of years there will be OSS alternatives to what you do, and they will only become more appealing, rapidly.

As a side note it’s not just license pricing that will drive customers to agentically-coded solutions; it’s licensing terms. Nowadays whenever I evaluate SaaS or open source, if it’s not fully published on GitHub and Apache or MIT licensed, then I seriously consider just coding up an alternative - I’ve done this several times now. It’s never been easier.
by helterskelter | 2025-12-15 23:14:30+00:00
> Functionally it makes no difference whether you split near the middle or not -- a truly random selection would sometimes end up with a pile of one, and that's totally fine.

Yeah I just mean I would be very conscious of splitting with a single stalk in one group and would wonder if that was really a 'fair' selection or something I did intentionally since I know the exact number of the yarrow in one hand. In practice, I can't imagine anyone would make a selection like that, even though in a truly random system it would happen not infrequently.
by nunobrito | 2025-12-15 23:14:50+00:00
You are correct that it existed well before, the difference is that it was always complicated to use. Heck, we have been able to send PGP emails since almost 30 years ago.

The innovative concept is that npub/nsec along with sending notes is trivially simple. The content does not need to encrypted, there is a huge value on publishing clear text messages that are crypto-verifiable. You also didn't had this feature on groove and others. I'd argue that NOSTR has indeed pioneered them into mainstream.
by netsharc | 2025-12-15 23:15:00+00:00
If that's the case, that's really just dumb side-skirting of compliance rules, how much difference does it make for a yet-notified family member to read "Persons aged [dad's age] and [mom's age] found dead at residence of [their last name]" compared to "Mr. and Mrs. [their last name] found dead."?

In any case, tragically, their daughter lived across the street and found them.
by piskov | 2025-12-15 23:15:48+00:00
There was already an article of how this thing is just ain’t gonna happen:

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horri...

—

If I were to guess, my first bet would be grand PR damage control for all the Mexicans, Irish, and what have you as in “don’t worry, we’ll soon be in space and out of your backyard” (no, they won’t).

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...
by losvedir | 2025-12-15 23:16:02+00:00
> The certificate offered from server to client and the certificate the server expects from the client do not need to share a CA.

Sure, but it seems like all the CAs are stopping issuing certificates with the client EKU. At least LetsEncrypt and DigiCert, since by the Google requirement they can't do that and normal certs, and I guess there's not enough market to have one just for that.

> You might do that if you're using the host HTTPS certificates handed out by certbot or other CAs as mTLS client certificate

Sure, what's wrong with that?

> You can still generate your own mTLS key pairs and use them to authenticate over a connection whose hostname is verified with Let's Encrypt, which is what most people will be doing.

That lets the client verify the host, but the server doesn't know where the connection is coming from. Generating mTLS pairs means pinning and coordinated rotation and all that. Currently servers can simply keep an up to date CA store (which is common and easy), and check the subject name, freeing the client to easily rotate their cert.
by msteffen | 2025-12-15 23:16:05+00:00
My understanding is that scientific research has a dual problem, where the number of students needed to carry out existing professors' research is much larger than the number of junior faculty positions generally available. The result being that most trained PhDs must leave (US) academia because there are no jobs for them. In fact, I've heard scientists complain that universities owe it to students to provide more help finding a job in industry after they graduate.

Given all that, where are professors supposed to find and hire students who don't want to stay in academia themselves? I think a lot of these students wind up being aspiring immigrants, and I'm not surprised that a lot of them would also have a hard time finding a place for themselves after graduating and that many of them would leave. Also, the abstract seems to argue that that US still benefits greatly from this arrangement: "though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share."
by SyzygyRhythm | 2025-12-15 23:16:13+00:00
We know the upper bound for most of those numbers. SpaceX already achieves internal marginal launch costs of ~$1000/kg, for instance. We know their rough costs per satellite. In contrast, we know little to nothing about the inputs to the Drake equation.

The numbers don't quite work out in favor of orbital datacenters at the current values. But we can tell from analyses like this what has to change to get there.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-15 23:16:41+00:00
Thankfully there are fun engaged hackery people.

The article here seemed to dive in, look at what was happening, and figure out some altogether decent & not absurd flows. It wasn't "easy", but it also wasn't totally absurd.

I get why you'd whinge & argue for a simple cable. But this was also a wonderful study, that showed steps, that I hope can bring joy & not just derision. That said, I also have no receiver box & rely on headphone out... which my not that old LG C4 has. Also, if that goes away: SPDIF decoder boxes are very cheap!
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-15 23:16:51+00:00
The cause is more just "not having enough bits". UUID is 128 bit. You're not running out even if you use part for timestamp, the random part will be big enough.

Like, it's a valid complaint.. just not for discussion at hand.

Also, we do live in reality and while having entirely random one might be perfect from theory of data, in reality having it be prefixed by date have many advantages performance wise.

> Permanent identifiers should not carry data. This is like the cardinal sin of data management

As long as you don't use the data and have actual fields for what's also encoded in UUID, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, provided there is enough of the random part to get around artifacts in real life data.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-12-15 23:16:58+00:00
The conversation has radically changed.

10-15 years ago my foreign grad students all wanted to stay. Only question was how.

There was always a big crowd who found the process of staying in the US painful, random, humiliating, and sometimes even downright abusive, so they went home.

What has really changed is China. That's what this paper shows too. Many of the Chinese students want go back home.

10-15 years ago when I would talk to grad students from China most wanted freedom and democracy. Now most tell me about how the Western system has failed and how a centralized government is more efficient.

Between making it harder to stay, China changing the narrative on dictatorships, and the West doing a horrific job in the last decade on pretty much every front, yeah, we're going to see a lot of folks move back.

Note: This is at a top-tier US university.