MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buran77 | 2025-12-12 20:11:43+00:00
> It is weird to me that we got to a point where we are being literal about the law again, instead of the spirit.

The "spirit" of any law requiring license plates on vehicles is that the license plate can be read under normal conditions. The letter of the law may have been more generic, although many countries define very precisely everything about the plate, its condition and legibility. So demanding visible plates is exactly in the spirit of the law. What's the point of a license plate that nobody can read?

People exploited the letter of the law by having a license that was illegible somehow. Covered, faded writing, flipped under the motorcycle seat, etc.

> vehicles that don't display their license plate for cameras of any kind are illegal

License plates predate traffic cameras and the requirement for readable plates has been in force in many countries since for almost all that time. The license needs to be visible first and foremost so humans can easily identify a car. It can be police or a witness when someone runs you over.

Cameras automate this so they make abuse far easier. But the need was always there for various legitimate reasons.

Almost no law would survive if everyone was allowed to just take some literal interpretation of their own choice. The attitude that "well technically the law says" is usually shot down by any judge for good reason. Someone could have a lot of fun with your right to "bear arms".
by frmersdog | 2025-12-12 20:11:44+00:00
>Mastroianni’s explanation is that the weirdos and freaks who actually move culture forward with new music and books and movies and genres of art have disappeared, potentially because life is just so comfortable and high-quality now that it nudges people against risk-taking.

Feels like it's the opposite. Things are so precarious that risk-taking becomes out-of-the-question.

There's been a cultural de-emphasis on risk-taking, too. Millennials went to college not because it was seen as a risky bet on gaining the skills and knowledge to change the world, but because it was supposed to be a reliable way to earn lucrative credentials. Now that we know college actually is quite risky, what do Zoomers do? Stop attending.

An interesting angle: look at the closure and consolidation in the thrill-seeking industry (theme parks, extreme sports, etc.). Those were a staple of the American recreation diet as a reflection and reinforcement of our penchant for seeking the novel and scary and visceral. Regional facilities are closing, and what's left are too expensive for most families to go to. A lot of Americans are being taught that risk isn't for them.

On the other hand, you do have the rise of sports betting... So maybe we're still being sold a kind of risk, but only the safe, addictive kind that always makes the house money.
by rurp | 2025-12-12 20:11:53+00:00
A few years ago I had the head of a devops team at a large company say that the project I was working on should switch from postgres to a "real" enterprise database like oracle. This happened while we were having zero issues with postgres, it was a perfect fit for our case, and it wasn't even relevant to the conversation. He just saw that's what we were using and reflexively thought that of course we should use Oracle.

It blew my mind at the time. Oracle is so widely hated among developers, entirely justifiably, that this guy's take really shocked me. I've literally never heard another glowing recommendation for that company before or since.
by overfeed | 2025-12-12 20:12:23+00:00
> if they're choosing incorrectly it's trivial to explain the facts for them to choose right

It's far from trivial when there are multiple, clearly-communicated trade-offs (documented in the design doc!) that, but you happen to land on opposite ends of value-judgements (e.g. pattern A is easier to maintain based on my experience with the codebase & bugs that have popped up, but manager thinks pattern B is simpler to implement, but brittle). The debate wastes time, and signals mistrust when you're the staff engineer, or the design was OK'd by staff/rest of team
by godelski | 2025-12-12 20:12:35+00:00
> Any scientist will tell you

The number of people, including scientists, who treat algorithms as black boxes is incredibly concerning. The math is meaningless without interpretation, and that requires understanding what goes into the scores.

That said, why would anyone think such scores could be a reasonably accurate representation? You are aggregating such complex situations and with that you kill off nuance. It doesn't mean the scores are useless, but need to be used carefully. I mean even look at the chart and you'll see weird things pop out. Ireland is ranked 5th by the "Freedom in the World" Index and falls into the highest binning for all 3 categories: economic freedom, press freedom, democracy. Yet New Zealand is 3rd, falling into the second bins for economic and press freedom. Further down you see the US below Argentina yet the US's scores are significantly higher than Argentina in each other category and the US is tied with Mongolia (who has a major problem with Press Freedom).

It should be quite clear that these scores are missing a lot of important details. Like the US definitely has problems with Freedom of Speech (and growing) but you can call Trump and Clinton pedos on the internet all day and nothing will happen to you[0]. Nuance is needed and treating these indexes as black boxes is just harmful to a conversation about freedom.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04vqldn42go
by mpweiher | 2025-12-12 20:13:47+00:00
Er...what?

There is a massive nuclear renaissance in-progress.

According to the following tracker:

https://globalenergymonitor.github.io/maps/trackers/nuclear/

There are currently 419 reactors in operation, 76 in construction, 140 in pre-construction and 290 planned/announced. I have a slightly older version of that chart, where those numbers were 69, 92 and 178, respectively.

Note that both the numbers are pretty large compared to the installed base (more than doubling the installed base), that they are increasing for the earlier stages (indicating more is in the pipeline than is currently being built), and that all the pipeline stages are increasing over time.

Which is of course consistent with the fact that 34 countries have now signed the international pledge to triple nuclear output that was first agreed at COP28. These countries include: France, the United States, China, Japan, Poland, Sweden, etc. India has plans and is on track to triple by 2032, but hasn't signed the pledge.

I am also not sure why you think that "all existing experts" have retired and there is no nuclear industry. The World Nuclear Exhibition in Paris November 4-6 of this year had over 1000 exhibitors, and more than half of those were from Europe.

https://www.framatome.com/en/evenements-clients/world-nuclea...

Even phase-out-Germany still has substantial nuclear engineering capacity, there's even a nuclear fuel factory in Lingen. And of course the actual nuclear component of a nuclear power plant is only around 20%. About the same effort/cost goes into the steam turbines, of which Siemens is a major worldwide supplier.

And of course civil nuclear programs have next to nothing to do with military nuclear programs. There are many more users of civil nuclear power than there are military nuclear powers, and the military nuclear powers invariably got the bomb first, and added a civil program later, with some like Israel only having a military nuclear program, not a civilian one.

In fact, there's a fun anecdote from the beginnings of the French nuclear program, since you mention France: when the Messmer plan got started, the military wanted to deploy an indigenous type of reactor for the civilian program that was more suitable for military uses, but in the end the government decided to standardize on a US Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that was not useful for military purposes.
by _jsmh | 2025-12-12 20:13:58+00:00
Finding experts might be hard, but it might not be that hard to find like-minded or curious people. The article got me interested in learning more about the Gini coefficient.

One of the platform's goals is to enable the lightweight version of an academic paper, where you present a claim and evidence and don't need to spin an elaborate story that makes up a full paper. When one isn't that far along in the research they can present what they have so far. Some academics say papers and the review process are too bureaucratic. The key determinant of "acceptance" is whether each sentence written in an article evaluates to true. This means the shorter an article the easier it is to publish. You can learn more in /how.

The platform's content isn't specific to academia. It might turn out that the platform needs to be narrowed down only to academic-like writing or cloned into a version that is only for academic-like writing. Intuition suggests this might be unnecessary or detrimental. That being able to report good results in few and simple words increases discovery velocity. Happy to make changes that increase the platform's ability to find and share novelty.

If the platform fills a need it will survive and if not it should be shutdown.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-12 20:14:01+00:00
What you say about missed optimizations is true only when the compiler attempts to handle itself in a graceful way the cases when overflows would occur, instead of raising exceptions.

This is not what is normal overflow checking. Normal overflow checking just raises a specific exception when integer overflow happens.

This has absolutely no effect upon compiler optimizations. The compiler always generates code ignoring the possibility of exceptions. When exceptions happen, the control is passed far away to the exception handler, which decides what to do, e.g. to save debugging information and abort partially or totally the offending program, because an overflow is normally the consequence of an unforeseen program bug and it is impossible to do any action that will allow the continuation of the execution.

You should remember that there is nothing special about integer overflow, almost every instruction that the compiler generates can raise an exception at run time. Any branch instruction, any memory-access instruction, any floating-point instruction, any vector instruction can raise an exception due to hardware. In recent CPUs, integer overflow is not raised implicitly, so you have to insert a conditional branch, but this is irrelevant.

If your theory that the possibility of raising exceptions can influence compiler optimizations were true, there would exist no compiler optimizations, because from every 10 or so instructions generated by a compiler at least a half can raise various kinds of exceptions, in a manner completely unpredictable by the compiler. Adding integer overflow exceptions changes nothing.
by DesiLurker | 2025-12-12 20:14:26+00:00
As a non gaming engineer, I dont want a union, what I really want is solid (really, harsh) enforcement of basic common sense labor rules for exempt workers like weekly working hour limits, no after hours scheduling or minimum notice/severance period for layoffs & many other abuses. Problem is tech industry does not wants to give an inch and workers don't complain because of higher pay and 'lottery ticket' effect.

I fear the time for fixing this is passing fast. Its because within a decade AI will have enough of labor displacement that labor wont have any negotiating leverage against capital. If this happens with union, so be it.
Bazenda – product discovery engine for US brands
by bazenda | 2025-12-12 20:14:48+00:00
Hey,

I built Bazenda, a product discovery and search engine for US brands. It helps you quickly browse clothing and accessories from different brands in one place — no selling, no checkout, just fast discovery.

You can: •search across brands •see trending items •check price history •find similar items with a quick photo

Bazenda updates itself automatically as brands add or change products.

Would love any feedback on the experience, search results, or the overall concept.

Website: https://bazenda.com iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bazenda/id6742709382 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bazenda.app

Thanks!
by AaronFriel | 2025-12-12 20:15:31+00:00
A lot of folks think this, but did you also implement EDNS0?

The golang team also thought DNS clients were simple, and it led to almost ten years of difficult to debug panics in Docker, Mesos, Terraform, Mesos, Consul, Heroku, Weave and countless other services and CLI tools written in Go. (Search "cannot unmarshal DNS message" and marvel at the thousands of forum threads and GitHub issues that all bottom out at Go implementing the original DNS spec and not following later updates.)
Show HN: PhenixCode – Added admin dashboard for multi-server management
by nesall | 2025-12-12 20:16:30+00:00
I built PhenixCode — an open-source, self-hosted and customizable alternative to GitHub Copilot Chat.

Why: I wanted a coding assistant that runs locally, with full control over models and data. Copilot is great, but it’s subscription-only and cloud-only. PhenixCode gives you freedom: use local models (free) or plug in your own API keys.

Use the new admin dashboard GUI to visually configure the RAG settings for multi-server management.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-12 20:16:48+00:00
Since the capacity factor is so much lower, 10x in capacity just about matches the energy production of nuclear. Never mind the dispatchable power.

And since nuclear power plants last about 4x longer than renewables, you actually have to install 4x the production to have an equivalent fleet over time.

So by your numbers, the world is shifting towards a nuclear fleet.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-12 20:17:05+00:00
This would seem like a form of State AI regulation forcing you to submit to flock AI surveillance. I thought the dear leader was going to make any sort of regulation of AI illegal nationwide? Looking forward to the absurd lawsuit asserting exactly this.

Especially when the boss move is just to retrain the network with a bunch of examples with the flock camera jammer applied. And if that's beyond the pythonic acumen of the employees of flock, that's their problem.
by Daishiman | 2025-12-12 20:17:06+00:00
> What's keeping any one of these Id software developers from accepting a competing job offer elsewhere?

* Employer-bound health insurance in the US

* Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members

* Noncompetes and NDAs

* Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-12 20:17:34+00:00
Around here, folks wipe off the paint from their license plates with paint thinner. The plate still has the number, but an ALPR won’t be able to read it.

I’m told the reason is so that they don’t have to pay bridge tolls (which are quite high).

It’s illegal, but I see cars with bare-metal license plates, all the time.
by anonym29 | 2025-12-12 20:17:41+00:00
Also, for what it's worth, you don't have to use same service on each leg of your trip, you don't need to have it pick you up at your front door, and you don't need to have it drop you off at your exact destination. While for some people, these are admittedly imperfect improvements (you can't really effectively conceal your destination as easily if it's, say, an airport, there's also absolutely nothing stopping you from calculating the cost of your full trip with an equidistant destination, ordering a short trip (not to your final destination), and offering your driver a reasonable amount of cash to take you the rest of the way. Uber/lyft themselves are con artists charging riders WAY more than they pay drivers anyway. You can get away with paying a fraction of what the app would charge you, paying the driver way more than they would otherwise receive, and cutting the parasite (the multi-billion-dollar corporation providing zero value after connecting you with a driver) out of the middle.
by eevmanu | 2025-12-12 20:18:17+00:00
I’m a bit confused because I don’t clearly understand the value this tool adds. Could you help me understand it?

From what I can see, if the content I want to enrich is static, the web fetch tool seems sufficient. Is this tool capable of extracting information from dynamic websites or sites behind login walls, or is it essentially the same as a web fetch tool that only works with static pages?
by sailingparrot | 2025-12-12 20:18:29+00:00
> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.

This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
by vablings | 2025-12-12 20:18:31+00:00
I don't think workers are to blame when it the business who makes the deals both with the employees and other business.

If I make a series of bad deals running my company and my employees take up collection action to demand a reasonable market rate increase in pay my business didn't fail because of collective action. It failed because I failed as ab businessman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Corporation#cite_note-W...
by Spivak | 2025-12-12 20:18:37+00:00
If the plate is visible and clearly readable to a human but not readable by a machine has the law been violated? In my state there is no law that requires that my license plate be viewable by ALPRs so long as it's in plain view to a human observer.

The software isn't a person and so I think there's a real question as to whether or not you can even say the license plate isn't visible to it because the software doesn't have eyes it can't observe anything, that's just our way of conceptualizing what it's doing. And I don't think this is theoretical because this idea that the machine isn't a person is argued by the state for why dragnet surveillance isn't a search until a human actually goes and looks at it.
by palmotea | 2025-12-12 20:18:57+00:00
> Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.

But the primary job of a union is to represent its workers in the workplace, not to do any particular political thing that workers are "best positioned to do." Given the weak position unions are already in in the US, it's not the time to, say, alienate the fraction of the workforce who supports Israel from the union. You need those guys to vote to get the union certified, which is already a difficult uphill battle without their alienation.

The union and its organizers need to be able to say no, and be ruthlessly prioritize and be pragmatic. If they can't, I think their chances of accomplishing anything are slim.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-12 20:19:03+00:00
Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management?

There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.
by Alupis | 2025-12-12 20:19:18+00:00
The Union is a business too - and it's product is the labor of it's members.

Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.

Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.

Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, driving jobs overseas, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.

Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.

Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.

If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
by runarberg | 2025-12-12 20:19:52+00:00
Yes, I do. It is engineeringly possible, but societally a horror prescription. I maintain that even the moon landing was an engineering dead end, it resulted in no major breakthrough which we wouldn’t have reached otherwise (for much cheaper) and the humanity benefited nothing but bragging rights. It was then used to further nationalism and exceptionalism by one particular society which went on to conduct many horrible acts of atrocities in the decades that followed.

The prospect of a Mars colony would be that except a million times worse. Humanity will never migrate to Mars, we will never live on Mars, we have nothing to gain by living there, and it may even be impossible for us to live a normal human life over there (e.g. we don‘t know if we can even give birth over there). The only thing it will give us are bragging rights to the powerful individuals which achives it first, who will likely use that as political capital to enact horrible policies on Earth, for their own personal benefits, at the cost of everybody else.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-12 20:19:54+00:00
Unfortunately you are responsible for making sure your plates are clearly visible while driving. Mud doesn't easily coat your plate to the point of obscurity, you either were driving in lots of heavy mud (clean off car before going back on public roads) or haven't cleaned accumulated mud off in a while (not adhering to making sure your car is road legal).

Negligence will still get you in trouble.
by torbengee | 2025-12-12 20:20:20+00:00
I've tried so many fonts in my coding life, but I think I've finally found my forever font: JetBrains Mono. Crisp, all characters distinguishable, slightly larger lowercase for better reading ...

I recently compared it once more to others – https://www.programmingfonts.org/ makes it easy to narrow down to your favourites one by one ... JetBrains Mono still wins. :)
by thedougd | 2025-12-12 20:20:32+00:00
It's wild dealing with Oracle. They are an adversary to their customers. They'll repeatedly try and setup meetings where they begin off-topic asking questions about how many cores/sockets you're deployed on (Answer: Fewer than we're paying for). When we declined their Java subscription (after thorough preparation on our part), they repeatedly threatened us with audits and ominous threats of download monitoring.

If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.