skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That same $750K might buy you a mile or so of trenching and cable.

If you want to make this about the economics...

All studies on this topic report that it costs less than $250k/mile in metro areas, which cost more due to the need to get permits, plan around utility lines and existing infrastructure, dig into asphalt/sidewalk, and then repair the damage.

In a rural area where you can just dig into dirt and not repair anything, $750k should get you all of a town and then some, and I'm assuming we're talking about one scattered out across tens of miles. You're primarily paying for labor, and it's possible for a small team to dig dozens of miles of utility trenches in a day with common construction equipment. Once you lay the cable, your expenses are essentially fully booked.

A single Starlink satellite, assuming maximum satellite bandwidth and minimal user bandwidth would service at most 2500 customers. At $750k/launch, assuming a useful life of 4 years (per Musk's Techcrunch interview from April 2020) and maximum customers, Spacelink would need to charge at least $6.25/month to each customer not accounting for operational or marketing costs just to break even. You would need to at least double the price to cover ongoing operational costs. Plus, Spacelink would need to pay other ISPs for interconnection agreements, which is another 1x cost there. Add in the costs of paying off R&D and other capitalized costs, and you're looking at a minimum of 5x the putative minimum price of $6.25/month, or roughly $30/month.

Or in other words, Starlink would be charging no less than its current satellite and landline competitors already charge today.
Newly described exploit allows attackers to eavesdrop on VoLTE calls
The cost of hiring a crew to dig up the ground runs to hundreds of dollars per foot. At $1MM for a satellite that can serve thousands of people is a lot cheaper.
The latency numbers look really good- under 100ms is similar to ground based connections
> Even a reliable 10mbps

What are some applications that requires more than 10mbps speed in rural places?
> and it couldn’t really be any worse than putting faith in ultra-consolidated corporate media

A lot of the media hate for Facebook is driven largely by jealousy over losing their influence on society.
Micron Spills on GDDR6X: PAM4 Signaling, Coming to Nvidia’s RTX 3090
about 40 and growing
20/30% market share is a massive win for an ethically-led company in a market dominated by the richest companies in the world (literally).

They don’t need 51% and never will. What Mozilla needs is a solid 15/20% to buy a seat at the tables that matter (standards etc).

Btw, if iOS allowed any other browser, Safari’s numbers would go way down almost immediately. Way.
Ask HN: Someone create a plugin for Twitter to bypass its nanny rules
I saw this new "feature" via a post on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/abnheel/status/1294365769090904064/photo/1

What I need: a Chrome/Edge/Firefox plugin to compress Tweets before posting, tagging those tweets in such a way that the plugin knows how to de-compress. Then, link to the decompressor plugin within the tweet so anyone can install the plugin to see those tweets. Yes, may lose some tweet space, but fends off otherwise innocuous trigger-cleansing "features."

What say you? Weekend project?
Bitcoin vs Ethereum

premine: 0% vs 70%

reward schedule: set in stone vs subject to change

philosophy: immutable vs experimental

blocktime: 10 min vs 13 sec

balances: utxo-based (unspent transaction output) vs account-based

scripting: branchless programs vs stateful & Turing complete

complexity: low vs high
welding next to fireworks which is next to ammonium
I re-read this sentence a dozen times trying to figure it out. Here's my correction, based on sibling comments:

> There's a lot to be said for working smart in a business where turnover is vanity, and profit is sanity.
Is there any way we can play this? Otherwise, it would be wiser to use the "Ask HN" format, as "Show HN" is for things that people can play around with themselves, not videos to watch/articles to read.
Apple Approves Citizen’s New SafeTrace Covid App
I deleted Facebook years ago and Zuckerberg has had little effect on my life since. I don’t seem to remember citizens being able to unsubscribe from Louis XVI or the Romanovs.
Do you have evidence?

Because I remember trying Chrome and immediately switching because it was miles ahead. So did my friends. It was faster and had slicker UI.

Nobody keeps using a shittier browser no matter how many times you shove it on their faces.

Btw Chrome is still faster than Firefox for stuff that matters and often by a considerable amount:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=chrome83...
Interview with Josh Aas, Founder and Executive Director of Let's Encrypt
What do you recommend as good GA frameworks?
Show HN: Rent vs. Buy Housing Calculator
Hey folks, I built this NPV calculator in Python a couple years back, before I bought my first house. Here it is again, rewritten it in React/Recharts. Let me know if its helpful and if you have any feedback!
Exactly. While it's not ideal to be dependent on a competitor like that it has been a very robust stream on income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio... $300M+ for 8 years (and now 3 more years)
Larger amounts of people mean more chances of exposure.

Being in urban environment means higher dependence on fragile supply chains- food security is totally dependent on JIT grocery store inventories.

Rural homes, by virtue of being isolated, are easier to self isolate.
The concern astronomers raised was blooming caused by oversaturating their sensors, not blockage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129977
That article seems to be a weird mish-mash of 3-5 contradictory conspiracy theories. It rants a good long while about how various forces in various countries want to take control of Lebanon etc through various means. Okay maybe it's true that they would want to do that, but how are any of these forces responsible for the local authorities keeping thousands of tons of explosives in a port warehouse for years, and then deciding to store some fireworks in there too, and then having somebody try to weld on the door of that warehouse?

I mean, I don't even say "conspiracy theory" in a hostile way. It's not impossible that one of those is actually true. But if we're supposed to be convinced of any of them, how about if they at least pick one and stick to it, and then maybe provide something more solid than wild speculation about how/why it would have happened in that particular way? A few vague tweets by the Israeli PM that could mean pretty much anything doesn't prove much, nor does a claim by a source based in a country hostile to the US to have seen multiple US reconnaissance planes of an unspecified type in the area at some unspecified time and location and means of detection.
I for one am pretty happy about the linseed oil stories in this thread because the low ignition temperature is something that I wasn't aware of.
That was true until the President of the most militarily and financially powerful nation on Earth used it as his a de facto means of communicating government policy and personal opinion.

Now, unfortunately, Twitter matters.
If he's riding in a "fast group" then the weight savings will be worthwhile. You can do this with a used 20 year old aluminum frame. It doesn't take elite hardware to benefit from light weight.
Firefox required admin rights to install on Windows, what locked most of the user base out of its reach.

Chrome got his market by silently installing as the IE rendering engine, and by being bundled with other software.
It’s obviously not rent seeking by anyone’s definition. This is really one of the most absurd claims that gets made about this situation.

Apple is today putting more effort into developing their software platform than anyone in history.

If they stopped doing that - how long do you think it would take for Google, or frankly any number of other players, to eat their lunch?

They continue to be in the leadership position because they are continuing to innovate as fast as they can.

Not because they somehow ‘own’ the position.

And frankly the amount of effort that is going into developing the platform is immense.

Every part of the platform contributes to its success. Fitness tracking, the watch, the massive investment in APIs, Accessivility, dealing with supply chains, governments geopolitical risks, etc. etc.

All of these things are why the platform has the reach it has today. Each one contributes to more people choosing the device and a larger addressable market for developers.

I’m delighted to let them take 30% for all this, because I didn’t have to do any of it.

Neither did Epic.
Even as someone who identifies as a liberal, I 100% agree with your sentiment here. Anyone who thinks otherwise is blind to the obvious narrative or too simple to acknowledge basic tenants of human behavior.
All the so called 'neo banks' are still in their infancy which is good reason to avoid them at all costs. I'm waiting until these startups mature (and they are startups).
I hope that you got by the particular bit of knowledge in the theoretical rather than the practical manner.
But isn’t stacking used for astro-photography all the time?
It's amazing how words work. If you use a word to mean a thing that is directly in opposition to its original meaning, you can form sentences that sound bad without worrying about reality.
Here's a VPN idea for Mozilla: bundle your VPN with a PO box / mail forwarding service. Target it to all the FAANG developers who's trying to take advantage of the WFH situation by moving to a lower CoL area, but are hesitant due to their companies' aggressive geographic-based compensation adjustments and enforcement.

/s
Good point. I think the what's missing is how electron energy states work in quantum mechanics. The wikipedia paged (linked below) has a pretty good explanation:

"A quantum mechanical system or particle that is bound—that is, confined spatially—can only take on certain discrete values of energy, called energy levels. This contrasts with classical particles, which can have any amount of energy. The term is commonly used for the energy levels of electrons in atoms, ions, or molecules, which are bound by the electric field of the nucleus, but can also refer to energy levels of nuclei or vibrational or rotational energy levels in molecules. The energy spectrum of a system with such discrete energy levels is said to be quantized". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_level)

To put things another way: while there could theoretically be infinite sizes of energy quanta, the permutations of energy states for matter are in fact discrete.

Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a physicist.
And yet we wonder why these people still can't feed themselves...
Yes. I've changed the title to Ask HN.

The Show HN rules have recently been updated btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
By the way, are you an astronomer? Would you mind putting your email in your profile? I'd love to chat without the accompanying gallery.
FWIW, here's a typical edit to an existing article: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web.dev/pull/3678
The bandwidth calculations work out about the same, as the users are pretty much stationary - users will be in an area handled by ~one satellite at a time (with handover between satellites).
True. But, if you're a US citizen, you live in a country where the President is elected in no small part due to his efforts.
And you will be blamed for imperfect prevention. Say that the army spent $20,000 moving the fertilizer to a disposal site. Would someone get in trouble for that? Yep.
I don't live rural yet, but I would just drive to the grocery. I would say most people living rural live close to a highway. If it is interstate you will be going 85 MPH, so even if the nearest grocery is 50 miles away it is 30 minutes away. I would probably buy $200-300 of groceries at a time. Rural places are usually going to have a large freezer, backup generator, fuel supply. Rural areas are probably not going to have many restaurants, but if you are in a resort/vacation area such as around a national park like Yellowstone there are going to be more restaurants. People I have known had no problem with online deliveries if they are within a certain range of a town, say 10 miles. I will probably deliver to an Amazon locker or UPS store and pick whatever it is up there.
Report: Most Americans have no real choice in internet providers
Single people make lasting change by sticking to their principles.
A corporation with enough power to be country-like would have to, somehow, claim a monopoly on violence almost by definition. That's really the only thing that would make them "country-like."

And it wouldn't be unprecedented. The British East India Company was a defacto state of its own, and companies have been known to employ mercenaries like the Pinkertons or local warlords to enforce coercion through violence on their behalf.

But to answer your question, no, I don't think it would, because a company has a more direct coercive role over their employees than governments have over most of their citizens. Companies can fire their employees more easily than democratic governments can arrest or kill their citizens. The infrastructure for surveillance within a company can also be far more pervasive and fine-grained than with governments, simply because the scale is smaller.
You're not being terribly clear. Do you mean to fund things like this from taxes, like (say) CERN or NASA?
> NK Jemisin...who?

Boy are you in for a treat.
And the federal government is supposed to bear the brunt of expense for these few state voting initiatives?

Edit: Besides, the USPS is almost effectively a privatized organization, with their requirement to operate within a balanced budget.
The issue with using them in power supplies is the ESR (equivalent series resistance). Check out this Rohm data sheet for more info [1].

Aluminum polymer electrolytics already provide both large bulk capacitance and good ESR and ESL performance (although they’re a bit more expensive than more common chemistries).

Not to mention, you can reduce the capacitance necessary for your design by increasing the switching frequency so bulk capacitance isn’t nearly as important. You can also synthesize bulk capacitors with good ESR and ESL by using an aluminum electrolytic in parallel with, for instance, an MLCC ceramic capacitor or even niobium or tantalum. [2] Careful with tantalum though, not only is it a conflict material it tends to exhibit, uh, thermal runaway (they explode).

I didn’t see ESR performance in the write up but I suspect if it was low-ESR they would have led with that. Likely the 0.5mA/cm^2 limit is due to a sky-high ESR.

[1] http://rohmfs.rohm.com/en/products/databook/applinote/ic/pow...

[2] https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slyt639/slyt639.pdf
"Impossible" is a strange way to say you're unwilling to forge convenience and live the life we all had in the 90s.
For tower defense, I'd prefer on phones/tablets.
If I somehow convince you to register at my site (just email and password to keep track of who bought) you would be able to play the game on any device you want with a PWA app. you could install it on your phone and desktop and continue your game wherever you want.

still not worth the hassle of typing the email and password?
I close my eyes. And I have a pretty fast set of glasses even so it's not enough to be able to avoid a blind spot after an hour or more of work. Better safe than sorry. The auto darkening glasses make it much easier to start a weld though, you know exactly where you are relative to the workpiece, which especially with stick welding is the difference between a lot of cursing + frustration and some reasonably good work.
No you don't understand! He has complete control over your life. He plays puppet master with your very life at every moment!

At least I heard some populist say that so I'm sure it must be true.
In my social group almost all of the parents working in the trades sent their kids to 4-year universities. Of the few who didn't, they didn't have much of a choice. The kids who didn't have the grades for college, enrolled in tradeschool.

Of all the kids who could go to college or go to tradeschool they all chose college.
Apple has finally met its Fortnite match
I don't understand something about many of the comments I've seen on HN regarding Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc....

Why does it matter if there is one source tree for all browsers? [0]

Is it really a bad thing if Chromium is the base, and then Google, Microsoft, etc push out forks of it?

Isn't that what we do in the linux world already with the kernel? Redhat, Ubuntu, Mint, etc all take a stock kernel from the git tree and then tweak it for their uses, yet we don't complain about that.

[0] - Yes, I know people lost their jobs, and that sucks, especially in this economy. But my question isn't about the jobs, it's about having multiple browsers and why some people vehemently believe that multiple browsers without shared source code is critical to our future. THAT is what I don't understand.
Why do software engineers feel the need to name abstract software after tangeable things, conflating search results? E.g., "Servo", "Containers", etc.

Can we not find a simple naming convention that is less ambiguous and confusing to the rest of the world that uses both software and hardware? E.g. ServoSW, ContainerSW, or stick with names that have no hardware corollary?
I couldn't get any of them to work with my Pixel 3, using Google Lens.
However, if you’re able to work from home, you can self-isolate pretty much anywhere, and drive wherever you need to get food.

If urban environments start seriously breaking down due to a food supply chain problem, rural areas won’t be safe from desperate people.

Anyway, both approaches have their pros and cons, but as someone who has a fairly severe back problem and not much inclination to try to live off the grid, I’d rather be in an urban area.
You must be joking, though? Who spends more than randonneur, with their hand-made frames, hammered fenders, and leather saddles?
Unlikely. Certainly a minute fraction of the efforts of the mainstream media (Fox, CNN, etc.)
Would you be equally confused if it was phrased the other way?

"How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?"

People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life.

The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.
If by February there isn't a vaccine or I don't have a physical office I'll be moving back to Texas and live with my parents.

It's 100% worth the money IMO, however, I've also strongly considered New Hampshire, Utah or Nevada.
Reduce prices. Expand the number of students. Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus. Heck, even "gender studies" degrees do not require it, if you'd like more of that.

This is once in a decade opportunity to increase the throughput, _and_ increase the quality of their creme de la creme (because with more throughput more high performing outliers will randomly be caught). And they'll 100% squander it.
I worked at a GEO company. They have a HUGE department just to work with governments to buy or keep their spectrum. The rules and regulations for spectrum are insane, and not just build this cable here in my county/state/country, but now this beam goes across borders what do I do? Oh wait, this region is contested by China/India we have to sell differently to each government.

Cost of labor => It's a calculation of how many people can be served per 1 mile (any unit) of cable. If that number is 20, cable wins. If it's 5, hotspot may win (which also uses cable FWIW). If it's 0.5 then these new satellites win. 5G may try to take more market from ISPs but they know they'll have to innovate to keep customers. I can 100% see cell towers being cheaper than cable, but not in every situation.

It's about supplementing not replacing infrastructure.
If I'm not mistaken, that's a post by yourself, so you could just say "I recently attempted..."
Remake? Number 5 is alive!
Congratulations, you've discovered the existence of media in a society with free speech.
> Getting mad at etymology is a sisyphean torture. You will always lose at this game. It's the nature of language.

There seems to be a lot of intentional evolution of meaning, and I believe the criticism of the article is based upon feeling that this is such a case. Using a word with a certain meaning in a different context uses the word's power without having the same meaning. The usefulness of the word as a rhetoric tool is the delta between the impact ("original sustainable") and the thing referenced ("modern sustainable"). It's why Peta calls dairy industry cow rape and speaks of Pig concentration camps: evoking emotions to further their agenda.
I had a bad experience with Django. I found it cluttered and slow. I really wanted to like it.
It might seem funny but a more straightforward framework like Symfony didn't get it in the way and ended up much faster.
Python should be much much faster than PHP but I guess the framework matters a lot too.
Yes. The same tool can be used to either remove or emphasize streaks.
You had the answer yourself. Legislation. Government-run factories for the benefit of the people.
I don't want a pushy salesperson and discounts - I just want to be treated without hostility when I walk in the door. I don't want to work to get someone's attention to attempt to buy a $550 bike from them. I don't want a rude answer when I ask what's wrong with my bike, or how long it'll take to fix.

There's a middleground here, and the problem is that at least where I am in the US, most bike shops are actively hostile to anyone who walks in the door - or maybe it's because I'm not wearing a full kit.
Does anybody know if one can program a chatbot for the signalapp?

Ideally in Go or Rust would be nice
> Such strong words! In many countries, it is totally normal to stay at home with your parents and attend a college in your hometown, especially if it is a big enough city with many colleges.

Exactly. This comment is quite insensitive even if ignoring the tuition costs in America. There are other reasons for living at home with your parents while going to university. I personally had to do this due to severe chronic health problems. I was 100% capable of going to university full time while working part time. I just needed to be able to live at home.
That NEOWISE photo was 17 photos deliberately stacked to emphasise the problem rather than minimise it, so it's not really a fair datapoint. Astrophotograhy stacking software will generally remove items that don't appear in all photos in the stack rather than retain them (previous discussion on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926699). That said, I love taking photos of the night sky myself and had some Starlink satellites affect a single exposure photo of mine recently, so it is a real issue - just not quite as crazy as it looks from that photo.
Yes, it absolutely is.
Poor quality of internet on planes is usually due to too many people on the plane trying to do high-bandwidth things at the same time when the connection was never designed for that level of saturation. Domestic flights usually connect to ground-based stations to provide in-flight wi-fi, which probably have similar throughput capabilities to Starlink, so I don't think this would help much. International flights use satellite connections, though, and this would definitely help there.