MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perks_12 | 2025-12-03 09:45:49+00:00
This whole discussion is weird. The ETSC-linked sources do not make any statements regarding vehicle size or US American car standards. It just claims that European standards 'supported' fewer deaths.

I am European, I don't think big trucks are particularly well supported by our road systems but I don't think we need to look at American car standards to get the next 10x reduction in traffic-related deaths.

IMHO it is not explainable how in 2025 there are still cars sold without LIDAR-based anti-collision systems, how are these still extra? Systems to warn of objects in the blind spot areas are available yet not mandatory.

This reads like the classic western world strawman to me. Instead of looking at how to improve things we just make sure things are not getting worse. By burning a strawman, in this case trucks from the US. Which are best described as a niche market over here, but now that we have a newly defined enemy, we do not have to confront our shitty carmakers about technological advancements.

These people do not care about human lives, they care about politics.
by kelnos | 2025-12-03 09:46:17+00:00
Yes, it's infuriating.

The extra dumb thing about it is that I don't believe the numbers in the US really even strongly support that preference. Yes, you're less likely to die in a big SUV than in a sedan if you get into a crash, but the difference isn't that large, and the risk of death in general is low enough that it's not worth worrying about.

I drive a sedan, but I'm only really worried about getting killed by one of these monster vehicles when I'm out walking, as a pedestrian, or while I'm on a bicycle.
by bojan | 2025-12-03 09:46:38+00:00
> LLMs are much easier to understand when you think of them in terms of human psychology

Are they? You can reasonably expect from a human that they will learn from their mistake, and be genuinely sorry about it which will motivate them to not repeat the same mistake in the future. You can't have the same expectation from an LLM.

The only thing you should expect from an LLM is that its output is non-deterministic. You can expect the same from a human, of course, but you can fire a human if they keep making (the same) mistake(s).
by NBJack | 2025-12-03 09:46:46+00:00
This assumes your model is static and never needs to be improved or updated.

Inference is cheap because the final model, despite its size, is ridiculously less resource intensive to use than it is to produce.

ChatGPT in its latest form isn't bad by any means, but it is falling behind. And that requires significant overhead, both to train and to iterate on model architecture. It is often a variable cost as well.
by tda | 2025-12-03 09:47:52+00:00
The reasoning is these trucks make no practical or economic sense in Europe. They are not allowed to be sold, because they are dangerous to bystanders, are polluting and oversized. Only through some loophole quite a few have been imported, which is very frustrating to all of us that are intimidated and appalled by seeing these on our roads.

These trucs signal that the driver does not care about other people, environment, climate, etc. Because they are dangerous, obnoxious and polluting. And instead of calling these things trucks, I think Kindercrusher is a perfectly apt description.
by vidarh | 2025-12-03 09:48:32+00:00
I use Claude Code for "everything", and have just committing most things into git as a fallback.

It's great to then just have it write scripts, and then write skills to use those scripts.

A lot of my report writing etc. now involve setting up a git repo, and use Claude to do things like process the call transcripts from discovery calls and turn them into initial outlines and questions that needs followup, and tasks lists, and write scripts to do necessary analysis etc., so I can focus on the higher level stuff.
by WreckVenom | 2025-12-03 09:48:55+00:00
That doesn't look like rural road in the UK (yellow lines down each side). I drive down rural roads everyday and there are usually no road markings.

Honestly getting past people isn't that much of an issue. There are normally passing spots where you pull over to let people through.

"Chelsea Tractor" is more of a dig at people Range Rovers for the looks and it never been using off-road.

There is a brand in the UK that have decided to "own" the label. Not sure why you would want/need a Ineos Grenadier in London, but some people will buy one.

https://www.chelseatruckcompany.com/
by citrin_ru | 2025-12-03 09:50:29+00:00
Public transport (especially trains) is very expensive in the UK. If you already have a car it's cheaper to use car even if you're traveling alone. For two it will be more than 2x cheaper than a train. If trains will be affordable I'm sure more people would use them. As to the size - during relatively good pre-COVID times SUV become popular but not many Brits can afford large vehicles today and on average cars in the UK are much smaller than in the US, I would not say it's a big problem.
by n8cpdx | 2025-12-03 09:50:41+00:00
Only about a third of European defense spending goes to the US. Europes struggles to ramp up production have been an ongoing story for many years now.

There is still about a trillion dollars of NATO defense spending to replace if Europe does not want to be reliant on America. Doable, but spending a third of that on American equipment wouldn’t help matters.

Perhaps if Europeans got an earlier start, instead of ignoring nearly two decades of warnings and a clearly deteriorating security situation, they wouldn’t need to care so much about US policy. Better late than never.

https://economist.com/europe/2025/12/01/europe-is-going-on-a... from The Economist
by vidarh | 2025-12-03 09:50:51+00:00
It's even better: It's a TUI if you launch it without options, but you can embed it in scripts too - the "-p" option takes a prompt, in which case it will return the answer, and you can also provide a conversation ID to continue a conversation, and give it options to return the response as JSON, or stream it.

Many of the command line agent tools support similar options.
by viking123 | 2025-12-03 09:51:03+00:00
I mean Claude is good for business use-cases, other than that it's completely censored cuck garbage and the CEO is worse than the pope. With Grok you can actually roleplay without it wagging its finger at you. OH MY GOSH YOU SAID BOOB!

Normies literally see no difference between GPT and Claude, just that Claude is much more expensive and CEO is even more of a dummie than Altman.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-03 09:51:19+00:00
+1

There is an old german saying:

Sagt der Fürst zum Kirchenmann: Halt Du sie dumm, Ich halt sie arm. (<- it rhymes.)

Meaning 'Says the ruler/sovereign to the man of the church: Keep them stupid, I keep them poor.' (by means of taxation)
by TheDong | 2025-12-03 09:51:26+00:00
> Notably [go] ended up giving up on [gerrit]

That's not accurate. They more or less only use Gerrit still. They started accepting Github PRs, but not really, see https://go.dev/doc/contribute#sending_a_change_github

> You will need a Gerrit account to respond to your reviewers, including to mark feedback as 'Done' if implemented as suggested

The comments are still gerrit, you really shouldn't use Github.

The Go reviewers are also more likely than usual to assume you're incompetent if your PR comes from Github, and the review will accordingly be slower and more likely to be rejected, and none of the go core contributors use the weird github PR flow.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-03 09:51:35+00:00
If they don't meet EU safety standards, they are, by definition, legally unsafe for sale in the EU.

Front sightlines are a common example given for larger pickups and SUVs. Pedestrian outcomes in collisions are also given more weight in the EU standards (which is why you can't buy a Cybertruck).

American semi trucks are also generally considered unsafe for that reason plus overall length - nearly all EU and UK HGVs are cabover models.

There's no rule againt US-made vehicles. It's just that many vehicle models that happen to be made and sold in the US don't meet safety requirements in other places.

You can well argue that EU vehicle standards are excessively strict (many EU residents may agree or disagree on various aspects), but coming at it from "very unfair trade, it's a huge deficit, sad!" angle seems more like simping for car manufacturers then reasonable public safety policy tuning.
by numpad0 | 2025-12-03 09:51:56+00:00
IMO: quality wise, FOSS fonts are fine(n=1) - it doesn't have to be a proprietary font but do have to be the right ones of CJK.

- In cases with the Noto project, they've given up long ago on literal singular font in both name and file to cover every languages; they have bunch of variants as different fonts(TC,SC,HK,JP,KR,...), available as both individual files as well as combined files[1].

- In cases with most Latin fonts like Deja Vu - I think this is where bulk of "wrong font" problem comes from. They don't support CJK at all, and operating systems often handle fallback to system defaults for missing characters, but sometimes OS falls back into wrong CJK fonts and cause text mIshmashlnG[2] problems or show bunch of square placeholders(aka tofu). The latter is usually solved by installing Noto fonts, and former by specifying what fonts are to be used for fallbacks(anyhow it's done, it can be OS or game engine dependent).

- There are also bunch of domestically made fonts such as IPA Gothic; they usually only support the targeted one of CJK + ASCII(+ISO-8859-1). Most Japanese-English _bi_ lingual contents take this route, which had lead to curiosity by some as to why Japanese content creators appear to have unique and specific taste for fonts[3] - in fact they're just reusing the font files already in the project folder.

- For creative purposes such as games, FOSS fonts sometimes don't cut it, but that is not unique to the Japanese language.

1: https://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/s/satob/20231... | https://archive.is/6qeVm

2: https://blog.enjo.life/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/fonts-and-... | https://archive.is/jSQzn

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dwSydGAJsk
by pjmlp | 2025-12-03 09:53:11+00:00
In the meantime, I am still looking for better runtime support regarding Go and Rust, which seems frozen in time, perpetual beta (Go) and community (Rust), surprising given how much Go and Rust Vercel is supposed to use, and mentioned in blog posts regarding infrastructure improvements,

https://vercel.com/docs/functions/runtimes

All the best to Python folks I guess.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-03 09:53:11+00:00
If pre-training is just training, then how on earth can OpenAI not have "a successful pre-training run"? The word successful indicates that they tried, but failed.

It might be me misunderstanding how this works, but I assumed that the training phase was fairly reproducible. You might get different results on each run, do to changes in the input, but not massively so. If OpenAI can't continuously and reliably train new models, then they are even more overvalued that I previously assumed.
by vineyardmike | 2025-12-03 09:53:20+00:00
There are many easier ways to effect this social change, if you’re willing to do basic legislation around the vehicle itself.

The easiest way to decrease unnecessary oversized vehicles, frankly, is to require them be painted pink and flowery. Many men in America pick big vehicles as they're perceived as masculine, and a basic paint job to attack this psychological would probably work.

Less jokingly, add mechanical speed limits to them. Big heavy vehicles are extremely dangerous, but that danger is closely related to speed.

Other options include adding excessive cameras and radar equipment, so the front of the vehicle isn’t a blind spot. Cars have plenty of cameras and mirrors already, so it’s not novel to drivers. It’s a missed opportunity already since this could really be implemented by major manufacturers within a year.
by atomicfiredoll | 2025-12-03 09:53:27+00:00
The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.

But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.

Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.

That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica
by lanyard-textile | 2025-12-03 09:54:03+00:00
:) As much I love ragging on ridiculous HN comments, I think this one is rooted in some sensibility.

IBM doesn’t majorly market themselves to consumers. The overwhelming majority of devs just aren’t part of the demographic IBM intends to capture.

It’s no surprise people don’t know what they do. To be honest it does surprise me they’re such a strongly successful company, as little as I’ve knowingly encountered them over my career.
by arghwhat | 2025-12-03 09:54:32+00:00
I do empathize with those picking the vehicle not on practicality but cool factor - considering how common and accepted gadget cravings are in other areas, I would find it unfair to attack that aspect. I'm currently using ~5GB out of my laptops 64GB of RAM, pretty sure I could start a small fire with my flashlight, and my motorcycle has off-road suspension in a country where the most demanding obstacle is a curb. Other things would objectively fit my needs better while costing less, but be less fun - and fun can be hard to find these days.

As you say, they are absolutely terrible for work use as well - Japanese kei trucks famously have larger beds than some common US pickup trucks, and the size of the custom beds we use in the EU makes the US ones look like absolute kids toys - but that too I wouldn't mind too much if they were just forced to be safe and with decent emissions so the idiocy mainly affected the driver and their wallets.

I'm not too impressed with your vehicle only getting twice the gas mileage though. I'd expect more than that. :P
by g-b-r | 2025-12-03 09:54:46+00:00
The 1994 paper (freely available at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1341727/m2/...) is actually about proper E2EE.

I addressed the other two at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132220 .

You did show that the term was already used, but in the current meaning
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-03 09:54:52+00:00
Have you considered that you might be out of touch from your bubble of NL remote SW dev for US corpos?

Like your idea sounds good in principle, especially if you're from a country with no automotive jobs, but then what do you do then with tens of thousands of unemployed people of the auto sector being displaced by the Chinese? Will you agree to pay more income taxes to fund the increased unemployment deficits of the others? How do you think those people will vote? What about maintaining some national sovereignty? Shall we just become a vassal state to China on automotive as well?

You can't throw such oversimplified solutions to such complex issues that have very deep ramifications.

If you haven't noticed, the EU economy and jobs market in general is already bad as it is, it won't be able to absorb tens of thousands of unemployed career switchers into to other domains that aren't hiring right now anyway, or if they are hiring, they're very picky due to the increased supply of talent with domain experience.

Currently, the defense sector is absorbing some of the slack of automotive layoffs on the production/manufacturing side in some countries like Germany, but that won't last forever. If peace happens in Ukraine, that will dry out as well as the glut of orders will be scaled back.
by trinix912 | 2025-12-03 09:55:16+00:00
> Just a handful of countries are spending 5% of their GDP on defense

Have you even read the comment in full before responding? I'm talking about this part of it:

> Percentage of GDP to military spending has been criticized as a bad way to measure how much military spending is done and needed

But since you wouldn't get it anyways:

The "5% of GDP" is a number that US politicians came up with, seemingly out of nowhere, because they figured they want to boost their military industry.

EU countries are already spending that or even more - just look at Ukraine spending by EU countries - but since it's spent on their own domestic defense industry, US politicians don't like it. That's the point.

They don't want us spending 5% of the GDP on defense unless we buy their stuff. So here we are.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-03 09:55:40+00:00
I have - or rather had, died - an uncle who had a very effective way of dealing with this. He just walked over the cars.

RIP Cor H., one of a kind. I'm pretty sure the fact that in that neighborhood even now people are religiously parking on the street and never on the sidewalk is a remnant of his presence in this world.
by kelnos | 2025-12-03 09:55:59+00:00
> The point is IBM is not the go-to to listen about AI.

Why not, though? For better or worse, they're a consulting services company these days, and they work with an eye-wateringly large number of companies. I would expect them to have a very good view as to what companies use AI for, and plan/want to use AI for in the future. They may not be experts in the tech itself, but I think they're decently well-positioned to read the tea leaves.
by zmgsabst | 2025-12-03 09:56:03+00:00
We know what the rate of deaths are: 1 in 8000; roughly 40,000 over 320,000,000.

Slightly less than the rate of suicide; and slightly more than half the number of fentanyl deaths. And a smaller fraction of medical mistake deaths. (Of course, none of the risk is evenly distributed.)

As a systemic problem, I’m not convinced that cars are the worst. Or outside what we accept in several areas.
by nonamesleft | 2025-12-03 09:56:18+00:00
G-klasse W465 is shorter than the equivalent medium sized sedan (E-klasse W214, and even shorter than my W212), and the hood is nowhere near as high as those overseas pickup trucks.

The monstrously large (5.8 meters) G63 6x6 is considerably rarer (i have never seen one in person).
by oersted | 2025-12-03 09:56:32+00:00
Relying on the model’s own “memory” to answer factual queries is almost always a mistake. Fine-tuning is almost always a more complex, more expensive and less effective method to give a model access to a knowledge base.

However using the model as a multi-hop search robot, leveraging it’s general background knowledge to guide the research flow and interpret findings, works exceedingly well.

Training with RL to optimize research tool use and reasoning is the way forward, at least until we have proper Stateful LLMs that can effectively manage an internal memory (as in Neural Turing Machines, and such).
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-03 09:56:52+00:00
Garden of Eden[0] is a related concept where time-reversal comes up. Mentions NFAs, DFAs, backtracking and brute-force analysis. I see no mention of it but the latter was probably doing custom SAT implicitly, even if there was no access to our nice fast modern solvers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden_(cellular_autom...
by epolanski | 2025-12-03 09:57:17+00:00
It doesn't matter how much is this repeated by politicians: it's a lie to suggest that the EU does not spend enough for defense.

We spend multitudes of times more than our only realistic threat. And that threat can't even wage war with Ukraine, you expect Russia to be able to fight Poland, yet alone the rest of the European countries?

Also, just a reminder: US servicemen have not been sent to fight a war for European souls since almost a century. Whereas European soldiers are actively deployed even now in the middle East for wars that Washington started.

Please start looking more at facts and less about propaganda. Of course Europe should step up in being more independent defense-wise, but you'd be a fool if you think the US does not enjoy and leverage the current status provides.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-03 09:57:36+00:00
But ... I don't understand why this is supposedly such a big deal. Look into it, calculate, and a very different picture comes forward, nVidia reportedly makes about 70% margin on their sales (which is COGS, in other words nVidia still pays about $1400 for chips and memory to produce a $4500 RTX5090 card, and that cost is rising fast).

When you include research for current and future cards, that margin drops to 55-60%.

When you include everything on their cash flow statement it drops to about 50%.

And this is disregarding what Michael Burry pointed out: you really should subtract their stock dilution which is due to stock-based compensation, or about 0.2% of 4.6 trillion dollars per year. Michael Burry's point is of course that this makes for slightly negative shareholders' equity, ie. brings the margin to just under 0, which is mathematically true. But for this argument let's very generously say it eats about another 10% out of that margin. As opposed to the 50% it mathematically eats.

Google and Amazon will have to be less efficient than nVidia, because they're making up ground. Let's very generously say that's another 10%, maybe 20%.

So really, for Google making their own chips saves them at best 30% to 40% on the price, generously. And let's again ignore that Google's claim is that they're 30% to 50% less efficient than nVidia chips, which for large training runs translates directly to dollars.

So for Google, TPUs are just about revenue neutral. It probably allows them to have more chips, more compute than they'd otherwise have, but it doesn't save them money over buying nVidia chips. Frankly, this conclusion sounds "very Google" to me.

It's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect Google to do. VERY impressive technical accomplishment ... but can be criticized for being beside the point. It doesn't actually matter. As an engineer I applaud that they do it, please keep doing it, but it's not building a moat, not building revenue or profit, so the finance guy in me is screaming "WHY????????"

At best, for Google, TPUs mean certainty of supply, relative to nVidia (whereas supplier contracts could build certainty of supply down the chain)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-12-03 09:57:36+00:00
Nobody except Mark Zuckerberg matters for Meta. He has majority control of the board voting rights.

It seems much more likely that this is driven by the fact that Facebook culture has always been very much around in-person 1:1 contacts between people. This frustrated me a lot when I was there, but it did seem to work for a relatively long time.
by tigerlily | 2025-12-03 09:57:41+00:00
That is a lot of Dodge Rams. It's a ponderous trend, it'd be interesting to see what is the driver. Is it a particular demographic, or subculture?

My mom who is originally from Bergschenhoek claims her elder brother taught her to drive, in a Dodge truck, probably post WW2 in a model like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_T-,_V-,_W-Series

I don't know whether there are hordes of bejaarden buying Dodges for nostalgic reasons, but that would mean the Dodge brand has some insane staying power. My guess would be that is absurd and unlikely.

I really dig your deadpan sprinkling of Nederlands. Some words have that etymological acuity that makes them irresistible to just deploy. I was always amazed by how many Yiddish and French words there are in Hollands.