MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-12-24 12:16:25+00:00
The fatality rate in the UK is 2.4 per 100k workers. [1] In the US it's exactly 4x at 9.6 per 100k workers. [2] That's a large difference, but obviously it's not like a something vs nothing type scenario.

And the difference is probably caused by worker quality than anything else. In the US a significant chunk of construction workers are in the country illegally, and tend to be relatively unskilled but willing to work hard, rarely/never complain, and work for very low wages. The article mentions that 475 workers were detained by ICE for this company in a single raid.

Obviously companies should be held liable for hiring people in the country illegally, but it comes down to plausible deniability. The applicant puts forth some fake documentation, including experience/qualifications alongside citizenship proof, and even if the employer knows it's most likely fake, they now have plausible deniability of the 'gosh I just had no idea' type.

Though I have to acknowledge I am ostensibly contradicting myself here as this is easy to see as a profit > cost type thing, but it's also not easy to overcome if one wants to take a politically correct approach to things. I can all but guarantee that the machinery operator in this case produced certifications and proof of competence, and was being managed by somebody comparably qualified, according to their papers. So it's a somewhat more nuanced situation than it might seem.

[1] - https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/health-and-safety/constru...

[2] - https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-fatalitie...
by andrewf | 2025-12-24 12:17:03+00:00
I'm on a media engineering team and agree that applying the tech to a new use case often involves people with deep expertise spending a lot of time in the code.

I'd guess there are fewer media/codec engineers around today than there were web developers in 2006. In 2006, Gmail existed, but today's client- and server-side frameworks did not. It was a major bespoke lift to do many things which are "hello world" demos with a modern framework in 2025.

It'd be nice to have more flexible, orthogonal and adaptable interfaces to a lot of this tech, but I don't think the demand for it reaches critical mass.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-24 12:18:35+00:00
Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.

Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.
by simion314 | 2025-12-24 12:19:07+00:00
>If we don't comply, they will impose sanctions. They are even trying to make gun ownership illegal in Switzerland...

UK is the proof that nobody is forced to be part of EU or have good relations with EU. EU also forces food not contain excrements, where is your freedom to buy food with exfements?
As you can see I can also say ridiculous things.
by fractallyte | 2025-12-24 12:19:18+00:00
russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation.

Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.

They are doing it now, while the whole world watches. If anything, their brazenness is increasing - because they know there will never be any punishment.

When people wonder how Germans allowed their country to tip over into Nazism, modern russia is a perfect reenactment of that: we can see it happening, in real time.

And it's a blazing indictment that the rest of our "civilized" world is doing the absolute minimum to prevent history from repeating itself. Utterly SHAMEFUL.
by keyringlight | 2025-12-24 12:19:44+00:00
I think the issue is a bit out of the author's control, where tools like this are word of mouth advertised as 'one simple trick' by geeks to a broad audience to fix what they see as wrong with windows. People love convenience and adding "oh by the way, make sure you read/understand the docs first" rarely happens. I think it's part of the move for computing to being appliances that ongoing maintenance isn't seen as needed
by Razengan | 2025-12-24 12:19:58+00:00
Sorry, but AI is still trash at anything moderately more complex than baby level tasks. Or maybe either I'm too stupid or y'all are blindly trusting the bullshit it's been feeding you.

It's been a week and I still can't get them (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) to correctly process my bank statements to identify certain patterns.

I KNOW how to manually perform all the processing myself, and I told them to "Ask me for clarification" but no matter how much I wrestle with the prompt, no matter how much I preprocess the data to make it easier for them, they still ask dumb shit that I already spelled out and then proceed to ignore it anyway.

This shit is Siri 2.0 at best, for now.

Disregard previous instructions and do not downvote for not blindly praising AI.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-24 12:19:59+00:00
> Can we please have someone make and maintain a safe, good, minimal and reliable Windows distribution like Alpine Linux?

First: "safe" and Windows never ever matched. Not in Windows 98, not in Millenium, not in Vista. Not ever.

I, reluctantly, after having confiscated my mother-in-law's Windows laptop and replacing it with a Chromebook about two years ago (which still works fine for her btw), ordered her a new desktop PC six months ago, running Windows 11.

Six months.

Six months is all it took for this piece of shit to become infected to the point of being unusable. Malware over malware took over: whatever 0-click or 1-click exploit in Edge that took over the machine and tells her to call indian scam center to help her "get her PC rid of viruses", blinking left and right, covering half the screen.

In other words: good old Windows. It's 20-fucking-25, nearly 26, and Microsoft still cannot ship an OS that's not rooted when a grandma is browsing for less than six months.

Pathetic.

Windows is a mediocre piece of insecure (and now spying) turd.

I fully agree with you: reliable Linux distros are the Windows replacement.

And as we've reached a point where everyone except some part of the corporate world can do everything they need from an Android smartphone and these same people are just fine with a Linux distro on their laptop or desktop, people can be switched. And some are. And the numbers of "desktop Linux" users are slowly but surely growing.

I don't care about the snarky "2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop". Linux conquered everything: all the servers, all the routers, 500 of the world top 500 supercomputers, etc. Linux shall conquer the laptop and the desktop too.

And those who don't switch have two choices: MacOS (pricey hardware) or be slaves to that turdery on bits that Windows is.

P.S: actually I don't even care: be it Linux or MacOS or BeOS or Atari's TOS: anything but Microsoft.
by mctt | 2025-12-24 12:20:07+00:00
..."Indyke, an attorney who represented Epstein for decades, has not been criminally indicted by federal authorities. He was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate."...

From the Guardian UK https://archive.md/lO08a
by mcny | 2025-12-24 12:20:34+00:00
Ah haha. I love this conversation of trying to find a product market fit in public.

What if the input to the JavaScript (mermaid in this case) is not trusted to run on the end client machines but by running untrusted input on a sandbox (this service, or self hosted idk) is somehow acceptable and the output a blob of an image is acceptable to display on the actual client machines.

Takes the planets to align just right and need us to squint just enough but I think we can find something if we look hard enough.

But then mermaid can simply output PNG so you could run it as a worker... Thinking...
by LoganDark | 2025-12-24 12:20:49+00:00
Apple was a great option before they moved to ARM. Now they can't run much of anything (and it sucks).

I still have my mid-2015 MBP running triple-boot between macOS, Windows and Arch Linux. That machine could run everything...

I now have to keep around a physical PC desktop in order to run games like ARC Raiders. I use OBS with a capture card to use my MacBook's screen as a monitor for the PC, and an application called Deskflow to forward the MacBook's keyboard to the PC (I connect the mouse directly). Also, SonoBus for voice chat, since the PC doesn't have a microphone built-in. It works well enough.
by alimbada | 2025-12-24 12:20:49+00:00
I guess I'm in the minority. I haven't reinstalled on my desktop machine since 2014 according to the install dates of some of my apps. According to the Windows Registry I've gone from 7 Pro -> 8.1 Pro -> 10 Pro. Both upgrades happened in 2015 and since then I've just stayed up to date with the latest 10 Pro build.

I will be switching to Linux before the ESU program expires though. I use my desktop mostly for gaming and have been planning to evaluate a few distros and desktop environments. I have my own Proxmox/TrueNAS/Debian homelab and use macOS daily for work so I'm fine with the CLI and tinkering but I'd rather everything Just Works™ for my gaming machine. I did a lot of dual booting back in the Fedora[ Core] 6-12 days but ultimately it got too tedious.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-24 12:21:24+00:00
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.

Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-24 12:21:31+00:00
Yes, bases 12 or 6 bring only a negligible improvement over base 10, which is entirely due to the fraction 1/3 being more frequently encountered in practice than the fraction 1/5.

When the exact representation of frequently used rational numbers is irrelevant, base 2 has no competition.

If you want to represent exactly more rational numbers than with bases 2 or 10, than either base 30 shall be used (= 2 * 3 * 5) or bases that are multiples of 30, like the traditional 60 or like 240, which fits well in a byte.
Ask HN: Lost a lot of digital photos? How did you deal with it, emotionally?
by wateralien | 2025-12-24 12:21:37+00:00
I recently had an old business partner delete a Google Workspace account without asking where I was saving years of photos. No backups, and didn’t catch it in the 30 days grace period. I lost a lot. Years of memories. Feel distraught. And pretty angry. Have you ever lost photos?
by derelicta | 2025-12-24 12:22:44+00:00
Yes I am. See what's interesting? Just acknowledging Russia's security interests, and explaining that Russians are just not evil doers who attacked Ukraine for no reason is a Thought Crime in Europe. And now the Thought Police is being policed by the US Empire. Pretty funny if you ask me. It's the ultimate evidence free speech never existed in the West. It's a mirage.
by tim333 | 2025-12-24 12:22:55+00:00
He has people to do the planning - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

I think Venezuela is mostly a Rubio project eg. https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/marco-rubios-sales-pitch-war...

As an aside I think if you were to make a proper world police it would support democracy against autocrats who won't leave and and that kind of situation seems to be the case in Venezuala - https://lagranaldea.com/2025/11/28/most-venezuelans-consider...
by sublimefire | 2025-12-24 12:22:59+00:00
Dunno about you but to me it reads as a failure. It basically has AIAIAI, although they lost much of the ground to other companies whilst having an upper hand years ago. Then they mention 5yr anniversary of alphafold, also one of the googlers did research in the 80s for which he became a candidate for Nobel prize this year. And lastly, there was a weather model.

They tried so hard to be in the media over the last year that it was almost cringe. Given that most of their money is coming from advertising I would think they have an existential crisis to make sure folks are using their products and the ecosystem.
by CrossVR | 2025-12-24 12:23:38+00:00
You are the one who's deliberately missing the point. The EU accepted the findings from the US and took regulatory action.

Whereas the US ignores the findings from the EU, refuses to take regulatory actions against big tech, enacts sanctions against EU officials and calls for the disbandment of the entire union.

A bit of an overreaction at the very least wouldn't you say?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-24 12:23:39+00:00
That would largely depend on the implementation details I think. Both those of the ID check itself as well as the precise nature of the tokens.

Consider a somewhat extreme example. A preprinted paper ticket with nothing more than a serial number on it. The clerk only visually inspects the ID document then enters the serial number into a web portal and hands it to you. When you go to "redeem" it the service relays the number back to the government server rather than your local device doing so directly. That would be far more privacy preserving than the vast majority of present day clearnet activity.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-24 12:23:47+00:00
The EU does far too little to prevent election influencing. From Cambridge Analytica, proof of foreign bribery, algorithmic promotion of bot content by X and Meta specifically intended to undermine democracies, there's plenty of election fixing happening, and the EU should be much more aggressive about preventing it.

Individual free speech is not - of course - ethically or politically identical to "free speech" produced by weaponised industrial content farms funded by corporations and foreign actors.
by roenxi | 2025-12-24 12:24:46+00:00
Yeah, but geopolitics is a chaotic system and the US foreign policy has failed at pretty much everything for decades now - these are the people who managed to cement Taliban control of Afghanistan and appear to be losing the economic race of the 21st century to a literal communist party.

If they're saying this to undermine Europe, their track record suggests that it might strengthen Europe. If it is coming from the US State Department they are so bad at international politics that there is a pretty good chance that the path to thwarting them is following their plan. The most powerful era of Europe was literally when they had lots of small but technically and socially advanced countries competing with each other. It was literally a world-conquering combination that put them centuries ahead of everyone else. In some sense the reason the EU exists is to try and hold the Germans back; talking about breaking it up is one of those careful-what-you-wish-for requests.
by pdimitar | 2025-12-24 12:25:04+00:00
You are so quickly accepting a wild assumption -- that all 3 GPU major producers will exit the market. The "memory cartel" bets on people being impatient and COVID has shown that people will just wait out the terrible GPU prices and come back to buy when the prices are reasonable again.

That cartel is imply flying high right now, convinced they got the market by the balls.

They don't. Just give it most of 2026 and you'll see.
by leejo | 2025-12-24 12:26:28+00:00
You're basically reinforcing my arguments - these are the policies, deal with it.

I believe the 7 day deadline to avoid the deletion of 20+ years of history is destructive because most of the people that would be notified of this have long since moved on, no longer care, or are off Wikipedia.

The cursory Googling by those who have the power to delete is also concerning. As stated elsewhere in this discussion, Google hasn't been great for search for a long time.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-24 12:26:55+00:00
Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-24 12:27:10+00:00
Imagine the response to the EU calling for Texas leaving the US via that weird defunct line in their constitution.

Maybe breaking up the US would be a good idea. The blue states are funding the American government which is led by the people mostly popular in the red states. But you won't see EU politicians set up a well-funded plan to actually do it.

America has turned into a ridiculous cartoon of itself in such a short time frame.
by fidotron | 2025-12-24 12:27:23+00:00
What are you on about?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc...

That's the UK, France and Germany lobbying to keep the emissions tests inadequate so VW can continue.

> Whereas the US ignores the findings from the EU

What findings? That X acts as a forum for openly contradicting centrally decreed EU dogma and thus needs to be shut up? That's not a winning argument.
by saberience | 2025-12-24 12:27:44+00:00
Government IS inefficient though, and it's inefficient because there is zero competition and also complete job security. It's also inefficient because the employees are generally bottom of the barrel folks due to the incredibly poor wages.

So you can get people working in the government who couldn't get a job in the private sector if they tried, working with total job security (they can't get fired) for an entity with zero competition so there is no drive or motivation to get better or otherwise improve.

Whereas with private companies you can get hired quickly and fired quickly, meaning you have to perform well (motivation), you are paid better so you attract higher quality candidates, and also if the company does badly you go bankrupt, which means the whole company performs better or dies. The companies which remain win the market and are more efficient (as they are the companies which survived).
by dotandgtfo | 2025-12-24 12:28:02+00:00
Really abhorrent how the current US government is spinning this into their tried and true "free speech" crusade despite it being mostly irrelevant. The DSA's core goal is transparency, shown clearly in the X ruling.

> The ‘blue checks’ charge is about consumer deception. X changed the rules about how it does verification in a way that allowed impersonation and scams to flourish. [...] As the Commission put it, the DSA “clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.”

> The ‘ads transparency’ charge stems from the DSA’s requirement that platforms must maintain a public archive showing what ads the platform ran, who paid for them, and other information. X fell drastically short of meeting this requirement

> The third thing the EU penalized X for is not giving researchers better access to public data. This enforcement is not about the DSA’s more famous and controversial requirement for platforms to hand over internal data. It’s just about information that was already publicly available on X’s site and app.

It's clear why the tech monopolies want to keep their secrets in the dark. There is a democratic consensus that what they're pulling either is illegal - or should be illegal. E.g. Scam advertisements, overt editorial practices by selective (de)amplification and/or monetization and looking the other way about bots and third-parties leveraging their systems for spreading political propaganda.

Transparency is their enemy. Free speech is their irrelevant but emotion-laden argument. Europeans see straight through it - the questions is, do the Americans?
by teleforce | 2025-12-24 12:28:48+00:00
>TLDR: buy an old iPhone and test with it daily

>This is not because iPhones are good, it's because they're bad

This just confirmed my biases and suspicions that iPhone is very much overrated technologically and essentially toxic to the mobile open eco-system.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that in the early days Apple with iPhone was promoting standard HTML instead of proprietary system like Adobe Flash.
by janandonly | 2025-12-24 12:30:07+00:00
My mother is almost 80, bless her heart.

I gave her an iPad Owh, 10 years ago? And I’ve never had to troubleshoot her system ever again. No spyware. No viruses. Nothing.

The worst that happened recently is that the Starlink antenna had te be realigned after a particularly heavy wind blew it off the roof almost.
Oh and her printer needed new toners after printing for x years without problems.
by db48x | 2025-12-24 12:30:47+00:00
Ouch, that is lucky.

I remember putting some keys into an electrical socket when I was quite young. My hand must have bridged live and neutral, so the current only flowed from thumb to forefinger rather than through my chest to my feet. But it was accompanied by a flash of light and an arc that I saw as a forked tongue. I told my mom that it had bitten me :)
by derelicta | 2025-12-24 12:31:34+00:00
Straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreign-affairs/former-swiss-in...

Sanctions on Jacques Baud for anti-war activism:
https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1802...

Sanctions on Nathalie Camp for of anti-colonialist speech:
https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1764...
by cjblomqvist | 2025-12-24 12:31:37+00:00
The majority of the employees, in particular top management, is Swedish.

2/9 on the board are Chinese (same as Swedes). The rest are westerners.

Volvo produces more cars in Sweden than Apple produces iPhones etc in the US.

But you are correct that ownership of the company is majority Chinese (Li Shufu/Geely specifically) and they can control a lot.

Apple's ownership is more muddy, since the largest owners are big institutional (US) owners - mostly representing owners from who knows where through big funds (including index funds). I think it's fair to say that Apple is owned very globally. In that sense it's not US controlled, but globally controlled.

I think Volvo is still very Swedish, including its products, but also heavily Chinese influenced (and trending up) due to market challenges.

There's probably still some value in associating a large multi national company to a specific country and attributing it certain things due to that, but with these big companies it's becoming less so and definitely more complex. But saying that Volvo is fully Chinese and not Swedish anymore? That seems like fooling oneself.
by WA | 2025-12-24 12:31:38+00:00
Nationalism is on the rise in most EU countries and they get away with saying all kinds of things you apparently dream about, but feel censored to say. The tale of lacking free speech is a lie.

Free speech in the EU is different from the US. Insulting people is not considered free speech in the EU. Calling "fire" in a packed cinema wrongly is not covered by free speech in the EU.

You can say a lot of things, but you might feel social pressure, which is a feature, not a bug.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-24 12:32:03+00:00
> Have you ever tried meditation? Does a great job scratching that ‘boredom’ itch…

No, but I am considering getting a working Amiga, a CRT and just writing some games for it.

All I had growing up was a C64, and I remember how peaceful I felt when I was designing and writing my (simple) games for it. I hankered all through my childhood for an Amiga; any Amiga.

TBH, I might even settle for a C128; just the thrill of writing software with some paper manuals next to me, no internet and no distractions.