MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by awongh | 2025-12-10 16:43:10+00:00
> The love for diesel engines in many European countries was always confusing to me.

And turns out the whole thing was a lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

It's unfortunate that so much rhetoric around environmentalism is based on faulty claims. It's starting to make me sceptical of environmental claims in general.

The latest one is AI data center water use- the extreme numbers like 5 liters of water per ChatGPT image just makes me feel sad that we can't have a civil discussion based on the facts. Everything is so polarized.
by water-data-dude | 2025-12-10 16:43:15+00:00
I don't assume that another country would LOVE to have me, I'd assume that I'd have to be an exemplary citizen to make it clear that I'm not another "ugly American".

The reason why I personally have been rolling the idea of leaving the country around in my head is because I'm gay and Hispanic (though born here), and I am NERVOUS about the direction this country is going. I do feel guilty about the idea of jumping ship, but it seems like it might be legitimately dangerous for people like me in the near future.

I probably won't leave, all my family and friends are here and it hurts to think about uprooting myself and leaving them, but it's NOT unreasonable. It's scary to be in an outgroup right now.
by whizzter | 2025-12-10 16:43:29+00:00
It's machine-learning generated "slop" honestly.

Looking at where I live and where I grew up the building heights are quite badly estimated.

- Some groups of houses around here that are more or less identically built but on sloped terrain are reported to have widly differing heights

- My neighbour building is reported to be half the height of this building (they're more or less equally high at 5 stories)

- A small office shack behind the neighbour building is reported to be taller than it (it's a single-story building, the neighbour building is 5 stories)

- The freestanding buildings on the farm where I grew up are like you said, badly combined, much of the estimation there seems to be dependent on shadows,etc.
by sokoloff | 2025-12-10 16:43:39+00:00
It depends on what you substitute it with.

If you substitute with “don’t travel far [or at all]”, it’s a big savings. If you substitute flying 1000 miles on an airliner with “drive 1000 miles instead”, or flying US to Europe with a cruise ship trip to Europe, you’ve probably made it worse; in that regards, it’s less the mode of travel and more the total distance in these trades.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-10 16:43:43+00:00
You honestly believe that a combined Germany-Poland-Baltic army, maybe with Italy's help and absolutely no USA involvement and manufacturing is today a viable threat to ruzzians? And that such an army is somehow more capable than today Ukrainian army in an all-out land battle with combined forces, permanently fighting for a decade now?

Of course such coalition has a big number of ultra expensive and effective weapons like planes, ships and tanks. That number of weapons will last for 3 months or so. Then what? Ruzzia is not a Taliban or Hamas, you can't just bomb them with impunity. Even half a century old soviet SAMs are valid threat to anything in the air, let alone newer ones. Plus Ruzzia is not alone, they have whole Axis manufacturing power potentially behind them - Iran, China, NK etc.

I would be very concerned about Ruzzia, if I were you. Just a thought experiment, what would Germany do when Ruzzian force will appear on the Poland-Lithuanian border, annexing all Baltic states?
by StratusBen | 2025-12-10 16:43:47+00:00
[Not a sales pitch - just answering the questions]

This AWS EC2 site is just an open-source project and site we maintain for the benefit of the community. So it's not directly our business but it promotes our brand and is just a helpful site that I think should exist. It's very popular and has been around for about 15 years now.

Our main business hosted on the main domain of https://www.vantage.sh/ is around cloud cost management across 25 different providers (AWS, Azure, Datadog, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) and the use-cases there about carving up one bill and showing specific costs back to engineers for them to be held accountable to, take action on, etc. Cloud costs and their impact on companies' margins is a big enough problem for vendors like us to exist and we're one player in a larger market.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-10 16:43:58+00:00
I believe the popularity of diesel car in Europe is actually a tax-related hack.

The idea is that diesel is the "work" fuel, for shipping, construction, etc... While gasoline is the "consumer" fuel, for personal use, motorsports, etc... Make the former expensive and it will affect the entire economy, everything will become more expensive and less competitive. Making gasoline more expensive will not have the same impact.

So, put high taxes on gasoline. The result was an increase in popularity of diesel cars, that cost less to run because of taxes.

Now, the situation is changing. Diesel, at least the one that is legal to use on the road is taxed at a level closer to gasoline. Diesel cars are also becoming less and less welcome with regards to low emission zones and green taxes, so many people are going back to gasoline.
by sigmar | 2025-12-10 16:44:10+00:00
>If they cared about emissions they could try regulating idling, which worse emissions profiles

They do, in fact, regulate idling my dude- https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02222

> In New York City, vehicle idling is illegal if it lasts more than 3 minutes or more than 1 minute when adjacent to a school.
by indymike | 2025-12-10 16:44:11+00:00
If your presentation requires a custom software installation, give the audience the instructions as a hand out/script so you can focus on the important part.

I once did a breakout about a Geo support in Django, but the presenter spent the entire time helping people install PostgreSQL with geo support for an entire morning. We never ran a single line of Django code when the presentation was over.
by 9rx | 2025-12-10 16:44:17+00:00
Isn't that ultimately a loss of motivation? With enough buy in there would be a lot of reason to keep iterating towards the desired outcome despite any setbacks. That is the nature of experiments, after all. Things going horribly wrong while you are in the iteration process is an expected part of experimentation.

Imagine a world where the Rust experiment hand't been going well. There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from keeping at it to prove why Rust should be there. The experiment can always live as long as someone wants to keep working on it. Experiments fundamentally can only end when successful, or when everyone gives up (leaving nobody to make the announcement).

That said, consider me interested to read the announcements HN has about those abandoned experiments. Where should I look to find them?
by lonelyasacloud | 2025-12-10 16:44:20+00:00
Afraid the intuition is somewhat incorrect.

Similar to with tire wear what's important to emissions is the amount of force that has to be applied to decelerate and how often it occurs. At highway speeds it's far less of an issue, but in slow speed urban environments with lots of stop start driving and high vehicle densities it's a real problem.

See for instance https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat09/1...
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-10 16:44:28+00:00
It's not a democracy to the extent that it has systematically unequal representation. That's not a problem of “intermediary representation”, its a problem of both the system of executive election (more of a problem for the US than it would be in many other systems because the US also has an extremely powerful executive branch) and the system of apportionment of the more powerful house of bicameral legislature (having a less-democratic upper house is not uncommon, but having it still be functionally more powerful is, and having that simultaneously with it being as far from democratic as the US Senate is even less common among things that pretens to be representative democracies.)
by graeme | 2025-12-10 16:44:51+00:00
"Not statistically significant" doesn't mean did not happen.

Given the physical mechanisms involved it is implausible that pollution did not decline. And if you look at their data you see a marked drop in 2020 at day 70

This is March 10 or thereabouts, I think. And there are ZERO high pm 2.5 days for a 20 day stretch or so. This isn't seen in other years. The vast bulk of days are below the trend.

And then for the rest of the year there are some days above the trend line but no high pm 2.5 days.

This fits with people being extra cautious in the early days and then relaxing a bit as things went on.

Now, I'm eyeballing this so I could be incorrect. But:

1. The effect was found in other cities

2. The physical mechanism makes it highly expected that there would be a drop

The study was about the slope of the regression modal, but if you had scrambled the years I'm fairly confident I could have picked 2020 out of the set.
by imiric | 2025-12-10 16:44:59+00:00
The nice thing is that once things are setup in Emacs, they usually work without much maintenance or surprises for years to come. How many times have mainstream email clients changed UIs and featuresets in the last 10 years? How many of them do you expect to still exist 10 years from now?

Another benefit is that using standard mailbox formats and separate tools allows you to configure, replace, and integrate any part of the setup. With traditional clients you're locked into whatever they support and allow you to configure.
by WilcoKruijer | 2025-12-10 16:45:07+00:00
I'm working on a meta framework for building "full-stack" libraries. I.e. libraries that bundle frontend hooks, backend routes, and a database schema into a single package.

This allows library authors to do more, like defining webhook handlers and (simple) database operations. The idea is to move complexity from the user to the author, making integrations easier.

I think libraries being allowed to write to your database is a pretty powerful concept, and can enable a number of interesting use cases.

https://github.com/rejot-dev/fragno
by pessimizer | 2025-12-10 16:45:34+00:00
This is nonsense, and I have no idea why you need to believe it.

Open Source can be used as Free Software because Open Source can be used as proprietary software or anything else, as long as you include the license or mention the author somewhere or whatever. But these are both standards for actual licenses, and the actual licenses are different. Copyleft software can not be included in your proprietary software.

Copyleft software is restrictive. You are required to allow people to access it, and required to redistribute it in source form if you are redistributing it in compiled form (or over the network for modern copyleft licenses.) You are also required to include all of the changes that you have made to the things that you have compiled within that source distribution, and to also distribute other code that is required to to make your software package work under the same licensing.

The confusion is only in people spreading misinformation trying to confuse the two things. You clearly seem to know that RMS can prefer copyleft over permissive licenses, but still need to pretend that there's no difference between the two. If you know that someone can prefer white chocolate to dark chocolate, there's obviously something wrong with you if you in the same breath say that there is no difference between white chocolate and dark chocolate. Why deceive people? What's the point?

If they're all exactly the same, everybody should be using the GPL in Linux then. Shouldn't even be a thought. Why waste time forcing corporate-friendly licenses if it doesn't matter and some people are against them? Shouldn't parsimony rule then?
by CrimsonCape | 2025-12-10 16:45:59+00:00
> But using C# required us to contemplate whether and which dotnet runtime our client supported. Or did we need to ship our own? Isn't this just a small launcher stub? This was just too much complexity outside of our wheelhouse to put between our product and the user. This is not to say that the C# approach isn't valid. It is just that our limited understanding of that ecosystem and its requirements counseled against shipping it as a primary entry point into our application.

You should be able to compile a relatively small, trimmed, standalone, AOT compiled library that uses native interop. (Correct me if i'm wrong, dotnet users). Then there would be no dependency on the framework.
by chandanyuva | 2025-12-10 16:47:07+00:00
great read so as i have understood to why ai is generally good at web dev and not so good at other low level stuff is "more data to train better the model". So model trained on the whole web > a model particular trained on a single language (in this case c). and i also think you can't go lower than C in this case, since below that the code is architecture specific and so even less data to train on. would love what others think
by menaerus | 2025-12-10 16:47:18+00:00
No, I am not saying keep the status quo. I am simply challenging the idea that kernel will enjoy benefits that is supposed to be provided by Rust.

Distribution of bugs across the whole codebase is not following the normal distribution but multimodal. Now, imagine where the highest concentration of bugs will be. And how many bugs there will be elsewhere. Easy to guess.
by dang | 2025-12-10 16:47:42+00:00
All: Don't miss thomasm6m6's follow-up: https://sw.vtom.net/hn35/news.html (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212180). He added the articles!

Edit: See also this current thread: Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220540
by estebank | 2025-12-10 16:48:00+00:00
The only thing I could ever see misconstrued of as "hostility" with my earshot from anyone in t-compiler is myself saying something along the lines of "that sounds like a lot of effort that doesn't gain much over rustc_codegen_gcc, and I am not interested in contributing to a cpp codebase". Note that nowhere in my position I state anything like "this shouldn't exist" or "they should stop" or "we shouldn't cooperate". If anything, the communication channels with them are quite open and friendly. During the RustNL Q&A for the gccrs talk people from t-lang and t-compiler asked point blank "what can we do to help make your life easier". Beyond some minor concerns about the potential for language divergence and gccisms becoming a thing, which they have been very vocal about wanting to avoid, my opinion on the project is that it is net positive and I am impressed with them, and I'll help in any way I can, short of writing code on my spare free time for yet another rust compiler—one is a handful already for me :)
by StratusBen | 2025-12-10 16:48:14+00:00
Founder of Vantage here and former AWS employee.

We actually recently made the decision to staff someone full time on the site just to maintain it for the community. Even the JSON file for the site gets hit hundreds of thousands of times per day...feels like it's become kind of the de-facto source of truth in the community for where to get reliable AWS pricing information and I believe its powering a pretty remarkable amount of downstream applications with how much usage its getting.

We acquired the site almost 5 years ago and want to continue to improve it for the community. If you have any cloud cost management needs, we're also able to help for our main business here: https://www.vantage.sh/

Awesome to see all the comments on it here!
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-10 16:48:22+00:00
> I see this argument almost exclusively from the fuckcars crowd...

That's not shocking to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Earth_(US)

> Friends of the Earth U.S. was founded in California in 1969 by environmentalist David Brower after he left the Sierra Club. The organization was launched with the help of Donald Aitken, Jerry Mander and a $200,000 donation from the personal funds of Robert O. Anderson. One of its first major campaigns was the protest of nuclear power, particularly in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Orville_Anderson

> Robert Orville Anderson (April 12, 1917 – December 2, 2007) was an American businessman, art collector, and philanthropist who founded [the United States' sixth-largest oil company] Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO).
by TimorousBestie | 2025-12-10 16:48:23+00:00
> I suspect that much of the hysteria surrounding the tightening of border controls is a result of selective reporting.

A >0.01% chance of being indefinitely detained and eventually deported/expelled is actually a risk that people are rational to consider when traveling to the US. Low probability * extremely high penalty = medium risk.

The fact that <99.99% of travel is routine does not change that calculation.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-10 16:48:35+00:00
I'm not actually claiming that an open source license that doesn't accept contributions is not open source. See my post where I say it's not a bright line.

But claiming open source is totally about the source and the license completely erases the diverse and vibrant community that has formed around open source over the past 40 years. The license is simply putting the community ethos into a legal document. The source being open represents a meeting place which focuses and collects the community. But the real power of open source is the human element that drives it, and the development philosophy they hold, not the source code.

Linux for instance wouldn't nearly be the powerhouse it is if it were merely "source available". You're really misunderstanding the power of open source if you think it's all about the code, and not the development model.
by anima-core | 2025-12-10 16:48:43+00:00
I guess my "vibe" is just better than your coding :)... Let me explain a few things, if you will. A few clarifications so the discussion stays aligned with what the experiment is actually measuring.

1. The HellaSwag “binary collapse” is intentional and not a leaderboard claim. This work doesn’t attempt to benchmark HellaSwag in the standard four-choice setting. The goal is to probe whether a single frozen layer carries enough information for a small head to distinguish correct versus incorrect continuations. That's a representational geometry test, not a SOTA claim. Binary framing raises the baseline, but that's expected and documented. It's not meant to compare against full LLM HellaSwag results.

2. No adversarial filtering was done. I am using HuggingFace’s standard split directly. Nothing was removed or curated. The experiment doesn't claim robustness or benchmark competitiveness, so the “easier eval” framing doesn’t really apply.

3. EOS extraction isn't cheating, it's the whole point of the probe. The extraction logic takes the final token’s hidden state, which is basic and standard for classification heads and probing studies. If the EOS token captures a high-level sequence summary, that's exactly the structural feature being examined. The result is meant to show how much task-relevant signal is already present in that early representation, not to present a new generative mechanism.

4. The purpose of the work is clearly narrow by design. This is not proposed as a drop-in replacement for full-transformer inference. The paper states that directly. The contribution is about how much structure a single early layer encodes and how far a tiny head can go under strict frozen-teacher constraints. So several of the criticisms make assumptions about goals the work never even claimed.

Thaank you for the feedback and for taking the time.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-12-10 16:48:50+00:00
Why does Qualcomm need this? They don't need to license RISC-V.

Is all the IP they acquired with Nuvia[1] tainted? Or were they just using ARM-derived internals?

From my understanding, just slapping on a different instruction decoder isn't a big technical hurdle. Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to design a chip with both an ARM and a RISC-V decoder on the same die and just fuse-off the ARM die on select units to avoid any fees...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm#2015%E2%80%932024:_NX...
by throw0101d | 2025-12-10 16:48:58+00:00
While most folks have probably heard of "the" Renaissance:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Renaissance

it was not the first in history:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...

There's a certain 'critical mass' of people and thinkers, as well as decent enough communications (roads, letters) to allow for collaboration, needed to achieve a flowering/growth of knowledge, and that was cut off by (amongst other things) the Black Death:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_late_Middle_Ages
by jlarocco | 2025-12-10 16:49:08+00:00
I don't like Windows, but I've always thought COM was pretty cool. It's a nightmare using it directly from low level languages like C++ and Rust, though. It's a perfect place to use code generation or metaprogramming.

In Python, Ruby and the Microsoft languages COM objects integrate seamlessly into the language as instances of the built-in class types.

Also, there's a fairly straightfoward conversion from C# to C++ signatures, which becomes apparent after you see a few of them. It might be explicitly spelled out in the docs somewhere.
by PoisedProto | 2025-12-10 16:49:39+00:00
I know it's also me that's the issue. But I just want a Linux distro that works. I've had enough of people saying "Nvidia has been getting so much better recently!" and "It's completely usable now!" when the newest drivers break my whole experience. I would use arch, and have tried about 5 times, but it's too complicated to get the driver I need and I won't even bother at this point. I've just accepted the fact that I'm going to use Mint until I get a desktop. Maybe I'll try to get help on a forum somewhere but idk, I think I would need personal help.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-12-10 16:50:20+00:00
> I'm curious as to which other metric you'd use to define successful? If it actual usage, C still wins.

Wait, wait, you can use C everywhere, but if absolute lines of code is the metric, people seem to move away from C as quickly as possible (read: don't use C) to higher level languages that clearly aren't as portable (Ruby, Python, Java, C#, C++, etc.)?

> Rust can't target most platforms, and it compiles on even less. Unless Linux want's to drop support for a good number of platforms, Rust adoption can only go so far.

Re: embedded, this is just terribly short sighted. Right now, yes, C obviously has the broadest possible support. But non-experimental Linux support starts today. GCC is still working on Rust support and rust_codegen_gcc is making in roads. And one can still build new LLVM targets. I'd be interested to hear what non-legacy platforms actually aren't supported right now.

But the real issue is that C has no adoption curve. It only has ground to lose. Meanwhile Rust is, relatively, a delight to use, and offers important benefits. As I said elsewhere: "Unless I am wrong, there is still lots of COBOL we wish wasn't COBOL? And that reality doesn't sound like a celebration of COBOL?" The future looks bright for Rust, if you believe as I do, we are beginning to demand much more from our embedded parts.

Now, will Rust ever dominate embedded? Will it be used absolutely everywhere? Perhaps not. Does that matter? Not AFAIAC. Winning by my lights is -- using this nice thing rather than this not so nice thing. It's doing interesting things where one couldn't previously. It's a few more delighted developers.

I'd much rather people were delighted/excited about a tech/a language/a business/a vibrant community, than, whatever it is, simply persisted. Because "simply persisted", like your comment above, is only a measure of where we are right now.

Another way to think of this is -- Perl is also everywhere. Shipped with every Linux distro and MacOS, probably to be found somewhere deep inside Windows too. Now, is Perl, right now, a healthy community or does it simply persist? Is its persistence a source of happiness or dread?