MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by everdrive | 2025-11-18 14:26:22+00:00
I understand that currently this is sort of a collective action problem, but I'm a bit baffled why people ever thought they needed brighter headlights in the first place. In the city, it's so bright that you don't even need headlights to see whatsoever. When cars started automatically dimming the dash via a light sensor, there was actually a period of time where I totally forgot to turn on my headlights because things were so well lit -- even at night -- that I didn't need them whatsoever.

Out in the country, you still don't really need brighter headlights. Other cars' headlights will always be visible and they have reflectors, so it's not as if you'll struggle to spot other cars. The road lines are actually reflective, so it's not as if you'll struggle to see the road lines. And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

So who are they for? I think broadly people may just not be able to avoid excess unless restricted by the facts of their environment. Allow people a plethora of calories, they'll get too fat. Allow them a plethora of entertainment, they'll drive themselves insane. And somehow .. allow them too many bright lights and they'll all just blind each other.
by zikero | 2025-11-18 14:26:35+00:00
If we're talking about putting static assets (like basic websites) on their CDN, or moving your backend to Workers, (etc...) you are by definition moving _away_ from single point-of-failure.

> Maybe that's the core of this message. Face your fears. Put your service on the internet. Maybe it goes down, but at least not by yet another Cloudflare outage.

Well I'd rather have my website going down (along with half the internet) be the concern of a billion dollar corporation with thousands of engineers - than mine.
by kordlessagain | 2025-11-18 14:26:54+00:00
Your argument is technically flawed.

In a CDN, customers consume bandwidth; they do not contribute it. If Cloudflare adds 1 million free customers, they do not magically acquire 1 million extra pipes to the internet backbone. They acquire 1 million new liabilities that require more infrastructure investment.

All you are doing is echoing their pitch book. Of course they want to skim their share of the pie.
by codegeek | 2025-11-18 14:27:01+00:00
As much as this situation sucks, how do you plan to "mitigate a DDoS attack on my own servers". The reason I use Cloudflare is to use it as a proxy especially for DDOS attacks if they do occur. Right now, our services are down and we are getting tons of customer support tickets (like everyone else) but it is a lot easier to explain the the whole world is down vs its just us.
by senfiaj | 2025-11-18 14:27:12+00:00
In theory even a single company service could be distributed, so only a fraction of websites would be affected, thus it's not a necessity to be a single point of failure. So I still don't like this argument "you see what happens when over half of the internet relies on Cloudflare". And yes, I'm writing this as a Cloudflare user whose blog is now down because of this. Cloudflare is still convenient and accessible for many people, no wonder why it's so popular.

But, yeah, it's still a horrible outage, much worse than the Amazon one.
by MallocVoidstar | 2025-11-18 14:27:19+00:00
> As they say in security, "no one will burn a zero day on you!". For your small blog with one hundred visitors per month, it's probably the same: "no one will burn their DDoS capabilities on you!"

The last I saw you can hire DDoS as a service for like $5 for a short DDoS, and many hosts will terminate clients who get DDoSed.
by MarcScott | 2025-11-18 14:27:19+00:00
I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.

Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-18 14:28:09+00:00
A generation of us grew up deeply coveting a pet coon, and have never given up on that dream, really...

The shocker for me was the bit about Rascal learning not to wash his sugarcubes before eating (or actually, to rinse once, because he was OCD about washing his food). Not that itself, although fascinating and charming; the idea that sugar was rationed to the author's family was mindblowing to juvenile me.
by whizzter | 2025-11-18 14:28:26+00:00
1: It's not meant to be cute but rather incredulity at a statement of declaring something to having failed that still very much seems to be in progress of being rolled out (and thus indicating that it'd be nice to have some more information if you know something the rest of the world doesn't).

2: Again, how are they failures? Yes, sales have been so-so but if you go onto Microsofts site you mostly get Surface devices with Snapdragon chips and most reports seems to be from about a year ago (would be interesting to see numbers from this year though).

3: Yes, I got a new x86 machine myself a month back that has quite nice battery life. Intel not being stuck as far behind on process seems to have helped a fair bit (the X elite's doesn't seem entirely power efficient compared to Apple however).

4: Yes, _I_ got an x86 machine since I knew that I'd probably be installing quirky enterprise dependencies from the early 00s (possibly even 90s) that a client requires.

However, I was actually considering something other than wintel, mainly an Apple laptop. If I'm considering options and being mostly held back by enterprise customers with old software I'd need to maintain the moat is quite weak.

My older kids previous school used ARM Chromebooks (currently x86 HP laptops at current upper highschool but they run things like AutoCAD), the younger one has used iPad's for most of their junior high.

Games could be one moat, but is that more due to the CPU or the GPU's being more behind Nvidia and AMD. Someone was running Cyberpunk 2077 on DGX Spark at 175 fps (x86-64 binary being emulated.. )!

But beside games and enterprise...

So many people that are using their computers for web interfaces, spreadsheets, writing, graphics(photoshop has ARM support) and so on won't notice much different about ARM machines (why my kids mostly used non-x86 so far), it's true that such people are using PC's less overall (phones and/or tables being enough for most of their computing), but tell a salesman Excel jockey that he can get 10-20% more battery life and he might just take it.

Now, if Qualcomm exits the market by failing to introduce another yearly/bi-yearly update then I'll be inclined to agree that Win-Arm has failed again.. but so far it's not really in sight.
by j_w | 2025-11-18 14:28:36+00:00
> Apple --> OpenAI can make a device that runs ChatGPT as the OS instead of relying on iOS.

Yeah... No they can't. I don't agree with any of your "disruptions," but this one is just comically incorrect. There was a post on HN somewhat recently that was a simulated computer using LLMs, and it was unusable.
by ranger_danger | 2025-11-18 14:28:53+00:00
>And then OPNsense can:

> Assume I want to enable the VLAN I just created.

> Assume that the VLAN is for my LAN port.

> Assume I want to create a static IP range for it where the tag number is the third octet (e.g. 192.168.10.0/24).

> Assume that I want to enable DHCP and use all available IPs in the /24.

>I’m happy for all the other options to be under an “Advanced” section, but why not just use sensible defaults?

How is this very specific usecase a 'sensible default' flow for everyone?

I strongly disagree with every one of these assumptions and I can think of several usecases where none of these make sense.

I think the interface is generic because it has to be. One person's usecase (as in OP's case) might be completely different to someone else's.

What they could do though, is have screens specifically for executing common flows together like what they describe, but IMO in no way should it be the only way to do those things, nor should it be assumed that everyone wants to do it that way.
by yabones | 2025-11-18 14:28:57+00:00
It's funny, because it's also one of the most "gotcha-filled" things you can do. Click the wrong box, and they'll stick you in a seat with no leg room or make you pay extra for a carry-on bag. I have very little confidence that an AI would be able to make the "correct" choice on an airline ticket consistently without making a rather impactful mistake.
by dlisboa | 2025-11-18 14:29:20+00:00
You make an assumption here that the software is also constant or static.

> There's a constant low-level flow of "we switched from X to Y and got Z% speedup" articles on HN, and while the details of the articles are often quite interesting, with rare exceptions I find that I read them and conclude that it was an error to ever have used X in the first place and the team should have been able to tell immediately that it wasn't going to be a good solution.

The language X was probably a good solution at first. Then the company started to increase its product surface or acquired enterprise customers. Now you have new workloads that were not considered and the language is no longer suited for it.

Most likely a decision is made to not introduce a second language to the company just for these new workloads as that complicates the architecture, not to mention hiring and managing, so you stay with language X and try to make do. Now you have language X doing more than it is suited for and response times often increase due to that.

This isn't really a case of startup growing pains, just that software itself cannot know ahead of time every application it'll have. You can choose a "mostly fast for all use cases" language and bet that your applications will fit those general use cases, this means you win small but also lose small.
by Taek | 2025-11-18 14:29:24+00:00
It's also worth pointing out that comparing a fine-tune to a base model is not apples-to-apples. For example, I have to imagine that the codex finetune of 5.1 is measurably worse at non-coding tasks than the 5.1 base model.

This chart (comparing base models to base models) probably gives a better idea of the total strength of each model.
by gk1 | 2025-11-18 14:29:26+00:00
Founder of a/b testing company accuses founder of evals company of misrepresenting how a/b tests are used in practice, then concludes by misrepresenting how evals are used in practice: "Or you can write 10,000,000 evals."

Could've easily been framed as "you need both evals and a/b testing," but instead they chose this route which comes across as defensive, disingenuous, and desperate.

BTW, if a competitor ever writes a whole post to refute something you barely alluded to without even mentioning their name... congratulations, you've won.
by jonasdegendt | 2025-11-18 14:29:27+00:00
It's much worse in America, in my experience. Much more deviation in cars/sedans/trucks on the road, with different road heights each, and MUCH more custom stuff on top.

I'm in Belgium and headlights don't generally bother me too much, but a month in California recently had me going "no wonder everyone has tints here."
by tovej | 2025-11-18 14:29:38+00:00
Could you please back that up with some evidence. Right now you're just claiming that there are a lot of anti-social businesses but that unicorns are separate from this.

That's quite a claim, as there's a higher probability of unicorns screwing people over. If a unicorn lives long enough it ends up at the top of the wealth pyramid. As far as I can tell, all of the _big_ anti-social actors were once unicorns.

That most organizations engaging in bad behavior aren't unicorns says nothing, because by definition most companies aren't unicorns. If unicorns are less than 0.1% of the population of companies X, then P(X | !unicorn(X)) > P(X | unicorn(X)) is almost guaranteed to be true for all P.
by gxnxcxcx | 2025-11-18 14:29:45+00:00
I fully acknowledge their existence. I'm sure I most certainly engage into equivalent antisocial behavior in some way or another wherever I most lack awareness, and my sole point is that, for most of us, when we are doing that, we dumb.

Slightly veering OT:

While I get the sore need for a place to vent after being subjected to a customer-facing workday, the website you keep linking to gives me in aggregate the rage farming vibes that are as prone to distort everyday reality as blind naïveté could be.
by Lammy | 2025-11-18 14:30:21+00:00
> So who are they for?

They're so machines can see better, not so humans can see better. There are so many more doorbell cameras, ALPR cameras, fixed building cams, PTZ building cams, dash cams, external vehicle cams, etc than ever before, and they all want to be able to spy on you as effectively as possible even at night.
by close04 | 2025-11-18 14:30:24+00:00
Headlights are brighter because when you are behind them, it's a game changer. The road visibility is so much better now, I still remember the dull yellowish lights I had on my first car (1970s model) and realize I was more driving by feel. But in front of those headlights it's a pain.

Then there's the height of the hood, headlights are so much higher than they used to on average. Amplifies that pain.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 14:30:54+00:00
Some US context:

"Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) regulates all automotive lighting, signalling and reflective devices in the United States.

In February 2022, FMVSS 108 was amended to allow automakers to install adaptive driver beam (ADB) headlamps on new vehicles. However, carmakers have not implemented ADB because of contradictions in the rule.

As of December 2024, FMVSS 108 has not been updated to adapt to widespread use of LED headlamps, which are criticized for being too bright and blinding other drivers. Some manufacturers have reportedly engineered headlamps to have a dark spot where they are measured according to the regulation while being over-illuminated in the rest of the field."

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

"Adaptive Highbeam Assist is Mercedes-Benz's marketing name for a headlight control strategy that continuously automatically tailors the headlamp range so the beam just reaches other vehicles ahead, thus always ensuring maximum possible seeing range without glaring other road users.

This technology is also known as Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB).

Until February 2022, this technology had been illegal in the US, as FMVSS 108 specifically stated that headlamps must have dedicated high and low beams to be deemed road-legal. An infrastructure bill enacted in November 2021 included language that directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to amend FMVSS 108 to allow the use of this technology, and set a two-year deadline for implementing this change. In February 2022, the NHTSA amended FMVSS 108 allowing adaptive headlights for use in the US. However, the new regulations are quite different from the ones in effect in Europe and Asia and prevent car manufacturers from easily adapting their systems to the US market."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp?wprov=sfti1#Adaptive_...
by mariopt | 2025-11-18 14:31:03+00:00
Enterprise self hosting is an expensive nightmare for most companies. I think it is time to discuss multi cloud deployments to escape outages.

I am hosted on Cloudflare but my stack is also capable of running on a single server if needed, most libraries are not design with this in mind.

I’m also wondering if all these recent outages are connected to cyber attacks, the timing is strange.
by neya | 2025-11-18 14:31:13+00:00
The lesson I learned is it's OK to put your site with Cloudflare. It's not ok to put your DNS on a registrar who is also on Cloudflare. We got locked out because our registrar is also on Cloudlfare, and now I can't even switch DNS to get the site back up. Keep your domain name registrar, DNS service provider and application infrastructure provider separately.
by glenstein | 2025-11-18 14:31:43+00:00
"They" are doing it! Remarkably, more than half of new energy generation deployed in the United States this year has been from solar. It's arguably the most shovel-ready form of energy infrastructure that exists right now.

Your framework is bizarre in the extreme. Despite the fact that no one thinks of mirror plants as having anything to do with the future of PV generation, you treat the future of all solar as if it hinges on that consideration. Meanwhile, back in reality, solar power could realistically occupy up to 30% of the grid's energy generation capacity without intermittency becoming a deal breaker. Combine that with the fact that the grid itself is going to continue to grow, and so 30% of whatever that future amount of total generation capacity is going to be a rather extraordinarily high number, solar is going to be an exceptionally important part of the energy generation picture in the future even if we never made an inch of progress on solving the intermittency problem. For that matter, it seems infinitely more rational to think that what's actually going to happen is some degree of experimenting with energy storage, more sophisticated demand management, and perhaps partner technologies that ease the stress of base load and peaking responsibilities. But instead of that, you're doing this completely out of left field U-turn towards solar mirrors.

So again, it's bizarre in the extreme to take that picture, which is about billions of dollars of grid infrastructure and multiple Terawatts of energy, and swap that out for a hypothetical relating to mirror plants, which is never going to happen in which no one is seriously entertaining, and to treat that question like it's decisive about the fate of solar power in the future.

This is what I mean about people coming out of the woodwork and treating big picture energy questions like they hinge on these bizarre idiosyncratic hypotheticals that have nothing to do with anything.
by jbreckmckye | 2025-11-18 14:31:58+00:00
> If you figure out how to do this completely, please contact me—I must know!

I think you want to use a TypeScript compiler extension / ts-patch

This is a bit difficult as it's not very well documented, but take a look at the examples in https://github.com/nonara/ts-patch

Essentially, you add a preprocessing stage to the compiler that can either enforce rules or alter the code

It could quietly transform all object like types into having read-only semantics. This would then make any mutation error out, with a message like you were attempting to violate field properties.

You would need to decide what to do about Proxies though. Maybe you just tolerate that as an escape hatch (like eval or calling plain JS)

Could be a fun project!
by varispeed | 2025-11-18 14:32:00+00:00
Never got good code out of Sonnet. It's been Gemini 2.5 for me followed by GPT-5.x.

Gemini is very good a pointing out flaws that are very subtle and non noticeable at a first and second glance.

It also produces code that is easy to reason about. You can then feed it to GPT-5.x for refinement and then back to Gemini for assessment.
by fionic | 2025-11-18 14:32:07+00:00
Cloudflare tunnels makes it dead simple these days. Like some others in the comments it seems; I'd rather Cloudflare fighting the war against hacker armies than me. Once our networks become compromised from opening our firewalls (possibly even not) our routers and IOT devices become unwillingly complicit in the army that's bringing the internet down.
by thedanbob | 2025-11-18 14:32:24+00:00
> And generally speaking out in the country, there won't be pedestrian foot traffic, so it's not as if you need the bright lights for them.

Animals, specifically deer. That said, you can use brights when no other cars are nearby, and when there is a car coming its worth a few seconds of extra risk to not blind the other guy and put him at risk.
by yorwba | 2025-11-18 14:32:43+00:00
The comparison is against general models which are explicitly fine-tuned. Specifically, they pre-train their models on unlabeled in-domain images and take DINO models pre-trained on internet-scale general images, then fine-tune both of them on a small number of labeled in-domain images.

The idea is to show that unsupervised pre-training on your target data, even if you don't have a lot of it, can beat transfer learning from a larger, but less focused dataset.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-11-18 14:32:55+00:00
Fun fact: a whole bunch of local (as opposed to global: the distinction here is important) Cloudflare-related outages were caused by exactly this thinking: see https://blog.cloudflare.com/going-bgp-zombie-hunting/ and related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45775051

But yeah, if you don't need Cloudflare, like, at all, obviously don't use them. But, who can predict whether they're going to be DDOS-ed in advance? Fact is, most sites are better off with Cloudflare than without.

Until something like this happens, of course, but even then the question of annual availability remains. I tried to ask Claude how to solve this conundrum, but it just told me to allow access to some .cloudflare.com site, so, ehhm, not sure...
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-18 14:33:09+00:00
> the US found it in the period between the end of WWII and the 1970s. High marginal taxes on extreme wealth, high inheritance taxes and zealous antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement all kept people's wealth and power disparity somewhat in check.

This.

People like to say Capitalism won the cold war, but in reality it was the welfare state with its massive redistribution and limits on concentration of power that won.

The current economic and social model isn't even desirable enough to prevent people from fantasizing Putin's Russia, it would have stood no chance against the USSR in the 50s.
Ask HN: Is Python's dynamic typing a liability when generating code with AI?
by ashed96 | 2025-11-18 14:33:12+00:00
I've been using Claude/Cursor heavily and noticed something: with TypeScript, the compiler catches interface mismatches immediately. With Python, I'm running code to find out it breaks.

This matters more with AI-generated code since I'm less familiar with what it wrote. Static typing gives me a safety net - I can see if the pieces fit before running anything.

Python dominates AI tooling, but is that despite the typing, not because of it? Or am I overvaluing compile-time checks?

(Yes, I know about type hints. Curious if anyone actually enforces them in AI-assisted workflows.)
by alistairSH | 2025-11-18 14:33:15+00:00
There are a two things contributing to "headlights too bright" in the US...

First, SUVs are really tall... If you're in a sedan (or worse, a Miata) and get close enough to an oncoming SUV, even well-aimed, legal lights are going to feel bright because they're pointed down at you.

Second, there's a decent sized market for cheap, unapproved HID/LED kits for older cars. They're often not aimed correctly.
by cratermoon | 2025-11-18 14:33:17+00:00
"Software development is intellectually complex but structurally simple"

I wonder if the author has fully considered the implications of this statement. Maybe an AI can, with 80% or so success, mimic the act of creating a complex system. It's not successfully recreating the intellectual work needed to make a working complex system.

In other words, AI is nothing more than an expensive, environmentally disastrous, and error-prone variation of the kind of automation that's already possible with deterministic tools.