Hacker News Reader

bildungon Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

To add to that, the current take that the US could just walk away from the conflict is incredibly naive - Iran will decide when this is over, and it won't be before the November elections. Before the US attacked, blocking the strait was only a potential, now Trump gave Iran the chance to prove that they are capable of doing it. And why on earth would Iran now give that away for free?

bildungon Solar panels at Lidl? Plug-in versions set to appear in shops

In Germany there was zero investment into the electric infrastructure, but the power allowed to flow from the panels into the grid is currently limited to 800W for this type of system. Seems to work fine. Larger systems still need a license.

bildungon Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

They paid about $10B on inference and had about $10B in revenue in 2025. The users and numbers of zeroes on those numbers are not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of those numbers. They apparently are not even profitable on inference, wich is the cheap part of the whole business.

And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

bildungon Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use

Of course they bundle R&D with inference pricing, how else could you the recoup that investment.

The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts for R&D and hardware without losing out to the competitors?

bildungon AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

But only if you ignore all the other market participants, right? How can we ever reach a point where all the i.e. smaller Chinese competitors perpetually trailing behind SOTA with a ~9 month lag but at a tiny fraction of the cost stop existing?

I mean we just have to look at old discussions about Uber for the exact same arguments. Uber, after all these years, still is at a negative 10 % lifetime ROI , and that company doesn't even have to meaningfully invest in hardware.

IMO this will probably develop like the railroad boom in the first half of the 19th century: All the AI-only first movers like OpenAI and Anthropic will go bust, just like most railroad companies who laid the tracks, because they can't escape the training treadmill. But the tech itself will stay, and even become a meaningful productivity booster over the next decades.

bildungon Study: Older Cannabis Users Have Larger Brains, Better Cognition

Further down:

> there was a single brain region where we saw that higher cannabis use was actually associated with lower brain volume – the posterior cingulate, which is part of the limbic system and is implicated in processes like memory, learning, and emotion. That said, some research suggests smaller posterior cingulate volume is actually associated with better working memory, so it’s a little unclear what this means.

bildungon Data centers in space makes no sense

1 KW of solar panels is 150€ retail right now. You are probably at 80€ or less if you buy a few MW.

(I'm ignoring installation costs etc. because actually creating the satellites is ignored here, too)

bildungon Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

Thanks for the reply, will look into the links. And yes, full agreement, algorithmic ranking is a whole different dynamic, and has to be both researched and regulated differently than a dumb feed. Even the latter probably has levers moderating human reception, i.e. if we evolved in communities of less than 150 individuals, being able to routinely follow the curated lives of e.g. 500 people probobly has other effects than a feed of 50 actual RL friends.

bildungon Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media

> The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny

Can you share the source? The last time I looked the association was both clear and pretty strong, e.g. "There was a linear dose–response association of TSSM and risk of depression. The risk of depression increased by 13% (OR = 1.13, 95%CI: 1.09 to 1.17, p < 0.001) for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents." DOI:10.3390/ijerph19095164

> “Social media” lumps together very different things

HN does this, but the research is usually pretty clear in spelling out they mean FB, Insta, TikTok and so on.

> If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design

I too would like changes in that direction (mostly because adults are also affected negatively by social media), but keep in mind even a non-optimized, strictly chronological feed produces these negative effects, see keyword (and associated studies for) "upward social comparison", i.e. people are always more inclined to post about things that went well or are fun, and thus even a pure chronologically sorted feed produces a warped perception of normal social reality.

bildungon European Alternatives

People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.

People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

bildungon EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal

Farming already is heavily subsidized in every EU country. The whole sector only exists as is precisely because of the fears you point out. And that is perfectly fine, because statistically speaking it already is a rounding error both in share of employment and share of GDP (1.2% of EU GDP), only kept alive for the exact purpose you talk about.

So even if these lobby talking points would be true, and everything had to be 100% subsidized, that wouldn't be a problem.

bildungon EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal

But is that really true, i.e. were you able to find actual facts supporting this? I'm asking because in Germany there are similar talking points driven by the farmer's associations (actually just the big agro corps, actual small-scale farmers don't have much of a voice in these) and everytime I tried to dig into a particular topic, it didn't seem to be supported by actual facts.

bildungon EU and Mercosur countries sign landmark free trade deal

Well yesterday he already imposed tariffs on several EU countries because they oppose the annexation of Greenland, so I wouldn't be surprised if he does the same in this case.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-vows-tariffs-eigh...

bildungon vLLM large scale serving: DeepSeek 2.2k tok/s/h200 with wide-ep

vLLM ususally only plays out its strength when serving multiple users in parallel, in contrast to llama.cpp (Ollama is a wrapper around llama.cpp).

If you want more performance, you could try running llama.cpp directly or use the prebuilt lemonade nightlies.

bildungon Fahrplan – 39C3

Or perhaps you changed over the years?

bildungon Mistral 3 family of models released

I didn't mean to imply US bad EU good. As such, this isn't about which passport the VCs have, but about local hosting and open weight models. A closed model from a US company always comes with the risk of data exfiltration either for training or thanks to CLOUD Act etc (i.e. industrial espionage).

And personally I don't care at all about the performance delta - we are talking about a difference of 6 to at most 12 months here, between closed source SOTA and open weight models.

bildungon Mistral 3 family of models released

I think people from the US often aren't aware how many companies from the EU simply won't risk losing their data to the providers you have in mind, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. They simply are no option at all.

The company I work for for example, a mid-sized tech business, currently investigates their local hosting options for LLMs. So Mistral certainly will be an option, among the Qwen familiy and Deepseek.

Mistral is positioning themselves for that market, not the one you have in mind. Comparing their models with Claude etc. would mean associating themselves with the data leeches, which they probably try to avoid.

bildungon Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

> Russia will conquer Ukraine, any other prediction at this point is absurd.

Are you sure? They are advancing, sure, put look what they paid for to achieve this: 300k dead, 700k wounded, depletion of their souvereign wealth fund, 20%+ inflation, lower oil production and so on.

bildungon Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost

> The USA is still THE powerhouse economy of the world.

Things look decidedly different if you exclude the ad companies (Google, Meta, ...) and associated shovel sellers, see the WaPo article about the S&P 493 from a few days ago.

bildungon OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030

OTOH, why don't they ship good enough products? To me all of OpenAIs recent investments strongly suggest they hit a dead end with their current LLM approach. After all, if they knew the path ahead for GPT looks great, why don't they invest into training the next big thing instead of doing datacenters with the intention of renting them out?

bildungon Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

I have zero experience with these, but every app crashing could also indicate a hardware issue. Faulty memory perhaps?

bildungon LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

To drive this point further: The one stable causal relastionship relevant here is the one between inequality and crime. Reduce inequality in ways 0xbadcafebee suggested would reduce inequality - though probably not in sizes measureable after a few years.

bildungon LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

It's probably reasonable to take a step back here and ask: Why is this not a universal problem? It's not as if every juristication outside the US simply lets criminals run away.

bildungon I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

Do you have an example of a good implementation of ai captions? I've only experienced those on youtube, and they are really bad. The automatic dubbing is even worse, but still.

On second thought this probably depends on the caption language.

bildungon Honda: 2 years of ml vs 1 month of prompting - heres what we learned

Apparently it's also shit. There was a discussion about it a few days ago that contains multiple project maintainers pointing out deepwiki didn't get their repos at all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884169

bildungon Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model

As counterpoints to illustrate Chinas current development:

* China has produced more PV panel capacity in the first half of this year than the US has installed, all in all, in all of its history

* China alone has installed PV capacity of over 1000 GW today

* China has installed battery electrical storage of about 100 GW / 300 GWh today and aims to have 180 GW in 2027

bildungon EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages

You just need to pay 60€ or so for a business license and off you go. A GmbH (a corporate structure with limited liability, somewhere between an LLC and Corp) is not needed if you want to start a) now and b) for almost zero cost.

bildungon Intel Announces Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card with 160GB VRAM

I also think they have to be substantially cheaper than nvidia to have any chance, but the pro 6000 with 96G is already available at 7-8k - so half the price would have to be significantly below 4k.

bildungon German government comes out against Chat Control

The CCC hasn't been only about computers since inception. They were clearly already political in the 80s, just have a look at this zine: https://ds.ccc.de/pdfs/ds024.pdf

bildungon Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement

Words are just noises. Think of them as pointers. They point to a concept in the brain. What concept that may be differs from person to person. But as long as the words point to something, they aren't used wrongly.

The idea that there was some point in history were the pointer target was officially designated to be x is just false. That point in time never existed.