according to the article, the denominator is ~235.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313348

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024695

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

1. US frontier lab unit economics are better 2. US frontier labs are moving up the stack making tools that are "stickiness" and will prevent users from switching.

For 1...he doesn't provide any evidence for US lab unit economics being better...the major input to unit economics is electricity...which is cheaper in China. And building data centers and connecting them to electricity is both cheaper and an order of magnitude faster in China. The main input that US labs might have an advantage in is in cost/access to chips, but that given the level of chip investment in China it seems unlikely to hold.

For 2...there's little evidence these tools are sticky. At least in programming, the trend seems to be tools like opencode that support multiple models and providers.

And even when they are sort of sticky, as we know on hacker news, people figure out how to point the tools they like to competing models even when the app doesn't official support it.

And every improvement in model capability makes it increasingly easier to make your own tools.

Wrote more on this in a blog post that has an earlier HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982061

Direct link: https://larrysalibra.com/ben-thompson-is-wrong-us-frontier-l...

This list (https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/) has US prices at 14.9 US cents/kwh and China at 10.8 US cents/kwh as of Q2 2026.

Tbh hard to tell how accurate those are either.

The larger issue is that (apparently) new US data center bills aren't getting connected to the grid because of lack of capacity (and the lack of planned growth in that capacity) compared to the very high growth in Chinese installed capacity.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48982061

Points: 30

# Comments: 4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969875

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Mainland China lets people opt out of phone calls that come from outside of the Mainland...it's a feature one can turn off on an on their mobile plan.

Calls from outside the Mainland always cause a warning to pop up on the receiving user's phone that says something like "this call is coming from outside of the mainland, be careful of being scammed".

I can imagine there are many reasons the US doesn't fix this..one of which probably that much of US customer service is outsourced to people outside the US!

I'm not confident enough to say it's as good as claude opus or even sonnet, but it seems not bad!

I did run into an api error when my context exceeded deepseek's 128k window and had to manually compact the context.

All Hong Kong residents are eligible (anyone with an HKID and permission to remain >= 180 days).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084593

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

The next day we had to follow our instructions exactly in class to make the sandwich which was hilarious. A formative experience for me!

10am to 9:30pm every day.

https://surl.amap.com/ooIMl6hgaqj

I asked for suggestions for rust libraries for a certain task and the suggestions from Deepseek were better.

Results here: https://x.com/larrysalibra/status/1883016984021090796

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42507361

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42418383

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

when one group votes to make rules for another group that cannot vote, it can be called many things, but "democracy" is not one of them.

Of the businesses in El Salvador marked on a map as supposedly accepting bitcoin (in bitcoin hotpots like Bitcoin beach), ~1/3 wouldn’t actually accept it for some reason or another.

That said, Bitcoin acceptance in El Salvador was still much better than I expected (perhaps my expectations were too low).

With a bit of planning, patience and persistence it is possible to have an entire trip in El Salvador using only Bitcoin