MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Denvercoder9 | 2025-10-13 20:34:41+00:00
> I assume this is an entirely independent Chinese company without some Dutch sponsor or something.

It's not, it's a Dutch company, formed according to Dutch law, with headquarters in the Netherlands, that was bought by another Chinese company a few years ago.

Dutch law sets rules on how any company, but especially public companies (so-called naamloze vennootschappen) must be governed. Even if you own all the shares, by law you don't have unlimited and unchecked power in the company, you have to abide by governance rules.

Seemingly simultaneously with the government order, a suit was brought to the court enforcing these laws (the Ondernemingskamer) alledging that the CEO and owner were not abiding by them. The court documents are a bit weird to me as a non-lawyer, with Nexperia named as both plaintiff and defendant, so I'm not sure who brought it, but it might've been the government, who are named as a party.

The court agreed that the suit could have merit, and as an interim measure while the legal proceedings play out, has suspended the CEO and named a temporary director. It also suspended the authority of the owners over their shares (except for one), and assigned a trustee to manage them temporarily. The court did not actually rule on the contents of the suit yet, it only issued interim conservatory measures. We'll likely hear more about how the suit plays out over the next few months.

An interesting matter of contention in the suit is that the CEO/owner want the CLO to be suspended, while the other side asks the court to prohibit firing of the CLO. I presume there has been a conflict in the board, either leading to or caused by the government order.

The court documents are public by the way (in Dutch, obviously): https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=nexperi...
by _wire_ | 2025-10-13 20:35:19+00:00
If computers have taught us one important thing, it's that if you've got something you don't want, you can just delete it. And if you don't know what to delete, don't worry as the computer may arbitrarily delete something for you!

CO2? Delete it

Labor? Delete it

Competition: Delete it

Loss? Delete it

The power and possibilities are endless!

--

"We don't have a trash can, we have a recycle bin... Are you sure you want to empty it? (Deleting...)"
by master_crab | 2025-10-13 20:35:28+00:00
Don’t do K8s on Pis. The Pis will spend the majority of their horsepower running etcd, CNI of choice, other essential services (MetalLB, envoy, etc). You’ll be left with a minimal percentage of resources for the pods that actually do things you need outside the cluster.

And don’t get me started on if you intend to run any storage solutions like Rook-Ceph on cluster.
by calgoo | 2025-10-13 20:35:39+00:00
I have been thinking of secondary machine that would just use my phones wifi and encrypted vpn tunnels. Basically, the phone is only used for the banking app and whatever future government ID app will be required.

The secondary device would basically be built on a open platform etc. Once we can't use the phone for sharing the connection, then we are basically stuck using other wireless connections, LoRa for short to medium connections, direct wifi links and offline home cloud environments. It gets a bit grim when you think about it, but there are always options. Now, would you travel with a home made tablet phone in an airport for example? What a about a train station with xray scanners. Cyberpunk always comes to mind as well when thinking of these possible futures.
by 827a | 2025-10-13 20:35:47+00:00
Another thing to note about China: while people love pointing to their public transit as an example of a country that's done so much right, their (over)investment in this domain has led to a concerning explosion of local government debt obligations which isn't usually well-represented in their overall debt to GDP ratios many people quote. I only state that to state that things are not all the propaganda suggests it might be in China. The big question everyone is asking is, what happens after Xi. Even the most educated experts on the matter do not have an answer.

I, too, don't understand the OP's point of quickly pivoting to value extraction. Every technology we've ever invented was immediately followed by capitalists asking "how can I use this to make more money". LLMs are an extremely valuable technology. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that anyone can correctly guess exactly how much we should be investing into this right now in order to properly price how much value they'll be generating in five years. Except, its so critical to point out that the "data center capex" numbers everyone keeps quoting are, in a very real (and, sure, potentially scary) sense, quadruple-counting the same hundred-billion dollars. We're not actually spending $400B on new data centers; Oracle is spending $nnB on Nvidia, who is spending $nnB to invest in OpenAI, who is spending $nnB to invest in AMD, who Coreweave will also be spending $nnB with, who Nvidia has an $nnB investment in... and so forth. There's a ton of duplicate-accounting going on when people report these numbers.

It doesn't grab the same headlines, but I'm very strongly of the opinion that there will be more market corrections in the next 24 months, overall stock market growth will be pretty flat, and by the end of 2027 people will still be opining on whether OpenAI's $400B annual revenue justifies a trillion dollars in capex on new graphics cards. There's no catastrophic bubble burst. AGI is still only a few years away. But AI eats the world none-the-less.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09275...
by OptionOfT | 2025-10-13 20:35:48+00:00
> Even modern languages like Rust did a crappy job of enforcing it: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.char.html#method.to_... .

What were they supposed to do?

According to Wikipedia:

> Traditionally, ⟨ß⟩ did not have a capital form, and was capitalized as ⟨SS⟩. Some type designers introduced capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form ⟨ẞ⟩ as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate.[4] Since 2024 the capital has been preferred over ⟨SS⟩.[5]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F#:~:text=Traditionally%2...

So this has been adopted since 2017. And Rust follows the unicode standard. It's not up to Rust, it's up to Unicode. And if that was what the mapping was in 2017, that's on Unicode, not Rust.

But I'm unsure if we can change the existing Unicode mapping without breaking backwards compatibility? I did learn that ẞ (the uppercase variant) is the same as SS (copy the SS and you'll see the ẞ highlighted, both upper and lowercase).
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-10-13 20:35:52+00:00
I was super-disappointed, attending my recent state townhall meeting, that the only way to participate was scanning a QR code to fill out a survey. After asking for a paper copy (which was never produced), I decided to participate in my own manner:

I stood up and heckled my clown state representatives, for almost an hour, providing audience-appreciated commentary to what I perceive as our failed political system (US bipartisan).

To their toothless grocery sales tax reduction legislation (which'll never pass), I suggested my fellow constituents just shop across the state line, in one of the many nearby grocery stores — just STOP giving our state this money, then maybe they'll consider legislative changes.

Perhaps this fell upon deaf ears, but I wasn't the only audience member frustrated with our legislators' back-patting/inaction. I will vote/shop with my money, elsewhere. I wrote my state officials a letter afterwards, offering common-sense suggestions — hoping this geriatric remembers my participation (he turns 80 soon... just retire already, Congressman!).
by alphazard | 2025-10-13 20:36:37+00:00
Containers (meaning Docker) happened because CGroups and namespaces were arcane and required lots of specialized knowledge to create what most of us can intuitively understand as a "sandbox".

Cgroups and namespaces were added to Linux in an attempt to add security to a design (UNIX) which has a fundamentally poor approach to security (shared global namespace, users, etc.).

It's really not going all that well, and I hope something like SEL4 can replace Linux for cloud server workloads eventually. Most applications use almost none of the Linux kernel's features. We could have very secure, high performance web servers, which get capabilities to the network stack as initial arguments, and don't have access to anything more.

Drivers for virtual devices are simple, we don't need Linux's vast driver support for cloud VMs. We essentially need a virtual ethernet device driver for SEL4, a network stack that runs on SEL4, and a simple init process that loads the network stack with capabilities for the network device, and loads the application with a capability to the network stack. Make building an image for that as easy as compiling a binary, and you could eliminate maybe 10s of millions of lines of complexity from the deployment of most server applications. No Linux, no docker.

Because SEL4 is actually well designed, you can run a sub kernel as a process on SEL4 relatively easily. Tada, now you can get rid of K8s too.
by metalman | 2025-10-13 20:36:39+00:00
depends, on which side, of the tarrifs an economy happens to be and where, geopoliticaly.

AI, or whatever a mountain of processors churning all of the worlds data will be called later, still has no use case, other than total domination, for which it has brought a kind of lame service to all of the totaly dependent go along to get along types, but nothing approaching an actual guaranteed answer for anything usefull and profitable, lame, lame, infinite fucking lame tedious shit that has prompted most people to.stop.even trying, and so a huge vast amount of genuine human inspiration and effort is gone
by notmyjob | 2025-10-13 20:37:14+00:00
It sounds like you have routed around your spatial visualization deficit, but that just proves the importance of alternate cognitive strategies rather than indicate that such an aptitude or deficit doesn’t ceteris paribus impact mathematical achievement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_visualization_ability

You probably are high g (iq), which has, historically at least, dominated other factors in determining overall outcomes.
by johaugum | 2025-10-13 20:37:30+00:00
> I'd like some day to be able to bike down the street with my kid, and have the drone take some photos.

Personal drones in public spaces are becoming a real nuisance. They’re disturbing, and the majority of people seem unable to fly them in a safe and respectful manner.

Others on the same bike path should enjoy without the risk of having a drone slam into their face.

In my opinion, rules around personal drone usage are FAR too relaxed, and enforcement is absolutely minimal.
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-13 20:37:43+00:00
If it's a weekends worth of work, then do it yourself and see how well it works. This kind of comment is insanely silly because CRTs behave physically different than how modern displays work. The closest approximations we've got all require incredibly high resolution displays to approximate the way the phosphors worked in CRTs. And we're not even close to attaining the level of response time yet.
by nrvn | 2025-10-13 20:38:27+00:00
One of the worst things about Environment variables among others discussed here is the implicit and opaque nature of them. Majority of applications rely on them in the *nix world. Even if more explicit and obvious ways of configuration files or remote services (consul/etcd, et al.) and command line arguments are supported env vars are traditionally supported as well.

But as mentioned in the article it is just a global hashmap that can be cloned and extended for child processes. Maybe in 1979 it was a good design decision. Today it sometimes hurts.

For example, kubernetes by default literally pollutes the container’s environment with so-called service links. And you will have fun time debugging a broken application if any of those “default” env vars conflict with the env vars that your app might expect to see.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/services/connect-applic...

They are ubiquitous and we are living in the world of neo-conservatism in IT where legacy corner cuts are treated as a standard and never challenged (hello /bin, /usr/bin, /lib, /usr/lib)[0]

[0] - https://askubuntu.com/a/135679
by LexiMax | 2025-10-13 20:38:33+00:00
I think "fixing distro packaging" is more apropos.

In a past life, I remember having to juggle third-party repositories in order to get very specific versions of various services, which resulted in more than few instances of hair-pull-inducing untangling of dependency weirdness.

This might be controversial, but I personally think that distro repos being the assumed first resort of software distribution on Linux has done untold amounts of damage to the software ecosystem on Linux. Containers, alongside Flatpak and Steam, are thankfully undoing the damage.
by nxor | 2025-10-13 20:38:39+00:00
Has the school changed?

And can we assume that because AI has made it easy to solve some hard problems, other hard problems won't arise?

Not that I don't agree

And hasn't the internet generally added to this attitude?

And if it makes you feel any better, as someone around that age, this environment seems to have also led some of us to go out of our way to not outsource all our thinking
by araes | 2025-10-13 20:38:46+00:00
This is kind of a meta commentary on this subject, yet something seems wrong with the HN rankings lately.

The link mentioned has 270 points, and 317 comments, was posted only a day ago, and yet now cannot be found.

Managed to eventually find it using Hacker News Rankings. Here's the chart. [1]

[1] Jeep pushed software update ... , https://hnrankings.info/45558318/

Story rises fast, makes it to number 2, then suddenly begins a rapid fall with no halting all the way down to 299, where it's no longer being tracked. (HN Rankings only tracks to 300)

There's no mark of a [Dead] story. No comments that the story is not appropriate. Comments appear reasonable and polite. The graph looks like vote manipulation and story burying.
by saisrirampur | 2025-10-13 20:39:14+00:00
Sai from ClickHouse here. Very compelling story! Really love your emphasis on using the right tool for the right job - power of row vs column stores.

We recently added a MySQL/MariaDB CDC connector in ClickPipes on ClickHouse Cloud. This would have simplified your migration from MariaDB.

https://clickhouse.com/docs/integrations/clickpipes/mysql https://clickhouse.com/docs/integrations/clickpipes/mysql/so...
by JohnMakin | 2025-10-13 20:39:30+00:00
As someone who's spent most of their career in cloud IAC, and likes to think they are pretty read up on the latest going on in that world, if you didn't know better you'd think YAML is one of the greatest threats facing mankind. There are plenty of things I certainly hate about it, but every configuration syntax I've ever used I have similar gripes about. It's like once a month this kind of "The world is growing tired of yaml" claim is just thrown out there like everyone just agrees with it. Choose something that works for you. This author repeatedly mentions TOML but there are plenty of issues with that one I could point out too. Syntax is one very small part of what makes an ecosystem great or not so great. Most of my exposure to yaml is helm chart templates, which admittedly is not pure YAML, but it works fine enough for me, at least to where I don't feel like writing lengthy blog posts about how much I hate it. I even wrote a library that converts yaml templates to HCL for internal use because I got so sick of people having this exact same argument like it deeply mattered. And guess what? They hate the HCL too.
by OptionOfT | 2025-10-13 20:39:31+00:00
Weirdly enough I have the feeling here that companies don't want to do make more money with the same (retrained) people.

They want to make more money with less people: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat...

> All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet.
by paradox921 | 2025-10-13 20:39:42+00:00
Hi all, I'm the primary author/lead on the "research exploration" that is Amplifier at Microsoft. It's still SUPER early and we're running fast and applying learnings from the past couple of years in new ways to explore some new value we're finding early evidence of. I apologize that the repo is in a very rough condition, we're running very fast and most of what is in there now has been very helpful but will very soon be completely replaced with our next major iteration of it as we continue to run ahead. I did want to take a pause today and put together a blog post to capture a little more context for those of you here who are following along:

https://paradox921.medium.com/amplifier-notes-from-an-experi...

For those who find it useful in this very early stage, to find some value for yourself in either using it or learning from it, happy to be on the journey together. For those who don't like it or don't understand why or what we're doing, I apologize again, it's definitely not for everyone at this stage, if ever, so no offense taken.
by rapatel0 | 2025-10-13 20:39:42+00:00
> I read or heard someplace that at many universities tuition paid by students in the social sciences is effectively subsidizing the STEM fields

I'm very skeptical of this claim.

In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants. If you invent something, the school will take 70% of the revenue from the innovation. Much like VC, some big wins can power the school for years.

Actually, most highly productive research universities use the research as a prestige magnet and marketing tool to help grow endowments and keep up in the US News college rankings.

I would be great if the funding weren't so opaque. We may be able to find accounting info for the public univeristies. I would bet money that, Liberal arts tuition likely goes into administration, endowments, and campus improvements for student life (better food in the dining halls...)
by hshdhdhehd | 2025-10-13 20:39:49+00:00
Please keep working on that piece I think it will be very useful for incident reviewers.

Someone said the quiet part loud! :

"""

Common circumstances missing from accident reports are:

Pressures to cut costs or work quicker,

Competing requests for colleagues,

Unnecessarily complicated systems,

Broken tools,

Biological needs (e.g. sleep or hunger),

Cumbersome enforced processes,

Fear of being consequences of doing something out of the ordinary, and

Shame of feeling in over one’s head.

"""
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-13 20:40:04+00:00
It's literally a skill issue. The correct way to help a drowning person is to get behind them and then hook your weaker arm around their neck & head while doing backstroke with the other. Having them on their back facing up (and out of the water) dispels the panic reflex. But this obviously requires you to be comfortable int he water and have some prior rescue training.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-13 20:41:42+00:00
> It's hard to do otherwise without doing injury to the core concept "You own your own machine" whether 'you' is one person with a smartphone or a corporation with a datacenter.

It's not hard at all. In fact it's easy. Simply recognize the basic fact that corporations are not even human to begin with. Adopt a user maximalist philosophy. Classify the corporations as second class citizens, below us in importance. We absolutely should own our machines. Corporations? Maybe, if they behave. Remember: they are not even human.

If they're abusing their freedom to exert undue influence on us humans, simply take the freedom away. They exist to serve us, not the other way around. And they need to serve us on our terms, not their shareholder value maximizing terms. Their reward for serving us is not just the money they make, it is their continued existence. They are not human lives that inherently deserve to be protected, they exist because people allow it.

Wanna see how easy it can be?

> I will send a challenge-response that you needed that chip to answer

Pass a computer neutrality and interoperability law which states that if you're a company and you have public servers then they must take requests from all clients. It doesn't matter if it's OpenAI or a tamagotchi, all computers must be able to participate in the system.

This allows you as a private person to keep your servers secure with challenge response while restricting the ability of corporations to abuse us with their attestation nonsense.
by nkrebs13 | 2025-10-13 20:41:46+00:00
This is a dumb headline. They probably got a special use permit, as the article suggests in an easy-to-miss paragraph.

DJI has been in this game a long time. They're already on thin ice with US regulators. These places are instantly recognizable and they're the preeminent commercial drone company. There's 0 chance that they did this illegally.
by HiPhish | 2025-10-13 20:41:49+00:00
> which is something you don't buy nor own, you buy a license to use it on the provider's terms

The distinction between "own" and "license" is purely a legal one. If I buy a kitchen table I own it, I can chop it up and use the pieces to make my own furniture and sell it. When I buy a copy of a Super Mario game I cannot rip the sprites and make my own Super Mario game because I don't own the copyright nor trademark of Super Mario. But I do own the copy, and Nintendo does not get to march into my home and smash my games because they want me to buy the new one instead of playing my old ones.

> linux phones can't come soon enough GNU/Linux. I used to think Stallman was being petty for insisting on the "GNU" part, but nowadays I understand why he insists on calling it GNU/Linux. There is nothing less "Linux" about Android than Debian, Arch or any other GNU/Linux distro, but GNU/Linux is fundamentally different in terms of user freedom from Android.