Hacker News Reader

atwrkon Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

Social Media brought a decline between 1975 and 1995? It surely plays a role (at least as a confounder), but can't be the sole cause.

atwrkon Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs

Why xAI? They have no market share and their own data centers are over 90% idle/rented out to the other AI shops, so it's more likely that the money flows in the opposite direction.

atwrkon The newest ESP32 can run Linux and it's getting close to a Raspberry Pi

At its core those all ESP32 are microcontrollers with RISC-V cores[0] and integrated wifi. There's a plethora of peripheral configurations, hence all those ESP32-* variations. This one even has Gbit ethernet and audio, bit still, at it's core (hah), RISC-V with only a few hundred MHz and 512kB RAM. So the peripherals are now similar to a Raspberry Pi, but not the CPU part itself.

[0] older versions had Xtensa cores, not RISC-V.

atwrkon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

Did you honestly just invent a conspiracy about some unnamed people with a hidden agenda of making nuclear look expensive by paying 10B euros for decommissioning a working plant?

Just a suggestion, but alternatively you could also accept that in reality, decomissioning actually is expensive.

atwrkon Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't

Because, as the arcticle states, the author comes from the position of whether to eat meat at all, so no meat vs. lab meat, not lab meat vs. slaughterhouse meat, as you imply.

atwrkon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

Have a look at this nuclear plant in Northern Germany that is in the process of being decomissioned since 1995. It's still not finished, suspected end date is now in the 2040s and is now projected to cost about 10B €. For a single plant.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald (you have to translate that page yourself, the English version doesn't contain the relevant information)

atwrkon Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

> Of course that kind of deal was insane, but it says more about financing long term projects on the market than it says anything about nuclear as a technology.

Well sure, but the alternatives aren't really affected by this, because they don't have to be planned and financed these such long time frames. So this is a problem for nuclear. The core technology seldomly is the deciding factor for these things.

atwrkon HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?

OpenAI started fearmongering way back with GPT 2, arguing that model was too dangerous to release freely. That model was barely coherent enough for using it as a twitter bot. Anthropic just hopped onto that later. Conveniently, calling for regulation now would ease the competition from open Chinese models, opening the chance for both companies to eventually reach positive ROI, with consumers paying the price.

The burden of proof that this isn't just a publicity stunt again is squarely on them.

atwrkon How Much Has Trump Made from Crypto? ($1.4B from 2025 Federal Disclosure)

He has certainly made gas prices stronger

atwrkon DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro

I guess this was a heavily quantized version from openrouter? I've never had that experience in the last months of quite intensive use of the official deepseek api.

atwrkon After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted

Most people want to live where other people live, for reasons ranging from social connections to access to services and infrastructure. I doubt broadband access access plays even a small role.

atwrkon DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X

Did you read beyond the headline? It's 1.65 trillion hidden and 1.35 trillion overt - which sums up to 3 trillion.

atwrkon DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X

Debt is at $3 trillion right now: https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/ai-debt-hypescalers-capex-cap...

Interest alone, at assumed 5%, amounts to about $150 billions per year. That's probably higher than the combined AI revenue of the top 3 providers.

atwrkon DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X

The big question is whether the demand will stay if the subsidized pricing ends. That's what the bubble talk is about. Right now all the players compete for market share and don't care about the losses (hence the debt). But what happens if no one wants to lend them anymore?

atwrkon EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services

This is intended to drive you insane on purpose. It is just malicious compliance intended to make users blame the anti-monopoly regulators instead of the monopolists.

This is a corporation with tens of thousands of software developers. If they wanted to do better, they could. As always: If the UI is bad for you, that probably means that particular implementation is good for the corporation.

atwrkon OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation

IMO they hope to make AI a strongly regulated industry, with OpenAI (and Anthropic) becoming military suppliers with their stronger models, and everything Chinese or open-weight gets banned.

The competition from the open models is so strong now that this seems to be the only way to keep both companies afloat, given their dire financials. OpenAI probably hoped that they can achieve market lead and then lower the training costs (and make inference cheap enough to eventually escape the red numbers), but the opposite is happening: The competition comes closer and closer, thus training has to be kept up with full force, thus the bleeding continues.

But if they can position themselves as too important/dangerous to be available for everyone (thus this incident report and the clever mentioning of GLM 5.2), they could get the military supplier treatment and would be protected from the market.

atwrkon The state of open source AI

To anyone having read about Mussolini, Italy's economy and political landscape in the 20s onward, his model of corporatism etc, the answer is obviously clear: the US. China also is authoritarian, of course, but the societal structure sharply differs from Italian fascism.

atwrkon The state of open source AI

To add to that, to me it seems that the idea is that open weights vastly accelerate dissemination into and practical application in the wider economy, which seems to be the goal. They don't seem to subscribe to the AGI/singularity silliness so prevalent in the West.

atwrkon Grok 4.5

A bit late now, but thanks for this detailed breakdown!

atwrkon Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

What makes you think Germany didn't do well with renewables? This almost looks like a hockey stick graph: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene...

atwrkon Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.

atwrkon OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says

You're right of course, but in this case the statement doesn't look that false. The source article [0] states that half of the assets is cash, so "assets" is defined a bit more freely here.

If we assume a 2026 revenue of 23B (Q1 2026 revenue x4) and costs of 70B (2025 costs * (2026 revenue / 2025 revenue)), even those 25B in cash reserves won't mean much. And this napkin math even ignores their debt obligations. So either they raise money in the range of 50-75B this year (actual money, not datacenter vouchers), or ...

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

atwrkon Grok 4.5

The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.

atwrkon Grok 4.5

He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.

Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...

"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."

atwrkon Grok 4.5

The owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?

atwrkon Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor

Coal is already shrinking in the China (in absolute terms, not just as share of production) [1], and share of wind + solar is already larger than in the US [2], so I doubt China will ever reach US proportions in CO2 emissions per capita.

An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3].

[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

atwrkon Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)

Well I guess reading the article could ease your confusion. Unsurprisingly it is a bit less generalized than your take.

atwrkon South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

> Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.

atwrkon Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

People around me, outside the programmer bubble, hate OpenAI with a passion. It's the symbol of antidemocratic US corporations cuddling with Trump etc, right there with Tesla. And no one outside my tech bubble has ever heard of Anthropic.

This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.

atwrkon How to earn a billion dollars

No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.

Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.