MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2026-02-04 03:36:48+00:00
> their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.

So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.

You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 03:37:17+00:00
> If you think there is no papework necessary for launching satellites, you are very very wrong

I would be. And granted, I know a lot more about launching satellites than building anything. But it would take me longer to get a satellite in the air than the weeks it will take me to fix a broken shelf in my kitchen. And hyperscalers are connecting in months, not weeks.
by awakeasleep | 2026-02-04 03:37:28+00:00
I completely failed to convey my point. It’s not about any of your beliefs.

The point is that you have been handed a pile of incoherent hog wash, and you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative. It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play. The point is you have to realize you are playing a game, in your head, and even if you can make a beautiful pattern out of the noise, it was still just noise.

Where there is actual meaning in life, its kind of obvious, you dont have to rewrite so much to find it.
by bartread | 2026-02-04 03:38:16+00:00
All of this and more.

For example: quite apart from the fact of how much rocket fuel is it going to take to haul all this shit up there at the kind of scale that would make these space data centres even remotely worthwhile.

I'm not against space travel or space exploration, or putting useful satellites in orbit, or the advancement of science or anything like that - quite the opposite in fact, I love all this stuff. But it has to be for something that matters.

Not for some deranged billionaire's boondoggle that makes no sense. I am so inexpressibly tired of all these guys and their stupid, arrogant, high-handed schemes.

Because rocket fuels are extremely toxic and the environmental impact of pointlessly burning a vast quantity of rocket fuel for something as nonsensical as data centres in space will be appalling.
by bibimsz | 2026-02-04 03:38:44+00:00
it all muddy and impossible to untangle. probably better not to focus on any one example. but i will say that both countries were basically under US military control through the 1930s, so there are external forces at play. gdp growth rates as trajectories probably say more than snapshots. ultimately I think it's self-evident that some genetic groups are more capable of advanced thinking than others, and that it shows up in development scores. Other factors also matter. All life is equally valuable under God. Some perform better on economics.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-04 03:38:50+00:00
> China is more stable than the U.S. China is also beating the pants off the U.S. in several sectors and in the ones they're not, they're rapidly catching up.

And another big difference is that during the US/Russia space race, the US had a GDP three times the size the GDP of Russia.

Now the US's GDP is only 50% bigger than China's GDP. So nearly 200% bigger vs Russia back then and only 50% bigger vs China now: it's not the same game anymore.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 03:39:30+00:00
The Marshall Plan was a very small amount of money. It was about $150 billion in today’s money, or about 5% of GDP of the recipient nations. The U.S. and its allies spent far more in Iraq for far fewer people. And the U.S. has nothing like that for Singapore, Korea, or Taiwan.

And Monroe Doctrine was primarily in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That doesn’t explain why Latin America got relatively rich during that period, and then fell behind once most of the intervention stopped.

Also, what counts as “support” is extremely nebulous. Which countries in Latin America had a coup where the U.S. was the but-for cause?
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 03:40:20+00:00
> Source? I can't immediately find anything like that

I’ve financed two data centers. Most of my time was spent over permitting. If I tracked it minute by minute, it may be 70 to 95%. But broadly speaking, if I had to be told about it before it was solved, it was (a) a real nuisance and (b) not technical.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-04 03:40:48+00:00
https://archive.ph/yLiFE

Not strictly ICE but very brown names.

Will they be most susceptible to a Buddhist chaplain convincing them that the IP has betrayed them ;)?

I read the Jew Steffi but I don't "live better" than bougie scum

Nice to know some west-slavs have retained their cultural heritage .. comparing with Polish lit, seems like KuK did some good after all ?

https://archive.ph/2026.02.02-142553/https://www.dw.com/de/f...

My defence of Zweig is that he moved from a damned monumentalist culture (KuK) to an even more monumentalist one (Brazil) :)

Was able to troll the flexhumble* Mann from beyond the EXIT !

*a function of age maybe? I hope not!
by hackit2 | 2026-02-04 03:42:04+00:00
It isn't that hard. I'm currently reverse engineering a old flight simulator game called A-10 Cuba. I had to teach myself X86 Assembly, and understand basic calling convention. Then C++ vtables, struct alignment and struct layout. How-ever you do need this basic level understanding of the core fundamental to help you along when the tools you use IDA, Ghidra that turn the assembly code back into C pseudo code.

So there is a big hurdle to get over in the initial stages but you soon find out that a lot higher code structure/scaffold isn't wiped out by the compiler. For example, the generated assembly code very closely mirrors the C/C++ function boundaries. This enables you to infer the over-all original code structure/layout basically from the call chain, and then you can manually step through and figure out what the original programmer was trying to achieve - abet the order of execution does get messed up by the compiler but it isn't that bad.

In my project with A-10 Cuba, I was successful in reverse engineering its file format, the over-all module layout, engine and rendering engine during my three weeks break. I still have some time to work out the AI logic, and mission design but one builds on another. What do I mean one builds on another? Well when you first start you have no types, not structs. So the first days you think you're making absolutly no progress because you're trying to calculate pointer offsets and structs layouts in IDA. I highly recommend Google Gemini or Claude code to do this heavy lifting because you can get away with a lot by asking it (for this IDA Pseudocode, infer what the struct layout is and tell me what it is doing?).

The first stage of getting those first struct layout is painstaking, then you soon can branch off one strut, or struct pointer to another. This feeds back like a feed-back loop - because programmers are lazy. And you soon have a large part of the struct/code-flow layout figured out.

You then take the structs/code-flow, and pesudo code and then do a re-write in a modern C/C++ compiler until you have a working version.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-04 03:42:22+00:00
> I don't think of base 10 being meaningful in binary computers.

They communicate via the network, right? And telephony has always been in base 10 bits as opposed to base two eight bit bytes IIUC. So these two schemes have always been in tension.

So at some point the Ki, Mi, etc prefixes were introduced along with b vs B suffixes and that solved the issue 3+ decades ago so why is this on the HN front page?!

A better question might be, why do we privilege the 8 bit byte? Shouldn't KiB officially have a subscript 8 on the end?
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 03:43:16+00:00
> when he talks about subject outside of his domain

Hate to burst your bubble. But I have a background in aerospace engineering. I’ve financed stuff in this field, from launch vehicles to satellites. And I own stakes in a decent chunk of the plays in this field. Both for and against this hypothesis.

So yeah, I’ll hold my ground on having reasonable basis for being sceptical of blanket dismissals of this idea as much as I dismiss certainty in its success.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-04 03:43:31+00:00
Actually the opposite is true.

If the environment was significantly more varied in health impact between twin comparisons than expected, then the correlations they found under estimate the genetic component.

Noise weakens correlation. Removing noise strengthens correlations.

Some randomness is part of the signal being studied, and some is undesired measurement noise to be controlled for. And it is only the latter that is beneficial to be carefully removed or otherwise controlled for.
by rpcope1 | 2026-02-04 03:44:16+00:00
I can't believe they haven't tried banning anyone from having a knee mill if they don't have an FFL yet (or just banned it entirely). It's not hard to convert an old inexpensive Bridgeport to CNC or just mill the parts by hand. Pandora's box is already open, and all this is is just useless flailing.
by dangero | 2026-02-04 03:45:02+00:00
There is tons of public information online about it. This is a strange approach to claim that the only way to know about a topic is to become an investigative journalist making phone calls to research groups.

Most of the usable water supply annually in CA comes from the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

This is also where the largest cloud seeding operations are.

People who claim cloud seeding ops only make a small impact on the usable water supply don’t understand that a small percentage shift in snowpack makes a difference between a drought and not a drought.

What I’m saying is that estimations of total cloud seeding water impact do align with the numbers needed to take the state out of a drought.

As I linked elsewhere there have been lawsuits in the past over cloud seeding causing floods.
by ziml77 | 2026-02-04 03:45:55+00:00
I'd say it's more true on Linux that malware can hide anywhere if you allow a sudo prompt (which people have been unfortunately been trained is normal when installing software).

Windows enforces driver signing and has a deeper access control system that means a root account doesn't even truly exist. The SYSTEM pseudo-account looks like it should be that, but you can actually set up ACLs that make files untouchable by it. In fact if you check the files in System32, they are only writable by TrustedInstaller. A user's administrative token and SYSTEM have no access those files.

But when it comes down to it, I wouldn't trust any system that has had malware on it. At the very least I'd do a complete reinstall. It might even be worth re-flashing the firmware of all components of the system too, but the chances of those also being infected are lower as long as signed firmware is required.
by o333 | 2026-02-04 03:47:13+00:00
The answer to this is very very simple.

Think about the stock return over a period - its composed of capital gains and dividends.

Now what happens capital gains disappears and perhaps turns into capital losses? Dividends have to go higher.

What does this mean? Less retained earnings / cashflows that can be re-invested.

Apple is the only one that will come out of this OK. The others will be destroyed for if they dont return cash, the cash balance will be discounted leading to a further reduction in the value of equity. The same thing that happened to Zuckerberg and Meta with the Metaverse fiasco.

Firms in the private sphere will go bust/acquired.
by rpcope1 | 2026-02-04 03:47:18+00:00
They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.
by jen20 | 2026-02-04 03:48:03+00:00
I do the same - largely because I open the IDE with `idea .`/`zed .` (or whatever) from a directory with the correct nix dev shell already loaded in order to ensure the correct toolchains get used.

Typically I have 3-4 different projects open at a time and probably 30-40 terminal windows across them and other places (in Ghostty).

Honestly it had never really crossed my mind that people used the built-in terminal for anything!
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-04 03:48:38+00:00
I've seen Sam Altman make similar claims in interviews, and I now interpret every statement from an Open AI employee (and especially Sam) as if an Aes Sedai had said it.

I.e.: "keep API model behavior constant" says nothing about the consumer ChatGPT web app, mobile apps, third-party integrations, etc.

Similarly, it might mean very specifically that a "certain model timestamp" remains constant but the generic "-latest" or whatever model name auto-updates "for your convenience" to the new faster performance achieved through quantisation or reduced thinking time.

You might be telling the full, unvarnished truth, but after many similar claims from OpenAI that turned out to be only technically true, I remain sceptical.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-04 03:48:57+00:00
> The old rules of reputation and shame are gone. The door is open to people who will generate and spam bad PRs and have nothing to lose from it.

The important part here is that reputation creates an incentive to be conscious of what you're submitting in the first place, not that it grants you some free pass from review.

There's been an unfortunate uptick in people submitting garbage they spent no time on and then whining about feedback because they trust what the AI put together more than their own skills and don't think it could be wrong.
by wtallis | 2026-02-04 03:49:21+00:00
NAND flash has overprovisioning even on a per-die basis, eg. Micron's 256Gbit first-generation 3D NAND had 548 blocks per plane instead of 512, and the pages were 16384+2208 bytes. That left space both for defects and ECC while still being able to provide at least the nominal capacity (in power of two units) with good yield, but meant the true number of memory cells was more than 20% higher than implied by the nominal capacity.

The decimal-vs-binary discrepancy is used more as slack space to cope with the inconvenience of having to erase whole 16MB blocks at a time while allowing the host to send write commands as small as 512 bytes. Given the limited number of program/erase cycles that any flash memory cell can withstand, and the enormous performance penalty that would result from doing 16MB read-modify-write cycles for any smaller host writes, you need way more spare area than just a small multiple of the erase block size. A small portion of the spare area is also necessary to store the logical to physical address mappings, typically on the order of 1GB per 1TB when tracking allocations at 4kB granularity.
by rayiner | 2026-02-04 03:49:55+00:00
India is a desperately poor country. It has a GDP per capita of under $2,700 annually. That’s poorer than the U.S. was in 1880! Singapore has a GDP per capita thirty times higher. If India had grown as quickly as Singapore since 1965, it would have a GDP per capita of $21,000, higher than Russia or Turkey. As recently as 1990, India was richer per capita than China. Today, China is more than four times richer than India per capita.

Of course if India can maintain the current growth trajectory for another couple of decades, and doesn’t fall into the middle income trap, that will change. But Nehru really fucked us all over. If he hadn’t become infatuated with socialism, India would already be on the precipice of being a developed country.
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-02-04 03:49:57+00:00
Also don’t underestimate the stupidity of inexperienced employees in their mid 20s…

One found someone installed a cracked Adobe Photoshop on a work PC. Probably a stupid one/off task. We were not graphic artists. Not 100% sure who did it but it was in an area only a few people had access.

The risk management team was not amused…
by yongjik | 2026-02-04 03:50:48+00:00
Worth mentioning that Park Chung-hee's "five-year economic development plans"[1] were the centerpiece of Korea's economic development during the 1960-70s, and we can draw direct parallels between that and Stalin's five-year economic plans [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_of_South_Korea

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_Soviet_...
by andreareina | 2026-02-04 03:51:19+00:00
You can derate/"underclock" a regular LED and it will run significantly cooler, heat being one of the big drivers of LED lifespan. Downsides are less output per lamp (so need more lamps, probably why long-life lamps are expensive on a per-lumen basis) and you need to do a bit of DIY.

bigclivedotcom video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISTB0ThzhOY
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-04 03:51:20+00:00
Same. Standalone terminals will always beat those built into other things in terms of being good at being a terminal. No need to pile more bloat onto an already bloated IDE/editor, and besides it feels kind of like those old combo TV+VCR units where neither the CRT tube nor the VHS player were great.

If I'd do anything to Xcode or Android Studio, it'd be to split more things out of them and make them excellent at their core tasks.
by michaelcampbell | 2026-02-04 03:51:21+00:00
> Every card remembers every rating you give it, as well as the time / date. This allows for Anki to solve for a 'forgetting curve', and predict when different cards have a chance to be forgotten.

True to a point; every card has its ratings, but the "forgetting curve" algo of FSRS is only tuned to the deck (or "option set") that the card is in, not per card.
by akdev1l | 2026-02-04 03:51:28+00:00
and you still need to mount volumes and add all sorts of holes in the sandbox for applications to work correctly and/or be useful

try to run gimp inside a container for example, you’ll have to give access to your ~/Pictures or whatever for it to be useful

Compared to some photo editing applications on android/iOS which can work without having filesystem access by getting the file through the OS file picker
Show HN: AI-credit – measure AI contribution to a codebase
by 924412409 | 2026-02-04 03:51:37+00:00
ai-contrib, a CLI that estimates how much code in a repo was actually written by AI tools.

It parses local session logs from tools like Codex/Cursor/Cline/Gemini/Opencode, extracts diffs, and only counts lines that still exist in the current working tree.
by throw3836284w | 2026-02-04 03:53:09+00:00
chabuduo is basically fail fast, fail early with Chinese characteristics. Maybe because I was in a frat, but talking to Chinese salespeople seems very similar to talking to my frat brothers.

Personally, I never really had too many issues sourcing from China because I made sure I was always introduced to a reliable partner first.

And secondly, I told them when deciding on two options, choose the better quality option, regardless of price.

Basically, I didn't tell them to save us much money as possible if that made all the difference.
by GMoromisato | 2026-02-04 03:53:11+00:00
China has a chance of landing humans on the moon before Artemis, but if it does, it will be because American's space program is more ambitious, not less.

Lanyue, which masses 26 metric tons, can land two (maybe four?) astronauts on the moon plus a 200 kg rover. Space X's Starship is designed to land 100 tons on the moon--that's 100 tons of payload.

Let's say you want to build a small moon base, one that's maybe 100 tons (ISS is 400 tons). How many Lanyue launches would be necessary? Maybe 10? Now remember that each launch is expendable. It will cost China between $500 and $1 billion per launch. That's $5 to $10 billion for a moon base, not counting the cost of the base itself!

Starship is designed to be fully re-usable. Their goal is to get each launch to cost $10 to $20 million total. To land 100 tons on the moon, they will have to refuel in orbit by launching between 10 and 20 tanker flights. That means one trip to the moon costs $200 to $400 million maximum. Even assuming that Starship underperforms and can only land 50 tons on the moon, we still only need two launches for a total cost of $800 million maximum.

That is literally 10 times cheaper than Chinese capabilities; alternatively, it is 10x the payload at the same cost.

Of course, there are two major developments that Space X still needs to demonstrate: rapid re-use (to bring the cost down) and in-space refueling. And that's why it's taken so long.

But if/when they pull it off, it won't really matter if China lands first. The American program is much more ambitious.
by o333 | 2026-02-04 03:53:56+00:00
"Gemini is practically guaranteed. With the ad model already primed, their financial resources, their traffic to endlessly promote Gemini (ala Chrome), their R&D capabilities around AI, their own chips, crazy access to training data, and so on - they'd have to pull the ultimate goof to mess up here"

Im not convinced on this TBH in the long-run. Google is seemingly a pure play technology firm that has to make products for the sake of it, else the technology is not accessible/usable. Does that mean they are at their core a product firm? Nah. Thats always been Apple's core thing, along side superior marketing.

One only has to compare Google's marketing of the Pixel phone to Apple - it does not come close. Nobody connects with Google's ads, the way they do with Apple. Google has a mountain to climb and has to compensate the user tremendously for switching.

Apple will watch the developments keenly and figure out where they can take advantage of the investments others have made. Hence the partnerships et al with Google.
by TheDong | 2026-02-04 03:55:50+00:00
> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!

Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).

The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).

The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.

People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.

Make sense now?
by Besibeta | 2026-02-04 03:55:52+00:00
The problem with the "70% solution" is that it creates a massive amount of hidden technical debt. You aren't thinking hard because you aren't forced to understand the edge cases or the real origin of the problem. It used to be the case that you will need plan 10 steps ahead because refactoring was expensive, now people just focus in the next problem ahead, but the compounding AI slop will blow up eventually.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-04 03:56:44+00:00
I'd like an option to make things like inspectors into floating utility panels like used to be common in Mac apps back in the OS X 10.0-10.6 era. This would be really nice for multi-monitor setups… your editors could use the entirety of the main window while inspectors get tossed over to the laptop's built in screen or maybe onto one of those funky vertical strip external displays.