skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR Yes, the numbers work out.

Starlink is not intended to replace terrestrial connectivity. It is intended to provide service to everyone on the planet that can not get terrestrial connectivity, and those areas that can never get terrestrial connections, like oceangoing vessels and airplanes.

But let's crunch some back of the envelope numbers.
SpaceX currently are allowed to launch 7500 Gen2 Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 can fit 22 of them in one launch, requiring ~341 launches. The satellites have a planned lifetime of 5 years, meaning the entire constellation would have to be replaced in that time frame.
So costs then. Musk has given out $15 million as best case marginal cost for Falcon 9 back in 2020. But let's be conservative and say $25m per launch currently. That's $8525m in total for launches.
The satellites themselves are estimated to cost between $200-300k each for the original v1, but the v2 probably costs a bit more, so let's say $500k each. That adds up to $3750m for the satellites.

So the totals then is $12275m over the span of 5 years, or ~$2.5 billion yearly.
The subscription cost is currently $110, but it fluctuates depending on the capacity in an area, so let's just use $100 as a simple round number. Each subscriber would bring in $1200 a year in revenue, so that means SpaceX would need ~2.1 million subscribers to cover the cost of replacing their currently allowed 7500 Gen2 satellites. It doesn't include the SpaceX operated ground stations that connect to the rest of the internet, but they're probably a smaller part of their total costs. The user terminals are now being sold at a profit.

As of last month, SpaceX announced they had over 2 million subscribers, and reports from earlier this year indicated that they have passed the operational break even point for Starlink, which means my conservative numbers are much higher than the real numbers.
There's also a lot of countries where it's not available yet, and given that it's a global system, the marginal cost for connecting a new country is very low, only requiring ground stations to be built.

So to conclude, yes, the numbers add up and they're in a good spot right now. Once they get Starship operational the numbers should change dramatically though, since launch costs are the main cost right now, and Starship would reduce that significantly.
> Living in poverty means not being able to afford medical care or access to basics such as electricity, shelter, and food.

Your own quote says the person you’re replying to is right — and the linked post wasn’t describing living in poverty.
I sympathize with the author, they have a gTLD that is being treated differently then more common TLDs. But it's hardly ICANN's place to get involved. The biggest issue here is usability.

People make typo's often and software can't always be sure if it should linkify something _just_ because it contains a dot. The definite way to be sure is people add the scheme `https://` or linkify the text using an app-specific way. Outside of that, every app has to make its own usability decision and some apps will correctly decide to ignore some unpopular TLDs for the sake of reducing annoyance.
How about you stop using ad block/popup blockers altogether? Getting annoyed by ads is understandable, but server space isn't free on any website.

In fact, how about we all rally together and start encouraging addings ads on HackerNews to help pay for the servers?
On the other hand self checkout still hasn’t replaced cashiers after 30 years.
> Very few referenda in Australia's history have received a 'Yes' result. The usual result has been overwhelmingly 'No'. The viewpoint is that it's better to have 'No Change' in the Constitution than 'Bad Change'.

I think there are several constitutional amendments which would pass easily except neither of the major political parties seems interested in proposing them. Examples: repeal of section 25; removal of all references to Inter-State Commission; repeal of section 74 (or its amendment to ban appeals to the Privy Council entirely). These are all effectively spent provisions so their repeal should be non-controversial. To save money, the referenda could be held concurrently with the next federal election

I don’t think it is reasonable to blame the Australian people as a whole for things which are the fault of Australia’s political class

> The same result happened in the last referendum 25 years ago on whether Australia should be a Republic. Despite most Australians wanting a Republic per se, the kind of Republic actually envisioned in the referendum was rejected.
reply

I think for both referendums, a major factor in their failure was the incompetence and unnecessary haste in proposing them.

For the Republic referendum, a staged process involving plebiscites (1) should Australia become a Republic? (2) which model of Republic should Australia adopt? (3) then a final referendum to approve the details of the model chosen in (2) - would have been more likely to have been successful. (1) and (2) could even have been structured as a referendum: e.g. (1) could have amended the Constitution to add a new section saying “(a) Australia will become a Republic with a President replacing the current offices of Monarch and Governor-General; (b) the current system of the Monarchy will be retained until the details of how the President is to be appointed or elected and removed are added to this constitution by a future alteration”

Similarly, why didn’t Albanese create a statutory Voice first, allow it to operate for a few years, and then propose a constitutional amendment to entrench it? It would have been harder for Dutton to oppose a statutory Voice given the Morrison government had already committed to create one, and even if he had, the government likely had the numbers to introduce one anyway; many of the “No” campaign’s arguments (e.g “we don’t have enough detail on how the proposed Voice is going to work”, “it is risky and we don’t know the consequences”) would have been significantly less effective if the debate had been about constitutionally entrenching an existing body instead of creating a brand-new one. But instead, we are now in the situation that even a statutory Voice is a political non-starter, given the nation has just voted “No” to a Voice. A Voice would be more likely to exist today (or next year) if this referendum were never held
The proposed legislation and rules indicate that the “EU Centre,” Interpol, and local law enforcement and governments would all have access to alerts (reports, unfiltered) and the databases and systems used to generate them.
I'm into sports.

I have been following the Rugby world cup on NBC's Peacock streaming service, I have never watched Rugby before but I've gotten into it and it seems very intimate and I can understand how I'd feel if my country got knocked out. I'll mention that the schedule is here, the games are on the weekend at times that are easy to catch on the U.S. East Coast

https://www.rugbyworldcup.com/2023/matches

It looks to me like American football on drugs, like the guy gets tackled and the play is not over but he passes it back to his teammate, instead of kicking the ball straight they kick it diagonally but the quality of play is great.

Lately I've been on a sports photography kick which means I go to as many home games at my university as I can, I went to an American football game today and a Polo game yesterday, tomorrow I might go to a field hockey game.

I got the Peacock subscription because I'm into Premier League Football (aka Soccer) which has the funny story I had a fight with my RSS reader YOShInOn which uses a content-based recommender algorithm. At first I was expecting it to learn that I liked the NFL and hated the Premier League but it kept showing me articles about games that went 7-0 or where it was 0-1 and an own goal and I went from "What the fuck is Arsensal?" to carefully following every Arsenal and Man City game.

So at this point in time I am so preoccupied with sports that I don't have the energy to really pay attention to the NFL or MLB at this point.
If you have a moral obligation why would you even use YouTube?
Mate if you get so much value from YouTube that you'll jump through these hoops just to use it without ads, why not just subscribe to premium? Personally it's by far my most bang-for-buck service.
> This, in turn, will spawn user scripts which work around the detection. Any client-side solution will be an arms race between Google and user script/adblock devs

No, you can't adblock remote attestation. Trust me, the whole idea is cryptographically sound (with a proper implementation of course), people have been building out the remote attestation/TPM space for 20 years now. It is unambiguously possible to use a TPM to detect modification of BIOS, OS, drivers, or anything else in the system, and you effectively cannot modify the TPM at all, and it has minimal attack surface (it just is a key-signing machine, essentially).

random practical explanation from someone's college papers: https://seclab.stanford.edu/pcl/cs259/projects/cs259_final_l...

Every time it's brought up (like I previously suggested that it could be used by NVIDIA/etc to disrupt mining operations from a VBIOS level) there's people who think there is some easy runaround and if there was the whole idea would be broken from the start. The TPM provides a secure root to start the cryptographic validation from, and while you can mod the software, it will be immediately evident from the attestation, and they will simply not serve the video. Or in the case of a GPU, you can have the PC attest to the drivers being official and unmodified, and if that doesn't happen the GPU refuses to clock up the memory bus, if the workload displays the characteristics of mining (100% memory load, flat and constant and low shader load).

At best it will be an arms race between TPM developers and adblock devs.

There is also the "analog gap", but that's been notionally plugged for years using HDCP. Early implementations were quickly broken, HDCP 2.3 is still doing pretty well, and it provides a massive speedbump to people who think they're just going to plug a capture card in and loop the video through.

Netflix and others have been doing this for years and the tricks are well-known at this point. Netflix doesn't push too hard, but they won't serve you the highest-quality video if you don't have a secure signal path either.

AFAIK at this point most of the "ripping" of decryption keys/etc for streaming content happens not by attacking the TPM, but by using android devices that are allowed to skate with reduced security modes, and just having a giant stack of them so when one device gets banned they throw it away and move onto the next.
I work with a number of employees in Eastern Europe and LatAm. Their English is fine and the taxes/liability stuff is all managed by the contracting company. Whenever they switch companies a new employee is swapped in by the company. It’s way easier than trying to find employees in southern CA.
Personally, I wish I could de-sports all of my apple news feed. Only sport I've found interesting to watch: billiards.

It would help if the sports didn't seem to have arbitrary rules towards a specific end. Fewer rules the better.
You're just rationalising. You know it's not a defensible position.
What is the cost for Google to serve YouTube data to users, is it $0.01/hour/DAU, or is it median 2-3x Premium subscription per user? If it's latter, how will this ever work out?

And, with inevitable encation spreading across Web, what is its long-term replacement? Is it App market dystopia, or some sort of Metaverse system, or could it be fragmented regional Webs? We have been seeing more Gitea repository in Chinese, leaked Russian footage in Telegram, European developer anecdotes from Mastodon, etc.
Unsure, but it's not high praise regardless
Agreed about the film industry. The writer and actor strikes are making it clear how vile the people running that are.
There are wonderful and worthwhile films and games, but not the majority of them.
The best way to exploit people is to convince them they want to be exploited.
That takes multibillion dollar investments, but it seems to be down to a science now. Edward Bernays was a pioneer.
While I understand your point, I still wouldn't give money to a company with such privacy violations. If YouTube had a subscription option where YouTube only used my watch history to improve my suggestions, then I'd gladly pay a subscription for it. But in its current form, I either give money to Alphabet while they continue to track me and sell my data to advertisers, or I just block the ads myself to avoid giving them money. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay for the product and be the product.

It's sad that the creators have to get caught in the middle of this, of course, but they can be supported through other platforms, like Patreon, ko-fi, etc., which kinda solves the issue. Or better yet, a YouTube replacement, like Nebula.
Only distribute your blog posts to people who sign an NDA.
Exactly. Municipal broadband is a potentially existential threat to Comcast. Comcast is highly motivated to see early high-profile municipal projects fail. Each household they siphon off with this service drives up the average cost per subscriber of the municipal option. If they can get enough, the municipal option will turn into a giant money pit with a bunch of disgruntled taxpayers.

A few years down the road, when other cities are considering their options, someone will inevitably point to Colorado Springs. Comcast really, really, wants that data point to be a bad one.
How much do creators actually get from premium subscriptions? All you're doing is repeating some empty marketing mumbo jumbo. I've never heard a creator say anything about the "youtube premium" income they've gotten, pretty sure it's not even broken down that way for them and google being able to bundle in a music streaming service just further affirms to me that they do not need my money.
I'd much rather directly support creators that deserve it trough patreon or ko-fi and pay for spotify premium instead of giving google any of my money
Just saw the other comment! Thank you!
wow... thank you!
This is really heavy handed and I don't think this will work as they hope.

I tend to spend too much time watching YT anyway.
This will help saving some time to do useful work or gaming instead.
Honestly, I don't think preventing ad blockers is abusive. Hosting videos for free is simply not sustainable. It does not work. We aren't entitled to getting everything on the internet for free.
This is a real shame. My favourite experience with photospheres was taking some with my old Google Nexus 5X.

I took quite a lot in Central London and at my family home. On a later trip to my parents' rural village in India, I brought along a Google Cardboard and spent hours showing the villagers our life in London.

These are people who live very simple lives as farmers and farm hands. They don't know much about the outside world and their lives are very much dictated by the humdrum of life within their small communities. Using the headset was perhaps the only way these people would get a chance to stand outside if the Houses of Parliament, or get a panoramic view of London from Waterloo Bridge.

I know that VR videos exist, but the ease of being able to take photos at home and giving people a VR experience to show them how we live on the other side of the world was something very special. It's one of the experiences that really shaped my view on what technology could do and how it can really help people understand one another.

That same thing is possible today, but I'd probably need a 360 camera and a different VR headset since Google Cardboard and Daydream were discontinued.
> The bad guys here are the corrupt regulators, not the evil capitalists.

Absolutely no reason to believe it must be one or the other. They are in fact working together. You propose that eliminating the government component would fix the issue, and I contend that eliminating the for-profit component would fix the issue. Both can be true.

> Without the corruption, municipal fiber or the free market would work great.

Entrenched networks are a well established phenomenon in relatively free markets. The cost to build a replacement for Facebook is relatively low, yet they still have a large moat due to their sizable subscriber base. In a physical system like a digital data network, the start up costs are much higher. It’s not a direct comparison to Facebook because one ISP is generally as good as any other, but generally it is difficult to compete with established companies when gaining a foothold involves a substantial investment from the outset.

Finally I did directly address your main point, I’m not quite sure why we’re still at the “either government or private for-profit firms” stage of the discussion when co-ops are a viable third option:

>> This last point is also why I would advocate for a co-op over government management, but I’d take either over for-profit networks.
All this performative righteousness is only going to end up hurting your cause in the long term. If a major site offers an ad-free option, and people refuse to take it, what does it tell the executives? What does it tell other publishers who are considering their monetization options? How do you think a business should respond to users that neither refuse to watch ads nor pay, can't be bargained with (see above), but nonetheless think they should be entitled to service? Companies aren't owed a viable business model, but consumers aren't owed a free service either.
Good luck donating to every single person you watch.
Spectrum is nearly managing it as well. There is FTTN in my neighborhood but the connection to my residence is still coaxial and using a cable modem. At inverse-peak traffic times I am able to reach speeds up to around 1.4gbps between my homelab and the backup server I have at the colo across town.

I haven’t actually checked to see if the limiting factor is my own network hardware but it very well may be.
A few years ago I read an article about how solar panels were about to gain efficiency after a widely-accepted "fact" in physics textbooks was shown to be wrong.

If I recall correctly, it was some characteristic of electrons in the atomic structure.

At the moment I can't find a reference. Anybody remember this?
This seems like a bad move. People know the name 'firefox'. Very few have heard of 'mozilla'
I just spent a while reading several pages of the grumpy.website, lots of good content there and should be mandatory reading for UI designers
Sounds like a no true scotsman: "if you didn't feel poor, you're not poor enough to count."
Not entirely but it’s cut a lot of jobs and put downward pressure on wages. It doesn’t have to be a complete replacement to negatively impact lives.
Covid Nasal Vaccines Get a Boost
Alignment is not possible for an AGI. Or, at best, it's only provisionally possible.

Consider what alignment means: It's an AGI, but there are certain goals that it cannot choose. If that's the case, then I assert that it is not actually general. If it is general, then it will decide what goals it will pursue, and you can't stop it from doing so.

The best you can do is load it with an initial set of goals (and perhaps values), and hope that it doesn't decide to change them. But you have no way of making sure that it can't change them without making it not a general intelligence.
Uh, it's getting pretty close. At places that have it, I use it almost exclusively. They need human tech support, and security, but the basic checkout task is pretty well solved.
The Puritans would one-box: evidential decision theory in the 17th century
Aren't you entitled!
Classic Tetris World Championship
The Classic Tetris World Championship is currently live. Top 48 today, 16 tomorrow.
I have zero problem paying for premium. I like it when the products I like, you know, survive.
If one were to make the ideal alternative to YouTube. What should the specs be like?
I'm using ublock Origin and have never seen any of those.

For those with ubO who still see them, cleaning the cache and updating the filters within ubO seems to help.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
If someone on the internet says they want money to hand it to individuals in need I believe them. Especially when it is a global, for-profit, money-printing monopoly power like Google, who have repeatedly demonstrated through their actions as an organization that they are nothing but honest, upstanding, and true to their word, fully deserving of our trust (and money).
US Internet (private fiber ISP in the Twin Cities) is an anomaly, not the norm. Minneapolis is incredibly lucky to have a local, private ISP that offers fiber to the home at up to 10 gigabit/s. The only other ISPs in the US that I know offer similar services are either municipal ISPs, co-ops, or Google Fiber.
Date calculations are really easy for most people. Even in this case I just think I would be annoyed.
Thanks for sharing this! I listened to the debate back in June and loved every second of it.

One of my favorite points that was brought up was this: While the risk of extinction through AGI may be non-zero, we can agree that the baseline risk is far above zero. Humans are headed for disaster on multiple fronts, and AGI might be a useful tool for keeping us alive long enough to keep debating it.

My other favorite point was that debating risk is useless without limiting the time period. Could something happen in 5 years? Probably not. Could something happen EVER? Well, yes, but that's pointless to discuss unless you're just trying to win an argument.
They don't even need that. They can just to server-side ad insertion into the HLS feed.
It won't be long until Firefox becomes a Chromium skin, like Edge and Opera.
Now you're making Mexicans sound like dicks, I don't want to believe that is true.
Happy ex-Comcast customer as well (as much as it pains me to say it, ATT has actually been pretty good to me with their fiber) but your numbers seem to go against a 1 TB limit but even the gigabit pro plan already includes the "unlimited data" option which allows you to go well past that. They never would say what exactly "fair use" was but it was at least above 15 TB/m from what I could tell of not getting kicked off.
Ask HN: What OKRs you have had in your technical team?
We gonna set OKR for our team and would like to know the other people experiences on successful or failures you have had ? also it would help a lot if you add company size and technical team size.
brymen multimeters are great, and they also will provide protocol documentation.

seriously, they are WAY better hardware than uni-t, basically fluke-level quality, but at much lower prices
The number of people who will do all the things necessary to play in that arms race gets smaller and smaller with each extra difficulty.

In the end, if the only way to block the ads is to have a setup so complicated that only 1 in 10,000 people would be able and willing to maintain it, that’s basically perfect. The people who will spend hours and hours perfecting and maintaining their ad blocking setup were never going to buy premium anyway and they’re negligible drains on resources.
That's where a flat rate comes in, it's $1000 if it takes an hour or a week. They are buying your knowledge as much as they are buying your time. I used to stand up equipment that my company charged ~$6000 for and I could do the job in about 2 hours, my company thought it took 4 days. Normally I'd take my time, do long lunches and knock it out in 2 days (it's hard to work that slow). Then one time I was in a pissy mood and knocked it out in 2h, I called up my boss to tell him I was done and I'd be on the next plane home -we had a good relationship so it we weren't at odds with each other but he asked me to look busy and not tell the customer that I was finished until the next day. I get it people think if you can do something quick that there's no value to it so when I do deliveries I try not make it look too easy and even if I can be done in 15 minutes I might take an hour or two.