MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-02-03 00:23:55+00:00
Or, just saying, we should eat babies because they are abundant and full of healthy nutrition for adult humans. [1]

Just because an idea has a some factors in its favor (Space-based datacenter: 100% uptime solar, no permitting problems [2]) doesn't mean it isn't ridiculous on its face. We're in an AI bubble, with silly money flowing like crazy and looking for something, anything to invest it. That, and circular investments to keep the bubble going. Unfortunately this gives validation to stupid ideas, it's one of the hallmarks of bubbles. We've seen this before.

The only things that space-based anything have advantages on are long-distance communication and observation, neither of which datacenters benefit from.

The simple fact is that anything that can be done in a space-based datacenter can be done cheaper on Earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal for the obtuse

[2] until people start having qualms about the atmospheric impact of all those extra launches and orbital debris
by crote | 2026-02-03 00:24:18+00:00
Isn't this already a major problem for AI clusters?

I vaguely recall an article a while ago about the impact of GPU reliability: a big problem with training is that the entire cluster basically operates in lock-step, with each node needing the data its neighbors calculated during the previous step to proceed. The unfortunate side-effect is that any failure stops the entire hundred-thousand-node cluster from proceeding - as the cluster grows even the tiniest failure rate is going to absolutely ruin your uptime. I think they managed to somehow solve this, but I have absolutely no idea how they managed to do it.
by SilasX | 2026-02-03 00:24:22+00:00
Whoa, I had to do a double-take on the Dorsey mention -- like, didn't he take the money and run while laughing at the folks that overpaid? But it seems he's retained a 2.4% ownership stake in Twitter/X, according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey#Twitter

Still, don't make the mistake I did, which was to read the above comment to mean "he put more money in at the time of the buyout", since he was called an "investor in X".
by rainsford | 2026-02-03 00:24:23+00:00
We also shouldn't overlook the fact that the proposal entirely glosses over the implication of the alternative benefits we might realize if humanity achieved the incredible engineering and technical capacity necessary to make this version of space AI happen.

Think about it. Elon conjures up a vision of the future where we've managed to increase our solar cell manufacturing capacity by two whole orders of magnitude and have the space launch capability for all of it along with tons and tons of other stuff and the best he comes up with is...GPUs in orbit?

This is essentially the superhero gadget technology problem, where comic books and movies gloss over the the civilization changing implications of some technology the hero invents to punch bad guys harder. Don't get me wrong, the idea of orbiting data centers is kind of cool if we can pull it off. But being able to pull if off implies an ability to do a lot more interesting things. The problem is that this is both wildly overambitious and somehow incredibly myopic at the same time.
by verdverm | 2026-02-03 00:24:35+00:00
Actually, almost everything stays within the private cloud, health care industry

GCP (main), AWS/Azure (b/c customers), Jenkins/Argo

TF/Helm are IaC and run from containers, no hashicorp services

CloudSQL, why are you sending your db queries to a SaaS?

LGTM for observability

The vendors we do have are WIF'd (i.e. code & secops scanning)

WIF is the key, mature vendors are supporting WIF, and amazingly the hyperscalers are supporting each others WIFs for cross-cloud, so we can give a GCP SA, AWS perms and vice versa
by adrianwaj | 2026-02-03 00:24:41+00:00
Is OP a bot?

'Since privacy will be an issue, "Shazam-like" filters will inhibit uncleared capture of voice.'

What does that mean in practice? Can you reword it please?

Anyway, there was an interesting name in crypto: OmniLayer, which "is like a classic car - it still runs and holds a place in history, but it’s no longer the daily driver for the crypto industry." (Gemini)

Perhaps a new layer for the OS is key. OmniLinux?

By this, shouldn't there be OS consolidation that allows interoperability, telemetry and control?

What I mean is that where do OS' exist today: car, washing machine, handheld, desktop, gardening, tv, pet feeding, lighting, camera, surveillance, appliances, climate control, blockchain, gaming, home automation, rentals/sharing - any electronic device --- can't there by a layer or OS to bridge them all to create a better distributed system?

At the very least, the new dimension can be used for power monitoring and saving, firmware updates and access control. Also, the rise of the Assistants will depend on it.
by II2II | 2026-02-03 00:24:52+00:00
> It's the same reason the IRS gives you a spot to declare your bribes and other illegal income.

The California example makes sense. They aren't asking a question that would lead to the admission of a crime. The IRS example doesn't make sense, since they are asking a question that would lead to the admission of a crime. Even if the answer was legally protected, a government who does not respect the law (or one that changes the law) could have nasty repercussions.
by robocat | 2026-02-03 00:25:15+00:00
The military (and/or government) should keep paying in advance for anything they need from SpaceX and make sure other unsecured creditors are not tooo significant.

When it all goes bankrupt, they can pay off the bonds for x¢ in the dollar and own SpaceX.

Perhaps if the gov could organize a little better, they'd make sure SpaceX owed lots of taxes and put themselves in front of the queue for ownership and screw other creditors (especially foreign).

Edit: looks like the US military doesn't spend that much on SpaceX: https://londoneconomics.co.uk/blog/publication/crouching-riv...
by adastra22 | 2026-02-03 00:25:23+00:00
That is not a realistic test, as any space engineer could’ve told them. First of all that’s on the very low end for a cosmic ray, an order of magnitude below the average energy. But the average energy doesn’t matter because there is a very wide distribution and the much more intensive cosmic rays do far more damage. It was also not a fully integrated test with a spacecraft, which matters because a high energy cosmic ray, striking other parts of the spacecraft, generates a shower of secondary particles that do most of the damage of a cosmic ray strike.
by bsder | 2026-02-03 00:25:34+00:00
> NLNET can only allocate funds to something an individual or small group proposes. If you want to propose something, please go ahead.

Well, gee, let's look at the sponsorship page for KiCad:
https://www.kicad.org/sponsors/sponsors/

I see a couple EU companies, but no EU governments. It takes a paltry $15K to be a Platinum sponsor.

I picked KiCad because PCB design is critical military infrastructure, the alternative programs are almost all under non-EU jurisdictions and could be pulled, and KiCad is both open source and local desktop to top it all off. This is exactly the kind of quiet, unflashy toil that desperately needs support from a government entity.

Lots of areas need support for open source alternatives that are controlled by proprietary software that might vaporize. I picked PCB design because it's an easy target. Cadence and Synopsys have locks on VLSI design domains that could get yanked from the EU. VHDL tooling is still disastrously poor. Everybody could use an alternative 3D modeling kernel (the EU is a little better here because the dominant proprietary kernels are from Dassault Systèmes and Siemens). I'm sticking to software as the domain because the purpose of the funding is obvious (pay developers, duh), but it also applies to things like small manufacturing and maintaining domestic supply chains (but the purpose and focus becomes a lot messier).

And yet, everywhere I look, any project I pick, crickets.

I don't expect the EU to front run, but something like KiCad is 3 bloody decades old.

> those are all in Silicon Valley because the money is there because the US has a privileged financial position.

And yet you had the rise of Akihabara as an electronic parts mecca which then later got eclipsed by Shenzhen. And that's not even talking about the fact that the modern computing sits atop a mountain of stuff developed out of the VLSI Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Project).

All of those occurred because their respective governments threw money around.

Sure, maybe you won't create another Silicon Valley hare, but, perhaps, just perhaps, you might create a relentless, open source EU tortoise that slowly displaces the proprietary software. The EU is good at slow--relentless, not so much.

Sadly, a continual state of inertia and sclerosis and failure around tech seems to be historically European:
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-eurochip/
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-03 00:25:44+00:00
All kinds of industries have been conserving more each decade since the energy crisis of the 1970's.

With recent developments, projected use is now skyrocketing like never seen since.

Before that I thought it was calculated that if alternative energy could be sufficiently ramped up, there would be electricity too cheap to meter.

I would like to see that first.

Whoever has the attitude to successfully do "whatever it takes" to get it done would be the one I trust do it in space after that.
by psawaya | 2026-02-03 00:26:18+00:00
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by vladdoster | 2026-02-03 00:26:19+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
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api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

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contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by StillBored | 2026-02-03 00:26:30+00:00
Frankly, the entire agency is unconstitutional. From the fact that they basically exist under a general warrant issued by the supreme court (although they invented a new catagory, "administrative search", which doesn't fundamentally change what it is) to the restrictions on the right to assembly requires free travel as well, although the current legal underpinnings are "creative", the 10th admendment which grants all non enumerated powers to the states, to the restrictions on bearing arms on the plane and a half dozen other parts. About the only part they might be able to stand on is commerce again, but then so much travel in the larger states remains in the state (ex dallas/houston, san fran/LA) requiring seperate security zones.

Bush should have _NEVER_ nationalized them, at least as a private entity they existed in a sorta gray area. Now they are clearly violating the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 10th amendments.

And the solution isn't another bullshit supreme court amendment of the absolutist language in the bill of rights/etc but to actually have a national discussion about how much safety the are providing vs their cost, intrusiveness, etc and actually find enough common ground to amend the constitution. Until then they are unconstitutional and the court makes a mockery of itself and delgitimizes then entire apparatus in any ruling that doesn't tear it down as such.

And before anyone says "oh thats hard", i'm going to argue no its not, pretty much 100% of the country could agree to amend the 2nd to ban the private ownership of nuclear weapons, there isn't any reason that it shouldn't be possible to get 70% support behind some simple restrictions "aka no guns, detected via a metal detector on public airplanes" passed. But then the agency wouldn't be given free run to do whatever the political appointee of the week feels like. But there are "powers" that are more interested in tracking you, selling worthless scanners, and creating jobs programs for people who enjoy feeling people up and picking through their dirty underwear.
by malvads | 2026-02-03 00:26:39+00:00
Hi, thanks for your comments (it’s on the plan), since Mojo is early-stage software, there is still things that need to be integrated, however mojo is not a mass-crawler, (you have to specify directly what to crawl), so even if I add robots.txt (wich is in the plan) Evil users can still just bypass this (I expect mojo to be used by technical (non-evil) folks).

But thanks for your suggestion :)
by camilacayo | 2026-02-03 00:27:21+00:00
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by tlb | 2026-02-03 00:27:45+00:00
People can build a factory that makes satellites. And then a factory that makes factories to make satellites.

There is plenty of material in the solar system (see my other response), and plenty of orbits, and launch capability can scale with energy harvested so the launch rate can grow exponentially.

Lots of people will probably decide they don't want any more satellites. But it only takes a few highly determined people to get it done anyway.
by tedggh | 2026-02-03 00:28:04+00:00
It seems to me it is more of a penalty to encourage people to get Real ID while still allowing them to fly. I would imagine most air travelers have some kind of real id, passport, actual real id DL or global entry card. Very few people cannot get real id due to name inconsistency issues, but most are just lazy. Allowing them to fly for $45 seems reasonable to me, particularly if they cause delays at security.
by addaon | 2026-02-03 00:28:45+00:00
The value of the journal having history (with comments and timestamps) is huge. I think what I'd prefer to see is having a start sequence of replay journal, build in-memory structure, optionally move old journal to backup name and write out minimal/compressed/comment-and-timestamp-stripped journal to new file. Optionally could be based on size delta; e.g. write if it's less than half the size of the old journal. This keeps journals as append only, while still giving access to full history. It does require some external management to avoid file usage growth even faster than a single journal; but it reduces startup time, and allows a management strategy like just deleting backup files older than a given date (once they're in cold backup, if needed).
by hypeatei | 2026-02-03 00:28:57+00:00
You'd have a lot stronger argument if ICE wasn't being used as a secret police force. They're Immigration Enforcement in name only. Your average citizen would say it's okay to enforce immigration laws, there is no doubt about that; doing middle-of-the-night raids with a blackhawk helicopter in cities of your political opponents is not reasonable[0]. There are plenty more examples of their abhorrent behavior (like killing two American citizens in the midwest and brutalizing protestors) if you cared to search for it.

I've noticed that the MAGAs have been adamant about trying to shift the window back to: "but you agree that immigrants should be deported right?" as some sort of attempt to justify what's happening, I guess. Is that talking point coming from some popular right wing show or something as a last ditch effort before midterms?

0: https://www.propublica.org/article/chicago-venezuela-immigra...
by LoganDark | 2026-02-03 00:28:58+00:00
I find it can be appropriate to talk about politics around a project when a political situation is directly affecting a maintainer of the project or the project itself and is a genuine reason why there are delays, weirdness or other impacts somewhere. I appreciate hearing about such things for transparency's sake. It's just all the other stuff that gets on my nerves, where it's just tacking politics onto the project just because there's injustice.

For example it's very normal for the Tor project to talk about censorship and privacy. It's also fairly normal for Russian maintainers to speak out about how it's no longer possible for them to receive support due to sanctions. And I can understand if a Ukrainian maintainer has to focus on trying to survive or escape the country instead of developing their software. All of that stuff is completely fine and I wholly empathize with it. It doesn't bother me because it's not extraneous; it is directly relevant to the project. I also don't mind projects listing their preferred charities.

But I do roll my eyes when projects continue to pine on about Taiwan's independence or the genocides in Gaza. If there isn't a reason why it's actually relevant to the project, I don't think the project page is a good space to push it.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-03 00:29:15+00:00
for a square solar array of side length L, a pyramid height of 3*L would bring the temperature to below 300K, check my calculation above.

people heavily underestimate radiative cooling, probably because precisely our atmosphere hinders its effective utilization!

lesson: its not because radiative cooling is hard to exploit on earth at sea level, that its similarily ineffective in space!
by tialaramex | 2026-02-03 00:30:25+00:00
Although I'm sure SpaceX would be a non-trivial loss, the most important idea - their truly reusable rocket -- is proven to the point where other people are assuming they should do that to make rockets, it's like if Benz' company goes bankrupt in 1899. In that universe the Mercedes probably never happens but the automobile idea is already a done deal.
by sollewitt | 2026-02-03 00:30:32+00:00
No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.

Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
by dzonga | 2026-02-03 00:30:45+00:00
Anyone remember the quote by Russ Hanneman on SV [0] - "No Revenue, means you're potential pure play"

We know datacenters in space - sound plausible enough - yet not practical - hence they're potential pure play - also you can have massive solar in space - unlimited space -- etc -- all true -- but how economical / practical is it ?

yet we know on earth - to power the whole earth with solar - only a fraction of the land is needed. Hell it's even in the Tesla Master Plan v3 docs [1] - current limitation being storage & distribution

so all you - are now witnessing to the greatest scam ever pulled on earth.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-03 00:32:23+00:00
I don't bother complaining about Electron-based applications to the developer, and I expect that's not an unusual position. It's not like the downsides are hidden, unique, or a surprise, and if the developers' priorities aligned with ours, they wouldn't have picked electron in the first place.

I use web-tech apps because I have to, and because they're adequate, not because it's an optimal user experience.
by rybosworld | 2026-02-03 00:33:10+00:00
Just so we can agree on numbers for the napkin math - an 8x H200 weighs 130 kg:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/data-center/dgx-h200/?utm_sourc...

Power draw is max 10.2 kW but average draw would be 60-70% of that. let's call it 6kW.

It is possible to obtain orbits that get 24/7 sunlight - but that is not simple. And my understanding is it's more expensive to maintain those orbits than it would be to have stored battery power for shadow periods.

Average blackout period is 30-45 minutes. So you'd need at least 6 kWh of storage to avoid draining the batteries to 0. But battery degradation is a thing. So 6 kWh is probably the absolute floor. That's in the range of 50-70 kg for off-the-shelf batteries.

You'd need at least double the solar panel capacity of the battery capacity, because solar panels degrade over time and will need to charge the batteries in addition to powering the gpu's. 12 kW solar panels would be the absolute floor. A panel system of that size is 600-800 kg.

These are conservative estimates I think. And I haven't factored in the weight of radiators, heat and radiation shielding, thermal loops, or anything else that a cluster in space might need. And the weight is already over 785 kg.

Using the $1,500 per kg, we're approaching $1.2 million.

Again, this is a conservative estimate and without accounting for most of the weight (radiators) because I'm too lazy to finish the napkin math.