MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dns_snek | 2025-09-27 08:38:17+00:00
> A single bus creates as much congestion as around 15 cars. It's a fairly well-known result in urban planning.

I've never heard anything of the sort and I don't believe it at face value - that's roughly the length of a football field. Perhaps this is true in a specific area with terrible bus infrastructure but where I live, and the majority of places where I've been, bus stops are off the main road so they never block traffic.

> I've seen buses blocking multiple cars for a traffic light cycle because buses take so much space.

As I said, a consequence of bad infrastructure, not an inherent flaw of this mode of transportation. And even if some cars get held up that doesn't necessarily mean that the throughput has been affected - in heavy traffic this gap will be filled by other cars.

> For example: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

This table lists "Coach (bus)" at 27g CO2e/passenger-km. I don't know why buses are listed three times and they don't clarify, but it sure seems like the figure for passenger EVs represents the average for all types of trips whilst bus service is broken down into long-distance (coach) and local city service, making direct comparison impossible.

Additionally, carbon footprint is one small part of pollution and arguably it's not even the most important one. Ultrafine particles, PM2.5, and noise pollution matter just as much to the local population.
by HiPhish | 2025-09-27 08:39:02+00:00
I have written a couple of lecture notes in LaTeX and I wrote my master's thesis (mathematics) in LaTeX as well[1]. It's actually a fine language if all you want to do is write and rely on other people's templates. But actually writing my own package or understand how the underlying systems work has always seemed like black magic where individual packages have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, or add specific workarounds. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I got.

It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that makes actually layout and designing the document approachable. I have only used it once for a quick one-off experiment and I did like the language, but as I have said above the language is not the problem if you just want to write text.

[1] That's not quite true, actually. I first wrote my thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc to generate the LaTeX and subsequent PDF. This allowed me to get started without having to write a lengthy preamble first. Then after I had more than half of it written down and had a good idea of what I wanted the document to look like did I clean up the generated LaTeX, adjust the formatting to my needs, redid the drawing in TikZ, and then kept writing LaTeX from there. I still think the language is not the problem, but it's easy to get hung up in the design phase before even the first chapter is written.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-27 08:39:30+00:00
To be fair this predates LLMs, SEO crowd was doing this even before to try to get into Google Answers, and before that to have a favorable-looking summary under their blue link.

The entire industry is full of tricks that may or may not work, seems closer to magic rituals than anything else. It's genuinely pretty difficult to analyze how well SEO tricks perform, so there's a lot of "wow, this site is doing well, let's try to copy the success by emulating its patterns randomly" going around.
by aborsy | 2025-09-27 08:40:02+00:00
Tex doesn’t attract software developers. The programming language has remained really old fashioned and clunky. The error system is particularly bad. I use it on a daily basis, and it doesn’t feel nice, far from the experience with Python or Rust.

The output is superb though, which is why everyone in academia keep using it. It’s just the tooling that is poor.

I think it needs to be modernized.
by Intermernet | 2025-09-27 08:40:18+00:00
I ran multiple mail servers for years until about 10 years ago (moved out of the industry). The deliverability problem, as far as I know, hasn't really changed that much in the last decade. The key was to configure DKIM, SPF, only use secure protocols and monitor the various black/block-lists to make sure you aren't on them for very long. In my experience, if you end up on a few bad lists, and don't react quickly, the reputation of your domain goes down rapidly and it's harder to get off said lists.

You also want some spam filtering, which, these days, is apparently much more powerful with local LLMs. I used to just use various bayesian classification tools, but I've heard that the current state of affairs is better. Having said that, when you've trained the tool, it does a pretty good job.

It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
by eru | 2025-09-27 08:40:47+00:00
Thanks!

> relaxing and omitting chess rules also changed the choice of variables.

I wonder if you can recast some of that in terms of (dynamic) row generation?

> I did try lazy constraints etc. before diving into the math, but they did not yield a significant speedup.

Yes, I can believe that. My point wasn't so much that using heuristics like these is somehow bad, but more that the off-the-shelf solvers can be made to cooperate with (many of) your heuristics.

> For example, not considering the white king as being in check simplified A LOT.

I guess you could classify that as branch-and-bound, if you squinted really hard?
by rsynnott | 2025-09-27 08:40:49+00:00
RE volume, a couple of years back, Ireland, a country of a little over 5 million people, recently made an order for 800 electric buses over five years via the national transport authority. Meanwhile, the transport authorities in the article, in a country with 340 million people, made orders for 10 and 17 buses respectively.

Now, I think Ireland's extreme centralisation on this is unusual, but the US's approach of having loads of absolutely tiny transport authorities is, too.
by shakna | 2025-09-27 08:42:29+00:00
The more people who pirate my books, the greater my sales across all platforms. That's not hyperboly - its something I track.

Individuals who pirate my books are also more likely to buy them in the future.

Piracy is just about accessibility and trust. If the person can't afford to take a chance, they pirate. And if you win them there, they'll buy.

(Nit: Zero of that applies to corps. Thanks Anthropic, Meta, and everyone else.)
by sieve | 2025-09-27 08:44:48+00:00
I have been planning to put out a quarterly Sanskrit newsletter for some time now, and was dreading having to deal with LaTeX. For basic stuff, LibreOffice PDF export works. But that is not a plain text workflow.

I then discovered typst and it is a breath of fresh air. Unicode/Dēvanāgarī support out-of-the-box, no installing gigabytes of packages, near-instant compilation.

My complements to those who got this done.
by 1dom | 2025-09-27 08:44:52+00:00
> Here I am, having to defend my claim that they are not intelligent.

It's because all you've done is made a claim without any evidence. Someone pointed out a challenge that most claims about them not being intelligent can't submit any evidence that can't also be met by an LLM.

But instead of submitting any evidence to support your claim, you descended into hyperbole about how hard done by you are being expected to support your claims.

In science, it's okay to say we don't know. The amount of disagreement - even amongst smart people - about if LLMs are intelligent or not, suggest to me that we just don't have universally accepted research and definitions that are tight enough to decisively say.

But you're talking not only like you _know_ the answer for sure, so much that you don't need to support it with evidence or credentials, because those who disagree are obviously just poor victims of the AI hype machine.

Please make sure you pass your knowledge of your LLM discoveries onto the scientific community, you could change the world!
by bob1029 | 2025-09-27 08:45:01+00:00
I hope the AI strategy of companies like Amazon and Apple is beginning to make more sense. Staying out of trouble sometimes requires a bit more discipline than seems rational to the tech enthusiast community at first glance.

These companies cannot turn on a dime. I would be very surprised if Microsoft isnt secretly developing a doomsday recovery plan right now. They got very deep into Narnia this time. I have a feeling this particular game of musical chairs will end much more abruptly than the prior ones.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-27 08:45:54+00:00
"Doomed"? If you listen to every two-bit "Elon Musk bad" grifter, then, sure.

In truth, Starship needs orbital refueling to get to the Moon - but so does Blue Moon HLS. Artemis depends on someone being able to figure orbital propellant storage and fuel transfer either way.

Which may have been a conscious decision by NASA. Orbital propellant storage and refueling are technologies that unlock a lot of capabilities - so if you get into a silly race with China over who gets to reenact Apollo 11 first, you might as well get that out of it.
by lordkrandel | 2025-09-27 08:47:01+00:00
This is how capitalists blame the workforce when they can't compete. There has been studied that disprove so. They themselves proposed remote work, 5 years ago. Don't fall into this power scheme where they blame you and put you on the lash again. Fight back woth all you can. Do you think Chinese like to work 996? That there is no burnout or sabotage in China?
by rsynnott | 2025-09-27 08:48:22+00:00
> China had a long term strategy to building its own trains (and, I assume, buses). They first imported high speed trains from Japan and Germany but ultimately wanted to build their own

Interestingly, this process has now somewhat gone into reverse. Alexander Dennis, say, built their first-gen electric buses on BYD tech (China was the leader in this space), but their second-gen on their own design.
Show HN: Proxmox‑GitOps: Self-Hosted GitOps (demo incl., recursive Monorepo IaC)
by stevius10 | 2025-09-27 08:48:43+00:00
Proxmox‑GitOps implements a self‑contained CI/CD control plane for Proxmox VE that bootstraps from a single repository and manages itself recursively within the LXC containers under management

Repository: https://github.com/stevius10/Proxmox-GitOps

Demo (1min+): https://youtu.be/2oXDgbvFCWY?si=gSSACmVi0mO6v8xx

Architecture

- A local bootstrap (`./local/run.sh`) seeds a Gitea instance and runner, initializes the pipeline, and creates an initial PR. Merging this PR transitions the system into self-management; subsequent commits converge the desired state across Proxmox LXC containers.

- The system uses a self-contained monorepo with reusable container libraries. Ansible handles provisioning against Proxmox, while Cinc (Chef) performs desired-state convergence and cross-layer orchestration where declarative modeling is insufficient.

Concept

- Recursive self-management: the control plane executes within the managed containers to maximize reproducibility and minimize drift.

- Git as current desired state: operations map to standard Git workflows (commit, merge, rollback) in a stateless management model.

- Convention-based extensibility: add a service by copying a container definition from libs, adding a minimal cookbook and `config.env`; the pipeline handles provisioning, configuration, and validation.

- Loose coupling: containers remain independently replaceable and continue to function without manual follow-up.

Environment

- Proxmox VE 8.4–9.0, Debian 13 LXC per default.

- Local bootstrap via Docker; further actions are repository-driven.

Install

- Configure Proxmox credentials in `./local/config.json`. - Run `./local/run.sh` to seed the environment.

- Accept the initial PR in the seeded Gitea instance at `localhost:8080/main/config`.

- Push changes to trigger provisioning, convergence, and validation on Proxmox VE.

Trade-Offs

- The recursive bootstrap increases complexity to preserve rebuild‑from‑repo semantics and deterministic behavior.

- On Proxmox 9, stricter token privileges limit certain operations; automation uses root‑context API access where tokens are insufficient.
by jpgvm | 2025-09-27 08:49:18+00:00
FWIW I live in a small semi-rural community in Krabi province, but it's an easy assumption to make. :) Also I did live in Bangkok for several years so I guess it's only a few years off temporally.

If anything I feel the people are happier here than in Bangkok which was by far wealthier and full of (traditional) economic opportunity. Here it's a combination of tourism in the nearby beach areas and lots of agricultural business (rubber, pineapples, etc).

As long as money isn't a problem it's not something making you unhappy. Having more than you need isn't going to directly make you happy, it can certainly help indirectly though.

Instead the things that make people happy are mostly family and community in my experience.

With that in mind there is a lot of reasons for people to be happy here - beautiful scenery, clean air, close community (I know pretty much everyone in my neighbourhood) and very active Chinese shines, Muslim mosques and Thai buddhist temples. Family life here is good, it's safe, there are good schools etc.

I used to think other things were more important but since moving here I have come to appreciate that these things are what matter and why people stay.
Show HN: One API for all your SMTPs
by goldenerfish | 2025-09-27 08:49:32+00:00
Hi HN,

I host my own mail infrastructure and don't rely on third-party tools to send my mails. But in a microservice architecture, managing all the SMTP configs quickly becomes tiresome. After a while I'd always have my credentials and settings scattered in application-properties, bash scripts and environment files.

So I've build Brieferl, an app where you can add your SMTP servers and send emails through a single API with a simple JSON payload. You also get logs of when/where emails were sent and HTML previews of messages.

I am interested in what you guys think about this. You can create a free account with just your email, add a SMTP server + API key and start sending. (There is no upsell, or paid plan yet)

This is super early, it works and I made it actually just for myself but a friend told me he‘d also love to use this, so I thought why not ask other developers what they think.

Is this something you’d use? Are there some features that would it more valuable for you? Or is this something only I’ve felt?
by jiehong | 2025-09-27 08:50:36+00:00
I think as an application, when receiving packets you never really see a coalesced UDP datagrams when GRO is active.

It’s more like the kernel puts multiple datagrams into a single structure and passes that around between layers, maintaining the boundaries between them in that structure (sk_buff data fragments?)

Not an expert, but I tried looking at how this works and stumbled upon [0].

[0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/768995/
by teiferer | 2025-09-27 08:51:10+00:00
Did you read my post? The claim is "LLMs are intelligent". And instead if requiring evidence for that, apparently most folks (including you) are fine with just accepting that claim and require evidence if somebody questions this. That's what I'm doing.

It's like a religion. "God exists" is the claim. Nobody needs to provide evidence that this is not the case. LLMs are intelligent" is the claim. Nobody needs to provide evidence against that. In either case, the burden of proof is with the one making the claim.

> In science, it's okay to say we don't know

But that's not what's happening. LLMs are called "AI". You know what the I stands for, right? It's not "artificial we-don't-know-if-intelligent".
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-09-27 08:51:30+00:00
SUBOR SB97 looks fantastic because it clones IBM Model M. Most keys are white, but Esc is grey, and and F5-F8 are grey. And arrows are grey. And some other keys are grey. Keyboard is contrast, alive, full of sense. All such conventions that were taken for granted, and this RPi 500 is dull all white.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-27 08:52:00+00:00
I fairly recently got a Glove 80, still not entirely used to the thing but I can certainly tell my wrists are a lot happier. Was also looking at the Advantage 360, but with shipping it's nearly twice as expensive where I live so it was hard to motivate.

Before that I was using a Keychron Q11, which is a split keyboard with a regular staggered layout. That helped my shoulders feel better, I have a pretty broad frame and regular keyboards put me in a kinda t-rex position, but my left wrist in particular was killing me since I couldn't type a fair few keys on the left side, c, x, z, and q, without constantly adjusting my hand position.

Must say that the Glove 80 is growing on me as one heck of a comfortable experience. No idea how durable it is, it's certainly a light keyboard, though at the same time I'm not sure how well that actually conveys build quality. Like would the solder joints really have been more resistant to drops and impacts if it had a steel plate in the bottom like the Kinesis does?
by HiPhish | 2025-09-27 08:52:10+00:00
> Why would you work for such a fucked up dystopian Orwellian corporation?

I never understood how someone can ask such a question. It's not like you can just change jobs like you can change clothes. Some people have a family to feed so they can't just decide to be jobless for a few months. Finding a new job takes time you might not have if you still have to show up to your existing job and keep up the mask as if you have no intention of quitting. Sometimes the shittiest jobs pay the most and you cannot afford the pay cut. And sometimes all options are equally bad, e.g. if you don't want to participate in planned obsolescence, but every company out there is making products designed to break. What's the alternative? Make your own company?
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-27 08:52:20+00:00
An OSS project has de facto owners and an established group of contributors. If they want to "drive off" new users that's their prerogative.

In fact, a CoC is no more than them laying down the law explicitly on how they want people to behave in the project.

"If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you'll be ejected" is spot-on on how things work in general.

That might lead the project to fail or fork (beauty of OSS) but that's life.
by mikaraento | 2025-09-27 08:52:23+00:00
Do you know of success stories here? Success of transferring models learned in physics simulation to the real world.

When we (ZenRobotics) tried this 15 years ago a big problem was the creation of sufficiently high-fidelity simulated worlds. Gathering statistics and modelling the geometry, brittleness, flexibility, surface texture, friction, variable density etc of a sufficiently large variety of objects was harder than gathering data from the real world.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-27 08:52:36+00:00
Most people doing some investing have heard that diversification is important, but I think a lot of people forget that thit employment sector is part of that. I keep thinking of those Enron employees whose 401ks were all stock in their own employer.

As software engineer, that means there are reasons to avoid investing in AI stuff, regardless of what I think about its trajectory.
by nasso_dev | 2025-09-27 08:53:20+00:00
Displaying comments is cheap because the AppView (the "cache" layer that consumes the aggregated feed of records from the relay) can maintain a relational database of the social web/graph.

When it receives a post, it creates a row in the Post table. When it receives a comment, it creates a row in the Comment table, which has a column pointing to the Post it's replying to. Then, getting all comments under a post is easy SQL.

About your second question: yes, you're correct. What handle you use and where your data is hosted are completely separate matters.
by Symbiote | 2025-09-27 08:55:56+00:00
I got sticker shock when I first bought an Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad.

It is, even in the USA, $129, compared to the $20 or so I'd otherwise expect to pay when buying a computer for a new employee.

Here in Denmark the RRP is 1699DKK = $267 = €227. (Still $215 without the VAT.)
by HiPhish | 2025-09-27 08:56:52+00:00
> On top of that, the company should be fined into bankruptcy.

Fines need to increase with subsequent offenses, otherwise they become just a number in the cost of running business. If the fine is 100k, but the profit from breaking the law is 1M, then it makes more sense to keep breaking the law and keep paying the fine.

Instead the fine should increase every time. The first time it's easy to pay the 100k, but then it rises to 200k (still worth), 400k (not so much worth it), 800k (barely profitable), 1.6M (actual loss) and so on. Of course this only works if the fine keeps increasing faster than the profitability of the crime.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-27 08:57:06+00:00
Yes. This is where the cell's current warms up the cells, you can picture Ri as in series with the cell current so the power it develops there is Ri * I * I. As Ri goes up the power goes up, the ratio between the load resistance and the pack internal resistance determines how large a fraction of the total gets dumped into the battery as heat. That's why you want to be careful with ensuring the batteries can shed that heat faster than they develop it, otherwise you might end up with a thermal runaway even if the pack wasn't strictly speaking broken.

Most half decent cell testers report Ri, and any deviation from the norm is a good reason to discard a cell. I test the cells of all the packs I build and I've had to throw out two out of a few hundred cells over time so this isn't common but it does happen (those two were Sanyo's, I normally buy Samsung but those were out of stock so in my book Samsung > Sanyo but my sample size is still small enough that it could have been a random issue, and they're all reclaimed cells so that may have been due to some cause that was beyond the manufacturers control).
by Gualdrapo | 2025-09-27 08:57:08+00:00
> It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that makes actually layout and designing the document approachable

Those goals fall way out of the scope of LaTeX (and of course of Typst). If you want to have more control and power into a document's design, there's ConTeXt - as a graphic designer I just love it and can't imagine myself replacing it with LaTeX or Typst.

But as you said, if you want to concentrate on writing your text without thinking too much about its design, LaTeX or Typst are great for that.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-27 08:57:40+00:00
Yeah I think this is correct, with the added caveat that it must be as good as the alternative PLUS the awkwardness of switching to have any hopes of breaking out of the local minimum.

Otherwise you become Dvorak, which despite being better than Qwerty and having been around for almost a hundred years, still hasn't seen widespread adoption, in this case because the awkwardness of switching is very significant. The effect is likely smaller on something like Typst.
by consp | 2025-09-27 08:57:53+00:00
Unfortunately the cheap "fatbikes" every kid has here these days have no premium cells and even worse chargers and usually poor or no balancing in the BMS. I don't expect them to not catch fire and my HOA is considering to ban charging ebikes in the basement (where you put your bike) due to that. End result is likely that people with more expensive bikes and cells adhere to this and charge in the house while the cheap ass bikes will still be charged in the basement and the fire department can flood it once again when it all goes up in flames.