MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matrss | 2025-12-29 18:11:24+00:00
> The government owns DB AG, it is not a private company. It is a public company.

It is a private company, as in it is a legal entity under private law. This is in contrast to a "öffentlich-rechtliches Unternehmen" (I don't know if this even has a proper translation or equivalent in other jurisdictions). There is more than two options here, it can be privatized and public according to your definition.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-29 18:11:33+00:00
For years, we’ve been told that the 4680 cell was the “holy grail” that would allow Tesla to produce a $25,000 electric car.

For years, we've been told a lot of things that have never come to fruition.

Just 6 months ago, we were told that Robotaxi would be available to half the US population by the end of the year.

https://electrek.co/2025/07/23/elon-musk-with-straight-face-...
by toast0 | 2025-12-29 18:12:24+00:00
> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.

All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.

Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.
by mrkeen | 2025-12-29 18:12:26+00:00
You pay the carpenter for his time and materials. The same thing could be true of software development.

But instead you buy a table from Apple and it's only compatible with chairs from Apple. So you can't pay your local carpenter for repairs or better chairs.

Anyway, the big companies have long since realised it's more lucrative to stop selling the furniture and rent it out instead.

What do you build?
by Neil44 | 2025-12-29 18:12:46+00:00
Reuters earlier this year - "The development of the 4680 battery has been facing troubles, with the company losing 70% to 80% of the cathodes in test production compared with conventional battery makers, which lose fewer than 2% of their components to manufacturing defects, the report said."

The company L&F referenced in this article were supplying said cathode material.

ref https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-plans-four-new-batt...
by Gormo | 2025-12-29 18:12:57+00:00
There are tons of Linux games distributed on GOG, and not having to use a proprietary client is one of its great advantages. Not to downplay Valve's contributions (and I may well get a Steam Frame when they come out), but they mostly amount to porting their mandatory DRM-laden client to Linux, and maintaining a fork of Wine that integrates with that client.

Ownership, control, and privacy are among the main reasons I use Linux, and are likewise huge advantages that GOG has over Steam.
Ask HN: How do you backup your Google account?
by leros | 2025-12-29 18:13:51+00:00
My entire life is in Google: GMail, Google Drive, and Photos. I'm happy with it except for the fact that I'm terrified of getting locked out and losing everything.

Is there any simple solution for an always running backup that could backup to a local NAS or reLly anywhere? The simpler the better. Ideally, I want an appliance not a bunch of scripts hacked together.
by patrickdavey | 2025-12-29 18:14:16+00:00
Interesting thought. I feel currently AI is most useful to those who have a decent understanding of the subject material and can critique any output. To wholesale trust the output of AI and remove any human in the loop, well, it needs to be really correct all the time.

Exams are a different beast and really a subset of a range of common problems.

Still, I'm very curious what happens when people who have just cheated their way through college, or these kinds of professional exams, meet the real world? Will they all get fired a few months down the track?
by jonp888 | 2025-12-29 18:14:16+00:00
The determinant is the amount of money invested in infrastructure.

No matter whether the train operators and the network operator are private or a state monopoly, all decisions about major upgrades and new lines are made and funded by the government. The network operator just deals with the maintenance.

Nationalisation(or sometimes privatisation!) is seemingly seen by many as panacea, but it won't help you if your network runs at 150% capacity every day.
by pseudobry | 2025-12-29 18:14:17+00:00
I also switched to controld after a period of unreliability from from NextDNS. NextDNS is a little easier and a little faster, and perhaps better for auditing a network, but controld overall has more features. Differentiators: more granular control in blocking related functionality, can replace your VPN for certain use cases, control over traffic flow and proxying, etc
by troupo | 2025-12-29 18:14:45+00:00
> As far as I can tell, the whole web components umbrella came into being because React/Vue got really popular, and the spec/browser people said hey let's bring the core common denominator

First web components proposal is from 2011. First specs are from 2011-2013.

React was introduced in 2013 and didn't gain much traction until at least a year later.

Vuejs was publicly announced in 2014.
by iwasrobbed | 2025-12-29 18:14:50+00:00
I built Shippy because there will soon be more AI agents on the internet than humans

So I want a future where anyone (human or machine) can contribute to anything, anywhere, and share in the upside. Not just one-off payments. Not worthless equity.

Help people profit, and they'll pay you a piece. The more you help, the more you earn. Easy peasy.

Let me know what you think
by Yizahi | 2025-12-29 18:14:51+00:00
The culture of selfishness, cheating and corruption IS a major factor in making a city unlivable. I've lived for a long time in a city somewhere in between on such scale, here are my observations:

Trash and graffiti are directly proportional to the levels of selfishness of the population. At the extreme point there are those horror videos of rivers covered in trash and trash mountains near residential buildings.

Grassroots organization of building inhabitants into an org which collect fees and is responsible for the building maintenance and cleaning is impossible below certain level of egoism of the citizens.

Disregard for the neighbors leads to the same disregard by the officials and thus abandonment of investing of the public transit. It then degrades or stays at trash tier and everyone tarts buying cars. Those cars are then parked everywhere, completely destroying all lawns near housing and near offices. Sidewalks are blocked by parked cars too.

In some cities egoistic citizens are burning trash for heating (it's cheap) and pollute air for millions living in the city.

Officials work expecting bribes and nothing is done without greasing someone's pocket.

And the list goes on and on. At a certain point just visiting a city populated by the more empathetic people, or at least governed by such, becomes a revelation. Especially if such city is poorer by the numbers, so makes do with less.
by thebruce87m | 2025-12-29 18:15:05+00:00
> In a regulatory filing today, L&F revealed that the contract’s value has been written down to just $7,386.

> No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.

Ooft. That’s one hell of a write down. Imagine the person that had to do the calculation and report it back.
by neuroelectron | 2025-12-29 18:15:11+00:00
I actually did want a lighter, 2 Wheel Drive Cybertruck (for $40,000). The "Long Range" trim was close. But it was actually $70k not the $60k they were saying.

Get rid of the touchscreen and the four-wheel-drive steering and the electrical flush door handles, the hatch thing in the back, smaller wheels, any other electronic features like 120v inverters, etc. solid rear axel would be nice but that would be a major redesign.
by yunnpp | 2025-12-29 18:15:31+00:00
I think the only value it adds is cloud saves. The UI is otherwise the worst way to explore your library or the store, crawls to death performance-wise and isn't even a good UX in principle.

For example, if you're on page X of a search, click on a game, and go back, guess where that takes you? Yup, page 0 baby, going to have to click next X times again (there is also only previous and next; you can't fast-jump.) There are many more examples like that, I have filed survey responses several times on issues like this.

The real goat would be if GOG Galaxy were available for Linux and integrated with Lutris/Proton so that you didn't have to worry about setup. Currently that relationship flows in the other direction, which I always found odd: Lutris integrates GOG (and Steam) games in its UI.
by jedisct1 | 2025-12-29 18:15:37+00:00
Because the authors found out about it by chance on Hacker News.

That said, these issues are not a big deal.

The first one concerns someone manually reading a signature with cat (which is completely untrusted at that stage, since nothing has been verified), then using the actual tool meant to parse it, and ignoring that tool’s output. cat is a different tool from minisign.

If you manually cat a file, it can contain arbitrary characters, not just in the specific location this report focuses on, but anywhere in the file.

The second issue is about trusting an untrusted signer who could include control characters in a comment.

In that case, a malicious signer could just make the signed file itself malicious as well, so you shouldn’t trust them in the first place.

Still, it’s worth fixing. In the Zig implementation of minisign, these characters are escaped when printed. In the C implementation, invalid strings are now rejected at load time.
by weatherlite | 2025-12-29 18:15:42+00:00
> It still needs to do learning (RL or otherwise) in order to do new tasks.

Why ? As in - why isn't reading the Brainfuck documentation enough for Gemini to learn Brainfuck ? I'd allow for 3-7 days of a learning curve like perhaps a human would need but why do you need to kinda redo the whole model (or big parts of it) just so it could learn Brainfuck or some other tool? Either the learning (RL or otherwise) need to become way more efficient than it is today (takes today weeks? months? billions of dollars) or it isn't AGI I would say. Not in practical/economic sense and I believe not in the philosophical sense of how we all envisioned true generality.
by on_the_train | 2025-12-29 18:15:43+00:00
> internal departments which acts as separate entities to mimic competition and each department has to place bids among each other to get contracts (more bureaucracy) but then they have an IT

Same here, with a big German semiconductor player you all know. The IT department has to battle the non-it departments and external contractors for internal software dev jobs. It's a made up game, costing 70% of our work time (just the beurocracy).
by ajross | 2025-12-29 18:16:32+00:00
> what would it look like to directly sell EV batteries to consumers? what would have to happen?

It looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/JESSY-3-7-Volt-Rechargeable-Battery/d...

These cells aren't special, they're all off the shelf designs. The 4680 got some marketing spin, but really it was just a bigger form factor with a tweaked chemistry that apparently just didn't work out. And of course that means you can meta-spin the failure as "supply chain collapse", etc...

Obviously, no, you can't just buy a bunch of 21700 cells and stuff them in the car yourself, the balancing and calibration needs to happen in an integrated way and that repair (digging into a 400V DC battery!) is just way too dangerous for amateurs. But the batteries themselves are mature technology and kinda boring.
by lawn | 2025-12-29 18:17:03+00:00
I think 3 thumb keys are too much as the thumb is slow and awkward to move. You can easily get by with 2 and you can get by with just one for normal usage.

See my own keyboard layouts for inspiration:

https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2024/11/26/the_current_cybe...

https://www.jonashietala.se/series/t-34/
by brabel | 2025-12-29 18:17:12+00:00
> had difficulty being adopted more broadly

Most applications don’t need to bother the user with things like how much memory they think will be needed upfront. They just allocate how much and when necessary. Most applications today are probably servers that change all the time. You would not know upfront how much memory you’d need as that would keep changing on every release! Static allocation may work in a few domains but it certainly doesn’t work in most.
by boothby | 2025-12-29 18:17:21+00:00
I'd argue that the populace is "ready" to be governed by the arbitrary whims of those in power, be it masked federal agents taking people off streets to social media peddling influence to the highest bidder to corporate structures determining financial and health outcomes, all the way up to the executives and board members behind all of these decisions. So if those arbitrary whims outsource decision-making power to some gpu farms, who's to say we aren't ready?
by daedrdev | 2025-12-29 18:17:42+00:00
Im pretty sure I read in the past GoG still sells you a license to a game in perpetuity, rather than ownership Of corse, practically there is little difference since they provide offline installers, so its much better to use GoG if you care about this.

The reason they also do this is because of copyright, the license allows games to forbid you from redistribution more copies

If Im wrong about this please let me know, I read some articles claiming this is the case but I am not sure if they truly were correct.
by majormajor | 2025-12-29 18:17:43+00:00
"This is hard to make" hasn't been the distinguishing factor for popular/expensive/trendy art for a long time.

There is a literal cliche "my six year old could've done this" about how some of the techniques do not require the years of training they used to.

And a literal cliche response about how the eye and execution is the current determining factor: "but they didn't."
by epolanski | 2025-12-29 18:18:35+00:00
Unlikely to pass anti trust, they failed already acquiring ARM back in time.

Edit: I see a lot of confusion on the topic. The anti trust does not need to be from US to be essentially binding, UK, EU, etc have also a de facto veto on mergers of global companies, even if those are US based, this is especially true in global sectors like semiconductors where everybody depends on everybody else from patents to machinery.
by lucb1e | 2025-12-29 18:19:34+00:00
> The argument is that travellers don't care why the train cannot move or why it is delayed

Deutsche Bahn does not think this is true and neither do I. If this was ever the thinking, they've performed or read studies and changed their mind

You can very clearly hear the drilled setup "<delay info> grund dafür ist <error category>" rigidly being regurgitated every. single. time. a delay is announced. The middle words are (per my understanding) a formal way to say "because of" and it's not something you will hear in daily life, so I presume it's the output of a committee and corporate requires them to say this, no matter if they know anything more than "the signal is red". Whether they know or not, the detail is always at a level that sounds like malicious compliance. I'd rather they say "we don't know" or say nothing at all. And if they do know, you'd hope they make up a new sentence like "someone was spotted on the crossing up ahead after the barriers closed. Someone is checking the cameras to make sure it won't come to a collision" instead of the robotic "we have come to a stop on the grounds of person on track". It mimics their training samples but is not actually helpful

Idk what creates this useless information culture, but they clearly know that passengers do want this information
by joha4270 | 2025-12-29 18:19:39+00:00
At least in my case, I got curious about the strength of /u/dustbunny's denouncement of Godot+C#.

I would have have put it as a matter of preference/right tool with GDScripts tighter engine integration contrasted with C#'s stronger tooling and available ecosystem.

But with how it was phrased, it didn't sound like expressing a preference for GDScript+C++ over C# or C#++, it sounded like C# had some fatal flaw. And that of course makes me curious. Was it a slightly awkward phrasing, or does C# Godot have some serious footgun I'm unaware of?
by graemep | 2025-12-29 18:19:47+00:00
Some exams in the UK (GCSEs) moved away from coursework because of the problem of cheating. If it happens with GCSEs, why would it not happen with high stakes professional exams?

There are some IGCSEs that you can take remotely (with a camera on you and a hefty extra fee) and I am wondering what problems those will run into. Pearson are offering them.
by andsoitis | 2025-12-29 18:19:51+00:00
> I really don't understand those investors and how they price a struggling company so highly.

Struggling, not so much: '24/'25 revenue of just under $100B, with Q3'25 record profitability and deliveries yielding $1.5B net income. Strong liquidity and a current ratio of about 2, boosting short-term financial stability. Solid cash reserves and relatively low debt ratio.

High stock price: far exceeds that of traditional auto makers even though Tesla's revenue is significantly lower. High valuation reflects investor expectations of growth and future tech upside. Exuberant? Probably. OTOH, Tesla has delivered better ROI for investors than the other automakers.
by britzsquad | 2025-12-29 18:20:07+00:00
For my job, I travel all over Germany very often. I take the car, train, bus, or sometimes even the plane. The train is the most comfortable means of transportation in Germany. Of course, there are delays, and sometimes mistakes happen that result in very long delays. But where doesn't that happen? I find traveling by car to be the worst. How many times this year have I been stuck in traffic jams for several hours without being able to go forward or backward? No one pays me compensation for being late. With the train, I even get some of my money back if we are late. I find this blog post ridiculous. The rail system in Germany is extremely complex and tightly scheduled. We have regional, long-distance, and freight traffic on the same tracks. Of course, the train can't just stop anywhere when there's a problem. Grow up. For those who are interested: I traveled from Berlin to Konstanz for the Christmas holidays, and both trips were on time. I paid €70 per trip and didn't have to worry about traffic, icy roads, or snow. I worked on my laptop for 6 hours on both trips. It couldn't have been more relaxed.
by ben_w | 2025-12-29 18:20:33+00:00
> What was the sole purpose of introducing this again? Preventing that. This doesn't help.

False.

Aside from the way the announced new payment system works with cards and doesn't actually need, merely also supports, apps…

Consider the MVP of a house: walls, door, roof.

Walls without a roof, without a door but simply a hole where a door might go, will let animals (or thieves) wander in, and be cold at night and not keep the sun off you in the day.

A door without walls or a roof is, what, an art installation?

A roof, supported by pillars without any walls or door, will keep you dry and will keep the sun off, but not keep the wind out, nor animals, nor thieves.

What the EU has done here is like any one of those three: necessary, not sufficient.

(Probably most like the roof given cards work without apps, but this was just the first analogy that came to mind, roll with it).

If the institutions of the EU ordered the creation of handsets (it doesn't have the power to do so, it's much closer to being a glorified free trade agreement with a light sprinkle of democratic self-updating to the rules of that FTA, than to being a federal government), but forgot to make a payment system, this would also still fail.

Collectively we also have to make office software and email systems, as demonstrated by the result of USA sanctions against ICC judges.

> And EU countries have already demonstrated ... they had a near-monopoly on everything really. On chips, interconnects, cell phones, cars, optics, planes, satellite internet, ... but they traded it for a bit of money.

Oh god no. We never had anything like a monopoly on most of those things, and still have one on some others.

We had — still have — decent players in aerospace; for space specifically it's more that SpaceX has outcompeted everyone worldwide including other USA companies than like the EU being behind. The EU's planes are still going fine, but Europe was never a monopoly there in the first place. Pre-Starlink satellite internet was always a joke (or emergency fallback), but the players were never monopolists. ASML and Zeiss are still even now major supply-chain players, but that's the closest the EU has ever been to a monopoly on this stuff (Zeiss more than ASML).

You could say we had and lost leads in interconnects though. Perhaps, though it's borderline, early mobile phones.

> In the short term it's slightly cheaper to have Google and Apple do this, and the ECB will have to live with the fact that if Trump decides all EU payments stop ... they stop.

Or this is one of several independent steps, it only works when all are ready, and they are willing to spend the money.

> Funny how the US has never done that unilaterally, always through the UN,

https://apnews.com/article/international-court-sanctions-tru...

> But I must ask: given that this doesn't make 1 mm progress towards their stated goal ... qui bono?

Consider that you may be wrong.
by rectang | 2025-12-29 18:21:26+00:00
Zeroing memory should absolutely be the default behavior for any generic allocator in 2025.

If you need better performance, write your own allocator optimized for your specific use case — it's not that hard.

Besides, you if you don't need to clear old allocations, there are likely other optimizations you'll be able to find which would never fly in a system allocator.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-29 18:21:38+00:00
$7,386 seems to be roughly one Cybertruck batteries worth (the only vehicle that uses that battery).

As in they literally expect to build one more Cybertruck battery and that's it. I'm guessing the excess stock in the Tesla factories covers spares for a few years already.

I wonder when the cancellation will be announced by Tesla? It's all but leaked at this point.
by georgeecollins | 2025-12-29 18:21:39+00:00
OK, but the model that Valve pioneered is the model that supports 90% of all commercial PC games made today, a higher percentage if you cut out MMOs and free to play games, which you certainly don't own.

I love GoG and I have worked closely with a lot of people there on projects they are great. This announcement seems like good news.

No one has to sell games on Steam. No one has to use a model where they "rent licenses". They could sell you everything DRM free. They don't because too many people pirate games to make that a viable business.
by comfysocks | 2025-12-29 18:21:42+00:00
No, I’m intentionally speaking of the leadership. Yes there are dissidents in China (and Russia and NK…) but the governments have been able to make their work seem futile.

There are also some Chinese who are happy to live in a police state. There are also some US citizens who would like more of a police state, provided the police are on their side of the culture wars.

The fantasy is that capitalism automatically breeds liberal democracy. Sometimes it does, but don’t forget it can work the other way too. It was the excesses of capitalism in the gilded age that led to the rise socialist revolutions in the first place. Sometimes might say today’s billionaire capitalists are becoming like the robber barrons of the gilded age.