MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by okanat | 2026-02-04 01:01:05+00:00
There is a middle ground (maybe even closer to more limited OS design principles) exist. It is not just toys. Otherwise neither UWP on Windows nor Flatpaks or Firejail would exist nor systemd would implement containerization features.

In such a scenario, you can launch your IDE from your application manager and then only give write access to specific folders for a project. The IDE's configuration files can also be stored in isolated directories. You can still access them with your file manager software or your terminal app which are "special" and need to be approved by you once (or for each update) as special. You may think "How do I even share my secrets like Git SSH keys?". Well that's why we need services like the SSH Agent or Freedesktop secret-storage-spec. Windows already has this btw as the secret vaults. They are there since at least Windows 7 maybe even Vista.
by like_any_other | 2026-02-04 01:01:17+00:00
Strange. The report the article discusses shows that whites are, relative to their share of the population, underrepresented at top-200 colleges [1, page 13]. And this counts Jewish students as white - if one counts them separately, the numbers are even more stark, at least judging by 2023 Ivy League admissions, where non-Jewish whites were the most under-represented group, despite having the 2nd/3rd highest SAT scores [2].

Yet the report ignores this, saying only [1, page 15]: Data on who benefits from legacy preferences is severely limited, but some research has found that the advantage goes mainly to wealthy White applicants;

Are they not curious why, despite benefiting from high SAT scores and legacy status and "inherited advantage", whites are still under-represented? The group that produced the report, Class Action, claims to be about equity [3] - isn't it then their job description to care?

[1] https://www.joinclassaction.us/post/a-first-look-at-college-...

[2] https://archive.org/details/ivy_league

[3] Class Action is a student-driven organization of student, alumni, faculty, and civil society leaders organizing for a new academic social contract: one that rebuilds public trust by embracing inclusion over exclusivity, public service over private gain, and opportunity over inherited advantage. - https://www.joinclassaction.us/s-projects-side-by-side
by gpt5 | 2026-02-04 01:01:18+00:00
I'm confused about the level of conversation here. Can we actually run the math on heat dissipation and feasibility?

A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate. There are around 10K starlink satellites already in orbit, which means that the Starlink constellation is already effectively equivalent to a 50 Mega-watt (in a rough, back of the envelope feasibility way).

Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?

Why is starlink possible and other computations are not? Starlink is also already financially viable. Wouldn't it also become significantly cheaper as we improve our orbital launch vehicles?
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-04 01:01:26+00:00
My guess is it’s just another example of his habit of trying to use one of his companies to manufacture demand for another of his companies’ products.

Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense. There simply isn’t any pre-existing demand for the kind of heavy lift capacity and cadence that Starship is designed to deliver. Nor is there anyone who isn’t currently launching heavy payloads to LEO but the only thing holding them back is that they need weekly launches because their use case demands a whole lot of heavy stuff in space on a tight schedule and that’s an all-or-nothing thing for them.

So nobody else has a reason to buy 50 Starship launches per year. And the planned Starlink satellites are already mostly in orbit. So what do you do? Just sell Starship to xAI, the same way he fixed Cybertruck’s demand problem by selling heaps of them to SpaceX.
by unclad5968 | 2026-02-04 01:01:28+00:00
> Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not

I'd argue it's the other way around. Politics is downstream of everything else. In other words, it's easier to predict the politics of tomorrow based on the culture today than it is to predict the culture of tomorrow based on the politics of today. I'd go as far as to argue that political details are almost irrelevant except in the most extreme cases where political figures change culture (Constantine or Hitler for example). The current political climate is the result of the cultural climate, and if it wasn't, the people in office would have never been elected in the first place.

National politics doesn't teach you any more about how the world works than the politics of your workplace or your school.
by ggm | 2026-02-04 01:01:41+00:00
This is the second article about hardware supply from China I've read and it reads very much the same, albiet in a different niche (the other one was about SBC construction) -Anything you don't specify will be done least cost, and there is no amount of "least" which cannot be chased in manufacture.

The other one noted if you don't specify the density of plastic for bags, or paper for bags and packing, you get clingfilm thinner than you thought existed, and paper which is almost tissue in its weakness. You don't even get boxes to put the boxes in, if you don't specify boxes to be delivered in boxes. So now wrapping a pallet becomes a nightmare if they don't stack. And if you don't specify how many to stack, and how to pad the stack, they won't do unit height stacking if it costs labour time. Your risk.

Some of this like the casting mistake, or the knob thing, could happen anywhere and you have to be close to final manufacture spec to find out e.g. the metal coating impinges on the knob at the free space you specified, because your test rig didn't have powder coating. Or, that a design feature you need like the light entry holes, is used by the casting engineer as pour points because it looked like you'd specified mould pour points not functional holes.

But other things like "yea, you didn't spec how long to make the tails so we cut the tails as close as we could" is just the cheapening above: if you don't SAY its a 10cm tail for the connector, it will be 2cm, if saving 8cm of cable saves money for them.

I've read some stuff which says the cost of 5 SBC boards with pre-applied SMD is now so low, you might as well order 5 so you get at least 1 which works. That means they will wind up working out your tolerance for failure, and produce goods to meet that: if 1 in 5 is viable, thats what they'll target.
by svat | 2026-02-04 01:01:41+00:00
Knuth is not in favour of using kilo/mega/etc with power-of-2 meanings:

> I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.

He also calls it “an important issue” and had written “1000 MB = 1 gigabyte (GB), 1000 GB = 1 terabyte (TB), 1000 TB = 1 petabyte (PB), 1000 PB = 1 exabyte (EB), 1000 EB = 1 zettabyte (ZB), 1000 ZB = 1 yottabyte (YB)” in his MMIX book even before the new binary prefixes became an international standard.

He is merely complaining that the new names for the binary prefixes sound funny (and has his own proposal like “large megabyte” and notation MMB etc), but he's still using the kilo/mega/etc prefixes with decimal meanings.
by jofla_net | 2026-02-04 01:01:53+00:00
Both are true, and both should be allowed to exist as they serve different purposes.

Sound engineers don't use lossy formats such as MP3 when making edits in preproduction work, as its intended for end users and would degrade quality cumulatively. In the same way someone working on software shouldn't be required to use an end-user consumption system when they are at work.

It would be unfortunate to see the nuance missed just because a system isn't 'new', it doesn't mean the system needs to be scrapped.
by foobarchu | 2026-02-04 01:02:02+00:00
> Allowing states to differ wildly was what let bygones be bygones,

I'm not convinced this was ever a thing. A good example is Bleeding Kansas (something every elementary student in the state is taught about, or used to be), in which Missourians flooded the state to influence elections and intimidate free-staters in hopes of creating another slave state (it's still a minor point of rivalry to this day). Point being, during the lead up to the civil war we had states trying to control the politics of other states
by j45 | 2026-02-04 01:02:23+00:00
I'm not sure datacenters in space have to make suense to everyone, or from the perspective of earth.

Taking a creative step back, perhaps datacenters in space support something with Mars?

As much as that might not seem realistic, I also have to counterbalance it with operationalizing and commercializing SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla relatively quickly when so much stays at the R&D stage for so long.
by vel0city | 2026-02-04 01:02:56+00:00
We're able to make 3D computer chips on Earth today, and I don't know about you but all my organs managed to get made just fine on Earth. Doesn't seem like we need zero g to do either of these things.

Either way, this isn't about 3D printing organs, this is about launching AI compute into space. To do important stuff, like making AI generated CSAM without worry of government intervention.
by mylifeandtimes | 2026-02-04 01:02:58+00:00
Don't know enough about your neighborhood, and I might have misread your comment (the "under the eaves" makes me think these are outdoor)

but as someone who appreciates darkness I'd be really upset to live near someone who did this.

Unless you can keep your light on your property (as in, you are extremely rural).

why are you lighting up outside unless you are outside in the light?
by wat10000 | 2026-02-04 01:02:59+00:00
"They started looking at it 14 years ago" is all you need to see that there's no urgency. They should have started looking at it 60+ years ago when it first started being a prominent issue for cars. It's not like they didn't know about the problem.

All of that stuff could have been overcome a lot faster if there had been motivation to do so. What they should have done is declare, with plenty of advance warning (say, 10 years), that leaded avgas was going to become illegal when leaded car gas became illegal in 1996. If you want to keep flying, figure out how to do it without lead.

The reason it's taking ages is because the FAA just doesn't care that much. The EPA hasn't pushed on it very much. The FAA's priority is minimizing the impact to aviation, not protecting the public from lead pollution, so as long as the EPA doesn't push them, the FAA is content to take things very slow.

Put it on a shorter timeline and solutions would happen faster. Some of those solutions might involve some aircraft being retired due to not being viable in an unleaded world. The FAA doesn't want that, but it should have been done.
by kibwen | 2026-02-04 01:02:59+00:00
The original model of computer security is "anything running on the machine can do and touch anything it wants to".

A slightly more advanced model, which is the default for OSes today, is to have a notion of a "user", and then you grant certain permissions to a user. For example, for something like Unix, you have the read/write/execute permissions on files that differ for each user. The security mentioned above just involves defining more such permissions than were historically provided by Unix.

But the holy grail of security models is called "capability-based security", which is above and beyond what any current popular OS provides. Rather than the current model which just involves talking about what a process can do (the verbs of the system), a capability involves taking about what a process can do an operation on (the nouns of the system). A "capability" is an unforgeable cryptographic token, managed by the OS itself (sort of like how a typical OS tracks file handles), which grants access to a certain object.

Crucially, this then allows processes to delegate tasks to other processes in a secure way. Because tokens are cryptographically unforgeable, the only way that a process could have possibly gotten the permission to operate on a resource is if it were delegated that permission by some other process. And when delegating, processes can further lock down a capability, e.g. by turning it from read/write to read-only, or they can e.g. completely give up a capability and pass ownership to the other process, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
by jaswise | 2026-02-04 01:03:10+00:00
Location: US, Canada Remote: Yes (preferred) Willing to relocate: Not right now Technologies: Next.js, React, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Node.js, Python, FastAPI/Flask, PostgreSQL, Firebase/Supabase, Vercel, AWS, automation systems, workflow engines, and AI integrations (OpenAI/Groq). Experienced with building dashboards, platform UIs, internal tools, and AI-powered business features.
Résumé/CV: Available on request Email: jason.lee.dev[at]outlook[dot]com Portfolio: https://jasonleebuild.com

Summary: I’m a full-stack engineer who specializes in building fast, clean MVPs and shipping product without the corporate overhead. I’ve helped founders and small teams build AI-powered platforms, automation tools, and SaaS dashboards from zero → production. I’m comfortable owning features end-to-end — front-end, back-end, architecture, deployments — and working async across time zones.

I’m looking for roles where I can collaborate directly with the great founders, move quickly, and build software that actually gets used. Contract, fractional, and full-time opportunities welcome.
by JoshPurtell | 2026-02-04 01:03:15+00:00
For devtools cos providing skills - we've found that using GEPA where you optimize the skill content instead of the prompt works really well to make sure the skill actually gets claude code/ codex /opencode to successfully use your service. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19457 More here if interesting https://www.usesynth.ai/blog/environment-pools-managed-agent...
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-04 01:03:41+00:00
The current tooling isn't aggressive enough in that it's not the first thing that the agent checks for when it is prompted, at least for claude code. Way more often than not, i remind the agent that the skill exists before it does anything. It's very rare that it will pick a skill unprompted. Which to me kind of defeats the purpose of skills, I mean if I have to tell the thing to go look somewhere, I'll just make any old document folder in any format and tell it to look there.
by davnicwil | 2026-02-04 01:03:42+00:00
I share your skepticism and think it's the classic pattern playing out, where people map practices of the previous paradigm to the new one and expect it to work.

Aspects of it will be similar but it trends to disruption as it becomes clear the new paradigm just works differently (for both better and worse) and practices need to be rethought accordingly.

I actually suspect the same is true of the entire 'agent' concept, in truth. It seems like a regression in mental model about what is really going on.

We started out with what I think is a more correct one which is simply 'feed tasks to the singular amorphous engine'.

I believe the thrust of agents is anthropomorphism: trying to map the way we think about AI doing tasks to existing structures we comprehend like 'manager' and 'team' and 'specialisation' etc.

Not that it's not effective in cases, but just probably not the right way to think about what is going on, and probably overall counterproductive. Just a limiting abstraction.

When I see for example large consultancies talking about things they are doing in terms of X thousands of agents, I really question what meaning that has in reality and if it's rather just a mechanism to make the idea fundamentally digestable and attractive to consulting service buyers. Billable hours to concrete entities etc.
by Lammy | 2026-02-04 01:04:15+00:00
> Keep your code private if that's your attitude though. You don't want to share your code, you just want free advertisement.

There is no money nor mindshare to be had, so advertising is the entirely wrong way to think about it. This is a thought-process warped by the commercial sector. Even if somebody doesn't use my code they are still welcome to learn from it. They're welcome to use it, too, I just don't want to know about it :)
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-04 01:05:07+00:00
Any idea what kind of games you'll want to play by then?

I suspect it won't be hair-trigger combat games in dark dungeons where every strike results in a blizzard of gems and stars flying around the screen while teenagers scream into the mic.

But if you like Sudoku and crosswords you'll probably be good. That's my jam anyway.
by simoncion | 2026-02-04 01:05:09+00:00
> I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

That's wise.

However, TFA's purpose in assuming cooling (and other difficulties) have been worked out (even though they most definitely have not) was to talk about other things that make orbital datacenters in space economically dubious. As mentioned:

But even if we stipulate that radiation, cooling, latency, and launch costs are all solved, other fundamental issues still make orbital data centers, at least as SpaceX understands them, a complete fantasy. Three in particular come to mind:
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-04 01:05:12+00:00
But everything after headers can (almost) be a blob. Just copy buffers while taking care to track CRLF and look if what follows is a space. In fact, you have to do it anyhow, because line-folding is allowed in headers as well! And this "chunking long lines" technique has been around since the 70s, when people started writing parsers on top of hand-crafted buffered I/O.
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-04 01:05:15+00:00
OpenAI in my estimation has the habit of dropping a model's quality after its introduction. I definitely recall ChatGPT 5.2 being a lot better when it was introduced. A week or two later, its quality suddenly dropped. The initial high looked to be to throw off journalists and benchmarks. As such, nothing that OpenAI says in terms of model speed can be trusted. All they have to do is lower the reasoning effort on average, and boom, it becomes 40% faster. I hope I am wrong, because if I am right, it's a con game.
by j45 | 2026-02-04 01:05:19+00:00
No one might have lost their money with the collapse of the banks but with the large amount of new money printed, the value of each dollar will continue to erode.

Inflation and hyper-inflation can wipe out debts with future money that's cheaper more easily in some ways. I forget where I had read or learned more about this in other countries that had experienced it.
by kergonath | 2026-02-04 01:05:54+00:00
> I'd argue that more free market forces need to be applied to the biggest failings in the US - healthcare costs, housing costs, etc.

For housing maybe. It’s useful to have governments nudge developers to build affordable housing, which is less profitable, but if you have enough supply it can work. It does not work in most of Europe, where land is scarce and expensive and developers still want money. More than zoning laws, housing issues in Europe is in large part caused by the lack of government-build (or subsidised) affordable housing on the low end.

For healthcare, hell no! A single payer brings massive economies of scale and a lot of bargaining power, which limits price gouging. Hospitals are local natural monopolies, it makes no economic sense to have enough of them around to have meaningful competition. Demand is very inelastic and people just pay what they must to get treated (when they can pay). Insurance companies have interests that are directly opposed to those of their customers. Most people do not cost much for most of their lives, but have crippling expenses at some unpredictable points when they get sick or have an accident. National social security schemes smooth out the risks over the whole population, which makes everything more manageable. To me, healthcare is the opposite of a situation where free market makes sense.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-04 01:06:01+00:00
Claude can always self discover its own context. The question becomes whether it's way more efficient to have it grepping and lsing and whatever else it needs to do randomly poking around to build a half-baked context, or whether having a tailor made context injection that is dynamic can speed that up.

In other words, if you run an identical prompt, one with skill and one without, on a test task that requires discovering deeply how your codebase works, which one performs better on the following metrics, and how much better?

1. Accuracy / completion of the task

2. Wall clock time to execute the task

3. Token consumption of the task
by wolrah | 2026-02-04 01:06:12+00:00
Another important part is that a lot of microwave recipes specifically state to leave the food in the microwave for a period of time after it's done cooking, and often stir it after that. Almost no one actually does that.

Most people think they should be able to put food in, nuke it at full power for as short of a time as possible, and then immediately shove it in their face with no consequence and we all know that doesn't work yet most of us will keep doing it anyways.
by phire | 2026-02-04 01:07:02+00:00
As far as I can tell, Data centres in space only seem viable because their advocates insist on comparing them to standard terrestrial data centres.

And nobody ever calls them out on it.

Today's data centres are optimised for reliability, redundancy, density, repairability, connectivity and latency. Most of advertised savings come not from placing the data centre in space, but the fact that advocates have argued away the need for absolutely everything that modern data centres are designed to supply, except for the compute.

If they can really build a space data centre satellite for as cheap as they claim, why launch it? Just drive it out into the middle of the desert and dump it there. It can access the internet via starlink, and already has solar panels for power and radiators for cooling. IMO, If it can cool itself in direct sunlight in space, it can cool itself in the desert.

The main thing that space gains you over setting up the same satellite in the desert is ~23 hours of power, vs the ~12 hours of power on the ground. And you suddenly gain the ability to repair the satellite. The cost of the launch would have to be extremely cheap before the extra 11ish hours of runtime per day outweighed the cost of a launch; Just build twice as many "ground satellites".

And that's with a space optimised design. We can gain even more cost savings by designing proper distributed datacenter elements. You don't need lightweight materials, just use steel. You can get rid of the large radiators and become more reliant on air cooling. You can built each element bigger, because you don't have to fit the rocket dimensions. You could even add a wind turbine, so your daily runtime isn't dependant on daylight hours. Might even be worth getting rid of solar and optimising for wind power instead.

An actual ground optimised design should be able to deliver the same functionality as the space data centre, for much cheaper costs. And it's this ground optimised distributed design that space data centres should be compared to, not today's datacenter which are hyper-optimised for pre-AI use cases.

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

Space data centres are nothing more than a cool Sci-Fi solution looking for a problem. There have been mumblings for years, but they were never viable (even bitcoin mining was a bit too latency sensitive). Space data centre advocates have been handed a massive win with this recent AI boom, it's the perfect problem for their favourite solution to solve.

But because it's a solution looking for a problem, they are completely blind to other solutions that might be an even better fit.