MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxerickson | 2025-11-21 03:40:44+00:00
I imagine that the variation is in the internal combustion engines the system is being paired with. In that scenario, it can be that the regulator is treating the combined units as a new drivetrain and requiring certification of each combination as if it were a new engine.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what larger operators have in their fleets. It could be that a few certifications go a long ways. They are going to be at least somewhat inclined to avoid variation.
by BoorishBears | 2025-11-21 03:41:07+00:00
Yeah reading this I was thinking, we've got Qwen-Image-Edit which is an image model with an LLM backbone that takes well to finetuning.

I'd be surprised if you can't get a 80%/20% result in a weekend, and even that probably saves you some time if you're just willing to pick best-of-n results
by alexpotato | 2025-11-21 03:42:19+00:00
My favorite example of why managers fire good workers:

- You are a manager of a team of 4

- You hear layoffs are coming

- You have one amazing direct report, 2 just ok and 1 awful

Who do you fire?

Most people say "Of course, fire the awful person"

I say: "When this actually happened, the manager fired their best person"

Other: "But, but why? That's not fair!"

Me: "You know layoffs are coming. You are the most expensive person on the team. If you fire the awful person there may be questions about why you even hired them. They then fire you and keep your amazing person as the manager (probably for less money).

You fire your best person, well then now you as the manager are the best person AND you can make the argument that that awful person needs 'more managing to be effective'"

It's not pretty or noble or heartwarming but this is how the logic goes in a lot of big firms (especially around layoff season).
by cpgxiii | 2025-11-21 03:43:00+00:00
> Americans don't like diesel cars... It makes no sense to regulate emissions on diesel passenger cars in the USA.

That doesn't follow. Americans don't like diesel cars because emissions-compliant diesel cars are a massive pain in the ass. Diesel emissions treatment systems are a maintenance pain, as indicated by how many people with diesel trucks perform illegal emissions "deletes". The "magic" of VW's cheating was that it minimized or eliminated this pain, so all the owner was left with was the increased MPG, and this was pretty popular. It wasn't more popular because (1) plenty of people who would have considered a diesel with this ease-of-use would not have considered a VW, and (2) none of the other automakers could compete, because, you know, the cheating.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-11-21 03:43:06+00:00
Private payroll systems are expensive, and all the risk remains with the purchaser. Why are they expensive? There is limited competition (often through acquisition) and the product is sold just below the price that the majority of companies would find an alternative. What results is no development and improvement of payroll, but instead companies incentivised to create complexity moats through regulation.

If the government is forced to provide at least one working payroll system for free or reasonable cost then private companies compete with specific verticals and ease of use. And when the government wants to change how payroll works for some third benefit... they just can.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-21 03:43:24+00:00
> Not everyone gets UBI. UBI pays you up to an amount, based on your other income.

This is not how UBI is typically discussed, and it wasn’t how the regional pilot projects I am familiar with worked. Rather, every single citizen of a community gets the same amount regardless of how much money they earn from other sources.

That is part of the “universal” and it is precisely how UBI improves employees’ position against employers: an employee can safely quit at any moment because he already has the UBI as backup with no further actions required. What you are describing is more the “negative income tax” form of universal income that has been criticized for not empowering the working class this way.
by ameliaquining | 2025-11-21 03:43:29+00:00
You're thinking of a different kind of company than the paper is talking about. (The headline, presumably written by the university's PR team, is a bit misleading about this.) The paper is about a certain kind of firm (e.g., the Big Four accounting firms, management consultancies like McKinsey, some elite law firms) that explicitly uses an "up or out" model, and explains why this kind of firm's business model (in particular, renting out the services of a particular employee to each customer) leads to this. The findings don't apply to other kinds of firms; e.g., in a typical big tech company, most engineers don't work primarily with a single customer, so the preconditions don't hold.
by maxerickson | 2025-11-21 03:44:25+00:00
It's gonna be California (but I'm guessing, not sure). Other states just defer to federal regulation.

That they don't put the state on blast sort of points to the big cost not being entirely real (where they either think they can induce regulatory change or the number of tests that is needed to sell the systems is quite a lot less than the number of tests that would be needed to allow 100% of the market to use their system).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-21 03:45:05+00:00
> Few of us like having our work critiqued by an "outsider"

I said aerospace community. Not NASA. Plenty of people hate Artemis. Most people hate SLS. But they hate it for good reason. Destin touched on some of that. But because he missed Artemis's purpose, he bungled that criticism too.

I like Destin. But he missed the mark pretty badly on that video, and I judge him for now following up with clarification.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-21 03:45:30+00:00
Central planning is why our cities are no longer choked by smog. It is extremely difficult to predict outcomes in complex human system, but that cuts both ways: it’s hard to know if some intervention is good or bad, and it’s hard to know if leaving things alone is good or bad.

If you leave things alone, you get the light bulb and the airplane, but also leaded gasoline and radioactive tonics. The notion that it’s always better to do nothing rather than something is as fallacious as the opposite.
by drnick1 | 2025-11-21 03:45:30+00:00
> My guess would be that your car would develop some covert or overt fault if you did that.

I used a bypass harness to avoid losing a speaker and the car hasn't developed any fault. I wouldn't buy a car without knowing in advance that this mod is possible. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this for popular makes/models. It may be as simple as removing a fuse, or you might need to disassemble part of the dash to physically unplug the modem.
by elevation | 2025-11-21 03:45:36+00:00
> The main point of OOP to me is hiding internal state. So OOP is great for user-interface

One principal I pursue aggressively in UI design is NOT hiding state!

A client had written a script to calibrate an embedded system across several operating parameters. The program consisted of a TUI to capture setup parameters, then ran 5-layers of nested FOR loop for several hours. This original program lacked even a basic progress bar. You never knew what it was doing or when it would be done - it hid a lot of internal state!

You might say, "the TUI program was hiding relevant state; your program should only hide the irrelevant state." But as I iterated on the program I realized that literally all of the program state was relevant! So I meticulously crafted a GUI to display every operational detail on screen at all times. This included the state of each FOR loop, a plot of the intermediate results, the state of each TCP connection, the state of the unit under test, and the user-selected test parameters, the full path of the calibration files the test relied upon.

While the program had some "magic" (it would auto-recall the default parameters associated with the model under test, and would auto detect equipment types with a network scan) I future-proofed it by ensuring that ALL of the parameters were both visible (not hidden!) and human-overridable AND resettable (A reset-to-default option would appear when the user changed defaults, in case the selection was unintended.) The GUI is also wire silent (no network packets transmitted) until directed by the user to scan for/connect to equipment, and it gives a visual indicator while waiting for network responses.

The GUI also tracked test progress as a first-class file-saveable object, so not only was there a progress bar, but tests could be resumed if equipment connectivity was lost mid-test. And a 95% confidence interval estimate, shown as "between 9 and 13 minutes remaining" to help production techs plan their day.

Even when state is read-only, I still don't hide it. Once a test has commenced, the selectable test parameters cannot be changed, but displaying them on screen confirms to users that their 5-hour test was not started with the wrong parameters.

My big takeaway from this effort is that ANY hidden/inaccessible state is a liability. A user should be able to observe at all times what their program is up to.
by VeritySage07 | 2025-11-21 03:46:37+00:00
Wayland’s fragmentation is less about one problem and more about how the ecosystem grew. Each compositor implements only what it needs, so tools like xdotool run into gaps and inconsistent behavior.

The post highlights a real coordination issue. The protocols exist, but adoption is uneven and expectations differ across compositors. Users see small breaks and developers face a moving target.

Wayland is improving, especially with work from GNOME and KDE, but stronger shared conventions for automation and accessibility are still needed.

Good write-up that shows why experiences on Wayland vary so much depending on the compositor.
by beefnugs | 2025-11-21 03:47:08+00:00
All they have to do is sell regular "windows" and "windowsAI" as a separate product and everyone would be fine with it... but no FUCK YOU ads in your fucking start menu you stupid bitch customer.

(sorry for big words, but this is how i feel they are talking to me when the base operating system I am suppose to put absolute trust in my privacy in treats me like an idiot)
by crazygringo | 2025-11-21 03:47:25+00:00
I think you're exaggerating or misunderstanding this.

It's not bullying or shaming by most kids. It's just, including SMS in an iMessage group chat is a terrible user experience. It's genuinely super annoying and breaks all the time. To the kids, the Android kid basically just has a broken phone. The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.

If you give your kid an iPhone it's not going to turn him into a bully. That's absurd. It's just going to let him be included in the group chats where friendships grow and plans get made.

Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it. Their suffering is not going to make Apple disable iMessage.
by Ethan312 | 2025-11-21 03:49:16+00:00
Stories like this show how blurred the line can get between media ownership, politics, and business interests. Even if nothing came from the talks, the idea of a buyer discussing hosts with the White House raises concerns about how much influence owners expect over coverage.

It also reflects a bigger issue. Many major news outlets depend on wealthy buyers or large corporations, and that creates pressure that can affect editorial independence long before any deal is done.

A good reminder that who owns the news often matters as much as the news itself.
by jppope | 2025-11-21 03:49:31+00:00
As I understand it, the process is known as up or out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out) and exists due to a the known corporate structure required to do consulting work. I have no clue about its effectiveness, but all the work I've ever seen done by Deloitte, McKinsey, or PWC was mediocre at best which to me would signal that the process probably rewards a different incentive set than they intend it to. For the rest of us its likely a lesson in the power of branding. To quote Matt Damon: "(they are charging you for) an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library"

The only other thing I have to say about it is I have noticed a high correlation with the reports produced and the things employees have been telling management to do for a long time - that is to say, there is some utility to having an outsider provide the information... even if that information isn't novel at all.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-11-21 03:49:48+00:00
This is not how things ever work in practice in representative democracy. The world is too complex, and the many overlapping sets of political groups in a country/provice/city have different takes on what the policy should be, and more importantly, each group have different tolerances for what they will accept.

Because everyone has different principles by which they evaluate the world, most laws don't actually care about principles. They are simply arbitrary lines in the sand drawn by the legislature in a bid to satisfy (or not dissatisfy) as many groups as possible. Sometimes, some vague sounding principles are attached to the laws, but its always impossible for someone else to start with the same principles and derive the exact same law from them.

Constitutions on the other hand seem simple and often have simple sounding principles in them. The reason is that constitutions specify what the State institutions can and cannot do. The State is a relatively simple system compared to the world, so constitutions seem simple. Laws on the other hand specify what everyone else must or must not do, and they must deal with messy reality.
by dluan | 2025-11-21 03:50:47+00:00
I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive, straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean. Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one.

I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy, and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years. Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.

The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely short and small, where the government works very closely and reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem. Because every single community district has a CPC office, with representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions, hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals. The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction. This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the Chinese general public.

The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.
by Ethan312 | 2025-11-21 03:51:33+00:00
Nice to see Grok 4.1 Fast added to Puter.js. It fits well with their focus on lightweight, browser-based tools. Smaller models are getting good enough for real tasks, and having one that runs with low overhead in JavaScript makes client-side AI more practical.

Will be interesting to see what developers build with it and whether more AI work starts happening in the browser instead of always depending on a backend.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-21 03:52:44+00:00
The point of HN comments are for tangents, so I'm happy to hear why you as a domain expert disagree with any of what I raised there.

Also to your point

> For 2 decades people have been encouraging the "average nontechnical user" to do incredibly unsafe things on the premise

Sure I can agree with that. But that wasn't my point either? Unless again you specifically object to the term "average nontechnical user."
by linguae | 2025-11-21 03:53:17+00:00
The NeXT variant did run on the following architectures:

1. Motorola 68k (the original NeXT hardware had 68030 and 68040 chips)

2. Intel x86 (NeXTSTEP 3.1 for Intel was released in 1993)

3. HP PA-RISC (I have an OPENSTEP 4.2 CD that can run on Motorola 68k, x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC hardware)

4. Sun SPARC

5. 32-bit PowerPC (Rhapsody, the original Mac OS X 1.0 that was essentially still Rhapsody, and of course Mac OS X from Cheetah through Leopard)

6. 64-bit PowerPC (Power Mac G5 and iMac G5)

7. Intel x86-64 (starting from Mac OS X Tiger all the way to macOS Tahoe)

8. 32-bit ARM (iOS on early iPhones with 32-bit ARM chips)

9. 64-bit ARM

I could be forgetting other platforms, but these are the ones I know from the top of my head.
by jchw | 2025-11-21 03:54:11+00:00
In my opinion, three basic things are needed:

- Device emulation: uinput covers this; requiring root is reasonable for what it does.

- Input injection. Like XTEST, but ideally with permissions and more event types (i.e. tablet and touch events.) libei is close but I think it should be a Wayland protocol.

- UI automation: Right now I think the closest you can get is with AT-SPI2, for apps that support it. This should also be a Wayland protocol.

None of these are actually easy if you want to make a good API. (XTEST is a convenient API, but not a particularly good one. Win32 has better input emulation and UI automation features IMO.)

Also the tangent about how crazy the compatibility layers are is weird. Yes, funny things are being done for the sake of compatibility. XWaylandVideoBridge is another example, but screen sharing is an area where Wayland is arguably better (despite what NVIDIA has to say) because you can get zero copy window and screen contents through PipeWire thanks to dmabufs.

Some of the lack of progress comes down to disagreements. libei mainly exists, by my best estimate, because the GNOME folks don't like putting things in Mutter, and don't want to figure out how to deal with moving things out of process while keeping them in protocol. (Nevermind the fact that this still has to go through Mutter eventually, since it is the guy sending the events anyways...) However, as far as I know, lack of progress on UI automation and accessibility entirely comes down to funding. It's easy to say "why not just add SetCursorPos(x, y)" and laugh it off, but attacking these problems is really quite complex. There was Newton for the UI automation part, but unfortunately we haven't heard anything since 2024 AFAIK, and nobody else has stepped up.

https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-...

Color management is the perfect example of how a simple ask can be complicated. How hard could it really be? Well, see for yourself.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

If Wayland lasts as long as X11 did, it's preposterous to not spend the time to try to get the "new" version of these things right even if it is painful in the meantime.

After all, it isn't like UI automation on Linux was ever particularly good. Anyone who has ever used AutoHotkey could've told you that.
by ramblenode | 2025-11-21 03:54:34+00:00
Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.

The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-11-21 03:54:39+00:00
I have never seen someone fired over hiring a dud. Reasonable people know that hiring has smoke and mirrors - everyone is putting on their best fake persona to get in the door. Maybe in some toxic, cut-throat environments, but this seems very particular.

Firing the best person because they outshine the master is plausible. One of the 48 Laws of Power.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-11-21 03:54:39+00:00
At this point the Wayland project is effectively keeping desktop Linux from succeeding. It might as well have been a plant project or a strategic intelligence war from Microsoft to keep Linux on the server only.

It's a ten+ year disaster project that held desktop linux back at the precise moment of complete insanity on the part of the Windows designers with Windows 8 and the dual desktop/tiles disaster and yet-another-window-kit.

Microsoft is still pissing off its customers actively, but now we have real traction with Steam for getting gamers off of MS and onto Linux.

The opportunity is still there.
by windex | 2025-11-21 03:56:37+00:00
The method used in all the big4s in India is this: You join and do well as usual. Your credit is shared by those above you. You continue to do well, your manager gets promoted or you get a manager who needs a promotion and needs the credit you generate. He gets promoted, aggregates your good work and shows it as his. You then get sidelined, PIPed, or leave in disgust.

It's political and I have begun to strongly believe that the best leave or are schemed against by the mediocre cabal. You cannot continue in a large firm in India if you are anywhere near good.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-11-21 03:56:53+00:00
Funnily enough, I actually play the cello and have enjoyed playing some of his cello suites in the past. Yes, I certainly admire the famous Suite I and it has an incredible mood to it.

I most enjoy playing music as a social affair rather than in isolation though. That may have a fair amount to do with my impression of composers from each era (Baroque is fine in a group, Classical can be unforgiving, Romantic is a lot of fun, etc.).

Looking at many of the responses here though (which have been wonderful), there are quite a few pieces from Bach that I was not aware of, or had forgotten about. He really was incredible.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-21 03:58:48+00:00
It's a stopgap measure until such time that an entire country's bureaucracy can be rewritten to meet the needs of its populace, rather than its legislators and elites.

Aside from laws being written the way they are (because the legal system is highly verbose and incredibly specific, which necessitates said language), I'm generally in agreement with you! Maps should be publicly available and kept up-to-date so citizens can quickly glance at them to identify potential business locations that have lower permitting requirements, and said permitting processes should be handled by the government rather than forcing new business owners to shell out for expensive attorneys and compliance officers right off the bat.

It's about balancing the needs of small business for flexibility and adaptability with limited resources, with the regulations needed to keep larger business interests from exploiting and monopolizing markets to the point of harming third-parties (consumers, small businesses, governments, the environment, etc). Striking that balance is hard, and maintaining it over time harder still, but it can be done without resorting to either extreme.