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New ask Hacker News story: Cellular service providers are charging 10x what the network costs

Cellular service providers are charging 10x what the network costs 3 by huntsmans | 1 comments on Hacker News. I've been thinking about this for a while and the economics of cellular service providers in the US are genuinely fascinating once you dig into them. The infrastructure reality: Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have largely sunk their tower infrastructure costs. The marginal cost of adding one more subscriber to an existing network is close to zero. Yet retail pricing for cellular service providers averages $60-80/month. The math doesn't reflect underlying costs — it reflects market power and consumer inertia. Where MVNOs expose the economics: MVNOs lease wholesale capacity from the big three and resell at dramatically lower margins. Same towers, same spectrum, same coverage. The only difference is QCI priority levels — postpaid gets slightly higher priority during peak congestion. For everyday use this is largely imperceptible. When you pay $65/month to Verizon you...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: When do you expect ChatGPT moment in robotics?

Ask HN: When do you expect ChatGPT moment in robotics? 3 by p1esk | 2 comments on Hacker News. Current humanoid robotic assistants are in early stage - somewhere around GPT2 level - they're starting to perform very simple, very narrow tasks, but stumble a lot, and still cannot do much. However, I've been tracking the progress in the last couple of years, and I feel that GPT3 level might already be happening, and some startups demonstrate impressive things (e.g. look up Generalist AI or Physical Intelligence). Plus the funding all these startups are getting should allow them to scale their methods 10x-100x of what has been tried so far. I'm not sure any additional research breakthroughs are actually needed to make the leap to usable products. Therefore, we might soon see a ChatGPT moment in robotics - a commercial availability a physical robot that will be capable of performing useful tasks: cooking, cleaning, simple repairs, yard work, elderly care, etc. Just like ChatGP...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How will most Anthropic customers respond to the threats by the govt?

Ask HN: How will most Anthropic customers respond to the threats by the govt? 3 by Poomba | 2 comments on Hacker News. Now that Trump/the administration has designater Anthropic a supply chainrisk and threatened every company that uses them, how do u think most companies that use Anthropic/Claude would respond? Anthropic only has ~100 customers in federally focused industries (ie defense) [1] but it seems Trump is not just targeting “pure” federal contractors/agencies but anyone doing business with the govt. so that obviously includes a huge chunk of tech companies like Crowdstrike, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot etc [2] and even non-tech companies And how is the govt going to enforce companies to not use Anthropic? Are they going to audit the internal tool usage of thousands of companies? What if individual developers pay for Claude Code personally? What if a company uses Azure or AWS Bedrock which routes to Claude? How would they handle those “edge cases”? [1] According to Bloomberry ...

New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to approach new people in 2026?

Ask HN: How to approach new people in 2026? 3 by tavro | 3 comments on Hacker News. i recently read an article in the guardian about how casual conversations with strangers are becoming increasingly rare. the piece argued that smartphones and post-pandemic habits have made people less likely to interact with strangers in everyday places. this made me think about my own situation. i have been fortunate to meet many great people through university and work, and i generally feel comfortable talking with people in those environments. but outside of structured settings it is a different story. i live in sweden, where approaching strangers in public is already culturally uncommon. it can feel even harder if you did not grow up here and do not already have established social circles. public spaces often feel socially “closed”. people are polite but tend to keep to themselves. so i am curious how others approach this today. how do you meet new people outside of work or school in 2026? do yo...

New ask Hacker News story: Aura-State: Formally Verified LLM State Machine Compiler

Aura-State: Formally Verified LLM State Machine Compiler 2 by rohanmunshi08 | 0 comments on Hacker News. I noticed a pattern: every LLM framework today lets the AI manage state and do math. Then we wonder why pipelines hallucinate numbers and break at 3 AM. I took a different approach and built Aura-State, an open-source Python framework that compiles LLM workflows into formally verified state machines. Instead of hoping the AI figures it out, I brought in real algorithms from hardware verification and statistical learning: CTL Model Checking: the same technique used to verify flight control systems, now applied to LLM workflow graphs. Proves safety properties before execution. Z3 Theorem Prover: every LLM extraction gets formally proven against business constraints. If the total ≠ price × quantity, Z3 catches it with a counterexample. Conformal Prediction: distribution-free 95% confidence intervals on every extracted field. Not just "the LLM said $450k" but "95% CI: ...

New ask Hacker News story: Tell HN: My daily game won a Players Choice Award

Tell HN: My daily game won a Players Choice Award 7 by paulhebert | 2 comments on Hacker News. I've shared my game Tiled Words a few times in "What are you working on" threads and as a Show HN. I wanted to share with y'all that today it won the Players' Choice Award at the 2025 Playlin Daily Game Awards! It was also runner up for Best Word Game and a finalist for Best Classic Game Reimagined and Best Visual Design. Thanks to everyone herewho commented or played. Your feedback and encouragement has made Tiled Words the game it is today. I designed and developed the game and make the puzzles with my wife. We would have stopped long ago if not for the positive feedback from the community. Playlin is a really cool organization and all of the winners are fantastic games that you should try: https://ift.tt/Fa0eLg8 And if you haven't played Tiled Words yet, give it a try here: https:// tiledwords.com

New ask Hacker News story: Seeking Advice on Improving OCR for Watermarked PDFs in My RAG Pipeline

Seeking Advice on Improving OCR for Watermarked PDFs in My RAG Pipeline 2 by hundredtrillion | 0 comments on Hacker News. I’ve been developing a small RAG pipeline and ran into a specific technical issue involving OCR. I’m using PyMuPDF for extraction, and whenever a PDF contains a centered watermark on each page, the OCR becomes noisy—text breaks, artifacts show up, and the output degrades enough that it affects chunking and retrieval accuracy downstream. The document is otherwise clean, so I’m trying to understand whether this is a known limitation of PyMuPDF or if there are better approaches for handling watermarked PDFs before OCR. I’m working with an RTX 4000 (8GB VRAM), so I’m also trying to stay within reasonable GPU constraints. I’d really appreciate any ideas on: more robust OCR libraries or models that handle watermarks well preprocessing strategies to suppress watermark text better extraction pipelines for RAG use cases or any general advice on improving this part of the ...