MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gareth321 | 2025-07-21 12:14:46+00:00
Really? That appears to be one of the primary applications, and it's discussed in many investor calls re Waymo and Tesla. The driver component in the total cost of taxi service is 60-70%. EVs also have a lower total cost of ownership, and this scales with the number of miles driven because electricity is cheaper than gas. Even if the price of EVs stayed exactly as they are, autonomous taxis would cost 70-80% less than convention taxis. That's a market disrupting drop.
by binwiederhier | 2025-07-21 12:15:16+00:00
Ha! I did not expect a reference to `innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit` here. I wrote a blog post a few years ago about MySQL lossless semi-sync replication [1] and I've had quite enough of innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit for a lifetime :-)

Depending on the database you're using, and on your configuration, they may NOT recover, or require manual intervention to recover. There is a reason that MSSQL has a VSS writer in Windows, and that PostgreSQL and MySQL have their own "dump programs" that do clean backups. Pulling the plug (= file system snapshotting) without involving the database/app is risky business.

Databases these days are really resilient, so I'm not saying that $yourfavoriteapp will never recover. But unless you involve the application or a VSS writer (which does that for you), you cannot be sure that it'll come back up.

[1] https://blog.heckel.io/2021/10/19/lossless-mysql-semi-sync-r...
by colechristensen | 2025-07-21 12:17:06+00:00
>Give as few orders as possible, once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.

Being a leader is a matter of taste. Make the decisions you need to make, take the actions you need to take, delegate the rest. If you had a very qualified group of people to do absolutely everything done you didn't want to do yourself "you" would get an incredible amount of stuff done.

Watch The West Wing for a taste of how the president of the US operates.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-21 12:17:21+00:00
> You're comparing companies of widely varying size

OVHCloud is not AWS size, but it is still a large company that generates over $1B in revenue. Yet is has almost no dev or product leadership presence outside of France or the US. Same with Scaleway, which is a division of Iliad SA - one of the largest telcos in France and founded by one of Macron's largest backers who is also the son-in-law of Bernard Arnault of LVMH (and the reason why every country negotiating with the EU puts tariffs on Congac and Champagne), who has pushed Macron to dump ministers and even his PM.

> it is pretty commonplace for European companies with enough activity across Europe to have offices around and to quite freely move/open offices in other countries.

Both OVHCloud and Scaleway have been around since 1999, yet haven't ever expanded their core engineering or product responsibilities outside France or the US.

Meanwhile, AWS, GCP, Microsoft, and hundreds of American tech companies and startups have all given core product leadership responsibilities to their offices across Central and Eastern Europe.

Even small (compared to OVHCloud) American startups like (randomly picking 2 ik of) Cyberhaven and Snyk have opened offices in Romania and Poland that own product and engineering decisions plus roadmap.

> So I don't really see this point as a good one.

It is a major point because it is French (and German) businesses that are lobbying for a combative position at the expense of other EU member states.

Why should Ireland, Czechia, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria suffer a severe capital outflow and retaliation from the US to help French companies that have keep jobs (and thus income and corporate tax revenue) within France and overwhelmingly benefit French (and German) capital owners?

And like I said before, this is why no unified European grand strategy ever develops - inevitably individual European nations undercut each other to protect their domestic industries.

At least Czechia, Poland, and Romania have helped burden-share via their contributions to Ukraine, which outshine those France has provided on a per capita basis, despite being much poorer countries than France.
by seec | 2025-07-21 12:18:35+00:00
Most of the wireless earbuds are the same thought.

Fundamentally they are fighting an uphill battle with physics and they'll probably never win no matter how much tech is developed.

They have settled on multiple mics with noise suppression technology to try to isolate and amplify just the voice but it's still so much worse than the cheap approach of a single mic along a cable not too far from your mouth that it's laughable really.

In my opinion this is a case of tech for the sake of tech, it only exists to "fix" a perceived inconvenience (at least marketed) of having a cable but to do so it creates more inconveniences and actually degrades the experience/quality.

When you think about it, it's really marketing genius that they are able to sell them at all. Basically, selling worse audio quality (both mic and speaker) than what was available in the late 2000's at 2-3 times the price, all that to not have a cable.
by Gareth321 | 2025-07-21 12:18:36+00:00
I strongly agree. Laws are a reflection of our values. If our values are that people should be free to blast loud music in public, spit on the sidewalk, and harass and intimidate others, our laws will permit that behaviour. Many Asian societies ensure their laws prevent people acting that way, often with harsh penalties. As long as we have such a strong movement to "defund the police," and "abolish prisons," our societies will never be as safe as theirs.
by brazzy | 2025-07-21 12:18:58+00:00
> In fact, seeing the gas vans up close was disturbing to Eichmann, as it would be to anyone.

And the gas vans (and chambers) were already an deliberate effort to make mass murder more palatable to those committing it.

In the early stages, the Holocaust was done not with gas, but with bullets. But the Nazi leadership found that their troops could not stomach mass shootings, not even the SS. Many started to drink too much, or started to talk too much. A few reveled in it - which in turn was something the leadership could not stomach: they had framed the actions to themselves as distasteful but crucial to ensure the survival of the German people, they did not want it to be executed by homicidal maniacs.

Thus, gas chambers: the person pressing the button doesn't have to see people die, and the disposal of the bodies can be outsourced to local labor, even to future victims.

Much easier on the conscience.
by aredox | 2025-07-21 12:19:02+00:00
To answer the questions the first commenters already have but didn't bother to search for: the accusation is « altération du fonctionnement d’un système de traitement automatisé de données en bande organisée » and « extraction frauduleuse de données d’un système de traitement automatisé de données en bande organisée ».

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/id/LEGISCTA000006149839
by graycat | 2025-07-21 12:19:16+00:00
Yup: And stochastic dynamic programming and stochastic optimal control! Suppose a cargo plane is to fly from Kansas City to St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, Dayton, Nashville, and Memphis and at each city pickup cargo. Suppose the cargo weights are known only in probability distribution from history and otherwise are probabilistically independent. Have weather reports for the winds and temperatures, but the actual values can vary from the reports. And suppose the fuel prices vary significantly among the stops but are known.

Then, how much fuel should the pilot buy at each stop to minimize expected cost for the trip? I.e., in simple terms, buy extra fuel where it's cheap and carry (tanker) it to where it's expensive but in so doing burn extra fuel from the extra weight of the extra fuel.

Solution: Stochastic dynamic programming.

Hint: In Canada, the solution is illegal!

Was meeting with Nemhauser (see references below); my cab back to the airport was waiting; and he gave me a 15 second lecture. On the plane thought about his lecture, ..., and stood for my Ph.D. orals and passed (extra credit for guessing my employer).

Some references (with TeX markup):

Stuart E.\ Dreyfus and Averill M.\ Law, {\it The Art and Theory of Dynamic Programming,\/} ISBN 0-12-221860-4, Academic Press, New York.\ \

Dimitri P.\ Bertsekas, {\it Dynamic Programming: Deterministic and Stochastic Models,\/} ISBN 0-13-221581-0, Prentice-Hall.\ \

George L.\ Nemhauser, {\it Dynamic Programming,\/} ISBN 0-471-63150-7, John Wiley and Sons, New York\ \

E.\ B.\ Dynkin and A.\ A.\ Yushkevich, {\it Controlled Markov Processes,\/} ISBN 0-387-90387-9, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.\ \

Wendell H.\ Fleming and Raymond W.\ Rishel, {\it Deterministic and Stochastic Optimal Control,\/} ISBN 0-387-90155-8, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.\ \

Michael Athans and Peter L.\ Falb, {\it Optimal Control:\ \ An Introduction to the Theory and Its Applications,\/} McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York.\ \

Dimitri P.\ Bertsekas and Steven E.\ Shreve, {\it Stochastic Optimal Control: The Discrete Time Case,\/} ISBN 0-12-093260-1, Academic Press, New York.\ \

E.\ B.\ Lee and L.\ Markus, {\it Foundations of Optimal Control Theory,\/} ISBN 0471-52263-5, John Wiley, New York,
by diulin | 2025-07-21 12:19:40+00:00
XML/XSLT/XPath are great, but XSLT ecosystem has been effectively "frozen" for over a decade in terms of innovation and tooling. The last major step was XSLT 3.0 (2017), which introduced streaming and function integration. However, in practice, no new engines or radically different approaches have emerged since then. And there is only one free XSLT 3.0 processor available, SAXON-HE (it lacks schema-aware & streaming though)
by rs186 | 2025-07-21 12:20:56+00:00
I mean, anyone who cares about energy use, noise and more general gaming playing experience should get a console, if their circumstances allow it. Gaming laptop is a lot of compromise.

The only reasons to get a gaming laptop is that you are space constrained or need to travel, while the only reasons to get a gaming PC is to get the best possible performance and/or build/upgrade your hardware.

If noise is a big issue, Mac is not a solution, because you don't have so many available games to begin with. Consoles like Xbox Series X are extremely quiet these days (at reasonable powe consumption -- <200W), while on a well-built gaming PC you can choose whatever solution you want to lower heat and fan noise.
by poulpy123 | 2025-07-21 12:20:57+00:00
It will still take a lot of time to write down the bullet points and get the data in support (I suppose that nih grants work like the ones in my country). The people that propose 40 grants in a year and that are targeted by this rule do not just use AI for helping to redact their proposal.

As a funny anecdote and a side note, I noticed a pattern of tricks used by people to detect AI texts that is dangerously close to my natural writing habits in English. For example I've seen people saying text with a lot of "fancier" words ( closer to my native language than more natural words), using a lot of moreover or "-" in the sentences. They are all things I've read people here and elsewhere say it helps them to know that a text is AI generated. I'm now very self-conscious about using moreover.
by kldg | 2025-07-21 12:22:27+00:00
As someone who went through a prepper episode in youth, I think this is worth underlining. I have a large digital archive of books and trade magazines, everything from bank industry primers for the oil industry to sewing patterns and "sewing theory". For a laugh with a friend, I admitted to having this still more than a decade after initial digital hoarding, and we went through some of them. One was a book from a hundred and some years ago titled something like "Woodworking Explained for Everyone"; and inside are pages and pages of complex greek formulas while the English-language context is written in a way largely incomprehensible to me. It would've taken me months to decipher the book and put anything into practice.

I just tell an LLM what I'm trying to do and it gives me 3 methods, explaining the pros and cons, and if I don't understand why it says something, I press about it. Even a local gemma-12b model can be pretty helpful, and in an era where we have so many cheap options for local energy generation and storage available, the case for hoarding digital textbooks/encyclopedias over an LLM is pretty weak.

That said, some old books are still very neat. We were reading through one called, I think it was something like the "grocer's encyclopedia", and it contains many very helpful thought-starters and beautiful and practical illustrations. LLMs are probably always going to disproportionately advantage non-visual learners in my lifetime, I think. Wikipedia, I think, is more focused on events than useful skills; I don't think Wikipedia would be very useful for "rebooting society"; it's more something to read for entertainment, or if for some reason you need to know which Treaty of London someone's referring to (but you could just ask an LLM that).
by herrmaier | 2025-07-21 12:22:38+00:00
I recently tried to use Serena (an AI coding agent + language server toolkit) and hit a crash during project indexing. Instead of filing a vague issue, I set up Claude Code, indexed Serena’s own codebase using Serena itself, and then asked the AI agent why Serena was failing.

This led to an interesting discovery: • My initial guess (“large files causing crashes”) was wrong. • The actual problem was that Serena’s language servers struggled with complex regex/iterator-heavy files. • I was able to file a much better issue report, with logs and a hypothesis, and propose an improvement (exclude certain files from indexing).

This seems like a useful workflow for open-source contributors: use AI-assisted analysis responsibly before submitting issues, to save maintainers time and avoid noisy back-and-forth.

Here’s the write-up: Why Half-Baked Bug Reports Waste Everyone’s Time (and How AI Can Level Up Your Open-Source Contributions) (replace with final blog link)

Curious if others are using Claude/Serena for similar “meta-debugging” workflows. Would love to hear examples.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-07-21 12:22:44+00:00
I found your medium article on this subject by hunting around. It's very interesting. Hope you write more.

From a layman's point of view, say this is true and embeddings should be a manifold. Like a horse saddle or sphere for example. Then some adding of vectors the simple way won't make sense. On a sphere west in China plus west in US is double west but in 3d it's zero as they point in different directions. Is this sort of the idea?
by scheeseman486 | 2025-07-21 12:23:06+00:00
I mostly switched because I had a motherboard failure and while dealing with that took the opportunity to install it and try it out. I've found that most of the custom tools they've built are better, the default choices are smarter (particularly their kitted-out kernel) and documentation is more detailed, it was a breeze to install. Performance doesn't seem any worse, though I haven't run benchmarks or anything like that.

EndeavourOS isn't bad, but I struggle to think of anything it does better.
Show HN: Want to know how to say the same thing in 20 languages?
by harperhuang | 2025-07-21 12:23:22+00:00
Hey HN! I built HowToSay (https://howtosay.cc) - a simple multilingual translation tool that's completely free.

Key features: • Translates to 20+ languages simultaneously • Up to 1000 characters per translation • No registration, no API keys, just paste and translate • Mobile-friendly for on-the-go use • Completely free

I got tired of switching between different translation services (and so did my friends), so I wanted something that could show me how to say the same thing across multiple languages at once. Perfect for language learners, travelers, or anyone working in multilingual environments.

The AI does a decent job with context and cultural nuances. I've been using it for business emails, travel phrases, and more.

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback! If this tool helps you out, please share it with your friends.
by ziofill | 2025-07-21 12:25:30+00:00
I was at a physics conference once and the RGB cable for the presentations was a bit faulty and one of the color channels wouldn’t work, and this presenter’s slides were all tinted cyan. After a bit of jiggling it finally worked and the slides went back to normal, but everyone heard an old professor on the first row go “on no, now they’re purple!”
by throw0101b | 2025-07-21 12:25:51+00:00
Is this different than the investigation that was opened on July 11?

* https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/07/11/france-p...

* https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/11/france-is-investigating-x-...

* FR: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...
by Gareth321 | 2025-07-21 12:26:14+00:00
When you list it like that, it's incredibly impressive. He's clearly autistic, and says and does very socially awkward things, but this is the kind of person which moves society ahead by decades. SpaceX alone has reduced space transport by 10 *times.* Starlink provides internet to everyone, anywhere in the world. [This](https://youtu.be/sX1Y2JMK6g8?si=rV5_BKsbPc2GPg3n&t=195) is like something out of a really cool sci-fi, but it's real life. It's going to be in the history books forever.
by remram | 2025-07-21 12:26:28+00:00
This is often tricky because not all home routers will let you set up the protocol forwarding you need.

Another option is to use a cloud provider that supports IPv6. For example Google's GCP gives you a completely free VM, the drawback is that enabling IPv6 is a bit of a puzzle. https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu... (create a dual-stack VPC with a dual-stack subnet in a region, add firewall rules, create dual-stack VM)
Ask HN: You Have Been Blocked (Half Price Books Blocking Denmark)?
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-21 12:27:03+00:00
So I was going to https://www.hpb.com/ for my first time ever as I have a bunch of books to sell, and I figured it might make sense to sell a large portion of them in bulk.

And I got blocked

From Google search half price books, and it did verifying you are human. And then it gave me the message

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access hpb.com

Why have I been blocked?

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

What can I do to resolve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

Cloudflare Ray ID: 962a9a7879a792ec •

Now I can't actually email the site owner as I can't get into the site to find out who the site owner is to tell them their security is a bit overzealous.

I am not on a VPN, my browser is FF without plugins.

But I am in Denmark and going to just hpb.com without trying www.hpb.com first (so in fresh browser, safari) gives me the following

403 ERROR

The request could not be satisfied.

The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) Request ID: Zxyp7jHDpqD8YMam6c20ZfBkumiC9mh1GYofKmP8RjzJcvf72I3MYQ==

Which is nice to know that they are blocking me from Denmark for some reason instead of just doing their other bullshit first.

So does anyone know why Half Price books seems to be blocking users from Denmark?
by hopelite | 2025-07-21 12:28:32+00:00
I think you may be overlooking that those are different and largely unrelated issues even if they are correlated. It is a shift of the whole modality, not just the service or location in which the modality is being conducted.

Stack Overflow was a modality of humans asking and answering questions of each other, AI is totally replacing the humans in the answering step (for the time being), and doing so far more efficiently. Ai does not care how many times someone asks the same question, let alone how unimportant it is to a human ego. Let’s also not act as if it was just SO that is hostile to answering questions of humans. Remember seeing that letter from the aughts that went around the internet, where Linus Torvalds berated people?

Ai does not do that, Ai is patient and supportive, not humanly limited in its patience and support. It is a far superior experience from that perspective.

Ai may be limited still at this point and will not have a certain amount of experience based on second and third order effects and interactions between systems and methods that a human will have experience with from a life of experiences, but I frankly do not have any reason to believe that level of fine grained synthesized expertise will be gained soon enough; it is a mere feedback and learning loop away. The infant that Ai is right now is really not all that far off from becoming a toddler smarter than any genius human coder has ever been in all of human history. I’m thinking it is no more than another year to year and a half, and Ai will be the undisputed expert at every single repeatable programming question there is.
Show HN: Harpoon-style window switcher prototype (100% Vibe coded)
by IntensiCode | 2025-07-21 12:28:48+00:00
100% vibe coded (claude code max primarily) window switcher with fuzzy select and basic harpoon style window tagging (ctrl-<key> assign, alt-key> jump).

this is pretty much aligned with my workflow. probably not super useful for others. but i find the harpoon style window jumping quite useful. i can <alt-tab><alt-m> to go to mail etc. without releasing <alt>. i prefer this over workspaces switching alone. probably very personal setup i'm driving...

fun project on the side...

don't look at the code please. it wasn't me! :-D

i added releases to the GH page. but i'm a linux n00b in many ways. no idea if these run on other DEs or kernels or whatever. ‾\_('')_/‾

i'd love to hear about other projects and proper window managers that implement this already. because this is ofc mostly a hack.
by hn92726819 | 2025-07-21 12:28:57+00:00
> I tend to skip the -u flag as bash scripts often interact with global variables that are set outside my scripts.

What? If globals are set outside the scripts, -u still works. If the author means they may or may not be defined outside the script, the ${VAR:-} construct allows it to expand to nothing if unset (just throw VAR=${VAR:-} at the top if you don't want to edit the body)

Also, I do not like the function return based on error code:

function ... { ... (( check_level >= current_level )) }

Unless I'm reading this wrong, this is a bad idea if using set -e. This is a function and it should instead:

return $(( check_level < current_level ))
by Tade0 | 2025-07-21 12:30:30+00:00
The yogurts at the back of my fridge still freeze up.

There's going to be a temperature gradient in a typical fridge, if only because one side is getting opened every now and then, and the other is separated by all the products which are inside.

I suppose what they're trying to do here is even out that gradient without running the compressor.