Hacker News Reader

random3on Environmental groups urge EPA to reject new PFAS to cool datacenters

This is the formal comment for EPA

https://www.regulations.gov/comment/EPA-HQ-OPPT-2026-1387-00...

This is the manufacturer marketing copy on Opteon™, which is functionally comparable to Freon

https://www.opteon.it/-/media/files/opteon/opteon-pfas-infog...

This is (some of) the research

https://chemrxiv.org/doi/10.26434/chemrxiv-2024-0djqt

> Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) is a persistent and mobile substance that has been increasing in concentrations within diverse environmental media, including rain, soils, human serum, plants, plant-based foods, and drinking water. Currently, TFA concentrations are orders of magnitude higher than those of other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). This accumulation is due to many PFAS having TFA as a transformation product, including several fluorinated gases (F-gases), pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, in addition to direct release of industrially produced TFA. Due to TFA’s extreme persistence and ongoing emissions, concentrations are increasing irreversibly. What remains less clear is the thresholds where irreversible effects on local or global scales occur. There are indications from mammalian toxicity studies that TFA is toxic to reproduction and that it exhibits liver toxicity. Ecotoxicity data are scarce, with most data for aquatic systems; fewer data are available for terrestrial plants, where TFA bioaccumulates most readily. Collectively, these trends imply that TFA meets the criteria of a planetary boundary threat for novel entities because of increasing planetary-scale exposure, where potential, irreversible disruptive impacts on vital earth system processes could occur. The rational response to this is to instigate binding actions to reduce emissions of TFA and its many precursors.

random3on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

And what else, forbid running workloads outside of US so you can’t offshore workloads? What’s the rationale behind policies that can be detrimental only to US companies?

random3on Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10B

To ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay

random3on Who's afraid of Chinese models?

Because the European researchers and engineers are busy building models in the US

random3on Making 768 servers look like 1

A 767 servers KV store should be enough for everyone

random3on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues

Can you elaborate on

> But it also allows for a lot of hardware to be locked down just like ARM

random3on Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

Meanwhile (seen while opening the referenced tweet) https://x.com/BlackHC/status/2077009476423647596

> I work at Google DeepMind. This won't make me popular. But it's all public reporting:

> 2014: DeepMind reportedly sold to Google on conditions: no military use, independent oversight

> 2026: a Pentagon contract for "any lawful government purpose"

> Not one safeguard survived intact

random3on Demis Hassabis has a plan to harness AI safely

lol - because that's usually how it happens?

random3on OpenAI mandates hardware-backed passkeys for Trusted Access Cyber members

It’s an advertisement by Yubikey - the hardware key manufacturer

random3on DeepSeek aims to make its own AI chip

there's some thing between supa-power and sign-language I guess

random3on QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

Please elaborate. There are literary step-by-step videos on how to build these. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3LT_b6K0Mc

random3on DeepSeek aims to make its own AI chip

Are you Chinese, or do you just think it’s an easy thing to change worlds?

random3on Distributed system is slower than a laptop

A distributed system is slower than a laptop or phone by definition of “distributed” which entails a network which has a higher latency than your local system. It’s not about raw speed/latency as much as it is about volume.

I used to compare distributed system with freight trains vs F1 cars. But there are a ton of low latency distributed systems too like your LTE network.

The key factor is how much data is shared by how many endpoints. Having these two very high makes it for very hard problems. Like streaming high definition events to millions of people.

random3on Distributed system is slower than a laptop

Games like quake are transient and have a small number of users sharing data and if it fails it doesn’t matter enough to need failover, although that could be done relatively easily with a write-ahead log. You need session stickyness at the load balancing layer but otherwise latency is more important than scale, so you don’t need a distributed system per se. Writing a small C/C++ server would make a lot of sense if you didn’t have Go, Rust, etc.

random3on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0 – Breyer: "Our children lose out"

OK, but what does that have to do with the suggestion that saying “nothing will happen” adds no value to this conversation

random3on Decrypting View State Messages

All I'm seeing when opening this is a big red warning

> Deceptive Website Warning > This website may try to trick you into doing something dangerous, like installing software or disclosing personal or financial information, like passwords, phone numbers, or credit

random3on CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

Also forked for similar governance concerns :))

random3on CoMaps – FOSS Offline Maps

Relevant thread from yesterday's thread on the original project this was forked from

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48794575

https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/

> Despite being advertised as a community-driven project, key decisions, including financial management, partnerships (with Kayak, for instance), and the inclusion of proprietary components in the code were made by a small group of shareholders, often without input from the broader contributor community.

random3on Organic Maps

Are you suggesting a Google/Apple Maps alternative with the differentiators being privacy-focused, "No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community"hits #1 on HN and somehow the OP or HN polyculture doesn't care about being forked aver governance concerns, the inclusion of proprietary components in the code, using project’s donation funds for personal expenses, and running ads because of "other reasons"? Please say more.

random3on Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

the finiteness, in a sense, makes it non-exponential. it boils down to the core characterstic of polynomials (equivalently "algebraic") of being finite series (compare with formal power series that don't have this limitation) of constant powers. Hence, given an input, you can get something that is a polynomial of that input, that makes it a finite sum of constant! powers of that input.

The sum is finite (vs formal power series which can be infinite) The powers are constant (this is what makes it non-exponential)

random3on Organic Maps

Thank you! This is highly relavant. I wish OPs would put a bit more research into what they post

https://itsfoss.com/news/organic-maps-fork-comaps/

random3on Factories are just rooms

This applies mostly to assembly lines. If you've seen large industrial complexes, you should know factories are not rooms. Instead they are large scale "machines". Tire factories, large pipe factories, chemical plants, etc. are much more complex than most assembly lines.

random3on Costco is the anti-Amazon

You can order from Costco on Instacart here in the Bay Area. This said, there's a lot of quality stuff at Costco (besides their huge wines collection) that you can't find anywhere else.

random3on Markets are competitive if and only if P != NP

It's a vast generalization of the cost to verify a problem/solution.

- P means polynomial - NP means nondeterministic polynomial

Roughly polynomial (P) represents the upper bound of the cost to verify, and the polynomial characterization says that given a problem with a certain input (e.g. the input can be the number of training examples in ML training set or the number of constraints/conditions in a general problem— e.g. all the places you want to visit on your next trip, given many "wants" in a group)

When the cost is polynomial relative to the input size it means it can only be finitely larger than the input - that's a characteristic of the polynomial which is just a finite sum of powers of x (the input).

When the cost is nondeterministic polynomial, one way to think about it in what is called a nondeterministic Turing machine. The nondeterministic part refers to the "states" that the machines can transition to from any current state. When the transition can happen to more than one state, we say it's non-deterministic— and can imagine it's determined by some probability.

The general assumption is that polynomial (P) is easier than nondeterministic polnomial (NP). This isn't necessarily the case as there can be arbitrarily large finite numbers (making P solutions intractible)

The P vs NP problem is one of the main open problems and generally considered a crank magnet and general confusion. For a good (likely the best) resource see https://scottaaronson.blog/

random3on An American Privacy Emergency

Yes, apparently there are crowdfunded superpacs exactly for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC

random3on We pay engineers to cut our infra bill

Without a complementary policy to cut salaries for introducing inefficiencies, they just created the unbounded incentive for more inefficiencies that can lead to ever larger savings.

random3on Makers around the world are 3D printing medical gear for Venezuela

These are mostly splints that were developed by two medical companies in Venezuela and which have open sourced their models so that they can get more to help with the effort.

https://printforhelp.org/parts

The splints are printed flat with PLA which allows thermoforming - putting them in hot water allows doctors to mold based on each patient's arm

random3on Makers around the world are 3D printing medical gear for Venezuela

English WhatsApp group https://chat.whatsapp.com/Fc7e08cW6ubC33GQCNHxME

random3on Makers around the world are 3D printing medical gear for Venezuela

https://printforhelp.org/parts

https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1uhevtz/request...

random3on Model Training as Code

> TL;DR: Model training has grown complex

So they’ve built Savanah - a workflow engine because the existing zoo of hundreds of workflow engines didn’t cut it :)