MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-22 12:26:02+00:00
>The dock/barge case is addressed here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45330638>

Addressed naively and wrongly hence the ongoing discussion

>An aerostat doesn't float on a liquid at stable equilibrium through draft displacement, it is suspended in a fluid, with the problems noted previously.

If you let a baloon go will it reach space? No, because the atmosphere is not constant density.

Balloon type objects have the nice side effect of expanding and contracting to reach buoyancy/weight/structural equilibrium. It's not like a submarine "flying" though the water. It's more like a fish expanding/contracting to ascend/descend. More literally, it's like a weather balloon that rides at different attitudes depending on what the weight of your payload is. If you really need to change altitude quickly (or perhaps in response to taking on or losing mass) it wouldn't be all that difficult to inflate/deflate (i.e. change displacement) a subset of whatever device provides buoyancy. Think of it like a heavy lift ship flooding itself (reducing displacement) to change draft.

Like I said, the lack of a "hard cut" between atmosphere and ocean makes the math wonky compared to what we're used to, but the physics DGAF.

>Docks and barges (along with general watercraft) may be constructed arbitrarily robustly from strong and resilient materials. Aerostats somewhat less so.

You could say the same thing about boats vs port facilities.

Yeah, it's an engineering problem but it's a fundamentally well understood one. The way your hand gets forced in terms of material choices might make cost go through the roof, but it the design side of things shouldn't be all that terrible.
by graemep | 2025-09-22 12:26:13+00:00
> It's not actually ethnicity he's talking about, it's skin color. Ethnicity is cultural.

DHH says people are not "native Brits". The literal meaning of that is ethnicity, not skin colour. Of course DHH might be using this as code for white, but it is not the literal meaning, and (as another comment points out) the statistic he quotes is for the total of the ethnic groups that are considered white British - it excludes white people who are not ethnically British.

If he is, then he is, again, projecting his own views onto a culture he does not really understand. Some people from European countries (e.g. an Albanian illegal immigrant) are far more likely to face hostility than some non-white people (e.g. a professional affluent South Asian with a British accent). Someone recently commented that a racist who they know well would not mind my (brown) family because we "sound posh" so would prefer us to people like Poles.

> How many generations is enough to become "native"?

Define native! Are white Americans native in the US, and are Afrikaners native to South Africa, etc.? It is an ambiguous word.

The problem disappears if you drop the adjective native and just say "British".

> Why exactly aren't people of any skin color who live in the UK, speak English, and believe in the full package of "Western values" (equality, freedom of speech, religion, rule of law etc) and "English behaviors" (queueing, tea, whatever)

I think the problem with that definition is that lots of people how have never even lived in the UK believe in those values and drink tea and even queue. I know plenty. Also, English or British? British is a nationality, English is arguable an ethnicity (as are Scottish and Welsh).

> It's extremely worrisome.

I agree there, and it is very disappointing to see DHH spouting this.
by cbeach | 2025-09-22 12:26:31+00:00
Few people have achieved as much as Musk.

He reduced the cost of space travel by 10x and restored America's re-usable vehicle capability after decades of government mis-management.

He spearheaded the transition to sustainable transportation by building a brand new car startup which is now the most valuable automaker in the world (by market cap).

He has demonstrated viable brain-computer interfaces in humans.

He co-founded the most important AI company in the world.

He brought free speech back to Twitter, ending a dystopian era of government-coordinated censorship.

He reduced Las Vegas commute times from 45 minutes to 2 minutes by starting a tunnelling company from scratch, developing new electric tunnelling machines with continuous capabililty, and building tunnels.
by Zigurd | 2025-09-22 12:27:58+00:00
If it were only that TSLA is a way for retail investors to buy shares of ELON, Tesla wouldn't need to do a Robo taxi rollout in Austin to bolster claims that FSD is for real.

Elon can't levitate TSLA and other valuations by himself. There has to be at least the appearance of substance. That appearance is wearing thin. While I'm going to observe the caution that the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, once reality assert itself, Elon will be powerless to recreate the illusion.
by Aachen | 2025-09-22 12:27:59+00:00
Wtf! Why do I need to find this out via HN? I live in Germany and all info I've ever seen says you can always call 112 in Europe with any phone you have on hand, active subscription or not, and worldwide potentially a different number but that it's part of the GSM standard that it lets you call via any carrier because your emergency call is treated differently, always gets accepted and routed with priority

Also considering you're required to authenticate to the government before being allowed to have a mobile phone number in Germany, some people might choose to mainly use their device on WiFis and with downloaded maps and other data. It's not like mobile data is that reliable in Germany anyway. That'd be an unpleasant surprise if you are subsequently denied emergency services in the life-threatening situations that 112 is for

I didn't believe you, or that it was possibly a temporary thing, but I checked and it seems to be true since 2009 with no news since. I'm curious to try it (if there were a test number like 117 and 119 in Belgium¹) because I'm still a bit in disbelief, or to know if it e.g. works with a data-only SIM, or if an expired SIM works (if it ran out yesterday and you haven't had time to fix it or charge up the prepaid card), or if you forgot the SIM PIN due to stress (happened to me once when the phone needed a reboot, so I spent my trip abroad without mobile service until I got home and could reset it). Is it that easy to change the IMEI of a device, that pranksters abuse the service with it constantly if not blocked outright? Why isn't this a thing in other countries? I have so many questions

What a backwater this is in terms of communications infrastructure

¹ https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noodcentrale_112#Testnummers_n..., English translation on https://www.reddit.com/r/belgium/comments/191hryo/comment/kh...
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-22 12:28:02+00:00
"Native Brit" as used by DHH does refer to an ethnicity. He uses data for London from the 2021 official census: 54% "white" but only 37% "white British" (and arguably "native Brits" might be an even smaller group).

There is also a difference between being "multi-ethnic" and being minority "native".
by chmod775 | 2025-09-22 12:28:45+00:00
It may look like that on video, but in fact you can hear the two guys pointing it out and chatting about it a whole 8 seconds before impact.

Also of course you're avoiding an unknown object that large, especially when there's plenty of space to go around it on either side.

If you still don't think you can avoid something like that, please get off the road for everyone's safety.
by elAhmo | 2025-09-22 12:29:07+00:00
Chances of those few people doing very large amounts of downloads reading this are quite small. Basic rate limits on IP level or some other simple fingerprinting would do a lot of good for those edge cases, as those folks are most likely not aware of this happening.

Yes, IP rate limiting is not perfect, but if they have a way of identifying which user is downloading the whole planet every single day, that same user can be throttled as well.
by vallismortis | 2025-09-22 12:29:36+00:00
It was centered half a mile from Berkeley Lab at 2:56am, on the Hayward Fault. Knocked out the elevators in my building and one other building, but other than that no obvious issues. We've been told to be on alert for anything that looks off. Hard to predict how this affects some of the Lab equipment.

FWIW, I've been expecting something like this. The Pacific Rim ("ring of fire" or whatever you want to call it) has been overly active, and that second 7+ magnitude earthquake in Kamchatka was definitely not a coincidence. That said, earthquakes are not my area, but it is a topic we talk about in terms of catastrophic failure of storage systems as "Hayward Fault Tolerance" where we have tertiary backups in a region outside of the earthquake zone.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-22 12:29:57+00:00
There is a reason why they added exemptions for themselves. Either they believe it is unsafe or perhaps there is a problem with child abuse on the EU legislator level which they want to cover up.

We are at a point where we shouldn't have to justify opposition to it. Just hold legislators of the EU accountable. If that isn't possible, hold the whole EU accountable and if that isn't possible, the EU has no legitimacy for such laws in the first place. Back to those responsible on a national level and repeat.
by baobabKoodaa | 2025-09-22 12:29:57+00:00
1) There's approximately 10 steps. The specific number of steps depends on input choices you make. For example, if you choose project-based billing, there will be fewer steps than if you choose hourly billing. As soon as you begin filling the form, there is a progress indicator visible at the bottom, giving you a rough percentage of how much work you still have to do.

3) Downloadable examples to see what is being generated: sample output links are already on the landing page. You can ctrl+f to "The PDF might look like this."

2) You can look at sample output to get more information about what the boxes mean. We made a design choice to avoid legalese text in the UI. Reference rights mean: The Supplier has the right to reference The Client in marketing as The Supplier’s customer.

4) Possible choices for dispute resolution are courts in Finland and arbitration. Before the summer we discussed internally whether we should include arbitration as a choice. We ended up deciding that we won't allow our users to choose arbitration. Since there are no further valid options for dispute resolution, we won't add an "other" option.

Thank you for the feedback!
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-22 12:30:06+00:00
It may do this or that on the announcement, but if growth stops (arguably already has) and there is no hype for years, it's likely going to grind down to a normal valuation with time.

The passive investing / market cap weighted ETF complex tends to help big valuations stay big, but a company like Tesla still needs that sharp shot in the arm followed by frenzied buying occasionally in order to stay aloft (be it by traders, retail participants, shorts covering, etc).

I suppose they could replace Musk with another hype salesman, but the "hate" that Tesla gets is a big part of these upside shock cycles for the stock, because the ticker is a siren call for short sellers, who are ultimately guaranteed future buyers.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-09-22 12:30:16+00:00
Whenever my team (cybersecurity) is about to send a global email or post, I wander around non technical teams to get 3 or 4 people to read it and explain me what it means.

Not once I got it right on first attempt. The final version was very different from the first one.

This is similar to the web page that was proposed to serve as the message people would read in case of a critical disaster of our systems.

The first version was with Vue, Tailwindcss and whatnot and I opened it on an old phone. Everything was everywhere, with drawers all over the place. I said that I would not approve anything beyond https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ because I need it to work on a tomagoshi.

The version we have now is beautiful in its ugliness and clarity. It opens on a smart watch (well I don't know that actually :))
by oblio | 2025-09-22 12:30:27+00:00
> The ùberphilosopher Bertrand Russell presents a particularly toxic variant of my surprise jolt in his illustration of what people in his line of business call the Problem of Induction or Problem of Inductive Knowledge (capitalized for its seriousness)—certainly the mother of all problems in life. How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions? How do we know what we know? How do we know that what we have observed from given objects and events suffices to enable us to figure out their other properties? There are traps built into any kind of knowledge gained from observation.

> Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, page 40
by somat | 2025-09-22 12:30:50+00:00
Fair enough, probably my fault for having linux and openbsd as my two reference systems and assuming most other unixen went the same way.

Now That I am second guessing myself I am not even sure about openbsd, My assumption is mainly based on the manual for pthread "This 1-to-1 implementation of the pthreads API initially appeared in OpenBSD 3.9 under the name “librthread” as an alternative to the pure-userspace (N-to-1) implementation. In OpenBSD 5.2 it became the default implementation and was renamed to libpthread." and some half remembered discussion on the lists about adding shared memory flags to the kernel process structure.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-22 12:30:51+00:00
I'm not talking about whether Germany's rail network is better or worse than other people's rail networks, but rather whether it embodies the supposed national characteristic of being methodical and precise.

The problem with the German rail network is not that they are running too many trains (I mean, they're planning on shutting services down!). The problem is primarily that there has been a significant lack of investment in necessary repairs and upgrades to maintain existing capacity levels, let alone support the increased capacity that comes from a growing population. The two options here are not "one time but rare" or "not on time but regular" — you can have both things, and it is completely within the power of a properly-funded DB to implement both things.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-22 12:31:20+00:00
> since you'd most likely want to build your own model objects from the JSON, so at some point both of them must be present in memory

Not really because the JSON library itself can stream the input. For example if you use `serde_json::from_reader()` it won't load the whole file into memory before parsing it into your objects:

https://docs.rs/serde_json/latest/serde_json/fn.from_reader....

But that's kind of academic; half of all memory and all memory are in the same league.
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-22 12:31:28+00:00
And you don't even know until it is too late even if you are paying attention. Suppose you see the obstruction well in advance. You expect the car to change lanes. You get past the point where you would have changed lanes but there's still time. You aren't yet aware that the car is missing the obstruction. A moment later you are much closer and make the judgement that the car is making a mistake. You grab the wheel but now it's too late.

The alternative is taking control of the car all the time. Something nobody is going to practically do.
by detaro | 2025-09-22 12:32:10+00:00
And why many "real" self-driving systems that share the road with other users are often quite speed-limited, to allow them to come to a full stop relatively safely if needed, and give a human time to take over properly. (E.g. the Mercedes system will stick way below the usual speed limits, which means it's main use currently is handling heavy traffic with stop-and-go, or many of the autonomous "busses" for dense city spaces/campuses/...)

Passively monitoring a situation continuously and reacting quickly when needed is something humans are not good at. Even with airline pilots, where we do invest a lot in training and monitoring, it's a well-understood issue that having to take over in a surprising situation often leads to confusion and time needed to re-orient before they can take effective action. Which for planes is often fine, because you have the time buffer needed for that, but not always.
Ask HN: Why is my 100M Nautica Voyage Eau de Toilette glass bottle unbreakable?
by prmph | 2025-09-22 12:32:33+00:00
I accidentally discovered this when I accidentally dropped it from a high table onto a hard tile floor.

Since then I thrown it on the floor multiple times without even it sustaining even a little chip.

Any explanation? Why would a cheap bottle of perfume be this unusually strong, when I've looking for cookware and drink-ware that is even half as strong without success?
by howmayiannoyyou | 2025-09-22 12:32:45+00:00
I expected to see OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, etc. provide desktop applications with integrated local utility models and sandboxed MCP functionality to reduce unnecessary token and task flow, and I still expect this to occur at some point.

The biggest long-term risk to the AI giant's profitability will be increasingly capable desktop GPU and CPU capability combined with improving performance by local models.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-22 12:32:48+00:00
I would argue that dependency on GitHub and Slack is not the same as dependency on AI coding agents. GitHub/Slack are just straightforward tools. You can run them locally or have similar emergency backup tools ready to run locally. But depending on AI agents is like relying on external brains that have knowledge you suddenly don't have if they disappear. Moreover, how many companies could afford to run these models locally? Some of those models aren't even open.
by Taniwha | 2025-09-22 12:33:26+00:00
There's an SF short story (Larry Niven I think) about a seismologist who predicts the big one, but the math is not quite right, the story gets out, panic ensues everyone heads for Nevada, he guy is still working in his lab trying to figure why the sign on his equation is coming out negative when all the rest of the US falls into the sea leaving just his part of CA
by duxup | 2025-09-22 12:33:29+00:00
I see it on forums now too. On Reddit, midsized subs that get a mild amount of traffic get these brand new accounts that post what reads like an amalgam of past posts. Often in help forums where people ask questions.

They have that uncanny thing where yes it's on topic, but also not how a human would likely ask exactly AND they always let slip in just a hint of human drama that really draws in other users...

They almost never respond to comments, when they do it's pretty clear they're AI (much like the response in this story).

I've unsubscribed from a good half dozen subs in the past few months because of it.
Ask HN: What's the hardest part of being a founder?
by paulwilsonn | 2025-09-22 12:33:52+00:00
Not funding, not hiring, not even product - I feel every founder I meet has a totally different answer to this.

For you, what’s been the hardest part?

1. Getting first users?

2. Building the right team?

3. Staying sane through the ups and downs?

Would love to hear the most real challenges you’ve faced.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-22 12:34:51+00:00
> To use a computer, especially for programming, is the purest form of creation that man has ever dreamed up.

Literature? Poetry? Sonnets? Film? Romance? Brewing? This is an incredibly uncultured take.

Reminder that only programmers, by and large, care about anyone’s digital creations. Anyone can appreciate romantic verse more than your C# program that spins a cube.
by swiftcoder | 2025-09-22 12:34:55+00:00
> have someone with minimal expertise go through your docs with the goal of achieving the goal of the docs. Sit next to them or screenshare. Do not speak to them, certainly do not help, just watch. Watch them fumble. Watch them not know what to do

And if you have access to user experience researchers, go talk to them! They are experts in running this kind of scenario, and can help you avoid all the pitfalls that might bias your results
by throwoutway | 2025-09-22 12:36:57+00:00
"require more or less the entire world's GDP to be invested in the US for several consecutive years"

Whoever wrote that is making stuff up now, even worse than Sam Altman asking for trillions of dollars to build data centers

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...
by nl | 2025-09-22 12:37:16+00:00
Security filming is common in Australia and not outlawed by this ruling. It is specifically the non-discriminate use of facial recognition technology this ruling applies to.

The specific difference is "sensitive information". General filming with manual review isn't considered to be collecting privacy sensitive information. Automatic facial recognition is.

The blog post makes this point about how the law is applied:

> Is this a technology of convenience - is it being used only because it’s cheaper, or as an alternative to employing staff to do a particular role, and are there other less privacy-intrusive means that could be reasonably used?

https://www.oaic.gov.au/news/blog/is-there-a-place-for-facia...
by rob74 | 2025-09-22 12:37:36+00:00
Well, I have to admit that your friend has a point. Humans are bad at reacting quickly and correctly to unexpected situations, and some debris large enough to damage your car showing up from out of nowhere after several hours of boring driving along a largely straight highway with little traffic is definitely one of these situations. But a self-driving system worth its salt should always be alert, scanning the road ahead, able to identify dangerous debris, and react accordingly. So, different pair of shoes...
by anonymars | 2025-09-22 12:37:57+00:00
There's sort of an analogous conundrum with Airbus-style automation: the system has various levels of automation and protection (e.g. preventing you from stalling the plane)

And then when something goes wrong, you are unceremoniously handed a plane with potentially some or all of those protections no longer active.

As an analogy, imagine your FSD car was trying to slow down for something, but along the way there is some issue with a sensor. So it gives up and hands control back to you while it's in the middle of braking, yet now your ABS is no longer active.

So now the situation is much more sudden than it would have been (if you had been driving the car you would have been aware of it and slowing down for it youself earlier in the game), you likely weren't paying as much attention in the first place because of the automation, and some of the normal protection isn't working.

So it's almost three levels of adding insult to injury. Potentially related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970363
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-22 12:38:05+00:00
If there were no duplicate URL field, say they were called FooURL and BarcoURL, you could access them as `opts.FooURL` and `opts.BarcoURL`. They are both fields of `opts`, via embedding. It's just that FooURL is embedded directly, while BarcoURL is coming from two levels of embedding.
by jacekm | 2025-09-22 12:38:08+00:00
In my company we sometimes cherry-pick parts of the AI summaries and send them to the clients just to confirm the stuff that we agreed on during a meeting. The customers know that the summary is AI-generated and they don't mind. Sometimes people come to me and ask whether what they read in the summary was really discussed in the meeting or is it just AI hallucinating but I can usually assure them that we really did discuss that. So these can be useful to a degree.