perihelions

It's true they're using much higher LEO orbits—not sure why you were downvoted for this basic and relevant fact. While Starlink goes to 500-600 km altitudes, Qianfan seems to target 800 km[a], and Guowang has been launching to 900 km and 1,145 km [b,c]. (I'm not discussing the few Starlinks in VLEO orbits below 300 km, because I don't know what the concrete plans are with those).

Those are orbits with 100+ year dynamic lifetimes (as is regularly discussed, i.e. ref [d]). It's true that they could actively deorbit them; that's the lifespan of passive debris that fails to actively deorbit. (Ref [d] also discusses spent rocket stages in this context, and China's uniquely bad behavior there).

I assume the main motive behind this is basic business economics. China doesn't have reusable boosters; the ones that might succeed this month won't reach Falcon 9 levels of mass production, and launch cadence, for several years. They're on an expensive on-ramp. To a first-order simplification 1,100 km orbits need only 1/4th as many satellites for the same coverage as 550 km orbits.

[a] https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-...

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang

[c] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-a...

[d] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...

Disagree on the technical aspects. It'd be inexpensive to monitor adversary military activities on the lunar far side: one lunar satellite would do it. The gravity well is not trivial, and any launches from the surface (should this become a thing) would be immediately visible from high orbit, by the intense infrared glow of rocket combustion exhaust. (Exact same way nuclear early warning systems work on Earth, for that matter[0]).

Agree that the general concept is a serious one, but I don't think the numbers work out on your specific implementation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Support_Program#Histor...

Satellite constellations (links in the final paragraph of the OP article).

I have a modern one with a mouse-event bug specific to Wayland, that still presents in XWayland windows. Switched to KDE/X11 just to work around it (so, not exactly enthused to see this news item on HN).

Direct link,

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23513

> "The Nesterov accelerated gradient method, introduced in 1983, has been a cornerstone of optimization theory and practice. Yet the question of its point convergence had remained open. In this work, we resolve this longstanding open problem in the affirmative. The discovery of the proof was heavily assisted by ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model, and we describe the process through which its assistance was"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14238786 ("Sent to Prison by a Software Program’s Secret Algorithms (nytimes.com)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14285116 ('Justice.exe: Bias in Algorithmic sentencing (justiceexe.com)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649811 ("Louisiana prison board uses algorithms to determine eligility for parole (propublica.org)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11753805 ("Machine Bias (propublica.org)")

Some HN threads about the past incidents mentioned in OP,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17686310 ("Computer Virus Cripples Several Taiwan Semiconductor Plants (bloomberg.com)"—2018, 100 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214952 ("TSMC's Photoresist Material Incident: $550M Loss (anandtech.com)"—2019, 15 comments)

I didn't read it[0] as being particularly nuanced. I thought it was a fact-loose, extremist hitpiece against FOSS, containing howlers such as

> "Particularité de GraphèneOS : on peut se le procurer autant sur le darknet que sur des sites grand public." ⇒ "A distinctive feature of GrapheneOS is that it can be obtained both on the darknet and on mainstream websites."

Quoting "both sides" (so to speak) doesn't automatically create a thoughtful dialog.

[0] https://archive.is/20251119082524/https://www.leparisien.fr/... (tr. "Google Pixel and GrapheneOS: drug traffickers' secret weapon for protecting their data from the police")

This post is just an excerpt—it's the first 4 paragraphs of a 29-paragraph article,

https://archive.is/DQpXM ("China reaches energy independence milestone by ‘breeding’ uranium from thorium"–SCMP)

Tangential question that's been nagging me; in spaces of functions defined pointwise, is there a natural way to lift algebraic structures (group/ring/whatever) from the base set up to the function space? It's generally true across many separate objects in math, but I don't know a clear explanation of why. (Category theory, I assume).

Many of the propositions in the author's Appendix A are of this form.

I.e., if you look at how addition on function spaces is defined pointwise, (f+g)(x) = f(x)+g(x) -- that's different meanings of (+) on either side -- that looks exactly like the defining relation of a group homomorphism, except that the symbols are backwards.

> "Particularité de GraphèneOS : on peut se le procurer autant sur le darknet que sur des sites grand public." ⇒ "A distinctive feature of GrapheneOS is that it can be obtained both on the darknet and on mainstream websites."

Occam's distro-hopper? Don't attribute to malice, what's easily explained by people chasing after trendy new things.

I got some of basic facts very wrong; I've removed that error.

> "In other exchanges, Mr. Summers appeared to ask Mr. Epstein’s advice on how to pursue a romantic relationship"

That's NYT-speak for "they joked crudely and overtly about pressuring the woman into unwilling sex". You can dump the New York Times and read competent writing here:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...

> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”"

I think it remarkable how the NYT buries (far down on the page), and CNBC omits altogether, the underlying story about what Larry Summers was actually doing. CNBC euphemizes the whole thing away to vapor (there were mails—the end). These aren't good expositions.

(Speaking of the NYT' coverage, there's a new revelation one of their reporters actually helped Epstein evade scrutiny—it's another bit from the recently-disclosed email tranches. Their reporter Landon Thomas secretly tipped off Epstein that one of his NYT coworkers was "digging around" into Epstein—even gave Epstein the guy's name).

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgeidner.bsky.social/post/3m5hn... ("Fall 2017: Then-NYT reporter literally warning Epstein that someone is "digging around again.")

> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"

Supporting background:

> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”

> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...

Epstein's email footer throws the whole spaghetti at the wall—confidentiality, attorney-client privilege, securities regulations, and copyright law, too.

> "The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE"

> "Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved"

At least the political maps are post-1992.

You can examine their modern military maps; there's many of them (staged) in backgrounds of random KCNA photos. I.e. this "big board",

https://www.rferl.org/a/korea-evacuation-kim-/24951984.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/who-north-koreas-secretiv...

I don't know why one wouldn't expect their military to have modern cartography, in the internet era.

Zinc boils at 1,180 K, so its vapor pressure should be negligible at room (300 K) or kitchen oven (500 K) temperatures. I suspect the GP comment is misapplying advice from a different context, like arc-welding.

(And a penny doesn't really have exposed zinc, I understand: its plating is pure copper).

I'd also note the combustion elements of stovetop gas burners are often brass (copper-zinc).

> "The old nuclear power plant at Wylfa was switched off in 2015"

Tangentially—this is a brownfield site, where there once was an early generation of nuclear fission reactor, cooled by CO2 gas. Here's a brief description of what those machines looked like (not this exact one):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890470 ("Nothing like this will be built again"—263 comments)

> "Today, there are not enough organics in the oceans to go anoxic," says Kump. "But in the Permian,"

The editorialized HN title misrepresents what the article says.

Hold up—where do you get the assessment that LandSpace "is not state funded" and that these startups have "quite limited funds"? My understanding is the diametric opposite. Here's WSJ:

> "At least six Chinese rockets designed with reusability in mind are planned to have their maiden flights this year. In November, the country’s first commercial launch site began operating. Beijing and local governments are giving private-sector companies cash injections of billions of dollars."

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-own-elon-musks-are-ra...

( https://archive.is/Ukmoa )

This is a national security priority for the Chinese state, which is why it's rational to expect a heavy amount of state support.

^ Be aware that a large number of accounts in this thread are throwaway sockpuppets which are obviously linked. It's a problem that they're pretending to be a crowd of unrelated people; it's an inauthentic attack trying (I don't know why) to manipulate HN sentiment.

The Zhuque-3 attempt should be a few weeks away,

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/... ("China's 1st reusable rocket test fires engines ahead of debut flight")

It also normalizes in the public eye the notion that conventional ID's deserve suspicion, and pushes the Overton window, in the US context, further in the direction of accepting that LEO's can and should be jailing people solely on their personal suspicions about ID authenticity.

A person without an iPhone (or not utilizing it fully) does not deserve suspicion. It's not a crime to opt out of the mainstream iPhone sociology. It is not right to treat a person who is e.g. elderly, or for some other reason has "fallen" behind the digital divide, as an inferior person with fewer rights and privileges.

It's reliably in tech peoples' blind spot, when thinking about how to make things "efficient" for the common case, one that reflects their own experience, to not think or care about the less-common cases that don't affect them. See: digital-only payments[0]. But being banned from shopping in a few hipster stores is a small thing compared to being wrongly jailed!

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cashless

> "SteamOS 3 (Arch-based)"

Holy shit, it's the Year of The Linux Desktop, for real this time. It's happening. It's actually happening.

A standard Arch Linux/KDE[0] PC for every home, in a polished, vendor-supported package. Like Apple, it's a single standard hardware/OS pair, so, FOSS' fatal hardware-support hell might well be made obsolete. The vendor is a household name corporation. There's an incredibly fortuitous (for Linux) market dynamic at this point in time, of "commoditize your complement"—the dynamic that Valve has incentives to invest massively in giving away a nice thing for free, because that does bad things to its competitors. And Steam is... the killer super-app to end all killer apps.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

This is real life!

Pendantically, too.

Also an HN thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45886479 ("Widespread distribution of bacteria containing PETases across global oceans (oup.com)"—1 day ago, 72 comments)

(The new $300 iPhone thong is made of PET (polyester), so, it's reassuring to know the universe does have the capability to unmake those).