MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arjie | 2025-12-03 08:29:09+00:00
There's something you can learn from the broad scale, but SF has pretty decent tracking and perhaps there's something you can learn from looking at one city too. SF has a Collisions Report[0] and also traffic citations data is open data[1] so you can see how enforcement has changed. Subjectively, I notice a lot more red-light running, and objectively the red-light camera near my apartment illuminates the ceiling of my home office every day.

I'm now a father so one cannot discount the amount to which my tolerance of bad actors has changed, but my experience has been that the lack of enforcement for violations (right-turn red lights in SF are rarely obeyed) is definitely taken advantage of by many drivers. However, the collisions report does make it somewhat clear that a non-trivial amount of the new fatalities are due to new traffic modalities: people now have the stand up OneWheels, and there are many more food delivery drivers on e-bikes.

But one gratifying thing is that the newer parts of town where people are having children have a lot more safety construction. I was walking home from the gym here in Mission Bay when I saw a group of kids between 6 and 12 on their little scooters.

[0] https://www.visionzerosf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/San-...

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/car-traffic-pede...
by lnsru | 2025-12-03 08:29:27+00:00
Absolutely the same with RAMs in Germany. Big toys for rich guys to compensate something small. Takes at least 2 parking spots and doesn’t fit anyway.

On other hand the RAMs are not relevant for the average citizen. Crazy fuel consumption is a showstopper. And the ones with some extra cash will continue to import with German „Individual Vehicle Approval“ equivalent. In my eyes it’s another useless European regulation. Let poor people import cheap Toyotas from overseas.
by thiago_fm | 2025-12-03 08:29:33+00:00
US pedestrian deaths increased almost 100% the last decade or so... and the Cybertruck is the most hilarious car, a representation of bad US car standards.

With its pointy edges, even in a very slow accident hitting a pedestrian, the outcome will make any Tarantino movie look soft, in terms of blood being spilled around.

Don't even get me started on those huge American cars, they are the absolute terror in terms of pedestrian safety.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-03 08:29:46+00:00
> And lots of those companies went bust, quite a few spectacularly so.

pets.com "selling dogfood on the internet" is the major example of the web boom then bust. (1)

But today, I can get dog food, cat food, other pet supplies with my weekly "online order" grocery delivery. Or I can get them from the big river megaretailer. I have a weekly delivery of coffee beans from a niche online supplier, and it usually comes with flyers for products like a beer or wine subscription or artisanal high-meat cat or dog foods.

So the idea of "selling dogfood on the internet" is now pervasive not extinct, the inflated expectation that went bust was that this niche was a billion-dollar idea and not a commodity where brand, efficiencies of scale and execution matter more.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com#History
by hinkley | 2025-12-03 08:29:47+00:00
Oh no, our decentralized VCS will be… decentralized!

Seriously though the big problem to solve will be squatters, when there are three logical places for a module to be hosted. That could create issues if you want to migrate.

I would rather have this happening after a contender to git has surfaced. Something for instance with more project tracking built in so migration were simpler.
by rvnx | 2025-12-03 08:30:08+00:00
There will always be a place for calligraphy, artisan, who place creativity, handcraft and art first.

You can see it like pizzas:

there will always be someone who actually makes these pizzas from scratch; grows his own tomatoes in his garden, does his own flour, does his own cheese, raises pigs, etc.

But these are exceptions, maybe 0.001% - it gets very very expensive, these people do it for passion and art, not for money or scale.

You need to pre-order your pizza weeks before, you will pay a lot and you are not sure what will be the final taste (hopefully tasty), and you buy a story and supports someone.

On the other end, you have companies like Gustavo Gusto who produce 100'000 pizzas a day.

Quality ingredients, great execution, convenient, immediate, available and cheaper than hiring someone.

The irony is that the expensive and slow small artisan may actually make a worse product, than something which has been battle-tested on millions of people and whose supply chain has been controlled end-to-end.

After all of that, the industrial fonts like Roboto are not that bad, and if the industrial people offer you to customize it in a couple of prompts, then this is the cherry on top.
by lloeki | 2025-12-03 08:30:19+00:00
> with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC9a3GR1HJY&t=371s

> I said there was no way this truck would pass a pedestrian impact safety standard. Now, I wasn't wrong that the truck won't pass a pedestrian impact safety standard, it won't! And that's why they can't sell it in Europe. [...] But I didn't realise that America has no pedestrian impact standards. [...] America actually allows companies to self-certify a variety of aspects of safety.
by pettertb | 2025-12-03 08:30:40+00:00
"What are you buying with those 20k?"

You keep a good thing going, you buy oil for the machinery, you keep your part of the bargain and do the maintenance. You pay the correct price for the stuff you are lucky enough to have been getting on the cheap.

I like the directness of the question: "Why should I pay more when it won't burn down right this instand if I don't?" This is a question asked all over, and it is dangerous, keeping anything going requires maintenance and knowledge in how to maintain it. That goes for cars and it goes for people.

This is not business, it is miserly behaviour, it is being cheap.

The miser will find himself in a harsh, transactional, brutal world. Because that is the only way for people to protect themselves against him.
by Sardtok | 2025-12-03 08:30:49+00:00
I suppose you're counting the joyo kanji plus kana alphabets with diacritics. But the actual count of kanji is much higher, even if Japanese uses a relatively small number of characters for day-to-day writing.

Pretty much every native university student I met when I studied there, had passed the Kanji Kentei level 1 test. A certification of proficiency in around 6000 kanji.
by arghwhat | 2025-12-03 08:31:26+00:00
Modern US trucks are an absolute atrocity. I am the demographic that thinks they look cool and might one day have bought one should I end up with more money than I knew what to do with if I hadn't learned that they're death traps.

The tall grill means impact to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycles is basically instant death as their head - the only thing above the grill - gets whiplashed onto the rigid tip of the hood. On a normal vehicle you get your legs swiped and rotate your whole body onto an intentionally flexible area of the hood for a much gentler impact.

The visibility from the driver seat is not only much worse than our actual semis, but also worse than actual tanks. You could have half a kindergarten and a small vehicle in front of your car without knowing.

As for the tax, eh - tbf these vehicles are mostly used for business purposes by sole proprietors and the likes, and while they're stupid vehicles they do still do the job. A fully decked Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter is also expensive with little registration tax. Registration tax is a weird (and arguably stupid) system, this isn't really an outlier in that regard.

I roll my eyes more when I see a sports car attempted registered as a van.
by yfontana | 2025-12-03 08:31:31+00:00
Interestingly, "aggregate first, join later" has been the standard way of joining fact tables in BI tools for a long time. Since fact tables are typically big and also share common dimensions, multi-fact joins for drill-across are best done by first aggregating on those common dimensions, then joining on them.

Makes you wonder how many cases there are out there of optimizations that feel almost second nature in one domain, but have never been applied to other domains because no one thought of it.
by omnimus | 2025-12-03 08:32:11+00:00
It's not about the shilling. It's about death of quality. As society we are self-destructing our culture using trash AI copies. It doesn't matter if it's fonts, code, movies or illustrations. Look at that service - the fonts are shit to meh but they are free. Corpo managers will of course want to squeeze every drop so they will push for free - especially as the AI gets close. So instead of allowing someone obsessive to produce highest quality output they can… we stop this by using stolen copy. In this can only lead to wiping any concepts of quality in our society while also robbing the people producing the quality work.
by mihaaly | 2025-12-03 08:32:14+00:00
Guaranteed new deaths everyday instead of possibly, maybe, USA president will not back out from a conflict on a whim or by getting offended and go full sulky kid due to some remarks on his patheticly idiotic personality (I hope he will never get here, I do not want to be carpet bombed because of a comment).

I'd say keep everyday life better and buy some stupid US military airplanes instead, to keep this deteriorated stupid smug child satisfied!

The EU representatives shall remain adults!!
by speedgoose | 2025-12-03 08:32:21+00:00
I wouldn’t bet. IT innovation used to be lead by the defence industry, but that has changed and now consumer technology is driving the innovation from what I have been told.

I’m sure they have some cool secret stuff, but they are perhaps not 10 years ahead. Also, I find unlikely that those secrets wouldn’t make it to the public society now, as we are probably close the top of the AI bubble.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-03 08:32:30+00:00
How exactly are they poisoning the well..? OpenAI committed to 1.4 trillion investements...with a revenue of ~13B - how is IBM CEO contributing to that absolutely already poisoned situation? Steve Jobs did not care about naysayers when he introduced iPhone - because his product was so innovative for the time. According to AI boosters, we now have a segment of supposedly incredibly powerful and at the same time "dangerous" AI products. Why are they not sweeping the floor off with the "negators", "luddites", "laggards" etc... After so many hundreds of billions of dollars and supposedly so many "smart" AI researchers...Where are the groundbreaking results man? Where are the billion-dollar startups launched by single persons (heck, I'd settle even for a small team)...Where are the ultimate applications..etc?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-03 08:32:43+00:00
>Even if you give aggressive raises, at the next interview they can fake/inflate their experience and jump in to a higher salary bracket

I don't think the kinds of people who see a 50% raise and complain that it's not 100% are the kinds of candidates you want to hire anyway. I'd like to see more of that before deciding we tried nothing and ran out of ideas.

I didn't leave my first job because I was non-autistic. I left because I was paid 50k and the next job literally tripled my total comp. Oh, and because I was laid off. but tbf I was already out the door mentally around that time after 2 years of nothing but chastising and looking at the next opportunity.

I would have (outside of said chastising) gladly stayed if I got boosted to 75k. I was still living within my means on 50k.

>Hiring and training junior developers seems incredibly difficult and like a total waste of energy

If that's the attitude at large, we're all falling into a tragedy of the commons.
by Antibabelic | 2025-12-03 08:32:51+00:00
Human "thought" is the way it is because "electrical impulses" (wildly inaccurate description of how the brain works, but I'll let it pass for the sake of the argument) implement it. They are its mechanism. LLMs are not implemented like a human brain, so if they do have anything similar to "thought", it's a qualitatively different thing, since the mechanism is different.
by rtpg | 2025-12-03 08:33:41+00:00
I think if you want to make this argument you can go look at the stats. Look at the relative cost of vehicles in the EU over the past 25 years, compare to the cost of vehicles in the US over the past 25 years.

Obviously the lack of difference there wouldn't prove much (if I had to bet I'd bet cars in the US have gotten way more expensive faster than in the EU, just from labor costs), but the lack of a major difference would complicate the theory that new regulations in the past 15 years have massively improved costs, absent a theory that some other thing the EU is doing but the US is not doing is also kicking in to similarly counteract that.

The numbers exist, this isn't in the abstract. Just a question of doing the legwork
by auxiliarymoose | 2025-12-03 08:34:07+00:00
For me at least, I find it easier to see the shape of algorithms, control flow, and expressions when the variable names are concise. But this also might be because I have found Go to fit my use-cases and thinking style well, and Go programs tend to follow this naming convention.

For example, if I have a struct `PageEntity` with a field `Id`, and I am iterating over a slice of such IDs, I would prefer using `pid` instead of `pageEntityId` as the variable name. But Java APIs and conventions tend to use these longer names, so I find it takes more thinking to remember the different names instead of quickly seeing the behavior of code at a glance.

Java also tends to have a lot of inheritance which results in these long glued-together names and makes it harder to follow program flow because behaviors get introduced in multiple different places (i.e., it has the opposite of locality of behavior).

But those are just my opinions and experiences! I know many people love Java, and it is a versatile and powerful language.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-12-03 08:34:26+00:00
> Marx would have a word about use value vs exchange value.

Sounds like a semantics trick. Value is value. Sure, something can have a different value if you exchange it versus if you use it. It can also have a different value if you eat it, or drink it, or smash it, or wear it, or gift it to a family member, or gift it to a friend, or gift it to a lover. "Exchange" is simply one way of use.
by CalRobert | 2025-12-03 08:34:39+00:00
As far as I'm aware, having any wheel on the footpath is illegal except in areas specifically signposted for it, but my experience has been that handhaving just didn't care

https://www.parkeerbord.nl/wetgeving/is-parkeren-op-de-stoep...

This spot used to drive me absolutely insane when walking to school with my kids - the gemeente even added marked parking spots and drivers just stole the footpath anyway, so we had to walk in the street, and the gemeente straight refused to issue tickets. The guy on the phone told me "it's not causing any trouble" because hey, it's not like _he's_ ever had to push a pram in the street.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YD5w84R19TGQgPX78
by astrange | 2025-12-03 08:34:42+00:00
You're reading research that says they're geniuses? As far as I know lack of self-control is the main factor.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8095718/ (see "Self-Control as Criminality" although it has a lot of caveats)

The other two are "being a young man" and lead poisoning, which are both versions of being dumb.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016604622...
by writebetterc | 2025-12-03 08:34:56+00:00
You're saying $8 billion to cover interest, another commenter said 80, but the actual article says ""$8 trillion of CapEx means you need roughly $800 billion of profit just to pay for the interest". Eight HUNDRED billion. Where does the eight come from, from 90% of these companies failing to make a return? If a few AI companies survive and thrive (which tbh, sure, why not?) then we're still gonna fall face down into concrete.
by knorker | 2025-12-03 08:35:00+00:00
You're misapplying it.

A language that doesn't let you do safe things, then that's a very different language.

In this case, it would be a language that does not allow creating a UdpSocket object by bringing in your own file descriptor, or it verifies that it's the right type of socket when you do. Which has performance implications without adding any "safe" guarantees.

Say you add this feature, taking the performance hit. Now you need to adjust seccomp policies to allow that. Ok, no biggie. But then I invent UDPv2, and this check fails. The code becomes wrong because of an incorrect assumption about the future.

All without gain. It's not an invalid state, any more than naming a variable "x_squared" but containing x+1 is an invalid state.

You could also imagine stdout to be of a different type if it's line or character buffered, and continue in the direction of a cartesian explosion for all states. Ok… that seems like it'd cause more problems than it'd solve.

> instead of getting indignant

Please don't assume my mental state. You got it wrong.

> This is a failure of imagination, nothing more. An appropriate type schema for this domain will be able to handle the requirements of the domain.

I'm all ears. Note that it also has to support "I got the file descriptor as a libc::c_int from a C library", or it's not fit for purpose.
by VogonPoetry | 2025-12-03 08:35:11+00:00
Yes, mostly raw TeX, just plain ascii - not specially coded for Braille. This was quite a long time ago, mid 1980's, so not long after TeX had started to spread in computer science and maths communities. My friend was using a "Versa Braille" terminal hooked via a serial port to a BBC Micro running a terminal program that I'd written. I cannot completely remember how we came to an understanding of the syntax to use. We did shorten some items because the Versa Braille only had 20 chars per "line".

He is still active and online and has a contact page see https://www.foneware.net. I have been a poor correspondent with him - he will not know my HN username. I will try to reach out to him.
by noduerme | 2025-12-03 08:35:52+00:00
Aaaannnnd.... I figured out last night that I don't need to go to 9, only to 8.4. Strangely, what version I needed to upgrade to from 8.0 was not stated anywhere in the mass of emails Amazon sent me. I hadn't yet gone on RDS and noticed that 9 is not on the list of options, I was just trying to build 9 on my Mac.

8.4 won't build in homebrew under Monterey, though, so I'm stuck with 8.3 for my dev stack. I guess I can live with that. I'm dreading the next forced upgrade.
by MarkMarine | 2025-12-03 08:36:18+00:00
That is not the only reason for a big car. You have to find special forward facing child seats to put 3 wide in a Tesla model 3 rear row, then do yoga to try to insert the children into them. To run the child seats facing backwards as long as possible, you need to be something like 5’4” or less to be comfortable with 2 seats in the back. That’s pretty standard in the “normal” sized car market, having a SUV or a minivan makes sense considering that.

I know. Sold my Tesla, now drive a Land Cruiser. A small car is just an exercise in pain when you have kids and need a car to get everywhere. If I had safe bike lanes to get the kids to school and practice and the grocery store, I’d just have an urban arrow… but I’m not contending with the aforementioned kindercrushers that aren’t looking for cyclists and risking my kids with the way our streets are designed. I would happily support changes that fix this, but this is the world we’re in as parents.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-03 08:36:29+00:00
Dumping our apprenticeship programs onto academia is exacly how we got into this mess to begin with. It has historically not been the job of a college to produce junior talent. They teach a best for T shaped individual and setup for more of their pipeline in research should students want to delve deeper

If industry doesn't want to pay for training, they better pay bootcamps to overhaul themselves and teach what they actually need. I don't think universities will bend much more since they have their own bubble on their hands.
by simianwords | 2025-12-03 08:36:35+00:00
The specific regulations here

> EU officials must revisit the hastily agreed trade deal with the US, where the EU stated that it “intends to accept” lower US vehicle standards, say cities – including Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and more than 75 civil society organisations. In a letter to European lawmakers, the signatories warn that aligning European standards with laxer rules in the US would undermine the EU’s global leadership in road safety, public health, climate policy and competitiveness.

They point to many things and not only the size of cars - like fewer approvals, lower pollution controls, fewer safety measures.

Some of them increase utility (like people might prefer bigger cars) and others decrease cost.
by rixed | 2025-12-03 08:37:05+00:00
Yes there is some bureaucratic paper churn to deal with them, but it's a one time cost. I did it once probably more than 10 years ago. Since then, login to the website takes me <10s (with OTP) every couple of days and then finding what I'm looking for in the web UI or the API doc is usualy just 3 or 4 clicks away (their website is a bit messy).

Compare that with AWS, where login is slow and unreliable (anyone else got an error message after every login and has to refresh to get in?), the website is a giant mess collapsing under its own weight, and slow like it's still running websphere.

Over the last 10 years, I've certainly lost way more time working through aws paperless bureaucracy than complying with Hetzner paper bureaucracy. And I'm not even using aws for that long.
by matwood | 2025-12-03 08:37:07+00:00
Are you saying that Google, Meta, Amazon, etc... can't do software? It's the bread and butter of these companies. The CUDA moat is important to hold off the likes of AMD, but hardware like TPUs for internal use or other big software makers is not a big hurdle.

Of course Huang will lean on the software being key because he sees the hardware competition catching up.
by arp242 | 2025-12-03 08:37:23+00:00
> Every EU politician who tries to subvert car safety should be dismissed and tried for endangering public safety.

Yeah, so that would be rampantly anti-Democratic authoritarianism... Peaceful transfer of power is pretty much at the core of why democracy works in the first place, and once you start engaging in political persecution because you don't like some trade-off involving safety ... yeah, that's no longer a democracy but something else.
by kelnos | 2025-12-03 08:37:42+00:00
Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games.

My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.