MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by okushigue | 2025-12-22 15:05:52+00:00
This paper presents the Janus Habitat, a novel spacecraft architecture for Mars transit that achieves artificial gravity
through a 200-meter tether system connecting a 50-tonne crew module to a 50-tonne counterweight composed primarily
of terrestrial recycled polyethylene terephthalate (R-PET). The system generates 0.5 g at 2.1 RPM with only ~200 kg of
tether mass, representing a 98.5% mass reduction compared to traditional rotating cylinder designs. The counterweight
utilizes standardized interlocking R-PET blocks manufactured on Earth at approximately 0.1% the cost of launching
dedicated ballast. An optional orbital debris processing system adds value by transforming aluminum space debris into
supplemental shielding. The complete 120-tonne system enables deployment with two heavy-lift launches, providing a
practical path to artificial gravity for long-duration transits while creating terrestrial environmental benefits through space-
based demand for recycled plastics.
by ashleyn | 2025-12-22 15:06:14+00:00
As a kid i remember being fascinated by technical difficulties screens, EAS tests, etc. Generally anything that unwittingly revealed the technical aspects of running a broadcast station. This was before we really knew how to use the internet even, so for many years, I'd wonder what a screen saying "No Access Card" or "Coriogen Eclipse" meant. When we learned about Google, it was suddenly a very educational experience to google these things and learn what was going on behind the scenes. I'm a software engineer today, but surely the nearest parallel universe version of me grew up to be a broadcast engineer.
by pigpop | 2025-12-22 15:06:50+00:00
I'm currently experimenting with trying to do this through documentation and project planning. Two core practices I use are a docs/roadmap/ directory with an ordered list of milestone documents and a /docs/retros/ directory with dated retrospectives for each session. I'm considering adding architectural decision records as a dedicated space for documenting how things evolve. The quote fta could be handled by the ADR records if they included notes on alternatives that were tried and why they didn't work as part of the justification for the decision that was made.

The trouble with this quickly becomes finding the right ones to include in the current working session. For milestones and retros it's simple: include the current milestone and the last X retros that are relevant but even then you may sometimes want specific information from older retros. With ADR documents you'd have to find the relevant ones somehow and the same goes for any other additional documentation that gets added.

There is clearly a need for some standardization and learning which techniques work best as well as potential for building a system that makes it easy for both you and the LLM to find the correct information for the current task.
by charlesabarnes | 2025-12-22 15:07:27+00:00
This is something I've personally explored and lightly researched. I think the general population generally prefers recommendation algorithms (they espouse how great _their_ for-you page is on tik-tok or how spotify suggests the best music).

You would also be combating against ad and social media companies with extremely deep pockets. You have to keep in mind that algorithmic sorting also would impact search engines like Google and a ton of shopping websites.

I personally think the way this has to be done is something more fundamental and "grassroots-like". Similar to how a significant chunk of the internet are against "AI content" I think that same group of people need to be shown that this algorithmic recommendation brainrot is impacting society considerably.

edit: To take this point further, as an American, I have been wondering why people would disagree on basic principals or what feels like facts. The problem is that their online experience is completely different than mine. No two people share an exact same home page for any service. How are you supposed to get on the same page as someone when they live in a practically different world than you?
by xienze | 2025-12-22 15:07:51+00:00
> No, anti-consumer sentiment is "you have to buy a different charger for each device and it becomes obsolete with the device".

But you don't? The other end of any Lightning connector is USB-A or USB-C. Works just fine anywhere.

> Factories in the EU means workers employed and taxes paid in the EU. It means a lot here.

So I guess going back to the original parent's point: if your company is producing stuff in Europe, proprietary screws are just fine from a consumer point of view. Which kind of confirms everyone's suspicions about EU regulations... they're just foreign company shakedowns under the guise of "protecting the consumer."
by api | 2025-12-22 15:08:15+00:00
My lord... this thing probably requires the power grid to do a generation dispatch when you turn it on.

When I was a kid I lived down in Southeastern Kentucky (Somerset) which gets a lot of its power from the local lake via hydro. My grandfather had this large (not this big but big) tube TV, the old wooden case kind. When you turned it on it'd take about ten seconds in which you could hear tube heaters tinkling, followed by a "grrrnnnnnzzzzz" sound as the tube came to life. I remember my uncle joking that the lake level started visibly falling.

Between LCDs/etc. and LED lighting, the amount of efficiency improvement we've done in home electronics is wild. I can now put my hand right on an equivalent to 100W light output light bulb and it's just... warm.
by imadatalla | 2025-12-22 15:09:10+00:00
Agreed, about the widespread misunderstanding of what LLMs are/aren't. Treating probabilistic models as decision engines is an error, and I think you're right about liability issues.

Especially concerning that, even with those limitations, these systems are already being deployed inside workflows that influence decisions... I assume hiring (and maybe firing down the road?), content moderation, surveillance, targeting, triage. It's often done with the assumption that "the model is good enough" or that human oversight will catch errors later. In practice, that oversight tends to erode once systems scale.

Wondering how organizations are handling that gap: what the models can do vs. what they're implicitly trusted to do once integrated into real systems.
by whitehexagon | 2025-12-22 15:09:21+00:00
SimonW used to have more articles/guides on local LLM setup, at least until he got the big toys to play with, but well worth looking through his site. Although if you are in parts of Europe, the site is blocked at weekends, something to do with the great-firewall of streamed sports.

https://simonwillison.net/

Indeed, his self hosting inspired me to get Qwen3:32B ollama working locally. Fits nicely on my M1 pro 32GB (running Asahi). Output is a nice read-along speed and I havent felt the need for anything more powerful.

I'd be more tempted with a maxed out M2 Ultra as an upgrade, vs tower with dedicated GPU cards. The unified memory just feels right for this task. Although I noticed the 2nd hand value of those machine jumped massively in the last few months.

I know that people turn their noses up at local LLM's, but it more than does the job for me. Plus I decided a New Years Resolution of no more subscriptions / Big-AdTech freebies.
by concinds | 2025-12-22 15:09:36+00:00
The "stricter" privacy rules of "Accept all" banners that send your data to 1000+ companies? Or "Accept all", but to Refuse you must tap a small grey link and manually uncheck dozens of boxes? Or worse, banners that force you to choose between accepting all tracking or paying a monthly subscription, blatantly illegal in the EU but ubiquitous in Italy even among large companies and news sites?

Meanwhile ATT blocks access to IDFA (instead of making it a pinky promise), and if apps were honest and were denied ATT it should disable other tracking too. The user has already indicated lack of consent.
by timerol | 2025-12-22 15:10:12+00:00
I was surprised to see "An Abundance of Katherines", given that it's not John Green's newest or most highly regarded work. I looked into the comments to see why it was being discussed, but it seems to be a classification error - all of the comments are discussing "Abundance", the political nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. That one makes more sense on the list, given that it was released this March
by marcthe12 | 2025-12-22 15:10:15+00:00
Basically the scrappers do not bother to cache your website or if they do, with an insanely low ttl. Also they do not specialize the content. So the worst hit sites are something like git hosting due the bfs style scrape (every link). The worst part is alot of this is done via tunneling so ip can be different each time or from residential ops. Which makes it annoying.
by bane | 2025-12-22 15:10:22+00:00
Sometime in 2006 we bought a house and our realtor gave us a gift certificate for $2500 at Best Buy (weird, but...those were the days). A brand new, state of the art 720p DLP projection TV was just a hair under that - we still have it and it works great. But I had a couple dollars to burn off on the card.

I happened to have noticed that they were trying to clear out any remaining floor models of CRTs. One of them was an absolutely giant Samsung, memory says it was >34", but I'm not sure how big...with a sticker on it for, and I'll never forget this...$.72.

Soooo two big TVs for the price of one!

Long story short, we were moving out of that house, CRT tvs were long since obsolete and that TV hadn't even been turned on for at least 5 years. So we decided to throw it away. I had never picked it up before and had forgotten how heavy CRTs could be. I ended up having to get two friends to come help me move it to the curb, it was well over 250 lbs. The trash company also complained when they had to pick it up and had to make a return trip.

I kinda regret getting rid of it, but it was among the heaviest pieces of furniture in our house.
by Clamchop | 2025-12-22 15:10:23+00:00
You don't have to pass it through a DAC. There's no equivalent of HDCP for protecting digital audio end to end. Crudely, you could capture S/PDIF but really, skip that and just output to a virtual audio device for recording. No DAC in the path either way.

But yes, it is inconvenient and slow.
by freedomben | 2025-12-22 15:10:32+00:00
Unfortunately I don't have any advice for recovering the money, as that's just so far outside of my knowledge field.

This may not help, but you have my utmost sympathy. An elderly lady that I know recently lost her husband and her only son, and got scammed out of much of her savings by people exploiting her horrible circumstances. She had to come out of retirement and go back to work because of it.

I think crimes like this are among the most evil you can commit to people. I really wish that law enforcement organizations would chase these down and prosecute as aggressively as they would if there had been a murder or something committed. They are fully capable of doing so when it's something that they care enough about, but they just don't seem to care about people like your mother and my friend. It breaks my heart and I really wish I could do something about it as well.
by clrflfclrf | 2025-12-22 15:10:33+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars

> Despite his moral quandaries, von Braun participates in the Nazi's V-2 rocket program during World War II to further his ambitions in rocket engineering. The film carefully depicts his efforts to reconcile his love for scientific exploration with the knowledge that his work is being used for destructive purposes.

I have a similar short story idea where a person of the calibre of Elon Musk who works so hard is made to feel and see his successful moonshot projects being used for destroying and subjugating nations. This would be similar to Oppenheimer. Another twist I can take with the story is Hero "Elon" knows about this outcome but still in the hope of change in institutional ideology over decades hopes for better use for his technology. In the movie Watchmen, Ozymandias feels the pain of millions he is going to kill to save future billions.

Watchmen: Killing millions to save billions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu2DdkOxLNs
by phil21 | 2025-12-22 15:11:17+00:00
It’s largely a market signal, it seems. I was listening to a podcast with an ex-GM engineer and he said basically the business end is entirely driven by financing vehicles. Very little profit is derived from selling a car itself, nearly all the profit comes from the finance end of the business either on leases or car loans. Americans overall drive cars for a very short period of time before upgrading.

That, coupled with massive consumer preference for “zero maintenance” vehicles like supposedly not having to change transmission fluid for 100k miles. The manufacturers know that such a schedule will guarantee (more) damage, but it’s considered a marketing expense to handle early failures under warranty but sell the idea your car just needs an oil change every 10k miles and nothing else. After that first owner and warranty period the parts are simply considered a consumable.

If you plan on keeping your car for more than 3-5 years, toss the maintenance schedule handbook in the trash and figure out what an actual reasonable schedule is. It’s probably at minimum double the recommendations are.
by eduction | 2025-12-22 15:11:26+00:00
> In Japan, it sold for 2.6 million yen, but in the United States, it retailed for $40,000, a significant markup. To be fair, shipping them across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States must have been expensive.

If they were going all the long way around to the Atlantic that would indeed explain the markup. Not sure why they would though.
by surajrmal | 2025-12-22 15:11:47+00:00
15 years ago, it was incredibly common to see folks texting things like "c u ltr". It made its way into instant messaging (where folks had a keyboard), but slowly disappeared once everyone had smartphones that autocorrected everything. I don't think it's strange to see that people prefer it stylistically. Text has very little in the way of showing emotions or intentions, so everything you can do to alter that is something to be used. People want to be less formal sometimes.
by blenderob | 2025-12-22 15:12:05+00:00
I want to vent about the way the word "algorithm" is increasingly used as shorthand for AI-driven, attention-sucking systems.

"Algorithm" is a beautiful and very old word. Long before recommender systems and engagement metrics, it meant precise problem-solving methods. Quicksort is an algorithm. Binary search is an algorithm. GCD is an algorithm. Most of modern technology exists because of algorithms in this broader, richer sense. It is one of the foundations of CS.

Yes, machine-learning systems are also algorithms. But collapsing the term to mean only opaque, attention-maximizing mechanisms strips it of its meaning and history. It taints a neutral technical concept as something manipulative by default.

It's more so disappointing when this comes from people in tech. We should be more careful with our vocabulary. Maybe we should call these systems what they are. Maybe "engagement engines", "recommender systems", or "attention-suckers" instead of letting one narrow and disturbing use redefine the word altogether.
by pcarroll | 2025-12-22 15:12:36+00:00
Thanks for that feedback. I share your feelings about Linux. It never occurred to us that it would be reminiscent of old MS days. We were going for "clean and uncluttered".

If it makes you feel better, all core development for Netrinos is done on Linux. Then, the code is adapted to work on macOS and Windows. Almost all of the code is cross-platform, including the UI. Only the implementation details are platform specific.

e.g. Linux uses nftables. MacOS uses pfctl. Windows, we had to write our own packet filter to avoid touching the often misconfigured Windows Firewall.
by palmotea | 2025-12-22 15:12:41+00:00
> It's just the nature of journalism and headlines.

It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth, to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding. If lots of people end up thinking men biting dogs is a bigger problem than dogs biting men, they've failed at that.

They really ought to put up some kind of corrective explanation (sort of like the NYT's disclosures of their lawsuit with OpenAI) in a prominent place of most articles that could leave a wrong impression on readers. That shouldn't be much of a problem for the NYT (which I'm most familiar), because its articles tend to be longer with much more background and context than those of its competitor the Wall Street Journal.
by indianmouse | 2025-12-22 15:12:42+00:00
Yep. Stating Github and providing a non existent Github link is a serious redflag which brings trust issues.

Either provide the Github (for whatever reasons) or remove the link from your website. I am assuming it is closed source.

Personally I don't trust new VPN solutions without published source code!

Alternatives: Tailscale with Headscale or better Self-hosted Netbird if one is a itty-bitty IT savvy.

Netbird (self-hosted) offers a lot lot more with the self-hosted solution.
- SSO
- Independent networks
- Superb policies / ACLs
- Keybased onboarding
- auto-expiration and a lot more like integrations and what not!

Tough to beat the Netbird Open source offering if one tends to spent a little time and effort (though not everyone's cup of coffee!)

Such can look at tailscale's offering since the free version of Tailscale offers more than what is offered here and all the client applications are open source and constantly updated.

If pricing is going to the only difference, (at a high level, everything under the hood looks similar - wireguard based, zero config, p2p mesh, port forwarding etc etc.,) bring a lot more trust by offering an open source version like others.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-12-22 15:12:44+00:00
I’m largely similar, except don’t even feel anything for spouse anymore either.

Even nice vacations aren’t enjoyable the way they used to be.

All started at the beginning of the pandemic (long before getting COVID).

Have had poor luck getting doctors to diagnose and treat actual problems, so haven’t tried for this.

Medically quite healthy by all measures.

What confuses me is I see people 10-20 years older with passions for doing things. They seem to have a zest for life that I cannot comprehend.
by energy123 | 2025-12-22 15:12:51+00:00
> I think the general population generally prefers recommendation algorithms

Not really. It's a dopamine addiction, like a gambling addict 'preferring' that a casino is nearby. But they know it makes them miserable. That's why people would pay money to quit.

https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/would-you-pay-to-qui...

What other product would people pay to not use? Only products that harm you.

I'm counting on a European country or Australia to try first, where the social media companies don't have much influence.
Ask HN: What Self-Hosted Observability Tools do You Use?
by rcarmo | 2025-12-22 15:13:37+00:00
I’ve been doing a bunch of my own testing and evals, but I was wondering what other people use and rely upon, and thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask:

- is there a simple, cross-scenario tool that you can use for VM/container/app metrics that isn’t a cobbled together wrapper around Grafana?

I find myself needing CPU/RAM/IO counters from VMs, similar from LXC/Docker, and NewRelic-like APM counters and traces from my apps.

I have been playing with various OpenTelemetry tools, and even as I sort of start rolling my own, I find myself pining for the simplicity of things like Smokeping and Cacti (which were great for tracking metrics over time, even if they don’t cover traces)

Any ideas/oponions? Something with ready made dashboards would be great, but ideally a single container with minimal footprint to grab/store/display metrics would be perfect. Think Gitea/Forgejo for metrics.
by mritchie712 | 2025-12-22 15:13:58+00:00
tacking on to the "New Kind Of" section:

New Kind of QA: One bottle neck I have (as a founder of a b2b saas) is testing changes. We have unit tests, we review PRs, etc. but those don't account for taste. I need to know if the feature feels right to the end user.

One example: we recently changed something about our onboarding flow. I needed to create a fresh team and go thru the onboarding flow dozens of times. It involves adding third party integrations (e.g. Postgres, a CRM, etc.) and each one can behave a little different. The full process can take 5 to 10 minutes.

I want an agent go thru the flow hundreds of times, trying different things (i.e. trying to break it) before I do it myself. There are some obvious things I catch on the first pass that an agent should easily identify and figure out solutions to.

New Kind of "Note to Self": Many of the voice memos, Loom videos, or notes I make (and later email to myself) are feature ideas. These could be 10x better with agents. If there were a local app recording my screen while I talk thru a problem or feature, agents could be picking up all sorts of context that would improve the final note.

Example: You're recording your screen and say "this drop down menu should have an option to drop the cache". An agent could be listening in, capture a screenshot of the menu, find the frontend files / functions related to caching, and trace to the backend endpoints. That single sentence would become a full spec for how to implement the feature.
by peerrate | 2025-12-22 15:14:12+00:00
Whether you sell services, goods, or rentals, reputation is everything in peer-to-peer marketplaces.

The problem: trust is locked to each platform. If you move to a new marketplace, expand to another one, or start selling somewhere else, you often have to start from zero — even if you’ve already proven yourself elsewhere.

We’re exploring PeerRate, an idea to make reputation more portable across peer-to-peer platforms using user-consented, read-only trust signals.

We’d love feedback from both sellers and marketplace operators:
– Is this a real pain point?
– What kind of reputation signals would actually matter?
by randerson | 2025-12-22 15:14:59+00:00
Am I? The second paragraph is about how to get around legally if you don't have a license. First and third paragraphs are about not making the bad decisions that you get into that situation in the first place (prevention is better than cure). What am I missing?

This thread is about driving without a license, but from the perspective of enforcing the laws to keep unlicensed drivers (who are generally more dangerous) off the roads to make the community safer. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes its unrealistic to expect 100% of unlicensed drivers to stay off the road (for reasons you have outlined), there is a large enough % of unlicensed drivers for whom visible law enforcement would be a deterrent and that would at least be an improvement over today.
by jader201 | 2025-12-22 15:15:30+00:00
Agreed, but when the source is mass media, they should be attributed the blame, not social media.

Social media is responsible for spreading much more misleading/manipulative information than even mass media would report on.

That is, if we saw a chart of how social media manipulated the news, it would be way more exaggerated than this.

Not defending mass media — I just believe social media can be 10x more misleading than what this chart would have us believe (whereas mass media is already terrible.)
by mlinhares | 2025-12-22 15:15:43+00:00
Same here, I'm seeing more and more people getting into these interactions and wondering how long until we have widespread social issues due to these relationships like people have with "influencers" on social networks today.

It feels like this situation is much more worrisome as you can actually talk to the thing and it responds to you alone, so it definitely feels like there's something there.