MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-11-29 20:16:28+00:00
Although Ford's CEO now gets it, Ford's product line doesn't reflect it yet. Farley has been bringing a few sample BYD cars to the US, for Ford people to drive around and to take apart. Farley dragged his executive team to China to see a BYD plant. They came back scared. But what Ford actually sells is 1) an F-150 converted to electric, 2) a Ford Mustang converted to electric, and 3) a Ford Transit converted to electric. They're all more expensive, and heavier, than their gasoline-powered versions.

BYD shows that electric cars are cheaper if designed properly from the ground up. The problem is that the US no longer makes many cars. Mostly giant trucks and SUVs. Hauling all that mass around requires a huge battery, resulting in 3-ton vehicles.
by keeda | 2025-11-29 20:16:30+00:00
It's not just Satya, the CEOs of all the hyperscalers are consistent in their messaging over the last several quarters that they are backlogged on capacity. Not only are they saying it, they are putting their money where their mouths are by actively burning double-digit billions of their free cash flow on this buildout.

How probable is it that all these competitors are colluding on the same story while burning what would have otherwise been very healthy profits?

Occam's razor and all that.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-11-29 20:16:41+00:00
I also saw a similar thing. I also naively pointed at "cosmic rays". It wasn't until someone found the actual bug that I realised how unlikely that was.

The actual bug was unsafe code somewhere else in the application corrupting the memory. The application worked fine, but the log message strings were being slightly corrupted. Just a random letter here and there being something it shouldn't be.

The question really should have been, if this was truly cosmic interference, why only this service and why was the problem appearing more than once over multiple versions of the application?

Cosmic rays are a great excuse to problems you don't yet understand. But the reality of them is extremely rare and it's like 99% a memory corruption bug caused by application code.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-29 20:17:46+00:00
That's silly. Batteries don't like to be kept at 100% all the time, not unlike your lungs which doesn't want to stay filled all the time (which is uncomfortable for your muscles even if you ignore the carbon dioxide).

e.g.: MacBooks discharge the battery down to 80% by using the battery even if it's plugged in by citing "Rarely used battery", and keep the battery at 80% for at least half a day, then charge it again.

Li-ion is an adversarial chemistry. You need to take care of it or the battery bites back by puffing up or losing capacity very fast, or becoming an indoor firework.
by noosphr | 2025-11-29 20:17:57+00:00
I don't think we've seen the end game yet.

I have an electric cargo bike. During a kids party yesterday I ran 5 different errands with it while someone with a car managed to get stuck in traffic, not find a parking spot, and miss the whole thing.

The only reason why cars are the size and shape they are is because ICE engines couldn't be made smaller. Electric engines on the other hand are small enough that I can have the chassis of a fully functioning car be light enough to lift by one man.

I think we will see small, light weight and intrinsically pedestrian safe cars made of tubes and canvas replace the heavy monstrosities we have now.
by tbrownaw | 2025-11-29 20:19:41+00:00
what this calls OR-Set looks equivalent to what Monotone uses (used? It's kinda mostly dead now) for merging scalar values (eg names, content hashes) since 2005.

The best current page I can find is https://tonyg.github.io/revctrl.org/MarkMerge.html . Boo link rot.
Show HN: I built a note-taking app with Markdown, images, and semantic search
by 5inGularity | 2025-11-29 20:19:42+00:00
I've used many note-taking apps over the years. Nothing comes close to Windows Notepad. As it opens instantly, you spend all of your cognitive load on the note itself rather than the app.

But, the lowly Notepad lacked essential features like markdown and images. The alternatives (Notion, Obsidian, etc.) are either too heavy or too complicated to setup.

So, I built https://notedown.xyz . It's fast (<200 kb), supports markdown and images, syncs anywhere, and has semantic search right in the browser.
by jrm4 | 2025-11-29 20:19:45+00:00
Fantastic, more of this. I don't know if I'm just missing it or what, but I'd love a GUI thing that showed all the devices on my network maybe even with a graph view.

I'm using an Eero router out of laziness and even it has some features here that I'd like to see more of in polished "home-user" style network tools; especially since it seems as if more are getting into the "homelab"/"selfhosted" thing.
by Apocryphon | 2025-11-29 20:20:42+00:00
The Netflix miniseries was very funny and engaging, but I can’t help but to think that it over-valorizes Garfield as some sort of fallen benevolent sage-king in the same way Oliver Stone’s JFK and other Camelot hagiographies do.

The man was not above the corrupt politics of the day, at least earlier in his career, after all.
by weinzierl | 2025-11-29 20:21:10+00:00
When I grew up in Germany it always made me proud that 100% of taxis were Mercedes Benz. If a car can withstand the rough demands of taxi service, it has to be good. And even in South America back then German cares were ubiquitous, especially Volkswagen.

When I was in Brazil this spring[*] I rode a lot of Uber and they were 100% BYD - 100%, no exception. It's not that my head hadn't known that German auto was dead but seeing it playing out like this hit hard.

[*] northern hemisphere
by sofixa | 2025-11-29 20:21:48+00:00
> 'we were too late, abort'

What do you mean, the ID series for the main VW brand have 7 upcoming models over the next two years (4 for the Chinese market, 3 for everywhere).

> all established brands we know are left behind

I wouldn't go that far. The Renault 5 is one of the best selling EVs in Europe, and all the reviews are extremely positive (it's a fun and good looking car overall, and accessible). They have the 4 rolling out, and the small Twingo coming next year. They've also managed to narrow down the time from concept car to production at scale to less than 2 years (which according to the article on the topic I read is very fast).
by bastawhiz | 2025-11-29 20:22:06+00:00
> a Ford Mustang converted to electric

I agree with your comment, but I'll be a little pedantic for a minute:

As a Charger Daytona owner, I'd love to call the Mach-E a mustang, but it's really just borrowing the brand. Ford has said unequivocally that they'll never make an all-electric muscle car, which is a real shame. The Mach-E is a great car if you're turned off by a Model Y, but you wouldn't choose it over a mustang GT or a charger Daytona or a Camaro.
by pengaru | 2025-11-29 20:22:10+00:00
I'm not sure how generally applicable it is. When you have several acres of undeveloped land full of sand at your disposal it's relatively trivial to dig a pit, mix some concrete from the sand you excavated, and pour a subterranean cellar to house a battery bank and other hazardous infrastructure. Nobody would even notice it happened/exists.

The situation is far more complicated for folks in apartments or high density housing.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-29 20:22:10+00:00
>I never understood Volkswagen's pivot from 'wait and See's to 'were inversing billions' to 'we were too late, abort'.

How is VW aborting in any way? They do not have a new ICE Platform, they are totally all in on EVs. Whether that will work out is of course another question, but it is bizarre to bring up EV when there is also Stellantis, who do not even have a dedicated EV Platform for their cars.
by pdimitar | 2025-11-29 20:23:29+00:00
Replies like yours gloss over nuance. I don't mind prioritizing time to market as a programmer; I am not clueless, I understand that imperfect product that pours money into my employer's coffers is infinitely better than it sinking and we all get fired out of necessity.

My problem comes from the fact that the leadership _never_ compromises and never allows us to avoid at least some crises that are extremely easy to foresee (and have happened like clockwork in 95% of the cases where I or other colleagues have predicted them).

Again, sure, let's go to market and start making sales. I completely agree. But scolding a dev for fixing a DB schema anomaly that slows down ~40% of _all_ feature requests and that it took him the grand day or two to do so, is not just myopic. It's moronic.

---

Even shorter / TL;DR version: If the balance of power was 80% leadership and 20% engineers, I'd still be completely OK with that. But wherever I go the "balance" of power is more like 99% leadership and 1% engineers (and that's only when stuff really has hit the fan; they'd take away that last one percent as well if they could).

That is the problem. There's no balance. No compromise. Just people barking orders.
by hecturchi | 2025-11-29 20:24:02+00:00
It must be great to live in a country where you can change your company address without any paper trail whatsoever: no rental contract, no utilities, no entry in the business registry, no acknowledgement from the tax office and nothing you can provide as proof or anything.

I guess the downside is, well, this, specially having thought it is a good idea to rely on Wise as first and only option for business banking, with their reputation...
by nottorp | 2025-11-29 20:24:33+00:00
I don’t dare to copy paste. But then I do relatively niche stuff and the “AI” fucks me over every second answer. And I don’t know which so I have to take everything with a sack of salt.

It probably feels different if you’re in the JavaScript ecosystem where the “AI” is trained on suboptimal and full of security hole tutorials from content mills.
by yumraj | 2025-11-29 20:25:50+00:00
Another alternate to Tauri is Wails if one prefers Go to Rust. I’m currently using Wails for something and it’s working out well so far.

There are some pro/cons but Wails and Tauri seems to be similar in principal. Tauri can also target mobile platforms it seems which Wails can’t is one big difference.
by DennisP | 2025-11-29 20:26:12+00:00
True, but as of this month 30% of zcash transactions are shielded, and 20-25% of addresses are private. That's a fairly large anonymity set. The percentage of shielded transactions is also increasing, at a rate that will make them a majority within a year if the trend continues.

https://www.coindesk.com/research/inside-zcash-encrypted-mon...
by sofixa | 2025-11-29 20:27:06+00:00
> The only reason why cars are the size and shape they are is because ICE engines couldn't be made smaller. Electric engines on the other hand are small enough that I can have the chassis of a fully functioning car be light enough to lift by one man.

Nope, the Smart existed for quite a while. Safety standards made cars slightly bigger (e.g. the new Renault Twingo is bigger than the original), but modern American "cars" are massive because that's what marketing has convinced Americans it's what they need. American vehicle manufacturers are pretty terrible at everything, and efficiency standards nudge them that way anyways, so making massive cars with high margins is a good deal for them.

In Europe there are SUVs, but the average car is a VW Golf or a Renault Clio sized. They are pretty decently sized, good visibility, can fit a family of 4, etc. Yeah, you can't haul a 50 ton campervan offroading up to Kilimanjaro, sure, but that's not what 99% of car trips are for.

> I think we will see small, light weight and intrinsically pedestrian safe cars made of tubes and canvas replace the heavy monstrosities we have now.

Renault Twizy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Twizy ) exists, but doesn't sell all that well (compared to "normal" cars).

The Citroen Ami ( https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(2020) ) is pretty popular in certain places (saw a ton of them in Amsterdam and semi-rural areas in France).
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-29 20:27:08+00:00
I think you are conflating mastery with some kind of beautiful codebase that is completely obvious to everyone else. Einstein had mastery over physics and yet his ideas required a lot of studying to understand and explore.

Engineering is the intersection of science and economics. You build the thing as best you can with the knowledge you have and you often discover things you didn’t even know once you start building. Combine that with time and resource limitations, and you have to make reasonable short cuts to deliver things.

Also remember that even if there’s one master on a codebase, organizations often pair them with many non-masters to try to accelerate things. What that looks like then is a mish mash of things that don’t make sense because the master is struggling to maintain a coherent vision that other people are executing; it’s hard to develop consistency even when there’s just one person let alone a broader team.

But your benchmark is fine if one master can show another master a codebase and explain why the pieces are there and which pieces are shortcuts and what the vision is. Trying to develop that knowledge by yourself in the middle of the dev cycle is a fools errand; one of the first things I do when I come to a codebase is ask a bunch of questions to build up my understanding of the history of the codebase and why things were done a specific way.
by mnky9800n | 2025-11-29 20:27:24+00:00
This is how I feel about riding in the rain to work. Like yes you get wet but also are you unable to get wet? If you want, wear rain clothes so you stay dry. And if it’s really pouring just wait half an hour or take the bus if you can’t wait. Just plan to ride every day and be okay with the days when life won’t let you.
by sixtyj | 2025-11-29 20:27:43+00:00
My comment is that despite all the automation we don't see the potential fuckups that occur with a subcritical number of customers - see infotainment and "modern" controls in cars today. Then it leads to Ford coming out with a "mechanically" controlled car and everyone can go nuts for it.

So the question was, do we really need a vacuum cleaner connected to a proprietary cloud? And is there a critical number of people using it so a supplier can maintain and run cloud for a long time?

Off topic: A few days ago there was a discussion that someone tried to turn off connecting to the Chinese cloud and the device stopped working altogether...
by BlaDeKke | 2025-11-29 20:29:15+00:00
Lag was certainly a factor, but there were also weird behaviors like visual glitches and UI rendering issues. There were a number of intermittent problems that are hard to list specifically, as it’s been a few months since we tried it.

She is not a power user. Working inside a container running Windows just to display MS Word introduces complexity. separate file systems, etc. Sometimes the abstraction breaks, and you "fall out" of the app and end up staring at a Windows environment. It is very confusing for a layperson. On top of that, the RAM overhead was significant for her older laptop.

She is a kindergarten teacher. The last thing she can use is friction on her laptop.

We didn't try LibreOffice. I'm familiar with it, but the learning curve/transition is just too much friction. They also share a lot of documents with colleagues. I don't know the current state of compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice, but I recall layouts breaking regularly. She also has a library of templates originally created in MS Office.
by casenmgreen | 2025-11-29 20:29:24+00:00
It's not quite what it seems.

I'd picked up a contract in the UK and relocated to the client and created a company for the contract.

I then tried to get a business bank account with a normal bank, and failed.

Metro bank took forever and tons of info and then said no.

(I issued a GDPR data access to see if I could find out anything. After a while, they sent me the same letter twice, arriving on the same day, telling me they had performed the data deletion I had requested.)

HSBC seemed to lose the application - it disappeared. It had been challenging to make in the first place, the application process was confused and confusing (and that was in the bank with help). I didn't try again (and there wasn't really time to try again - the client was already having to hold off paying me, which is awkward for them).

I looked at some others, Lloyds and Barclays, and it's been a while so I can't remember why but they didn't pan out.

TransferWise was my final choice.

When the contract was done, I left the UK, so no opportunity to open further bank accounts in UK for the business.
by jrm4 | 2025-11-29 20:29:28+00:00
Yeah, and I think often it's not hard to see the historical intersection with power; a lot of the Christian stuff has to do with preserving the churches power.

Seems like today's stuff is in line with the combination of an extremely good and reasonable desire to protect the vulnerable, with a perhaps unhealthy dose of "protecting ones own individual feelings from any awkwardness or discomfort whatsoever?" But for whatever reason, not very "large official institution" driven?
by pmg101 | 2025-11-29 20:29:32+00:00
Your first three paragraphs are sound.

But surely the problem with the final paragraph is the transition? Assuming the old style of vehicle remains on the road, then my lightweight one is at risk of being crushed. Only a niche minority would choose that (as a cargo bike owner, I'm also one, but I recognise most are not, with good reason.)

Unless we built a whole separate infrastructure.... We already see a lot of electric scooters using cycle lanes.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-29 20:30:34+00:00
"Americans only want trucks and SUVs." (I hear people say.)

Cool. Then allow BYD non-trucks, non-SUVs into the U.S. then.

The Japanese back in the 70's showed U.S. automakers that price and mileage (in that decade anyway) were important to Americans. I suspect price is still important.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-29 20:30:47+00:00
To be fair taxis have unique requirements. Taxis in the UK were like 80% Prius for a long time because they drive very long distances and hybrids are very cost effective for city driving where you're doing a lot of low speed driving and don't have convenient recharging opportunities. But most people aren't in that situation.

Still, I think BYD are kind of killing it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-29 20:30:52+00:00
BYD recently went live with a highly automated, large scale manufacturing facility in Brazil. The BYD Dolphin Mini sells for ~$22,500, and the manufacturer already has 200 showrooms open across the country.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/22/cop-brazil...

https://www.byd.com/us/news-list/First-BYD-Electric-Vehicle-...
by EnPissant | 2025-11-29 20:31:08+00:00
I quite disliked him. He always came off as a smug asshole, and I think the evidence backs that up.

His core shtick was being a food hipster which often involved putting down others preferences to prove how superior he was. For example saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten.

He treated his staff like trash on one hand while publicly proclaiming "Mistreat the floor staff and you are dead to me." for cool guy points.

Add to that the incredible narcissism of dumping both his wives for younger women as soon as he could, but then playing the victim when his new younger wife cheats on him.
by rijoja | 2025-11-29 20:31:09+00:00
yes obviously it's clippy because everyone hated clippy that is the point

the idea is that when your CEO goes on slack or teams or whatever and see 100 clippies they'll be "oh wow, nobody likes how we earn our dollar."

or the very least people who are concerned about surveillance will know who is on their team!

so just do it

I'm serious
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-29 20:31:21+00:00
> If you call it a 'mobility culture' it a very niche one.

And yet it is relatively successful in Montreal (as TFA says). If we are completely honest, bicycling could be called a niche activity in most of North America.

> Bicycling is a thing for very specific demographics in Montreal in comparison with Amsterdam and even with Eastern European cities.

For students, for example.

I did say, "Bicycling is part of the mobility culture of Montreal". I did not claim more, and I also said that it's a controversial topic. On the positive side, Bixi has been a relative success compared to other Canadian cities.[1]

(You know Bixi, so I'll add a link for others to read.)

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixi_(bicycle_share_system)
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-29 20:31:54+00:00
Apparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAGUrkDsj4) to protest the fact that the world feels like a dystopian hellscape run by evil corporations and greedy politicians. He's not wrong, but it's kinda felt that way since the 70s (see the movie Network for reference)

This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating. But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool?

For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs
by array_key_first | 2025-11-29 20:32:32+00:00
Those are inseparable from data collection, because that is data collection. The only reason we have to worry about things like Flock is because there's people who will die on the hill that filming people in public is okay, even when corporations do it and use that data for your oppression.

I just don't understand how it's impossible to prevent. We haven't even tried. This is a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" sort of mentality, which is as lazy as it is harmful.

There's plenty of things in public that you CAN do, but which we prevent pretty well. For example, every human being has the ability to flash anyone, at any time. However, we do a pretty good job preventing that via the law, despite the fact there are absolutely zero technical or physical limitations to pulling out your dick. If anything, it's one of the most human things you can do - humans have penises and vaginas because they are animals.

And yet, despite the availability of such actions, I don't have to worry much about seeing a veiny cock at the local starbucks. But you know what I do have to worry about? Being filmed, and that video being uploaded to hundreds of computers globally in real time, where it can be used for any and all purposes. Including denying me a loan, or a job, or even imprisoning me. And humans don't even have cameras built right in to their crotch.
by rossjudson | 2025-11-29 20:33:00+00:00
My armchair guess is that they had a new control pathway not properly participating in their integrity hand-off protocols, doing some kind of transformation outside of that protection.

I once saw some HW engineers go nuts trying to find out why a storage device had an error rate several orders of magnitude higher than the extremely low error rate they expected (and triggering data corruption errors). It turns out to be one extremely deep VHDL-based control area for an FPGA that didn't properly do integrity. You'd have to flip a bit at an incredibly precise point in time for error to occur, but that's what was happening. When all the math was said and done, that FPGA control path integrity miss exactly accounted for the the higher error rate.