MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-13 14:31:30+00:00
Relevant concerning this topic:

From 1993 to 2000 (with some attempts of later revivals) there was a TV game show in some German commercial television channel (RTL) named "Die 100.000 Mark Show" ("The 100.000 Mark Show" - (100.000 mark is a little bit more than 50.000 Euro using the conversion factor of 1.95583)) where the winners could win 100.00 mark.

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_100.000_Mark_Show

This was the first game show in German TV that offered such a huge amount of prize money and was initially criticized for this.

In 1999, in Germany "Wer wird Millionär" (basically the German version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?") - initially with 1 million mark (2002 it was even changed to EUR 1 million) - started.

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wer_wird_Million%C3%A4r%3F

I can also remember that at this time the show was criticized for this large possible prize money, but got more accepted over time, in particular because the host of this show (Günther Jauch) was very popular (he was basically the reason why "Wer wird Millionär" was very popular in Germany, but many other similar quiz shows were not).

In 2000 another TV channel (Sat.1) made a heavily marketed experiment with "Die Chance deines Lebens" (The chance of your life)

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Chance_deines_Lebens

where you could even win up to 10 million mark. While this was again criticized by the media, the show was a failure because it was too slow-paced, and nobody won the 10.000.000 mark in any of the broadcasted episodes (which would have caused media headlines and thus popularity).

On the other hand, from 2006 to 2015, there was a game show "Schlag den Raab" (Beat the Raab)

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlag_den_Raab

where you had to win against the (at that time very popular, but incredibly narcissistic) TV host Stefan Raab in a lot of games. There were also variants of this TV show in other countries, but only in the German version the winning sum was very large (at least EUR 500.000, with the money going into a jackpot if Stefan Raab won in the episode, so (see Wikipedia article) winning sums up to EUR 3.5 million were achieved).

Basically the fact that the winning sum was very large (in opposite to the versions in other countries), and the fact that this winning sum was "fair" because winning against the (very narcissistic) TV host Stefan Raab is a huge achievement (this was marketed very aggressively by Stefan Raab himself) made this show highly popular in Germany, but to my knowledge the versions in other countries were not popular. Relevant is here that because Stefan Raab was so controversial and narcissistic, most people who watched the show really wanted the candidate to win (and get the "deserved" money) - if only for the fact that this made Stefan Raab look stupid.
by threemux | 2025-11-13 14:31:33+00:00
In the US, some have failed, some have worked. In my home state of Maryland, the PPP (P3) for redeveloping the Travel Plazas along I-95 is often cited as a success story and they are indeed widely considered top notch rest stops. It's a small-ish thing, but it did work.

https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html

I don't know enough to say if Seagirt is considered a success but I do know Baltimore's port does very well. The Purple Line is/was a failure.
by bluehatbrit | 2025-11-13 14:32:09+00:00
I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am).

Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.

But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day.

They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay.

The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet.

All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK.

Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.
by roryirvine | 2025-11-13 14:32:22+00:00
Yeah. Ambulance services have been hard-pressed in the UK in recent years, especially in the immediate aftermath of Covid - but this should very clearly have been a Category 1 call (unconscious, difficulty breathing, or heart attack symptoms).

Last month in England (each country in the UK has its own stats), the mean response time (from dialling 999 to the ambulance arriving) for Cat 1 was 8 mins 1 second, and the 90th %ile time was 14m18s. That's a bit above the target response time of 7 mins, but a 3 hour wait strongly suggests a miscategorisation.

"Is the patient breathing? Are they conscious?" are literally the first words on the dispatcher's script, so something seems to have gone terribly wrong here.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-13 14:32:26+00:00
I've owned all the Xbox's back to the first, the Series X hardware was/is fine and they are generally pain free but they've made a series of poor choices one after another which in isolation where not catastrophic but in aggregate have gotten them to where they are now.

Things like this - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgepkwpkg4o are just strange when you are losing this generation of consoles already, they really need to decide whether they are staying in the console sphere long term in which case eat the cost temporarily and go all in on the next generation or just exit it entirely.

One foot in/One foot out is just wrecking their reputation with gamers (generally).
by prodigycorp | 2025-11-13 14:33:01+00:00
as someone who misses the coding sessions and deep work, my workflow here is evolving. youtube and leisure stuff takes me too far out of work that i avoid it.

so far the best thing i’ve found is to have a side project or two that doesn’t require deep concentration or as high a level of quality as your main project to vibe code on the side while i’m waiting.

one of the benefits of it is that it sometimes doing other stuff often takes me down a rabbit hole of working on my own cli tools or other knickknacks that make my life easier.
by leumon | 2025-11-13 14:33:24+00:00
This problem wouldn't exist if openai wouldn't store chatlogs (which of course they want to do, so that they can train on that data to improve the models). But calling nyt the bad guy here is simply wrong because it's not strictly necessary to store that data at all, and if you do, there will always be a risk of others getting access to it.
by randycupertino | 2025-11-13 14:33:39+00:00
Like don't get me wrong sometimes I enjoy celebrity gossip (hurrah, Prince Andrew was stripped of his title and lost his tax-payer paid for house!), but I generally only comment about it to my partner and don't tweet about it, and also I am not President of the United States nor CEO of three companies. And if I was I would keep those things to myself and not interject to the world so they could all know my hot takes.
by mentalgear | 2025-11-13 14:33:44+00:00
Fun fact: DB (Germany public-private national rail company) has become one of the UK's biggest train service providers - even the Queen's train was under their service.

DB (Schenker) buys stakes in transportation all over the world - with German tax payer money: A fact that many Germans do not like given the very poor train service in their own country.
by aboringusername | 2025-11-13 14:33:50+00:00
See my comment [1]. This is already happening with security patches and GrapheneOS has already commented on their socials about the situation.

It's quite bad as security patches used to take around a month, now it's around 4 months and the patches are being leaked to threat actors who can exploit the bugs until the patches are released.

Example: A patch is fixed on September 1st, released under embargo/closed source to all OEMs. Pixel issues the patch in December 1st publicly (either source code/software update), they now have until April 1st (4 months) to release it according to the law. So the patch is 7 months old before it has to be released according to the law.

All the march 2026 updates are done, now, today, and ready/waiting, but they are not released by Pixel/open source. Once that happens the timer will begin.

This EU law has made security far worse.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914692
by jasode | 2025-11-13 14:34:51+00:00
> i think the apparent 'lumper' is just a person ignorant of classification scheme offered, or at least, ignorant of what property it purports to capture.

>In each case there is a real objective distinction

No, Lumper-vs-Splitter doesn't simply boil down to plain ignorance. The L/S debate in the most sophisticated sense involves participants who actually know the proposed classifications but _chooses_ to discount them.

Here's another old example of a "transpiler" disagreement subthread where all 4 commenters actually know the distinctions of what that word is trying to capture but 3-out-of-4 still think that extra word is unnecessary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160415

Lumping-vs-Splitting is more about emphasis vs de-emphasis via the UI of language. I.e. "I do actually see the extra distinctions you're making but I don't elevate that difference to require a separate word/category."

The _choice_ by different users of language to encode the difference into another distinct word is subjective not objective.

Another example could be the term "social media". There's the seemingly weekly thread where somebody proclaims, "I quit all social media" and then there's the reply of "Do you consider HN to be social media?". Both the "yes" and "no" sides already know and can enumerate how Facebook works differently than HN so "ignorance of differences" of each website is not the root of the L/S. It's subjective for the particular person to lump in HN with "social media" because the differences don't matter. Likewise, it's subjective for another person to split HN as separate from social media because the differences do matter.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-13 14:35:03+00:00
London is particularly notable because it escaped forced privatisation of e.g. bus services. In London all the buses are red and work the same. You do not care whether your bus is a "Big Corp" bus or a "Tiny New Outfit" bus, they're both red, they both take Oyster, or credit cards or whatever, they're the same, the bus service is controlled by Transpot for London which responds to an elected Mayor. In most UK cities by contrast there are multiple, privately owned bus companies. The local government can try to persuade them to run services it wants but they don't have to, and indeed if the local government won't do what they want they can just fold up the service and go home, too bad, the government have to contract with a for-profit business and if nobody wants to do it then too bad no buses.

Until relatively recently (things have improved in Scotland especially and now increasingly in English cities) it would have been illegal to do what London does anywhere else. My city really wanted a single card that works on a bus or a train anywhere in the city, they couldn't persuade anybody involved to actually do that and the cards went away without ever being actually useful.
by hardlianotion | 2025-11-13 14:35:50+00:00
It's really an open question - UK's railways were in a poor state & lacking investment when they were handed over. Rail journeys and infrastructure investment did increase in the intervening period.

It's not at all clear that railways will have consistent, adequate funding in the public realm, not least because the government is leery of capital expenditure and is always interested in ways to make debt levels look smaller.
by prmoustache | 2025-11-13 14:37:46+00:00
no, that is not done via developer mode. When You download or try to open an apk from any app, it asks you if you want to allow it to install apps and send you to the configuration dialog. You still have to validate the app installation manually tbrough another dialog. In that case I usually leave the config dialog open while the app is installed, then disable the app permission right after install because that option is usually not easy to find. I usually only do it once on a new smartphone to install f-droid from a browser then allow f-droid and aurora store permanently.

I think that is the part that should be fixed, users should be able to allow a one time exception to avoid letting that permission activated by mistake. I don't need to allow permanently a web browser to install apps.
by bluGill | 2025-11-13 14:38:17+00:00
The tax is applies after the total is added up so there is no other choice When I was a kid a value meal at McDonalds was $3.18 after tax, but two of them was $6.37 - that extra penny over all the meals McDonalds sells in a state adds up to a lot of money and they were not going to let that go.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-13 14:38:34+00:00
> Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots.

Yes and that's as it should be, a fully loaded high speed intercity train has more souls on board than most commercial aviation planes (apologies pet peeve of mine because our media keeps banging on about how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid).

A bad day at the office for me is I break production and cost the company some money, a bad day at the office for them is considerably more serious - it's a lot of responsibility.
by hoistbypetard | 2025-11-13 14:38:52+00:00
When they closed the discussion, they explicitly welcomed people to talk about it outside their issue tracker:

> Our issue trackers (other projects may differ) are used to track the work for maintainers or soliciting community contributions. They do not exist for people to debate the merits of decisions already made. We have Homebrew/discussions (and, well, the rest of the internet) for that.

They just don't want discussion about the merits of a settled decision to interfere with their work tracking when they provide a perfectly good discussion forum[1] for that.

[1](https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions)
by blenderob | 2025-11-13 14:39:18+00:00
> They did something impressive so a useful model is to say "they know something about this world" or "there is something unique about them".

It may be tempting to say "they must know something others don't" or "there's something unique about them." But that's exactly the kind of thinking GP is pushing back against. Whether or not you say "genius" or not is semantics. But it's true that in some cultures, being rich is seen as a sign of wisdom or superiority. I see it sometimes on HN and I've definitely seen in public discourse. But I can't relate very much to it.

This may be a cultural gap but where I come from, wealth doesn't carry that kind of moral weight. It's like, sure Alex might be super rich. But are they honest, humble, and kind? Those qualities matter far more than how much money and assets they have.

Yes, there are billionaires where I'm from too, but no one treats them as inherently special. What people truly admire are virtues like groundedness and community service. When someone uses their skills with sincerity and a spirit of giving, that's when people say, "there's something unique about them." And this is going to be true as much for a rich bloke as it'd be for a poor bloke. Wealth has nothing to do with it.
by agurk | 2025-11-13 14:39:20+00:00
There are some nuances to it. British Airways (not the original British Airways Ltd [0], who merged to form BOAC) was established to manage several existing airlines that had already been nationalised (BOAC, BEA) and two regional carriers (Cambrian Airways and Northeast Airlines).

Of course BOAC and BEA had been made my consolidations of many smaller airlines which gets messy quickly when tracing the lineage. Even Cambrian and Northeast had formed British Air Services prior to this which was 70% owned by BEA.

So it is technically true that is was started as a state owned airline, but one made from companies that were originally created as private with a mixed history of state ownership.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Ltd
by rsynnott | 2025-11-13 14:39:25+00:00
British trains are _terribly_ expensive, and get cancelled a lot, has been my general impression (from next door in Ireland, another country with a notoriously bad rail system, though it is at least cheapish).

As someone else mentioned, London (and really urban commuter services in general) are essentially separate; the problems are _primarily_ around the regional/intercity stuff.

One specific consequence of the privatisation. Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train.

I mean, no-one can tell me that’s a sensible way to run a railway.

(Mind you, this still beats Dublin airport, which currently has no rail at all, and under current plans will have _two_ separate rail lines around 2040-2050, and maybe a tram. Though, if that happens, at least the same ticket will work for both…)
by shevy-java | 2025-11-13 14:39:49+00:00
Depends - some got wealthier. :)

Although, even with this in mind, it seems as if the UK really has a notoriously bad railway system. Most countries in the EU of a comparable size have a better railway system as such, even though they also have their own problems. One of the best in Europe is in Switzerland - the swiss really are clever. And also not in the EU.
by Y-bar | 2025-11-13 14:39:51+00:00
> […] there is absolutely no way OpenAI should be having sensitive private conversations with anybody. Sooner or later all that data will end up with Microsoft who can then […]

I don't think you even need to go as far as to Microsoft (who have earned zero points in the Privacy Protection league), just have a look at Altmans "I want to create a biometric database of every human" Orb/World-coin eye-scanning project: https://www.ft.com/content/0c5c2b8d-b185-40b6-9221-b80ee130b...
Ask HN: What open source LLM agent do you guys use and why?
by _345 | 2025-11-13 14:39:58+00:00
I have tried aider, aider-ce, and opencode. I'm on Windows 11, I code in Windows using MSYS2's bash-like shell and in Ubuntu via WSL2 (so just bash).

In my experience, aider is the best out of the three. It has the least features too, but it "just works" the best. I tell the tool exactly what I want done and after learning a bit it goes and does that right like 90% of the time.

With aider-ce and opencode, I ran into way too many bugs. For example in Windows right now it seems that copy pasting just doesn't work, which is a massive loss of functionality when you can't copy paste important snippets to the model.

Opencode looks really cool as a TUI with the themes and such, but I really didn't like how random these agents are. I don't know if claude code and codex are like this too, but whatever simple task I give out could be solved right away or it could for some reason result in taking 5x as long as aider as it calls random tools, tries to do web searches for documentation that is technically correct but not the thing it needs, running into 403's probably because of bot detection, and then trying that 3 more times before it submits a worse patch than what aider would have made.

I'd just stick to aider, but aider-ce (community expansion) exists because the dev just kinda stopped working on it despite the fact that it has as many stars as opencode. Wondering if there are any better alternatives out there or maybe if others feel the same way about what's happening to aider. Its a shame because aider really is great at just applying AI just enough that I don't have to stress about its stochastic nature and it just does exactly what I asked no more no less. I feel like I have maximal control over AI running on my code with aider.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-13 14:40:40+00:00
There have been lots of privatizations all over the Western world and most are not well known, its the negative examples that are very much talked about. And many or most are somewhere between fully private and fully public anyway, so the picture is much more muddy. I think to say its all a failure would be very reductive.

I think many of the telephone operator privatization worked pretty well in most places and buildup of user business for those companies and more competition, mostly from formerly public operators competing in other markets. But it also depends on the country.

Some of the airline privatization seems to me also sensible.

In my country (Switzerland) government owned some banks or partly old them and sold some stock in them, witch seems sensible to me.

Some water infrastructure was privatized and regulated in many countries and for the most part this has worked fine, maybe not in Britain.

Denmark seems to have done quite a lot of privatization and it was mostly considered pretty well done.

I was really surprised how much of this was done all over Europe, often by 'left' governments. Once you start researching you find more and more.

Would be the work for an economists thesis or something to try to do a full accounting of this across all European nations.
Show HN: Radkit – Build reliable AI agents with Rust
by irshadnilam | 2025-11-13 14:41:23+00:00
We (me and my co-founder) have been working on this library for a while and would love to get your thoughts.

github.com/agents-sh/radkit

radkit.rs/getting-started/

Most of the agent librararies out there just adds a huge prompt, put all the tool definitions and call the LLM on a loop hope and for the best.

This is not a way to build reliable ai agents. A better way to build ai agents is described in 12-factor agents by Dex Horthy here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kMaTybvDUw

https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents

Another limitations of current agentic frameworks is their support for interoperability among agents is very limited.

Google came up with https://a2a-protocol.org/latest/ (now under linux foundation) to address this, but the agent frameworks trying to do as much as possible and keep the end users locked into their "ecosystem" instead of supporting such protocols.

Everyone is so focused on MCP for some reason. (no hate for mcp, radkit supports mcp as well).

We belive in an agentic future where businesses expose ai agents and not mcp servers or rest apis. If you build an agent using radkit, it is a2a-protocol compliant from the get go.

With all of this in mind, we are building `radkit`.

It is still early stages. But we have reached a milestone and wanted to share with the community.