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Open Source @Github

Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic

https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/2608
40•edent•53m ago•11 comments

Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/20/microsoft-sharepoint-hack/
550•spenvo•1d ago•238 comments

Uv: Running a script with dependencies

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#running-a-script-with-dependencies
245•Bluestein•7h ago•70 comments

AI comes up with bizarre physics experiments, but they work

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-comes-up-with-bizarre-physics-experiments-but-they-work-20250721/
125•pseudolus•5h ago•44 comments

What went wrong inside recalled Anker PowerCore 10000 power banks?

https://www.lumafield.com/article/what-went-wrong-inside-these-recalled-power-banks
372•walterbell•12h ago•176 comments

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft begins taxi tests

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-x-59-quiet-supersonic-aircraft-begins-taxi-tests/
52•rbanffy•2d ago•31 comments

Jujutsu for busy devs

https://maddie.wtf/posts/2025-07-21-jujutsu-for-busy-devs
118•Bogdanp•6h ago•109 comments

Don't bother parsing: Just use images for RAG

https://www.morphik.ai/blog/stop-parsing-docs
234•Adityav369•13h ago•65 comments

AccountingBench: Evaluating LLMs on real long-horizon business tasks

https://accounting.penrose.com/
443•rickcarlino•13h ago•113 comments

TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale

https://github.com/KrishKrosh/TrackWeight
514•wtcactus•15h ago•128 comments

An unprecedented window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-18/what-scientists-learned-scanning-the-bodies-of-100-000-brits
9•helsinkiandrew•3d ago•2 comments

AI could have written this: Birth of a classist slur in knowledge work [pdf]

https://advait.org/files/sarkar_2025_ai_shaming.pdf
16•deverton•3h ago•14 comments

Losing language features: some stories about disjoint unions

https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/318788.html
65•Bogdanp•3d ago•15 comments

Workers at Snopes.com win voluntary recognition

https://newsguild.org/workers-at-snopes-com-win-voluntary-union-recognition/
80•giuliomagnifico•2h ago•3 comments

Look up macOS system binaries

https://macosbin.com
20•tolerance•3d ago•2 comments

New records on Wendelstein 7-X

https://www.iter.org/node/20687/new-records-wendelstein-7-x
210•greesil•15h ago•89 comments

Erlang 28 on GRiSP Nano using only 16 MB

https://www.grisp.org/blog/posts/2025-06-11-grisp-nano-codebeam-sto
136•plainOldText•10h ago•8 comments

The Game Genie Generation

https://tedium.co/2025/07/21/the-game-genie-generation/
116•coloneltcb•12h ago•49 comments

The surprising geography of American left-handedness (2015)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-surprising-geography-of-american-left-handedness/
28•roktonos•9h ago•13 comments

We have made the decision to not continue paying for BBB accreditation

https://mycherrytree.com/blogs/news/why-we-have-made-the-decision-to-not-continue-paying-for-accreditation-from-the-better-business-bureau-bbb
77•LorenDB•3h ago•36 comments

What will become of the CIA?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/the-mission-the-cia-in-the-21st-century-tim-weiner-book-review
84•Michelangelo11•12h ago•127 comments

Spice Data (YC S19) Is Hiring a Product Associate (New Grad)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/spice-data/jobs/RJz1peY-product-associate-new-grad
1•richard_pepper•9h ago

Tokyo's retro shotengai arcades are falling victim to gentrification

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/18/cult-of-convenience-how-tokyos-retro-shotengai-arcades-are-falling-victim-to-gentrification
28•pseudolus•3d ago•9 comments

Scarcity, Inventory, and Inequity: A Deep Dive into Airline Fare Buckets

https://blog.getjetback.com/scarcity-inventory-and-inequity-a-deep-dive-into-airline-fare-buckets/
96•bdev12345•11h ago•37 comments

I know genomes. Don't delete your DNA

https://stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/i-know-genomes-dont-delete-your-dna
41•bookofjoe•11h ago•50 comments

Show HN: Lotas – Cursor for RStudio

https://www.lotas.ai/
65•jorgeoguerra•12h ago•26 comments

Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

https://the418.substack.com/p/a-bug-in-the-mail
167•shayneo•15h ago•167 comments

My favourite German word

https://vurt.org/articles/my-favourite-german-word/
33•taubek•2d ago•38 comments

I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/ive-launched-37-products-in-5-years-and-not-doing-that-again-0b66e6e8b3
136•AlexandrBel•18h ago•118 comments

FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/fcc-to-eliminate-gigabit-speed-goal-and-scrap-analysis-of-broadband-prices.1508451/page-2
187•Bluestein•7h ago•111 comments
Open in hackernews

FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/fcc-to-eliminate-gigabit-speed-goal-and-scrap-analysis-of-broadband-prices.1508451/page-2
187•Bluestein•7h ago

Comments

vjvjvjvjghv•6h ago
Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.

- Reduce science

- Reduce collected data

- Reduce immigration

- Reduce infrastructure

- Reduce adoption of EVs

giantg2•5h ago
What did EVs make us a leader in? If I remember right, other countries have much higher adoption.
aaomidi•4h ago
Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend. Aka leading.
giantg2•4h ago
By that definition, we haven't been leading for years since the Chinese are cranking them out much faster than Tesla.

What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.

Bluestein•3h ago
Typical Chinese move: Observe, copy. Scale. Improve. Extinguish.-
testbjjl•2h ago
Take the “L” friend, it’s okay to learn see perspectives.
datahack•2h ago
That’s the kind of unkind and rather toxic comment I would expect on Reddit, not HN.

Unimpressed.

aaomidi•1h ago
This website is worse than Reddit. Lower your expectations.
datahack•1h ago
That’s not the standard I’ve always had, and I’ve been here from the early days.

You get the community we settle for.

mattgrice•1h ago
By any definition has China not been leading?

Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.

The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.

By any measure that is weak.

stingraycharles•4h ago
Yeah agreed, Tesla showed the world it was possible, but they seem to be failing to maintain their leadership position.
bigbuppo•45m ago
Cut their CEO some some slack. He's a thought leader/rocket mogul/ISP guy/social media but wants to make it a bank for some reason dude/former government sort-of-official/professional gamer/full time twitter shitposter that's also starting a political party and who is responsible for fathering over a dozen children. On second thought, I think I see the problem.
JumpCrisscross•3h ago
> Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend

And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130131031501/http://www.reuter...

wnevets•3h ago
If an adversarial nation had control of the white house would anyone be able to tell the difference
smt88•2h ago
I think an adversarial nation would reduce military activity far more than the current regime has.

That might be the only difference, though.

Mistletoe•2h ago
If you reduce all those other things you don’t need to reduce their military. You already won, without a battle or any casualties on your side. The decay and rot from the inside will take care of the rest.
reactordev•2h ago
In which case turn the military on the people and expedite the process. /s
mattgrice•1h ago
It depends what adversary I guess. It seems like several middle eastern countries of very different religious bent are quite happy with our military activity. Though they are not usually named as adversaries they certainly are by any rational metric.
gigatexal•1h ago
This is the Manchurian candidate movie all over again except it’s not China it’s Russia who planted Trump in office and then neutered him.

This whole project 2025 garbage is a coup run by weird Christian nationalists.

Anything good about America and its government is over. Any goodwill we gained is gone.

CesareBorgia•5h ago
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
tacticus•5h ago
Yeah cause they're not going to have to compete with real bandwidth availability.

given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s

greyface-•5h ago
It's good for incumbent terrestrial cable companies, too.
garciasn•5h ago
Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.

Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.

I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.

kemotep•4h ago
Where do you live? Because Starlink is double my current internet plan for half the bandwidth and at least 10x in latency.

I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.

I live in rural Ohio.

garciasn•4h ago
It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me.

My lake home is in Central MN.

kemotep•3h ago
Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service. Central Minnesota isn’t that different in terms of availability of services from my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area but even then if you are half a mile out of the service area it can cost a fortune. I just wanted to validate your claim of Starlink’s price competitiveness and at least for my address it is one of the worst offerings available to me at least.
vel0city•3h ago
It's not really a global service in terms of service area, it's many many many small service zones. You can only be serviced by the satellites overhead after all.

You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.

deathanatos•3h ago
> Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service.

… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?

> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area

I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.

opello•3h ago
Rural telephone cooperatives that moved to fiber tend to provide an alternative in places where cable companies were the dominant urban option. Some of those cable companies also moved to fiber. The service areas end up overlapped and some competition keeps prices in check.
Marsymars•3h ago
I only have one FTTH connection to my house, but if I stretched I could probably claim “3 fiber providers in the area” - the local cable co does FTTN with 2000/200 service and there’s an independent fibre provider that serves multi-unit buildings in the downtown.
erikerikson•2h ago
In Kitsap county the municipality owned lines can be used via a service contract with any number of service providers. Kinda a monopoly and kinda not.
kergonath•43m ago
That is the right way of doing it. It does not make any sense to have 3 companies building last-mile infrastructure in a neighbourhood, but you can have multiple service providers competing and using the same cables. But then, public oversight on the de-facto infrastructure monopoly is critical.
wmf•3h ago
The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
pwarner•3h ago
Yeah drawing the right line on what's rural is probably key.
ivape•3h ago
- They removed WSJ from the White House press pool because of the Epstein story

- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak

It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.

conradev•1h ago
Yeah, a regulatory goal that can be met by FiOS today but will take Starlink billions to get there does not seem like the correct way to allocate federal funds.

Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.

Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.

etchalon•5h ago
So odd that the FCC would suddenly revert all these rules which were designed to advocate for consumers. Wonder what changed recently?
downrightmike•5h ago
Previously and recently, we've had to fight tooth and nail to make any progress on this and then others like Ajit Pai just flagrantly fake support for destruction of net neutrality.
paul7986•4h ago
Republicans are always pro-business first consumers whatever!
tbrownaw•4h ago
Well there was that one court ruling that said agencies have to stick to what Congress actually authorized them to do rather than having free reign to reinterpret their own authorizations however they want.
idiotsecant•3h ago
That's a pretty reductionist take. Here's what I think is a more reasonable one. If I told you your job was to keep the house clean, but made you come back to me for permission to pick up socks, but told you that absolutely didn't give you permission to pick up shoes, waited 8 months to reply to your request for permission to vacuum, denied you authority to decide what pieces of paper are trash and which are important, and also told you that it wasn't your job to get large muddy dogs out of the house you might think I wasn't serious about having an effectively cleaned house.

And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.

vlovich123•3h ago
Assuming you’re referring to Chevron/Loper, I fail to see the relevance to this case.

Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.

tbrownaw•3h ago
> It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity)

This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.

Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.

threatofrain•2h ago
Their expertise is in science.
tzs•3h ago
If you are thinking of the ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, that's not what it said. What it said is that courts do not have to defer to the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The court can make and use apply its own interpretation.

Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.

tbrownaw•2h ago
Here is an article that (1) lambasts the 2023 Sackett ruling that a swampy back yard is actually not a navigable waterway; and (2) says that that decision teed up the 2024 Loper decision that got all the headlines: https://minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6R... , section starting at the page numbered 2863.
toofy•5h ago
i absolutely dread the day of the enshitified internet connection.
anonym29•4h ago
I take it you've never lived in an area where Spectrum DOCSIS over copper coax and geostationary satellite internet were the only options available at all?
ikiris•4h ago
Maybe this will suddenly be the line where HN people discover that regulations matter when their internet sucks.

/doubt

0x457•1h ago
I will let you in a on secret: internet connection in USA been enshitified for a long time.
_--__--__•5h ago
FYI to all commenters: the current FCC chair was nominated by Trump>Biden>Trump and unanimously confirmed by the Senate all 3 times.
Cornbilly•4h ago
Also, FYI to all commenters: The FCC board is required to have no more than 3 members from a single political party on the board of 5.
xeonmc•4h ago
Are there any similar requirements for the Supreme Court?
ivape•3h ago
When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.

The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.

JumpCrisscross•3h ago
> it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution

Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.

I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/

ivape•2h ago
The problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges, so the pool is tainted. A solution to this is probably something everyone needs to start thinking about (the whole problem), because a future democrat or sane republican will need to push a reform onto the court. Biden tried to push term limits before he left. Trump is a pen tester and showed all the cracks, so there's going to have to be a massive repair job of our systems.
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
> problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges

President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.

Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointments_Clause

RedShift1•4h ago
From what I can tell senate confirmation means nothing. They ask a bunch of questions to grill them but the answers do not matter, they get confirmed anyway so it's all show to me.
wat10000•4h ago
This is highly misleading. He was nominated to the commission by both Trump and Biden. He was nominated as chair by Trump this year.
Niksko•3h ago
FYI to all commenters, take 5 seconds to google Brendan Carr and you will see how much of a partisan, anti-free-speech hack he is. The man wears a gold Trump head pin on his lapel ffs.
tzs•2h ago
You can't really read anything into that.

As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.

Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.

Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.

Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.

giantg2•4h ago
I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.

Edit: why disagree?

maccam94•4h ago
If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building
baby_souffle•4h ago
> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users

640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.

100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.

> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas

Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...

ericmay•3h ago
> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...

Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....

With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?

I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.

baby_souffle•3h ago
> Well they voted for it

Not all of us.

> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?

Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.

> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.

Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.

userbinator•2h ago
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users.

What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?

vjvjvjvjghv•2h ago
Work from home? Copy large files?
userbinator•22m ago
The majority of WFH setups are either "remote into a server and work there" (RDP uses a few Mbps at most when streaming HD video, and SSH is basically negligible) or "everything you need is already on your local company-owned machine."
Larrikin•1h ago
2 younger kids streaming a movie, one parent listening to a podcast in the shower, one parent streaming a YouTube cooking video while making dinner, and an older kid playing any game would completely saturate the network. That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network

Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.

0x457•1h ago
2x1080p streams is 10mbit/s 2x4k is 30mbit/s. so below 100mbit/s. Video games don't consume a lot of traffic[] fortnite literally measured in 100s kbps. Video games consume traffic most only when they're updating, then sure you can saturate 100mbit/s, but you also can saturate 10G just as well, so in this case it's about speed, kid can do some chores while it's updating lmao. I initially wanted to skip podcast because...320kbps max? But then thought that not only that, but it's also most likely already downloaded to the device.

[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.

That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.

vjvjvjvjghv•2h ago
A country that wants technological leadership needs to aim higher. It needs to do more than the absolute minimum.
Dylan16807•2h ago
> The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users.

100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.

> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.

Coax can do it.

> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.

Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.

puppycodes•4h ago
thanks government we love slow and expensive.
anonymars•3h ago
"we" = "we the people": sarcasm

"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"

sigh

jmyeet•3h ago
My building recently got wired up with a local ISP taht is offering gigabit fiber for... $25/month.

AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.

Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].

We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.

But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.

When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.

There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.

And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.

[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/

kstrauser•1h ago
I live in the SF Bay Area where Sonic offers 10Gbit connections for $60/month. They’re a medium sized local provider with excellent support and great prices, and they’re making money doing it. If “economy of scale” were uncapped, Comcast should be a fraction of that price.
lenerdenator•3h ago
As with everything involving this administration, the behavior will continue until an effective negative stimulus is introduced.
Bluestein•3h ago
"Beatings will continue until morale improves".-
lenerdenator•3h ago
That's the problem, though; no one's applying any negative stimulus at all.
timewizard•3h ago
"That's the problem, though; I don't actually like democracy."
ikiris•2h ago
We seem to have hit the point where a civil engineer 2 brick layers and the town drunk are voting on if beams are necessary.
knodi123•2h ago
Did I miss the vote we had on broadband speed goals, or whether we should publish prices?

Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.

lenerdenator•1h ago
I mean, most people didn't vote for Project 2025, which is exactly what Trump is implementing, despite having lied about not knowing about it during the campaign.

Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maximum sentence, presidential election be damned.

mvdtnz•1h ago
Come on. There was plenty of media attention around Project 2025 before the election. This is exactly what people voted for.
lenerdenator•1h ago
And a lot of it surrounded how Trump denied it.
ivape•49m ago
From the horse's mouth on national tv:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fov7Mq75gYE

You're absolutely right.

dlcarrier•3h ago
You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs.

Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.

Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.

Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.

I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.

yxhuvud•3h ago
Not certain I buy this argument - higher throughput tend to require more modern hardware throughout the whole chain, and modern hardware also tends to have better latency than old. So for most people, they will get improvement in both latency and throughput if they would get a gigabit fiber connection. But sure, if you are comparing chains of the same hardware generation, go for latency in most cases.
dlcarrier•2h ago
You're all using the same equipment, regardless of the tier you sign up for. The firmware in your modem or their router limits the maximum packet rate, but individual packets and small groups of packets are always traveling at gigabit speeds, regardless of the speed cap.

That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.

With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.

A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.

kstrauser•1h ago
This is called being “confidently incorrect”. As mentioned above, I have those millisecond-class pings at 200x faster than that piddling 50Mbit pipe (for $60/month). There’s no imaginable advantage to getting a slower, more expensive connection.
dlcarrier•1h ago
I was just being unclear.

Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.

On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.

My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.

jedberg•3h ago
I don't know about where you live, but by far the lowest latency option for me is symmetric gigabit. And my options jump from 200/20 to 1000/1000, and 200/20 was for sure not enough for everyone to stream and video chat at the same time.
dlcarrier•58m ago
Multiple video chats can saturate 20 Mbps up, but if they offered 200/200 it would be more than plenty. Them not offering reasonable plans in between a little to low and way too high doesn't mean that it couldn't exist, it just means that they aren't offering it, likely because they have paid your local government to prohibit any competition, allowing them to force a large portion of their customer base to use a more expensive plan than they need, because no one else is going to offer a reasonable one.
WatchDog•3h ago
All other things equal, higher bandwidth links are inherently lower latency.

Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.

  | Component                                      | 100 Mb/s            | 1 Gb/s            |
  | ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------- |
  | Propagation (30 m)                             | ≈ 0.15 µs           | same              |
  | Two NIC serializations (TX + RX, 1 500 B each) | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 2 × 12 µs = 24 µs |
  | Two switch serializations (store‑and‑forward)  | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 24 µs             |
  | Processing in switch + NICs                    | \~10 µs             | \~10 µs           |
  | **One‑way latency**                            | **≈ 490 µs**        | **≈ 58 µs**       |
  | **Ping RTT** (×2)                              | **≈ 1 ms**          | **≈ 0.12 ms**     |
dlcarrier•2h ago
They're not sending out 100BASE-TX ONTs to lower-tier subscribers. You're all using the same hardware; they're just limiting the packet rate to match the plan.

Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.

Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.

Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.

kingstnap•2h ago
There's no reason to artificially limit the speed. If your city has fibre, everyone can have gigabit internet.

There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.

dlcarrier•2h ago
Most ISPs are guaranteed a monopoly by the local government, so anything they can charge for, they will charge for, because there's no other option.
runako•2h ago
> how tech savvy someone is

> rare power users

I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:

- disk backup to the cloud

- use Docker

- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)

- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal

Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.

dlcarrier•1h ago
Saturating even a 100 megabit connection to a cloud provider gets really expensive, really fast. That's 45 gigabytes/hr. Only a subset of power users are going to have daily or even weekly sustained full-speed transfers of that size, and 100 Mbps is usually the bottom tier plan, from a US telco.

Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.

For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.

Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)

On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.

kstrauser•1h ago
What had made you suppose fast means laggy? I upgraded to 10Gbit Internet because their fiber is cheaper than the 1Gbit connection. I get 3ms pings to Google, or 5ms on older IPv4.

Fast, low-latency, and cheap is a pretty great combo.

dlcarrier•41m ago
More so, there's diminishing returns above a reasonable speed, and below a reasonable amount of lag, and gigabit speeds are well past that point, but for many ISPs the lag is fixed and before that point.

Which is to say, every major telco offers faster speeds than the majority of their subscribers will ever use, often even on their bottom-teir plans, but a significant portion of ISPs have enough lag to affect their users, even on their top-tier plans.

If you're trying to push telcos toward offering a more useful product, don't set a goal for them to offer higher speeds, which are already high enough for the vast majority of customers, but instead push for low latency, which most telcos cannot provide even between the customer's equipment and the telco's equipment.

Fiber providers have excellent latency, and of course that's what you should get if it's an option, but many subscribers are stuck with telcos that use DOCSIS over a cable network or LTE over a cellular network, and nothing can be done to reduce the latency for current generations of those protocols, but there's no technical reason the protocols couldn't have lower latency, so pushing telcos toward offering lower latency could make it happen, creating an actual useful improvement.

userbinator•3h ago
Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.

Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.

wmf•2h ago
You don't need gigabit but resource constraints have never reined in bloat in the past and they won't now.
userbinator•26m ago
Apparently you've never heard of the demoscene.
pabs3•2h ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639837
tzs•2h ago
Wow. The article notes:

> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.

Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".

But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".

I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.

gigatexal•1h ago
What a win for the Telcos. What a loss for all of America. If only municipal broadband/fiber was given the chance to grow there’d be real competition.
jonhohle•54m ago
Telcos were given billions to expand and improve broadband for decades and never did it. If the FCC has scrapped the goal are they also scrapping the handouts? If so, it’s long overdue.
bubblethink•57m ago
To be the devil's advocate, the previous admin also squandered a lot of broadband money away in a pattern that seems common to all Democratic infra projects. See https://reason.com/2024/06/27/why-has-joe-bidens-42-billion-... . Neither party is good at this. The FCC broadband map and the b/w labels (previous admin) are nice though.
izacus•14m ago
Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?