MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tmfdagger | 2026-02-04 02:01:22+00:00
StraighterLine (straighterline.com) | Staff Software Engineer (Full Stack) | Remote (US Only) | Full Time

Our mission is to create opportunities for career advancement through access to affordable education. We are also the market leaders in early childhood (ECE) training and certifications. We are looking for two Staff Engineers to help lead development on next-generation learning platforms.

You will be building modern, API-driven, scalable services and applications with React/Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL, and AWS, using AI-assisted development practices. You will collaborate on architecture, shared services, internal tooling, and interface design, owning features from concept to production.

Competitive base salary, bonus and benefits (401k match).

Apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/straighterline/36d8f56b-14ac-4a35-af0c... and please mention HN under Additional Information.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-04 02:02:25+00:00
No, but really, where will it come from?

If (as seems to be the case) nobody can identify a specific source of latent demand that is large enough to soak up the two order of magnitude increase in the supply of heavy lift launch capacity that Elon wants to deliver, then that strongly suggests that SpaceX does not actually have a business plan for Starship. Or at least, not a business plan that’s been thought through as clearly as a $5 billion (and counting) investment would warrant.

“Defense” is not nearly specific enough to count as an answer. What kind of defense application, specifically, do you have in mind, and why does it need specifically this kind of heavy lift capacity to be viable?
by cdf | 2026-02-04 02:03:26+00:00
I was listening to a podcast featuring Gavin Baker and he went on and on about models being defined in generations, and we will be moving from Blackwell generation to Rubin generation soon and it will be awesome. This is not something I know a lot about and he sounds like an expert I could learn so much from.

Then he talked about datacenters in space and this is something I have some appreciation for, and I immediately knew he couldnt have done much Physics, and sure enough, I was right.

There are "experts" out there who basically have no idea what they are talking about, "it is absolute zero in space in the shadow!", as though radiative cooling is that effective.

And that's not even talking about part failures. How do we replace failed parts in space? This is a scam, but everybody is afraid to openly challenge eloquent "experts" who are confidently wrong.
by 8note | 2026-02-04 02:03:35+00:00
> kind of like AWS us-east-1

is this the right comparison? us-east-1 goes down a lot to an extent because everything goes down at the same time, rather than as a collective need to stay up. its one of the worst AWS regions if what you care about is stability and up time. too big to fail does not add extra up time guarantees to that region
by butvacuum | 2026-02-04 02:03:42+00:00
After the last round of this a few weeks/months ago I realized: Assuming the investors for this are too stupid to do the figures seen here themselves is folly. So, they must be factoring in something else-

Perhaps space based DCs allow for expansion into ITAR controlled countries and/or sanctioned countries/individuals.

Maybe throw in the fact that nobody can REALLY verify system behavior once its up there. So NSA/CIA etc sure are chomping at the bit to allow it.

I'm sure there's others I haven't thought of- probably less outlandish/tinfoily as well.
by kittikitti | 2026-02-04 02:03:43+00:00
My HP printer already does this. It blocks random prints on paper. I once tried to print a target practice thing for snowballs and it would always fail. There were other cases too. My very expensive printer has some other very sketchy issues with it. It's easily the least secure device I have connected to my network. This surveillance state has gone too far and I'm so sick of it.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-04 02:05:07+00:00
> anything, Corporations were more liberal than the population at large in America

They are more to the left of the population, yes. But nothing about them or the current left in the US is liberal in any real way anymore. The Dems are nothing like they were before about 2008 and the policies they push are very very different from the ones passed in that era.

PS Liberal means French enlightenment ideals which (for example) includes meritocracy as a core tenant.
by alansammarone | 2026-02-04 02:05:45+00:00
Yep. I'm no fan of Elon - exactly the opposite, in fact - but this is just someone trying to look smart and eco-friendly by doing the simplest, least ambitious, most obvious and surface-level analysis.

The sentence you mention was indeed a give away, but there are many others.
Worst case scenario, nothing works and Elon burns a bunch of money, part of which goes into jobs and research. Best case scenario, we actually move away from technologies from the 50's and end up with daily, cheap earth-to-low-orbit (ideally something better than that - how about the moon?), no more whining about energy costs, and laser communication IRL. That's just the obvious stuff.

Being "realistic" and "having a budget" is what companies like Google do. That's all good, but we have enough of those already.
by trhway | 2026-02-04 02:05:47+00:00
>1. The capital costs are higher, you have to expend tons of energy to put it into orbit

putting 1KW of solar on land - $2K, putting it into orbit on Starship (current ground-based heavy solar panels, 40kg for 4m2 of 1KW in space) - anywhere between $400 and $4K.
Add to that that the costs on Earth will only be growing, while costs in space will be falling.

Ultimately Starship's costs will come down to the bare cost of fuel + oxidizer, 20kg per 1kg in LEO, i.e. less than $10. And if they manage streamlined operations and high reuse. Yet even with $100/kg, it is still better in space than on the ground.

And for cooling that people so complain about without running it in calculator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46878961

>2. The maintenance costs are higher because the lifetime of satellites is pretty low

it will live those 3-5 years of the GPU lifecycle.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 02:06:01+00:00
Social sciences departments around the world should be working overtime to explain this graph: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/...

It’s a graph of regional GDP per capita as a percentage of the U.S. Latin America was around 40% around 1950, but has declined to around 25% by 2018. Sub-saharan africa has slowly lost ground since 1950. Southeast asia has gone from almost as poor as Africa in 1950 to almost as rich as southern europe (50% of US GDP per capita).

What makes some countries rich and some countries poor? In the modern era, I think political dysfunction explains a lot. Developing countries with neoliberal governments that started out authoritarian (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan) have done well. Countries that can’t maintain a stable government have suffered.

In my home country, they were experiencing 5-6% per capita GDP growth for about 15 years: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/.... But then a motley coalition of idealistic students and Islamists overthrew the government. I suspect that will lead to a lengthy period of slow growth, because who wants to invest in a country where people regularly overthrow the government?
by 46493168 | 2026-02-04 02:06:03+00:00
>What food has the term "UPF" helped you learn is 'unhealthy', which you otherwise would have thought of as healthy?

It's not that I didn't know that certain foods were unhealthy. The term UPF (understood to mean foods that are manufactured specifically to be hyper-palatable while otherwise lacking in nutrients) taught me the reasons why I find certain foods harder to resist than others, and consequently what foods I should focus on instead (higher protein / high fiber).
by IFC_LLC | 2026-02-04 02:06:20+00:00
Just like an idea of using an oil-powered carriage instead of a good'ol horsie was in 1910.

Listen, I totally agree, the tech makes absolutely no sense. It does not. But the fact that someone is willing to spend money on figuring this out is pretty good. The worst thing is going to happen, we'll have a cheaper space travel. And let the guys to have the first hit at it, wasting money on an enormous amount of research needed.

Ain't my money being spent.

As long as we don't have to use Russian rockets to send the US payload to the orbit, I'm cool with it.
by m4rtink | 2026-02-04 02:06:28+00:00
Yet another reason why fully open hardware and open software is so important + of course a fully open source slicing pipeline.

It might be a bit less convenient than a shiny vendor locked Bamboolab closed machine but it is perfectly doable.

A filament 3D printer is basically just a control board, firmware (like Marlin), bunch of off the shelf steppers, two thermistors, heatbed and nozzle heater. If you have modern stepper drivers you don't even need end stop switches.

Put this together and you have a machine you fully own and control and can easily repair or upgrade. Then just feed it GCODE generated by something like Prusa Slic3r from STL/obj/step files and that's it.

Avoids any shenanigans like forcing you to use only blessed consumables or trying to dictate what you can print.
by zmhanham | 2026-02-04 02:06:30+00:00
Ash can be used in conjunction with Phoenix, they aren't mutually exclusive. Ash is really just a framework for modeling your domain(s) and getting a bunch of helpful functionality for free (e.g advanced querying capabilities, pagination, data validations, json+graphql apis, and more) Then you could use those functionalities with phoenix to build a full web app. Or you could use something else other than phoenix, it's up to you :)
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-04 02:06:38+00:00
This is getting tiresome. I can make the operations as complicated as necessary by comparing all possible permutations of the input string w/ every other permutation & that will not be reducible to standard attention comparisons. The n-gram was a simple example anyone should be able to understand. You can ask your favorite chatbot to compute the complexity for the permutation version.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-04 02:06:49+00:00
Low literacy is driven by systemic poverty and, more recently, social media consumption.

Insulting facts are still facts, regardless of feelings about the facts. I am not in politics, being liked is irrelevant to me.

https://youtu.be/ZvCT31BOLDM

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving...
by EGreg | 2026-02-04 02:06:53+00:00
They’re not exploiting them, it is a function of not having really strong safety nets or even UBI.

So a lot of people are desperate to survive and keep a roof over their head.

And technology makes money flow upwards to the rich and corporations.

Soon with AI employment is going to become pity-employment. Make-work jobs. Because people just can’t seem to trust other people to be charge of their own time and have free money. Overton window in USA is not there yet. So capital will find ridiculous ways to exploit labor via the desperation of the masses. Maybe gig economies and race to the bottom for service providers as out-of-work people flood the market with useless crap, who knows.
by ahnick | 2026-02-04 02:07:13+00:00
Exactly. How many times have we seen politics adapt to the new realities of the day? Everything is really downstream of technology.

A few examples:

- The Printing Press

- The Steam Engine

- Factories

- The Internal Combustion Engine

- The Internet

- "Smart" Phones

- Social Networks

- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)
by abraae | 2026-02-04 02:07:32+00:00
The example - the cable not extending far enough from the post to make a connection - was explained in the article as something he failed to specify properly. Not a failure of the manufacturing partner.

For this not to be a problem a worker would have to notice it and put two and two together, then investigate further and then persuade their supervisor to raise it with the customer and get a change made to the spec.

While enjoying your faith in the rigour and attention to detail of the US assembly line worker, I think this example tells exactly the story the article says it does - that you have to specify everything.
by N_Lens | 2026-02-04 02:07:35+00:00
The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans.

That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.

I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.
by buildsjets | 2026-02-04 02:07:49+00:00
I had my corporate card get cloned by the Wendys at Seatac airport, about 10 years ago. Do you consider that to be a sketchy restaurant? Why are you victim blaming?

I had not used the card in several weeks. Coffee and a breakfast sandwich at Wendys was the only purchase I made that day. ~4 hours later my card was declined when checking in to my hotel in LA. Called their security department, they wanted to know whether I had authorized a $4000 purchase at a Best Buy in Dallas.
by MinimalAction | 2026-02-04 02:07:51+00:00
Nice article! The upshot is that the boom of Chinese commodity prices in the mid-2010s is what stopped poor countries from catching up. That's a high level answer, but there's more nuance to it. In many places, I firmly believe the poor governance added with unnecessary bureaucracy is how half the countries lose sight on development. The prime example is India and to some extent Brazil.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-04 02:07:53+00:00
YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged their companies to use products and services from other companies in their portfolio.

The simplest explanation is that this is a mostly symbolic move: They want to show that the stable coin and crypto companies they invest in are actually trusted by YC. It starts to look hypocritical if an investor is funding crypto companies and praising them as important breakthroughs, but not actually using them where it’s important.
by rafaelmdec | 2026-02-04 02:09:58+00:00
I'm not gonna say don't do it. By all means, go ahead and try it out.

My only advice is: don't get married to the solution.

Or, in wiser words, fall in love with the problem, not the solution (I think Ury Levine coined that one).

At the end of the day, either you'll have learned or succeeded.
by marcosdumay | 2026-02-04 02:10:13+00:00
> Particularly at high altitudes.

Well, maybe "higher", but not really high.

The lower the altitude, the larger the odds of making one, in a quadratic fashion. But also the lower the altitude, the less time it will last.

There is some space where it lasts basically forever but is small enough for it to happen. It's higher than LEO, and way lower than things like GEO.
by troad | 2026-02-04 02:10:45+00:00
> Yet we look at phones, and we see people accepting outrageous permissions for many apps

The data doesn't support the suggestion that this is happening on any mass scale. When Apple made app tracking opt-in rather than opt-out in iOS 14 ("App Tracking Transparency"), 80-90% of users refused to give consent.

It does happen more when users are tricked (dare I say unlawfully defrauded?) into accepting, such as when installing Windows, when launching Edge for the first time, etc. This is why externally-imposed sandboxing is a superior model to Zuck's pinky promises.
by s1artibartfast | 2026-02-04 02:11:12+00:00
By way of analogy, imagine someone making a $20k salary that can do big things while spending 10% of their salary projects. However, someone making $600k, spending 30% of that on projects can't get get meaningful work done.

These are the proportions we are talking about. It begs a lot of questions.

Are the projects really comparable? Did competence change? Did the working environment?
by N_Lens | 2026-02-04 02:11:38+00:00
The law (and the system/society) generally serves capital, instead of humans.
That's why big corporations can both use copyright against smaller companies and individual creators, while also ignoring the same copyright laws when it suits them.

I think this is unjust. As we see capital concentrate, we see more injustice as the power balance becomes more lopsided. This isn't good for anyone, not even the super wealthy because it undermines the stability of the whole system upon which their wealth depends.
by adventured | 2026-02-04 02:11:55+00:00
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.

Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.

Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 02:11:55+00:00
“Sharing wealth” is an idea that has millions of children’s blood all over it. It’s a recipe for keeping countries poor and backwards, so children die of disease, hunger, and political instability.

When my dad was born in a village in the British Dominion of Pakistan, India/Bangladesh/Pakistan and Singapore were similarly poor. Nehru went to Cambridge and learned about socialism. Lee Kuan Yew went to Cambridge and learned about capitalism and high-trust British people: https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8

The rest is history. Singaporeans now get to stay in their home country, while desis flee to Anglo countries to escape the society Nehru and their grandparents created.

Waiting for Europeans to give you money is a loser mentality, and people peddling that mentality in the name of “empathy” are causing harm. What the third world needs from Europe is the social and political technology that Europe itself used to become rich. That’s what people like LKY understood that so many third world leaders failed to learn.
by trcarney | 2026-02-04 02:12:01+00:00
Yeah i get that. I just hesitate to give any government even more power than they do now to silence people, which they would definitely use any law like that to do.

I will have to check that out, it sounds interesting. It was also pretty obvious how all the social media companies pushed the same narrative through COVID.

I don't like how these social networks and the media try to manipulate things but I don't think giving the government even more power will fix anything. It will probably make it worse. I think even if you had those laws on the books, you would still get manipulation through selective enforcement.

I think the only solution is education and individuals saying no to these platforms' and their algorithmic feeds. I think we are already seeing a growing movement towards people either not using social media or using it way less than they did previously. I know for me personally, I use X but only follow tech people i like and only look at the "following" tab. It is a much better experience than the "for you" tab
by MBCook | 2026-02-04 02:12:34+00:00
How much of this is because putting data centers in space is WAY harder for any terrestrial government to get their hands on and seize or block?

They make no sense otherwise.

The only other thing I can think of is the whole thing is just a scheme to get investment and they’re never going to actually go through with it.

At this point I kind of think the former is more likely.
by drecked | 2026-02-04 02:12:49+00:00
We need to get away from the NOVA system.

It’s terribly broken, which is unsurprising since it was never designed to do what it does, and ends up placing healthy, non addictive foods under the ultra processed category 4, while including hyper palatable foods that are not healthy at all in categories 1-3.

Hyper palatability, which is much better defined and is designed to capture what the NOVA system is actually used for, is likely a better categorization.
by tzs | 2026-02-04 02:13:47+00:00
> 99% of commercial profits come from the first 5 years after any piece of media gets published - book, music, film, artwork, etc.

Many songs make far more profits when they are featured in popular movies or TV shows decades or more after their first publication than they do in their first 5 years.

It is also not uncommon for songs released before a future big star becomes a big star to make much money (or even lose money), but when they become big people their early work sells.
by deaux | 2026-02-04 02:13:59+00:00
If the modern right's obsession with "ivory tower academics" was real instead of a stick with which to beat ideas they don't like, the field they'd focus on would be economics, not gender studies. Most of it is astrology for those who like to wear suits. It has been decades since the complexity and chaos factor of the real world has overtaken the ability to make meaningful correlations or predictions in all but the most straightforward cases where one institute (e.g. a central bank) controls everything.

It's made even worse by the great bias towards "everything about globalism and capitalism is obviously fantastic for the world!".

This case is such a prime example of both of the above. Firstly, the one-off China event having such a big impact on its own that general theories are entirely irrelevant. Second, of course

> "Now that those were swept away—they were, he said, merely a “temporary phenomenon”—the catch-up growth that economic theory predicted had finally arrived. Globalization was working; development was succeeding; the gap between rich and poor countries was closing.
by EdwardDiego | 2026-02-04 02:14:17+00:00
Then I see people claiming current AI is human equivalent because "humans make mistakes/hallucinate too." It's tiring.

I'll believe AI is approaching human equivalence when one writes the next great American novel, or becomes superstitious - if you're going to be human level, genuine creativity ex nihilo and/or pattern recognition that overfits into religious belief would convince me.
by 0x20cowboy | 2026-02-04 02:14:21+00:00
Lol, I like that as a joke, but I wouldn’t think you are saying “a person who has no idea how something works” their opinion should be given equal weighting as someone who actually knows? Maybe you are - that seems to be how things work now.

I think you already get what I am saying, but it seems that there are maybe 3 groups. 2 who know how things work under the hood and have differing opinions and are curious to hear the other side, and one group who have no idea how things work, are very loud, have sci-fi fantasies, and spout strong opinions.

I wouldn't call that discourse i would call it ignorance.
by floatrock | 2026-02-04 02:14:21+00:00
I mean, you don't have zoning in space, but you have things like international agreements to avoid, you know, catastrophic human development situations like kessler syndrome.

All satellites launched into orbit these days are required to have de-orbiting capabilities to "clean up" after EOL.

I dunno, two years ago I would have said municipal zoning probably ain't as hard to ignore as international treaties, but who the hell knows these days.