MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2026-02-04 01:35:10+00:00
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.

It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
by okanat | 2026-02-04 01:35:13+00:00
It may "make sense" but that's actually a false equivalence. The raw disk space for a 3.5" high-density floppy disk for IBM PCs is 512 bytes per sector * 18 sectors per track * 80 tracks per side * 2 sides = 1,474,560 bytes. It is 1.47 MB or 1.40 MiB neither of which is 1440 KB or KiB. The 1440 number comes from Microsoft's FAT12 filesystem. That was the space that's left for files outside the allocation table.

Sectors per track or tracks per side is subject to change. Moreover a different filesystem may have non-linear growth of the MFT/superblock that'll have a different overhead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
by Aloisius | 2026-02-04 01:35:58+00:00
It mentions it once.

More importantly, not only are those regulations not in effect, the final regulations haven't even been written or approved yet - which brings up certain questions about how a stablecoin could be compliant with them.

And of course, even if a US-based stablecoin is well regulated, it still doesn't make these foreign "savings" account companies offering guaranteed high rates of return is a safe place to park your money.
by tedsanders | 2026-02-04 01:35:59+00:00
It's good to be skeptical, but I'm happy to share that we don't pull shenanigans like this. We actually take quite a bit of care to report evals fairly, keep API model behavior constant, and track down reports of degraded performance in case we've accidentally introduced bugs. If we were degrading model behavior, it would be pretty easy to catch us with evals against our API.

In this particular case, I'm happy to report that the speedup is time per token, so it's not a gimmick from outputting fewer tokens at lower reasoning effort. Model weights and quality remain the same.
by Findecanor | 2026-02-04 01:36:22+00:00
As silly as that sounds, you gave me a thought ...

If SpaceX, by being a company serving the federal government are covered by a law that would make its offices (on Earth, duh) a protected area ... then could they by some law-bending make that protection also encompass the data centres that contain the AI-generated CSAM and training data, in order to protect them from being raided by state law enforcement?

It does not have to sound reasonable to us, but to Musk.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-04 01:36:23+00:00
What is helpful about Nova? What are the useful statements we can make? I would argue that Nova makes it more difficult to make useful statements. For example, someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed" and if they equate "ultra processed" with bad... well, they'd skip those. Meanwhile, they could eat raw mean morning to night, or drink their own urine, and they'd be on a totally unprocessed diet.

What framework has Nova helped develop for eating healthier?
by emkoemko | 2026-02-04 01:36:31+00:00
i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more then 0K?

plus you would have to insulate the servers from the sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its just way easier to run a server on the ground
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-04 01:37:13+00:00
US Gov/cabinet in that period were basically so racist they thought they could outsource all the manufacturing to asia and nobody would ever figure out how to develop advanced technology like cars, desktop computers, telephones, jet engines etc, and would remain dependent on US controlled fossil fuels forever anyway. in a sense they thought India or LatAm in 2025 is where most of Asia would peak, and US giants would retain control.

both sides of the aisle, the old school Wellesley college democrats were just the same. they didn't even think China would be able to make washing machines! you must remember that in the early 1980s the majority of whitegoods (washing machine, toaster, fridge, etc) were made in the USA and the idea of moving it to China was about as crazy as space data centres or self driving cars
by fogzen | 2026-02-04 01:37:13+00:00
“Stablecoins is one of the key pillars for us,” Dalal said, referring to one of the areas where Y Combinator would like to see more startup ideas. “So we just want to live and breathe that as well.”

I asked ChatGPT for an honest translation:

“We’re actively trying to manufacture demand and legitimacy for stablecoins by forcing them into the startup supply chain.”
by pigpop | 2026-02-04 01:37:24+00:00
Once again another proposed law that would just make normal people's lives more difficult while doing nothing to prevent individuals who are motivated to do the illegal thing from doing it. Offline 3D printers are really not difficult to build, there are many open source plans and all of the hardware is available to order from AliExpress making it simple to do. Somewhat more technically capable people can cobble them together from alternative sources if they don't want to purchase things online.

But the bar is even lower than that since you can simply buy a gun much more easily than you could 3D print parts for one.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-04 01:37:44+00:00
California set this precedent roughly a decade ago [0] with no challenge. It will stand.

Subnational diplomacy is the norm in most federations, hence why GOP led Iowa [1] and Montana [2] lobbied in favor of India with Trump leading to the current trade deal [3].

[0] - https://calmatters.org/environment/2017/11/gov-jerry-brown-t...

[1] - https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2025-09-07/gov-reyno...

[2] - https://www.daines.senate.gov/2026/01/20/daines-travels-to-i...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/us-trade-chief-says-indi...
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 01:38:55+00:00
> Kessler syndrome: a cascading explosion of debris crippling our access to space

I'm taking the parts of this write-up I don't have expertise with a grain of salt after seeig this.

Kessler cascades are real. Particularly at high altitudes. They're less of a problem in LEO. And in no case can they "[cripple] our access to space." (At current technology levels. To cripple access to space you need to vaporise material fractions of the Earth's crust into orbit.)
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-04 01:39:19+00:00
I think it's incredibly liberating.

I started hobby-coding, and that can continue if I want to do it. If the point is to get into the mental exercise and craftsmanship of coding.

But for most of the time, the thing I really want is the product, the program, the result. Being able to skip the coding step and go direct to the result by using an LLM is really freeing. I can try different approaches, experiment with different ways of presenting it, iterate on actual product ideas without having to spend months refactoring code. It's great.

As for the commercial stuff - I don't know if you've ever worked as a software dev in a large company. I have a couple of times, and it's a living nightmare of politics and compromise (hence only a couple of times, I prefer working in startups and small businesses). The average software dev spends their days doing pointless JIRA tickets in sprints designed to make their manager look good at their next review. Nothing valuable will be lost by replacing all of this with LLMs.
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-04 01:39:21+00:00
Open, public non-academic prediction markets basically exist to be manipulated by people with insider knowledge.

Filter out all the noise of people random ass guessing what will happen in the future and focus on people making big bets late in the game. That's your important "prediction".

See: Anonymous person who made $400,000 betting on Maduro being out of office, etc.

I'd be surprised if there weren't already people running HFT-like setups to look for these anomalously large late stage trades to piggyback their own bets on the insider information.
by Greduan | 2026-02-04 01:39:30+00:00
Other languages remove lifetime tracking by making you track it in very limited spots. Instead of "for each individual object", you track it for "this particular kind of object in this part of my application".

I.e. don't need to keep track of the memory for each allocation in my HTTP request and make sure I clean it up before closing the connection, I can just allocate some memory _per request_, put stuff in it, and at the end it gets cleaned up, whether I used the memory or not.

Some languages have the idea of "memory allocators" as a native construct, so that you can actually start thinking about managing memory in more sensible terms than "everything individually", e.g. Odin lang.
by brailsafe | 2026-02-04 01:40:07+00:00
> Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.

Are you prevented from fresh water swimming because you can't fabricate a beach for yourself, even if you own the property next to it? Seems like a strange complaint
by vel0city | 2026-02-04 01:40:12+00:00
> We currently have some quarter of megawatt of solar panels of ISS

It's average outbut is like half of that though. So something the size of the space station, a massive thing which is largely solar panels and radiators, can do like 120kW sustained. Like 1-2 racks of GPUs, assuming you used the entire power budget on GPUs.

And we're going to build and launch millions of these.
by y-curious | 2026-02-04 01:40:16+00:00
Definitely raised my eyebrow. I assume he was being tongue in cheek. Reminds me of this copypasta:

“PROTIP: if you own a gun over a year without negligent discharging at least once, you aren't handling it enough. NDs are a natural part of handling weapons, just like tweaking your back is part of weightlifting and car accidents are part of driving. I ND several times a year because I actually HANDLE and know how to USE my weapons. It makes me a better firearms handler and marksman, and it's a small part of the price you pay in the sheepdog lifestyle Simple fact is, the "safety mentality" will build mental blocks in your head that will get you killed. You need to be comfortable putting your finger on the trigger and pointing the gun wherever you want no matter the time, place, or status of the weapon. Taking time to check whether the gun is loaded whenever you pick one up will serve to make you hesitate in a personal defense scenario”
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-04 01:40:28+00:00
The US hasn't spent 10% of our GDP on defense since the cold war. We begged you (both parties) to at least keep at least token military and you couldn't even do that. And on the other side of your continent you have a real risk playing out right now that you can't defend yourself from. The EU is currently having plenty of negative consequences from absurd takes like yours. And even with all that, you write that dribble.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 01:40:59+00:00
> It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power

It's a way to get cheap capital to get cool tech. (Personal opinion.)

Like dark fibre in the 1990s, there will absolutely–someday–be a need for liquid-droplet radiators [1]. Nobody is funding it today. But if you stick a GPU on one end, maybe they will let you build a space station.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_droplet_radiator
by mr_toad | 2026-02-04 01:41:13+00:00
> Yes, and the made up words of kilo and kibi were given specific definitions by the people who made them up

Kilo was generally understood to mean one thousand long before it was adopted by a standards committee. I know the French love to try and prescribe the use of language, but in most of the world words just mean what people generally understand them to mean; and that meaning can change.
by thr3sholds | 2026-02-04 01:42:20+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Canada (CST / UTC -6) | Remote

I do focused, outcome-driven fixes on existing web systems (often PHP, plus infra and automation).

Most engagements run 1–3 weeks and resolve specific failures or bottlenecks.

I prioritize functionality and usability over novelty and don't upsell rewrites if repair is possible.

I'm a good fit for teams that value decisive fixes over lowest-cost bidding.

Examples available on request.

Contact: matt@thresholds.trade
by freeopinion | 2026-02-04 01:42:53+00:00
In this specific discussion familiarity does seem relevant. I don't think shooting is so relevant, but printing and assembling are.

You don't have to be a life-long user to regulate heroin, but if you start legislating second-hand heroin smoke, people might look at you sideways. You kinda need to know a little even if you've never actually ever seen heroin. If you demonstrate severe ignorance, people are going to call you on it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-04 01:43:14+00:00
The real problem is criminals don't care about the law.

* Firearms owners follow the law as they enjoy their hobby

* Firearms enthusiasts are not going to make something that will eventually fail ripping their fingers off and opening up their own neck. They will customize something with retail parts like a sane person, and that is allowable in most cases under the law.

While governments may seek regulatory capture of 3D printers with sycophantic idealism, it is a fools errand. People that enjoy that hobby also don't want their toys taken away for doing stupid illegal stuff.

Criminals don't care about the laws, and adding more laws does nothing to change that fact. Adding a valid firearms license requirement to purchase ammunition, barrels, and magazines could help constrain the ghost problem. =3
by Aurornis | 2026-02-04 01:43:21+00:00
> Isn't 50MW already by itself equivalent to the energy consumption of a typical hyperscaler cloud?

xAI’s first data center buildout was in the 300MW range and their second is in the Gigawatt range. There are planned buildouts from other companies even bigger than that.

So data center buildouts in the AI era need 1-2 orders of magnitude more power and cooling than your 50MW estimate.

Even a single NVL72 rack, just one rack, needs 120kW.
by aunty_helen | 2026-02-04 01:43:23+00:00
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.

Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?

As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-04 01:43:24+00:00
you give the 'elites' far too much credit. reagan was a tv cowboy that got elected because he was really popular, and cut taxes. Bush 1 was a cowboy and oil man from texas, and clinton was a cowboy from arkansas who made money trading cattle futures and doing land deals in the ozarks. Bush 2 grew up in rural texas and had a GPA of 2.35.

these people were really good at fundraising and getting elected, nobody after kissinger was competent in these ideas (kissingers morality is debatable, but he was very competent)
by jmward01 | 2026-02-04 01:43:28+00:00
To get a similar token/sec in training though you would need to swap batch size and seq length so you could have the massive batch size but then won't you start hitting memory issues with any reasonable sequence length? You would have to create do something similar to a minibatch along the sequence and cut the gradients after a short number of tokens on each sequence. So how will they learn truly long sequences for recall? Or is there a different trick I am missing here?
by hirsin | 2026-02-04 01:43:28+00:00
Simply put no, 50MW is not the typical hyperscaler cloud size. It's not even the typical single datacenter size.

A single AI rack consumes 60kW, and there is apparently a single DC that alone consumes 650MW.

When Microsoft puts in a DC, the machines are done in units of a "stamp", ie a couple racks together. These aren't scaled by dollar or sqft, but by the MW.

And on top of that... That's a bunch of satellites not even trying to crunch data at top speed. No where near the right order of magnitude.
by autoexec | 2026-02-04 01:43:32+00:00
> I don't think there is any reason to protest outside people's personal residences. People can protest at a government building, or a public square, or somewhere intentionally disruptive that isn't implicitly aimed at intimidating a public servant.

All protest is aimed at intimidating someone. Free-speech zones aren't going to make anything better. I'd absolutely support anyone protesting something I agree with (or protesting for something I don't) and can't imagine that limiting people's right to protest or increasing the ability of government to hide from the public would be good for anyone except corrupt or incompetent government officials.

> This is the purview of journalists, police, and independent investigative boards.

There are no special rights given to "journalists" that aren't already given to all people. Journalists are just regular people and everyone has the freedom of the press. This matters more than ever today considering that our mass media is captured by political interests and controlled by an increasingly small number of rich people. We need independent journalists to be free to do their work. We absolutely need random "unqualified" people "stalking" politicians to uncover fraud. (where "unqualified" means independent, and "stalking" just means evidence gathering through recording or public records requests). There are countless of examples of "random nobodies" uncovering fraud or corruption. Some of them are doing it by carrying out long drawn out investigations over many months where they gather and review documents and conduct interviews, while others are doing it in a matter of seconds with nothing more than a cell phone recording posted to the internet. Some of those people uncovering and reporting corruption are people I'd generally disagree with politically, but I'll still support what they're doing because it's a critical function of a free nation.

As for police, there's a lot of problems with government investigating themselves and their friends. Independent investigative boards can be helpful but they too are best when they're just regular people.

There are extremely few public servants being assassinated in their homes. There are far more cases of public servants killing innocent people.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-04 01:44:15+00:00
The entire essay obsesses over GDP convergence while ignoring that GDP (especially in the West) increasingly measures asset shuffling, imputed rents, and healthcare billing rather than anything humans actually experience. (Healthcare, finance, real estate, and legal services combined are ~40% of US GDP!)

So we've got 3000 words eulogizing a metric that tells you more about financialization than flourishing. Look at life expectancy, infant mortality, or caloric intake and you'll find a more interesting story -- with some poor countries doing very well, and increasingly so, whereas others are on a fairly grim trajectory.
by cjbgkagh | 2026-02-04 01:44:36+00:00
It’s becoming a thing, police don’t like to report on it because they don’t want to give people ideas. They didn’t want to report on Glock switches either. I do machining as a hobby and am interested in machining guns from an academic challenge perspective, I’ve not done it because I focus on making things I can’t buy. Guns from an academic perspective are fascinating, we’ve been making them for a long time in just about every possible way, and there is an easy way to measure and communicate quality, I.e. does it shoot and how accurate is it. I think the ban is absurd, the tech to make 3D printers / CNCs is pretty generic and someone sufficiently motivated to make a gun is unlikely to have difficulty putting together the machines to do it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 01:44:42+00:00
> Can you smoke ketamine?

Apparently [1]. But "when ketamine is heated, its chemical structure degrades, reducing its potency."

[1] https://innervoyagerecovery.com/can-you-smoke-ketamine/

(Going to go ahead and VPN to my home connection from this airport Wi-fi.)
by kazinator | 2026-02-04 01:45:59+00:00
The "which program you use" confusion was instigated by the idiots insisting that we should have metric kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes (cheered on by crooked storage manufacturers).

Before all that nonsense, it was crystal clear: a megabyte in storage was unambiguously 1024 x 1024 bytes --- with the exception of crooked mass storage manufacturers.
by georgegearhart | 2026-02-04 01:46:06+00:00
Goji Labs back in the house | We have multiple openings for: PM, Designers, QA Engineers, Go Engineers, Full Stack Typescript Engineers

About us: We're a fast-growing, strategy-first software studio. We design, build, and launch products across many verticals. We're fully remote with flexible working hours. Learn more about our company culture at the apply links below!

Note: for the product/designer roles, we're mainly interested in technical folks who want to leverage AI to invent new ways to design, build, and ship.

** Please use "hackernews" as your referral source and I'll flag your CV for priority review with the hiring team! **

ROLE: Product Designer | REMOTE (USA/Canada)
https://careers.gojilabs.com/32359

ROLE: Product Manager (Account Facing) | REMOTE (USA/Canada)
https://careers.gojilabs.com/31900

ROLE: Technical Product Manager (Internal, delivery focus) | REMOTE (Central/Eastern Europe)
https://careers.gojilabs.com/32417

ROLE: Quality Assurance Engineer | REMOTE (Central/Eastern Europe)
https://careers.gojilabs.com/32205

ROLE: Go Engineer | REMOTE (Central/Eastern Europe)
https://careers.gojilabs.com/34031

ROLE: Full Stack Typescript Engineer | REMOTE (Central/Eastern Europe)
https://careers.gojilabs.com/31725
by alephnerd | 2026-02-04 01:46:11+00:00
Read my comment, and dig into the context. Also, who said the current situation is not something some of us so called adults are opposed to [0][1]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43574128

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989996
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-04 01:46:15+00:00
That's a perfect example of the problem. It's overgeneralized to the point of meaninglessness.

It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?

Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.
by mrandish | 2026-02-04 01:46:18+00:00
> Ground-based solar panels have been getting more cost effective for decades and show no sign of slowing down.

I'm no expert on solar but I thought there was some upper limit on how much power ground-based solar panels can generate per area based on how much energy gets through the atmosphere all the way to ground - and that panel efficiency was approaching that limit.

However, I don't doubt ground-based panels can continue to improve in cost and other metrics and thus exert competitive pressure on space-based solutions.