MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drunx | 2025-12-29 12:50:36+00:00
I lived 15 years in The Netherlands and 3 years ago moved to Germany.

Back in NL I used to complain about trains being late...

Boy oh boy was I not ready for Germany and Deutsche Bahn. I heard stories, but it was so absurd at times that I treated them as comical acts.

Then I traveled long distance on DB...

- trains being late by 15-40 minutes is NORMAL. It's included. At this point I feel like it's even planned.
- the "thrown out in the middle of nowhere" happens! Ruthlessly. Operationally. With zero empathy or guidance. One minute you traveled inside the train approaching your destination another minute you are on a station in some village, knowing nothing about "why?" And "what is next?"

I still take trains - but I do not plan any appointments on arrival. As arrival is theoretical and not guaranteed. I just take a gamble and sink hours into the journey. Read books. Watch movies.

P.s. I am surprised that DB is not held more accountable for the absolutely shit service they provide.
by harddrivereque | 2025-12-29 12:50:44+00:00
Deutsche Bahn has gone from not perfect to straight up disastrous and antisocial in the past years. They use scamming approaches more misleading than airline's and in cases straight up lie. It's rightfully headed for insolvency despite billions of wasteful and wrongful state funding. I hope that company goes under as soon as possible. Any other solution to the railway system management is better than DB. DB is not going to make it
by microtonal | 2025-12-29 12:51:19+00:00
It's also funny considering how here in South America we look at Germany trains (and Switzerland trains)

That's very outdated, DB has been terrible for a long time though. Switzerland is still the best though. Here are some stats for 2025:

https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

Since you have to scroll down quite a bit to get the list of most reliable European trains (with percentage on time):

1. Switzerland 97.8%

2. The Netherlands 93.9%

3. Belgium 88.6%

4. Austria 82.2%

5. France 79.7%

6. Italy 62.0%

7. Germany 58.5%

(Not sure why these are the only countries in the list.)
by turbonaut | 2025-12-29 12:52:33+00:00
UK and DE appear to use different punctuality metrics with a train being late after 3 minutes in the UK but 6 in DE.

Latest punctuality figures for UK are 84.8% and DE 88.1%. Making an assumption on distribution I’d guess UK comes out slightly better.

Of note, DE long distance stats are pretty bad!

UK: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/ebmnxxih/performance-sta...
DE: https://zbir.deutschebahn.com/2024/en/interim-group-manageme...
by ernst_klim | 2025-12-29 12:52:58+00:00
> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped

Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.

I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.
by WickyNilliams | 2025-12-29 12:53:13+00:00
What makes custom elements good is inrerop. I can use them in react, Vue, angular, svelte, solid, or just plain ol' server rendered html. I can switch out the internals entirely for a WC lib, or not, with nobody knowing or caring.

This is a unique advantage to WCs. And it's such a compelling advantage that it makes almost all the downsides tolerable. At least if you are in a position where your component might be used in many places. Design Systems are a good example. The consumer can be any app, built on any technology.

And there are plenty of downsides. But they are mostly felt by the author, not the consumer. Similar to how TS libs can be very complex to author because of type level gymnastics, but when done right are easy to consume.

(I do not push them heavily, but I can appreciate strengths and weaknesses of all tools)
by btreecat | 2025-12-29 12:53:28+00:00
I like this approach!

I am struggling to lock down a pod in my home cluster to allow local connections to it's web UI but force all other connections through a VPN client. I'm going to investigate if I could use squid for this.

My next approach is going to involve using a sidecar.

One heads up to the author, the text based charts didn't render well on FF mobile. Text is meant to reflow based on screen size, typeface etc. I feel this is a great case for using a drawing/image instead.
by em500 | 2025-12-29 12:53:33+00:00
Deutsche Bahn is completely state owned, UK rail is privatized. They're both pretty bad. China's new high speed rail is state owned, while the Japanese network is largely private. They're both far better than UK and Germany. I wonder what are the main determinants of the quality of large infra networks? State ownership only seems to have a very loose correlation, where even the sign of the relationship is unclear.
by manarth | 2025-12-29 12:53:49+00:00
> "If you find yourself in a similar situation and want out - call emergency services, say chest pain, out of breath"

Being stuck on a train that's arbitrarily changing stops is irritating and disruptive to passengers. Faking a medical emergency is also disruptive to passengers, and also to the emergency services, who may prioritise the hoax call over genuine emergencies, which risks other peoples' health.

> "The problem is that nobody actually wanted to get off that train."

It's pretty clear they did. No-one would prefer complaining about an hour-plus unplanned detour over simply following their plans and getting off the train.

> "Comparing it to a kidnapping is offensive and absurd."

It's clear they're using the word "kidnapping" as a hyperbolic rhetorical narrative device, and aren't literally comparing it to a kidnapping.
by reddalo | 2025-12-29 12:54:18+00:00
> Most people here speak English

Germany is the country where I found the highest number of people not being able to speak English, even people working in accomodation!

French people probably know English but they refuse to speak it; Italians don't know English that well, but they try their best using rolling R's and gestures.

(I'm a bit ironic)
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-29 12:54:20+00:00
The TL;DR is: regional trains are usually on time, long-distance trains usually are not. If you need to travel between cities, plan with an hour buffer time. Basically, "show some adaptability".

The one good thing about frequent long-distance delays is that you might be lucky and catch an earlier delayed train and actually arrive a bit earlier than planned ;)

(also JFC, does the author like to whine about nothing - I'm travelling frequently with DB for about 25 years now, and while shit happens from time time, most of it is merely a slight inconvenience).
by whateverboat | 2025-12-29 12:54:36+00:00
The one big reason why CEOs exist is trust. Trust from the shareholders that someone at the company is trying to achieve gains for them. Trust from vendors/customers that someone at the company is trying to make a good product. Trust from the employees that someone is trying to bring in the money to the company (even if it doesn't come to them eventually).

And that trust can only be a person who is innately human, because the AI will make decisions which are holistically good and not specifically directed towards the above goals. And if some of the above goals are in conflict, then the CEO will make decisions which benefit the more powerful group because of an innately uncontrollable reward function, which is not true of AI by design.
by graemep | 2025-12-29 12:54:40+00:00
My experience of the trains themselves has been fine in the UK.

Ticket prices vary a lot and are unpredictable. I have not a last minute ticket from London to the midlands for just over £20, but they can be a lot more (several times as much?) for the same journey even booking ahead.

I definitely prefer the train to driving if I am going long distance by myself, but if its multiple people the car becomes a lot cheaper.

Local services in cities are pretty good. I never owned a car in London, nor in Manchester until I had a child.
by raverbashing | 2025-12-29 12:55:03+00:00
I wonder if people think they will be taken seriously with so much hyperbole and drama

> Only then I notice: the driver has been speaking German only.

Oh wow a German conductor in a German train speaking German oh how awkward...

No you were not "kidnapped" your train just stopped at a different station.

> “That’s a different federal state.”

Yes and if you go to many cities in Europe and the US you can walk from one country to another. Oh wow shocking I know /s

Of course this is Deutsche Bahn at its best (in getting hand and feet mixed up) and that compensation is ridiculous. It should at least get your ticket back to the place you intended to go.

Neuwied to Troisdorf is 1h by car or train (in a good day of course)
by hulitu | 2025-12-29 12:55:12+00:00
> They also needed smoother frame pacing and we got a scheduler that Zuck is now using to run data centers.

There was a lot of work in Linux scheduling space over the years. Con Kolivas BFS was one example. The issue was that Linus had his own ideas about kernel scheduling which, unfortunately, were very different from the ones of the linux community.
And yes. The default linux scheduler sucks.
by timthorn | 2025-12-29 12:55:50+00:00
I did learn German at school but it didn't help much when trying to get to Munich airport last year. I could understand what was going on with the cancelled trains at the station I boarded at, but the train I did catch end up tipping us all out after a few stops.

I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.
by zinekeller | 2025-12-29 12:56:34+00:00
(this is just a rant)

Honestly, the weird 16-239 (on 8-bit) color range and 60000/1001 fps limitations stem from the original NTSC standard, which considering both the Japanese NTSC adaptation and European standards do not have is rather frustating nowadays. Both the HDVS and HD-MAC standards define it in precise ways (exactly 60 fps for HDVS and 0-255 color range for HD-MAC*) but America being America...

* I know that HD-MAC is analog(ue), but it has an explicit digital step for transmission and it uses the whole 8 bits for the conversion!
by tomhow | 2025-12-29 12:56:50+00:00
It's great that you've won this award, congrats! But this isn't the way to share it with HN.

For a Show HN post, please follow these guidelines and also consider applying the tips: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638.

If you're sharing a 3rd-party post like this, then you need to use the article's original title, rather than editorializing it to draw attention to your own project.

The right way to share news about winning an award like this would be to write your own blog post, giving the audience some narrative about your journey from conceiving the project to winning the award. That could be a great post.

It's up to you how you communicate your work and achievements to the world, of course, but anything submitted to HN needs to adhere to the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by appreciatorBus | 2025-12-29 12:57:07+00:00
> you seem to think we should be concerned only with problems that provably lead to the end of the world

I am deeply sceptical of trying to use large public institutions and government to solve the “problem” of a price rising and falling from time to time as supply and demand change.

If you don’t believe in supply and demand or markets or you think that economics is some big scam, then we could save some time if you just say that, and then we don’t have to go back-and-forth pretending the issue is about AI or GPUs.

If there is a monopoly case to be made in GPU manufacturing or whatever, then make the case and let’s regulate that monopoly or break it up.

If there’s financial fraud going on, great make the case and let’s deal with it.

If all that’s happening is that some people are making speculative bets on prices a few years out, and they’ll either be right or wrong and either way it will be over, then I just have trouble getting worked up about it. If it means the gaming PC you have planned to build this year will either be a bit more expensive or you’ll have to put it off till the next year, I have trouble getting worked up about it.
by martin-t | 2025-12-29 12:57:14+00:00
I chose unalive because i didn't know google trends allowed searching for asterisks. Appears it does. k*ll was apparently used even before tiktok but usage increased markedly around the same time as unalive appeared. Interestingly d*ad and r*pe don't follow this pattern. I am not sure it treats asterisks correctly, nor that google trends is the right tool to research this, given people searching for the word is only a poor indicator of its usage.

Sidenote, I wish all websites supported markdown properly and not a custom weird subset they found convenient.
by truculent | 2025-12-29 12:57:27+00:00
> As an example: I'm autistic and I learn inside-out, building larger new concepts out of smaller existing ones; those with Asperger's on the other paw, learn outside-in instead, breaking down larger existing concepts into smaller new ones; both are part of the "autism spectrum", but differ very fundamentally.

This is a really interesting observation - can you expand on this a bit more, please? How did you first notice this distinction?

When, for example, learning a new concept in math or physics, what would outside-in look like vs inside out? Would you characterise neurotypical learning in one way or the other?
by ACS_Solver | 2025-12-29 12:57:51+00:00
I think 2016 is a bit too early but yeah, xoofx first wrote about CoreCLR in 2018 and said he'd made considerable progress with something like himself and two other engineers doing it as a side project. That is four years before Unity as a company announced the migration as a priority, which in turn is another four years before the current estimate for when they may ship it.

From my perspective, Unity seems very poorly managed in recent years. The editor experience isn't improving while they continue the usual pattern of shipping features in a poor state where they need another couple versions to become properly usable, and of course they make terrible decisions like the runtime fee, a total insanity that caused a huge loss of trust and boosted Godot development enormously.

Of course my perspective is biased by me not being Unity's main target market. I work on PC strategy games, which are on Steam. At our studio, we don't do mobile, advanced graphics features aren't very relevant, and we may have the most complex UI that ever shipped in a Unity game.
by locallost | 2025-12-29 12:58:07+00:00
I don't know what to make of this. Of course everyone has a right to be pissed off for losing time because of someone else's mistake, but at the same time the language is... I mean if you feel kidnapped because your train connection didn't work out I am not sure how you'd feel if you were really kidnapped. Was my family kidnapped when they were sitting for two hours in the airplane before takeoff because of xyz? No, it was just an unfortunate turn of events that happen from time to time when you fly.

German railways could be better, but at the same time it's nowhere near the level of complaining the average person makes, as in this article. I think it says more about the author than the company. "It's twenty minutes late, I consider this early". Despite the problems that exist, I wouldn't say I ever had the feeling of being relieved the train is only 20 minutes late. Especially not with local trains.
by djoldman | 2025-12-29 12:58:23+00:00
> I was trying to travel 35 kilometers. I was now 63 kilometers from my grandmother’s house. Further away than when I started.

Oh boy. There's something deeply human about the frustrations of state institutions and bureaucracy.

From the linked article:

> How are train cancellations and delays compensated when traveling with the Deutschland-Ticket?

> In the event of a delay of at least 60 minutes at the destination station due to a delay or train cancellation in local transport, you will receive €1.50 compensation per case.

> Amounts under €4 will not be paid out due to a legal de minimis threshold. However, you can accumulate multiple late payment claims.

https://www.bahn.de/faq/deutschlandticket-verspaetung-erstat...
by zaphar | 2025-12-29 12:58:31+00:00
This is an interesting perspective. I usually don't try to imagine how someone should handle the error. Instead I try to indicate the different types of errors that could occur and what type of information needs to be included to be useful to the caller. I can leave the question of what to do with that information to the caller since it's highly situational and the context necessary to make that decision lives outside of the code where I am modeling the error.
Anyone else having trouble topping up on SMS-activate recently?
by Waffle2180 | 2025-12-29 12:59:00+00:00
Recently I ran into an issue where I couldn’t top up my balance on sms-activate for several days.

This wasn’t a one-off glitch — payments simply didn’t go through, and there wasn’t much visibility on when it would be resolved. For anyone relying on SMS verification services for testing, onboarding flows, or QA, this kind of dependency failure is surprisingly disruptive.

It made me reflect on something we often underestimate: how fragile “infrastructure-like” third-party services can be, especially when they’re widely used but lightly abstracted.

Over the past months, I’ve been working on a small alternative called SMS-Act, initially just to reduce my own operational risk. The goal wasn’t to compete on scale, but to focus on a few principles I personally cared about:
• Clear scope: one-time, temporary numbers only (not long-term rentals)
• Transparent pricing (credits refunded automatically if verification fails)
• Simpler UX for developers and testers who just need a code, fast
• Fewer “black box” behaviors when something goes wrong

I didn’t plan to talk about it publicly, but the recent downtime made me realize many people here might be facing the same issue and quietly scrambling for alternatives.

I’m curious:
• How do you handle SMS verification dependencies in your stack?
• Do you build internal fallbacks, or just switch providers when things break?
• What’s the biggest pain point you’ve had with services like this?

If anyone’s interested, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned building SMS-Act so far — or just discuss better ways to reduce risk around these kinds of external services.

(No hard pitch here — genuinely more interested in how others approach this problem.)
by tyleo | 2025-12-29 12:59:21+00:00
I wrote the Circuits programming system for Rec Room, and we took a similar approach: keeping the core logic free of Unity dependencies so it could run and be tested on CoreCLR.

The results were similar as well with significantly better performance outside of Unity. There anre also secondary benefits. Unity’s API surface is huge, and it’s easy for code to accidentally entangle itself with engine details in ways that confuse or constrain other developers.

By isolating the core in a separate DLL, we only expose Unity concepts where they’re actually needed, and we enforce that boundary with tests. That logic constraint ended up being just as valuable as the performance gain
by tessierashpool9 | 2025-12-29 12:59:51+00:00
Asked for a solution of a photographed Ubongo puzzle: https://gemini.google.com/share/f2619eb3eaa1

Gemini Pro neither as is nor in Deep Research mode even got the number of pieces or relevant squares right. I didn't expect it to actually solve it. But I would have expected it to get the basics right and maybe hint that this is too difficult.

Instead in Pro Simple it just gave a wrong solution and Deep Research wrote a whole lecture about it starting with "The Geometric and Cognitive Dynamics of Polyomino Systems: An Exhaustive Analysis of Ubongo Puzzle 151" ... that's just bullshit bingo. My prompt was a photo of the puzzle and "solve ubongo puzzle 151"; in my opinion you can't even argue that this lecture was to be expected given my very clear and simple task description.

My mental model for language models is: overconfident, eloquent assistant who talks a lot of bullshit but has some interesting ideas every now and then. For simple tasks it simply a summary of what I could google myself but asking an LLM saves some time. In that sense it's like Google 2.0 (or 3.0 if you will)
by roryirvine | 2025-12-29 12:59:51+00:00
They often seem to go out of stock over the holidays - sometimes it's worth checking other countries to see what's normally available.

Generally, it's the Precision workstation and laptop lines, the Pro Max desktops & laptops, and the XPS laptops. They've recently started to offer RHEL on the Precisions, too.

(And all their servers, too, of course)
by a2fz | 2025-12-29 13:00:30+00:00
Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.

I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.

Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
by kevin061 | 2025-12-29 13:00:35+00:00
ES has Bizum, NL has Tikkie, and iDEAL, IT has Bancomat, Poland has BLIK.

Thailand is just a country. Why are you comparing Thailand to the world's second biggest economy?

Are you really telling me that failing to coordinate several dozen countries, some with their own currency, is a showcase of failure of the EU?

This makes absolutely no sense.
by cowl | 2025-12-29 13:00:46+00:00
rerouted? it was a completly different destination, much further than he was originally. there is nothing "noone can do" about stupid burecracies like "can't stop at this station because we are not registered". First they had time to register the stop when they changed the itinery, Second if they fauiled taht somwhow and most probably because of "there was no manual how to do it", in a sittuation like this stupid rules like that should go out of the window and the pasengeres be let off as soon as possible and not 60km away. somehow they can be flexible with the people's time but not with their stupid checklists.
by zaphar | 2025-12-29 13:00:48+00:00
what you're describing about errors bubbling up to the top layer, is what happens with the overwhelming majority of errors in my experience.

I agree that this is what happens in practice for most code that I read and have to interact with. I think where I differ from you is that I don't think this is good and do not advise people to do this for their own code. I think it's a pervasive but bad practice in our line of work.