Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
  1. I find the "no one could have seen it coming" crowd extremely tiring, they usually always say that about something anyone who paid a tiny bit of attention could see coming.

    It's genuinely baffling to me why business owners pay so little attention to the politics that will directly impact their business.

    The entire tariffs thing was incredible obvious to me (I am Australian) and I only check in on US politics for 10 min a couple of times a month, any less and it would be zero.

  2. No, temperature does not decrease significantly when objects are in the shadows, unless hey stay there for a long time. Even when they don’t get energy from solar radiation, they still dissipate it by radiative transfer, which is very inefficient. So they cool down slowly.
  3. Or something like that - the temperature goes hot and cold as the things go into light and shadow so they have insulation.
  4. > You cant use your common law experience to interpret the law in other countries.

    That interpretation wasn't mine. It came from the Court of Europe doc I linked to. Feel free to let them know its wrong.

  5. So aggressive and rude, and over... CSAM? Weird.
  6. Except "it was made after the constitution was written" is a standard you've made up -- there is existing case law from SCOTUS that 2A protects guns "in common use"
  7. Even the buses for giant communications satellites are still at the single digit kilowatt scale. The current state of the art in AI datacenters is 500+ kw per rack.

    So you're talking about an entirely different scale of power and needed cooling.

  8. How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd?

    If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox?

    I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn't modular enough? Use something else then that is modular.

  9. 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.

  10. Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment)

    If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections

    There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

  11. I can't quite tell what's being compared there -- just looks like several different LLMs?

    To be clear, I'm suggesting that any specific format for "skills.md" is a red herring, and all you need to do is provide the LLM with good clear documentation.

    A useful comparison would be between: a) make a carefully organised .skills/ folder, b) put the same info anywhere and just link to it from your top-level doc, c) just dump everything directly in the top-level doc.

    My guess is that it's probably a good idea to break stuff out into separate sections, to avoid polluting the context with stuff you don't need; but the specific way you do that very likely isn't important at all. So (a) and (b) would perform about the same.

  12. Can you blame them for existing during early globalization, before over the financialization of everything? It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly, it's a consequence of their local economy and where it was at the time.
  13. I've been building computers for my friends and I for 25 years and the two worst "random stability" issues I had were high quality but aging PSUs.
  14. I always wonder how many system crashes that we put on the software or the OS are actually just sub optimal components. Computers are so complex and so fast that just a little bit of instability can probably lead to data corruption.
  15. Blue states combined are the second largest economy in the world, just ahead of China (3rd) but behind the US in totality. California alone is the fourth largest economy. Their economy would be worth about ~$15T. Combining resources is simply good policy imho.
  16. For someone who has no idea about light engineering or electronics if I stack two 25k Lm lamps next to each other does it make 50k Lm light?

    I recently changed my car's headlamps to Chinese LED which claims to be about 37kLm and I don't know how much it is probably less than that.

    Two of those lamps costee me around $24 on Amazon US (pretty sure under $10 in China).

    What makes this $800+ ?

  17. It will be interesting to see exactly where Texas decides to come down if there really was a split in the US. I have to imagine they would want to follow the rich blue states rather than be stuck footing the bill for Arkansas and Mississippi.

    I guess they probably just try to become their own country, like they already did once anyway.

  18. It seems like every argument in favor of doing this is: "yeah sure but what if X was Y% cheaper?"

    And some of us are reading these things and trying to be polite.

    But at some point the only response is some variation of "what if unicorns and centaurs had teamed up with Sauron?"

    The limit of the ratio of useful:useless "what if's" approaches zero.

  19. I mean you have this around the wrong way.

    The reason we dont have a lot of compute in space, is because of the heat issue. We could have greater routing density on communication satellites, if we could dissipate more heat. If Starlink had solved this issue they would have like triple the capacity and could just drop everything back to the US (like their fans think they do) rather than trying to minimise the number of satellites traffic passes through before exiting back to a ground station usually in the same country as the source. In fact, conspiratorially, I think thats the problem he wants to solve. Because wet dreams of an unhindered, unregulated, space internet are completely unanswered in the engineering of Starlink.

    I have actually argued this from the other side, and I reckon space data centres are sort of feasible in a thought experimental sense. I think its a solvable problem eventually. But heat is the major limiting factor and back of the napkin math stinks tbh.

    IIRC the size/weight of the satellite is going to get geometrically larger as you increase the compute size due to the size of the required cooling system. Then we get into a big argument about how you bring the heat from the component to the cooling system. I think oil, but its heavy again, and several space engineering types want to slap me in the face for suggesting it. Some rube goldberg copper heatpipe network through atmosphere system seems to be preferred.

    I feel like, best case, its a Tesla situation, he clears the legislative roadblocks and solves some critical engineering problem by throwing money at it, and then other, better people step in to actually do it. Also triple the time he says it will take to solve the problem.

    And then, ultimately, as parts fail theres diminishing returns on the satellite. And you dont even get to take the old hardware to the secondary market, it gets dropped in the ocean or burnt up on reentry.

  20. The real punchline is that this is a perfect example of "just enough knowledge to be dangerous." Whoever processed these emails knew enough to know emails aren't plain text, but not enough to know that quoted-printable decoding isn't something you hand-roll with find-and-replace. It's the same class of bug as manually parsing HTML with regex, it works right up until it doesn't, and then you get congressional evidence full of mystery equals signs.
  21. In Athens, an "idiotes" was a citizen who focused only on private matters rather than participating in the polis (city-state). Because civic participation was considered a duty, this term carried a negative connotation of being socially irresponsible or uninvolved.

    This term evolved into the modern "idiot" which we are familiar with.

  22. I think it's interesting to note that not only is there precedent for this type of "blocking technology that prevents the printing of certain things"[1], but it's also inconsequential and uncontroversial enough that most of the people here obviously have never even heard of it.

    We lost the ability to print $50 bills with our HPs[2] and it had no noticeable negative impact on society. I'm not sure why losing the ability to print a gun with our Prusas will be any different.

    [1] - https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/cant-photocopy-scan-cu...

    [2] - https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-Archive-Read-Only/Won...

  23. Your skepticism is valid. Vercel ran a study where they said that skills underperform putting a docs index in AGENTS.md[0].

    My guess is that the standardization is going to make its way into how the models are trained and Skills are eventually going to pull out ahead.

    0: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...

  24. On face I don't see why startups would oppose to paying people under the table unless they just have a dogmatic adherence to the law. Like anything, they are likely to do a cost/risk analysis, which could change wildly depending on the context of the remote employee.
  25. > It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly

    And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before. We can thank them for creating a world where women get to vote but also criticize them for creating a world where everything costs a million dollars and all young people can earn is pennies. At any point in time they could’ve been like “this may not in my selfish interest, but it will ensure the future generations can have the same life as i do” and pushed for policies accordingly. But that didn’t happen.

  26. How about receiving funds in car-park vouchers and ramen?

    Then I could at least save the time I spend at the asian supermarket to get more work done.

    Edit: Also vouchers for a good cafe with wifi please.

  27. > As someone who generally stays out of politics, I didn’t know much about the incoming administration’s stance towards tariffs, though I don’t think anyone could have predicted such drastic hikes.

    I have an appreciation for very bright lamps, and the project is neat, but that stuck out to me.

    I'm always fascinated by people who both feel comfortable ignoring maybe the single most impactful society-determining apparatus but will also say "no one could have seen that coming", where that is whatever they were unaware of because they chose to check out. I find the stance so fascinating because for myself, it would be impossible to not try and understand why the world is the way it is.

    Everything is downstream of politics whether people want to recognize that or not, and choosing to ignore it is, in fact, a political choice.

  28. > We see that that’s a quite a long line. Mail servers don’t like that

    Why do mail server care about how long a line is? Why don't they just let the client reading the mail worry about wrapping the lines?