MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by audunw | 2025-07-06 08:57:56+00:00
What are you talking about? Batteries don’t dump their energy in seconds. They dump their energy over many, many hours.

The initial burst of flames you see in some videos is not the energy stored in the battery, it’s the flammable electrolytes separating the anode and cathode that’s burning.

There’s a study from Sweden that set an ICE and EV car on fire. The energy release profile is fairly similar. The ICE is a bit more intense overall. So there’s nothing inherently more dangerous about batteries. Quite the opposite.

The only issue with (current gen li-ion) batteries is the thermal runaway. When the battery is shorted the energy is dumped over the following hours and it’s nearly impossible to stop. It’s doesn’t “burn” per se, but it will get so hot that it will re-ignite any flammable material that the car or truck is made out of. For a trained fire department it’s fairly easy to deal with though. You just need to cool the battery pack during the time where it’s dumping its energy. This could be done with a specialised hose that sprays water underneath the battery pack. You can inflate a barrier around the car and fill that with water. We’ve also seen that fire departments get an empty container delivered, fill it with a bit of water and lift the car into it. For a truck that’s obviously not possible. My point is there’s dozens of ways to deal with it.

Several next generation batteries (which are fairly mature and well beyond the lab stage at this point) have electrolytes that are less flammable or not flammable at all. So you avoid both the initial burst of flames and reduce the potential of thermal runaway. With good separation between cells/packs, it’s extremely unlikely that the whole pack will burn at once.

EV cars and trucks are already objectively (as measured by fire statistics in countries with high share of EVs like Norway) safer. No company is going to introduce a battery chemistry unless it’s more safe than the current commercial cells, so it’s only going to get better from here. Fire departments are only going to be better trained, and these days they can just copy the learnings from countries like Norway, where the fire departments already consider EVs to be far better for overall fire safety than ICE vehicles.

Batteries have the potential to be nearly entirely fire proof, even while storing a lot of energy, so the future is very bright in this area.
by hermitcrab | 2025-07-06 08:58:51+00:00
"Alleged eyewitness reports of Joseph's levitations are noted to be subject to gross exaggeration, and often written years after his death."

That sounds super reliable. ;0)

"Poisoning due to the consumption of rye bread made from ergot-infected grain was common in Europe in the Middle Ages. It was known to cause convulsion symptoms and hallucinations. British academic John Cornwell has suggested that Joseph had consumed rye bread (see ergot poisoning). According to Cornwell "Here, perhaps, lay the key to his levitations. After sampling his own loaves he evidently believed he was taking off–as did those who partook of his high-octane bake-offs.""

Eilmer of Malmesbury showed a bit more commitment to his flying:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury
by prmoustache | 2025-07-06 08:59:39+00:00
> "or just because they're hard to obtain "

Are they?

I have the feeling they are easier to obtain than if they were only sold at dedicated stores and teenagers had to show an ID, or similar to casinos addict trying to get out could ask to be put on ban list.

Having said that, legalizing would not get rid of cartels, who are very diversified and also operate illegally on legal products by taxing producers and controlling transport and distribution. It would merely allow us to spend the same amount of money on health care and prevention so that less people get addicted and those who are have more chances of rehab.

If war on drug worked, you would see addicts accross the country in the news complaining that their dealers are all in jail and they can't find a new one. Or saying that their dealers do not have any stock so they have to travel to get their fix. Has this ever happened?
by jaimefjorge | 2025-07-06 09:02:17+00:00
I feel an urge to build personal local AI bots that would be personal spam filters. AI filtering AI, fight fire with fire. Mostly because the world OP wants is never coming back. Everything will be AI and it's everywhere.

I also feel an urge to build spaces in the internet just for humans, with some 'turrets' to protect against AI invasion and exploitation. I just don't know what content would be shared in those spaces because AI is already everywhere in content production.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-06 09:03:08+00:00
European perspective:

A large proportion of truck traffic in the EU is regional trunking - regular runs between distribution centres, typically as part of a hub-and-spoke model. To give an example, If I receive a parcel via Royal Mail, it's likely to have travelled via the Midlands Super Hub to my local mail centre, a distance of about 120 miles. At either end of that journey, the truck is likely to spend at least 30 minutes being unloaded and loaded.

There are many thousands of routes like that, with a constant flow of trucks covering relatively short distances on a predictable schedule. The operators running those routes have fleets of many thousands of vehicles and would have no difficulty whatsoever in managing a mixed fleet, using diesel or electric based on what's most suitable for the role; with diesel costing over $7 a gallon, there's a very obvious financial advantage to electric trucks.

Currently, the rollout of electric trucks is overwhelmingly bottlenecked by grid capacity rather than vehicle range - installing rapid chargers on every loading bay in a medium-sized distribution centre might require 20 megawatts of peak capacity, which isn't the kind of thing you can wire up overnight. Many operators are ready and eager to switch a large proportion of their fleet to electric trucks, they're just waiting for the grid to catch up.
by kgeist | 2025-07-06 09:03:09+00:00
We run our own LLM server at the office for a month now, as an experiment (for privacy/infosec reasons), and a single RTX 5090 is enough to serve 50 people for occasional use. We run Qwen3 32b which in some benchmarks is equivalent to GPT 4.1-mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash. The GPU allows 2 concurrent requests at the same time with 32k context each and 60 tok/s. At first I was skeptical a single GPU would be enough, but it turns out, most people don't use LLMs 24/7.
by stevedonovan | 2025-07-06 09:03:18+00:00
But this is one thing that Gen AI is genuinely good at, constructing computer programs under close human supervision. It's also the most profitable (but not enough to justify valuations) Also, it may be a big thing here but its pretty niche in the larger scheme of things

The article is about it encroaching in the domain of human communications. Mass adoption is the only way to justify the incredible financial promises.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-06 09:03:29+00:00
The interaction that messes me up all the time is the side button and payment related stuff

One press turns on/off the display Two taps enables Apple Pay

Quite often my timing is not perfect or one press isn’t hard enough so I shut off the display

Then, paying with Apple Pay is a double press but paying for transit is no press. but often I’m absent minded and as I’m walking through the transit gate my brain thinks “must pay” “pay = double press” so I subconsciously double press and the gate screams since is not in transit mode now it’s in Apple Pay mode
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-06 09:04:35+00:00
How exactly does this stop you allowing people to play the game offline?

Is your game not allowing the Mercedes logo to fall off intrinsically tied to it being online? Is the server code the only thing keeping the logo in place?

Or are you just making shit up because you find the initiative icky?

I find it bizarre how game developer companies try hard to antagonize the public that keeps buying their things.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-07-06 09:05:00+00:00
A few posts before he shared a story of a black woman Amazon delivery driver caught on camera complaining about delivering to a rich person's large house.

He attributed this to basic monkey psychology and said it led to revolutions where all the rich people get killed and society gets poorer overall.

I read it as mocking poor people, but maybe he was trying to warn the people who get killed in those kinds of revolutions.
by latexr | 2025-07-06 09:05:12+00:00
> business wise this is my passion project for life I feel

I am genuinely glad that you’re so pumped for it, and wish you the best of luck.

But I have to agree with the other comments, its current state absolutely killed it for me. There’s no useful information on the page and I’m not going to register just to check what little there is. Ordinarily I’d just have closed the website and never returned, though in this case I may check again in the future.
by LeonM | 2025-07-06 09:05:29+00:00
> He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.

As a European visiting US/Canada I once struck a conversation with a truck driver who had a really cool vintage semi, with lots of chrome and flare. I told him that I really liked the look of his truck, but that vintage trucks of that age would never be allowed on the road again in Europe, at least not for commercial jobs.

He then told me his truck was basically brand new...

Besides me making a fool of myself, I really grew an appreciation for the EU having rules about semis, especially in the noise department. Yeah, US domestic semi trucks are cool in their own way, but the constant noise of clutch fans, air brakes, 'jake' brakes, 'stack' exhaust with no of mufflers, etc. would drive me insane.

In (most of) Europe, all vehicles are subject to strict noise and emission rules, and many larger cities are now congestion zones which prohibits larger/older diesel powered vehicles from entering the city. Same for my city, where most trucks and busses are now electric. Since it happened gradually the change wasn't all that noticeable, that is until you go somewhere else and hear (and smell!) a diesel powered bus/semi drive by... We like to complain about all the 'stupid' government rules, but when you go to a place without those laws you really start to appreciate them, it truly feels like taking a step 'back' for the worse.
by rollcat | 2025-07-06 09:06:33+00:00
> Lua doesn't have a CGI module in stdlib either.

Lua barely has any stdlib to speak of, most notably in terms of OS interfaces. I'm not even talking about chmod or sockets; there's no setenv or readdir.

You have to install C modules for any of that, which kinda kills it for having a simple language for CGI or scripting.

Don't get me wrong, I love Lua, but you won't get far without scaffolding.
by protocolture | 2025-07-06 09:06:38+00:00
In my experience its not that ambition is bad, its just that much more difficult to act upon successfully these days than previous.

I was speaking to friends of mine a few years back, and they mentioned that they successfully created a facilities management and cleaning business for a few years just to have the experience. Made a lot of money and moved on. My parents did something similar, bought a sub 5000 dollar print cartridge restoration franchise, turned it into 50k in 18 months and dumped it.

You try either of those today and the margins are too thin to even contemplate. You can work 18 hour days for a few years and end up with very little. Not to mention the generally poor returns on wage labor compared to cost of living. My parents combined income 20 years ago is less than I earn solo now. They had 2 cars and a house on that money. I rent at more than 5 times their mortgage cost.

I actually tend to blame hobbies, for having such a good happiness return per dollar, for soaking up discretionary spending. Society is fucked to the point where some people toil hopelessly without recreation, and others are devoted almost entirely to recreation. Like the division of labor coming in to play to ensure the people best suited to leisure are completing that task.
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-06 09:07:54+00:00
Again, what the fuck does the licensing of music or textures have anything to do with people playing the game offline?

Why do you mix your awful DRM scheme with something completely separated from the subject matter?

Are you trying to claim that the licensing scheme establishes by contract that the players must be stripped of their consumer rights by not being able to own the game they bought?

Well, good news for you, maybe the regulations that will come out of it will make this sort of licensing contract illegal. Perhaps it will make it easier to make games for you.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-06 09:09:17+00:00
Feck all, unfortunately. Like, if you either 1. buy a house some years back or 2. get an off-books rental through someone you know then you can do well.

Alternatively, if you work for one of the Big Tech places then you'll get a really good wage (by irish standards) as well as enough benefits to make you feel a bunch better off. Additionally the bonuses and equity there help a lot.

But yeah, Ireland's super expensive. Our household is at about the 85% percentile income, and we have a (small/expensive) house but we don't have a lot left after all of our outgoings.

So yeah, you can get a better salary but you probably won't have a whole lot more disposable income (but apart from all that, ireland's a great place to live).
by audunw | 2025-07-06 09:09:44+00:00
We have a tunnel nearby that was built with a grade that’s too steep. Every year there’s a large ICE truck that overheats, catches fire and shuts the tunnel down for a while. This is simply not going to be an issue with EV trucks. A fire is possible but much less likely in general, and MUCH less likely in that specific scenario.

In Norway we’ve also already seen that tunnels and garages require less ventilation as the share of EVs gets higher, saving millions on new construction. Electric semi trucks will unlock the full benefit.

Larger vehicles like trucks and buses is also where you get the most benefit of noise reduction.

EV semi trucks are going to improve so many things.
by sasaf5 | 2025-07-06 09:11:46+00:00
> I’ve seen employees spend days drafting documents that a free tool like Mistral could generate in seconds, leaving them 30-60 minutes to review and refine.

What I have seen is employees spending days asking the model again and again to actually generate the document they need, and then submit it without reviewing it, only for a problem to explode a month later because no one noticed a glaring absurdity in the middle of the AI-polished garbage.

AI is the worst kind of liar: a bullshitter.
by chithanh | 2025-07-06 09:11:46+00:00
I don't buy these arguments. If game developers don't want to sell games that way then don't. Sell subscriptions instead. Like instead of $60 for a game, $60 one-time fee for a two-year subscription, which afterwards renews automatically in 3 months intervals at no cost until further notice. Same applies to all paid in-game content.

That way the developers can continue offering both games and subscriptions where each type makes most sense. And everybody knows what they are signing up for. People who buy a game get a game which they can play indefinitely. People who buy a subscription know the earliest possible end date and everything beyond that is just bonus.
by ezst | 2025-07-06 09:11:55+00:00
Depends on what you value. To me, MB Pro's keyboard is terrible, and MacOS is abysmal. On an ideological level, I defend right to repair, right to upgrade and oppose vendor lock-in. What does that leave me with? An admittedly decent CPU, a good display and speakers? That's pretty weak to entertain Apple's consumer-hostile charade with my own money.
by alexanderchr | 2025-07-06 09:12:24+00:00
> Especially on the discounters here in EU (especially Ryanair / Easyjet), i'm the only one in the non-priority queue, everyone else is in the priority queue. This used to of course not be the case; you paid extra and was in first. Now i'm usually in before 2/3th of the prio queue. Which is just weird.

That’s because the ”priority” queue for those carriers is really a ”paid for a proper carry on”-queue. But the airlines realised that they could brand it as a priority queue to make the upcharge to bring a bag more palatable. You’re not spending €40 just to bring a bag that used to be included in the ticket, you also get to feel more important. At least the first time until you realise 2/3rds of the plane is also important.
by ben0x539 | 2025-07-06 09:12:24+00:00
At my last job, a lot of our web services also benefited immensely from in-process caches and batching (to be fair, some of them were the cache for downstream services), and their scaling requirements pretty much dominated our budget.

I can totally see how the cgi-bin process-per-request model is viable in a lot of places, but when it isn't, the difference can be vast. I don't think we'd have benefited from the easier concurrency either, but that's probably just because it was all golang to begin with.
by daymanstep | 2025-07-06 09:12:26+00:00
What discourages Chinese people from pursuing innovation are the lax IP laws.

In China, if you spend 10 years designing a new awesome thing, everyone else will copy it as soon as you publish it. There is basically no protection for IP. That's why China caught up to the West so quickly, but it's also why very little innovation happens in China.
Skype went silent, and so did my business
by andybady | 2025-07-06 09:13:03+00:00
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by alextousss | 2025-07-06 09:13:25+00:00
They do in a YouTube video on their channel [0]. It’s 40 (!) watts. They also show it shooting indiscriminately at any small object, with an example where they feed it foam chips.

[0]: https://youtu.be/Ta0f0oB4I-Q?si=WqlhTmVHVszXSjtU
by dzaima | 2025-07-06 09:13:51+00:00
re edit - While the hardware differences are significant, some by necessity, some by tradition, it's not my point.

My specific point is that "how to write code that is generic across block size, boundary conditions, and thread divergence." is just not the correct question to ask for many CPU SIMD use-cases. Many of those Just Do Not Fit That Paradigm. If you think you can just squeeze CPU SIMD usage into that box then I don't think you've actually done any CPU SIMD beyond very trivial things (see my example problem in the other thread).

You want to take advantage of block size on CPUs. It's sad that GPU programmers don't get to. In other places I've seen multiple GPU programmers annoyed at not being able to do the CPU SIMD programming paradigm of explicit registers on GPUs. And doing anything about thread divergence on CPUs is just not gonna go well due to the necessary focus on high clock rates (and as such having branch mispredictions be relatively ridiculously expensive).

You of course don't need any of fancy anything if you have a pure embarassingly-parallel problem, for which GPUs are explicitly made. But for these autovectorization does actually already work, given hardware that has necessary instructions (memory gathers/scatters, masked loads/stores if necessary; and of course no programming paradigm would magically make it work for hardware that doesn't). At worst you may need to add a _Pragma to tell the compiler to ignore memory aliasing, at which point the loop body is exactly the same programming paradigm as CUDA (with thread synchronization being roughly "} for (...) {", but you gain better control over how things happen).
by mhog_hn | 2025-07-06 09:14:04+00:00
What meta structure allows us to get rid of rent seeking behavior?

I don’t have an answer - is there scientific research on this?

Taxation? Loopholes will be found.

Lawfare against it? Lobbying will win.

I am amazed by capitalism, but at the same time it is a ruthless machine - and in democratic countries it is highly unlikely that a single political party can force the machine into a new direction. Perhaps that is a very nice feature, at the cost of also having to tolerate rent seeking, but it sure as hell sucks to see these downsides.
by andyst | 2025-07-06 09:14:33+00:00
especially the australian airline example and perhaps with much broader applicability, I know that companies are completely happy with managable competition (Australian domestic airlines are functionally 2 players, and similarly across many large industries here that's true) where over time once they can establish profitable gimmicks neither party really wants to rock the boat and they're able to lock in that margin forever more. It doesn't suit established players to compete on that, they both open up losing situations in the game theory compared to silent non-competition.

In high capital businesses like airlines and supermarkets it seems to play out all over the place these days.
by lmpdev | 2025-07-06 09:15:17+00:00
What interests me is long-term, which nation/currency is optimal as reserve currency?(assuming no political/military factors)

Like theoretically, assume all countries can’t collapse. Should the reserve currency be primarily the countries with the most people? (think China/India/Indonesia/Nigeria) Most natural resources? (think Australia, China or Russia) Historical power? (UK) Linguistic network? (France)

Can we even derive a normative answer?

Do non-national currencies differ to national ones?

I’m not the biggest fan of economists, but I feel like research does need to be done here…
by flowerthoughts | 2025-07-06 09:15:39+00:00
Yes, this one got caught. ;)

This seems difficult. Even with two Starlinks: one to control it in Colombia, and one to control it at the destination coast, killing power to each. And make it autonomous on the way. This leaves the problem that there is a sudden (dis-)appearance of the link at sea, which might still make you light up like a lighthouse in analysis.

However, it would seem cartels could use a cubesat and make their own links?
by diggan | 2025-07-06 09:16:44+00:00
Why they'd name it 99% the same as the existing model?

Now there is "BYD SEAL U DM-i" and "BYD Seal 6 DM-1", with seemingly vastly different performance (double the range + half the price?)

None the less, looks like another interesting and competitive model. I'm currently looking at replacing a Audio A3 Sportback (diesel) with hybrid or electric, and I would be lying if I said BYD doesn't looks almost just right for this...