MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arjie | 2025-12-03 08:19:22+00:00
It's got to be a nightmare to drive these large American cars in Europe. The streets really aren't the most accommodating for them. I rented a Mercedes V-class minivan for my family and friends to drive to a wedding in the UK and that was such a pain in London. I've never driven such a large vehicle in London before and I probably never will again. Should've just taken the train out to some far off spot before renting the car.

We also had a wedding to go to in France where we drove a Citroen C4. To be honest, if these weddings weren't so far from railway stations and we didn't have to transport so many people together I'd never have done it. And both these cars were tiny compared to the GMC Sierras or Cadillac Escalades you see on San Francisco streets.

I can only conclude that anyone who drives an American-size vehicle in these places is a masochist. It cannot be fun. No, not even to ride in while someone else drives.
Are RGB LED installations contributing to e-waste and energy waste?
by emmasuntech | 2025-12-03 08:19:50+00:00
I like programmable LEDs. WS2812 strips, NeoPixels, addressable matrices—they’ve enabled ambient lighting, and interactive installations. But lately I’ve been wondering: what’s the hidden environmental cost?

Most consumer-grade RGB LED strips are not repairable: one dead pixel often ruins the whole strip.They’re typically built on flexible PCBs with mixed materials, making recycling nearly impossible.And while individual LEDs draw little power, large installations (e.g., 300+ LEDs at full white) can easily pull 30–60W continuously—comparable to an old incandescent bulb, but running all night as “mood lighting.”Yet in maker tutorials, hackathons, and even commercial smart lighting, sustainability rarely comes up. We optimize for brightness, color depth, and latency—but not for lifespan, repairability, or standby power.

So I’m genuinely curious:Are there modular, repairable LED systems being developed ? Could we design these systems to sleep deeply when idle, or use local sensors to avoid unnecessary illumination? Or is the energy impact so small that it’s not worth worrying about?
by echelon | 2025-12-03 08:19:59+00:00
Americans want big cars.

American regulations created a dichotomy where there's no middle ground. Big car or sour cream dollop with no space and no power.

Americans want big because big means "safety". An SUV feels safer next to the semi than a Smart car. They also want big to haul the occasional furniture between moves, go on the occasional road trip, bring all the gear when camping, or bring back a massive shopping haul.

American housing is way less dense outside the cities. There's no reason for a compact car if you live in the burbs apart from gas mileage.

At the same time, more and more people want to build bike lanes and people infra near roads. "Strong Towns" movement, etc.

We're putting more bicyclists on the roads next to big cars now.
Show HN: Holesail – Share localhost over peer-to-peer, no port forwarding
by supersuryaansh | 2025-12-03 08:20:24+00:00
Hi guys,

Wanted to share a project I have been building for a while: Holesail, a lightweight peer-to-peer tunneling tool that makes sharing local self-hosted services extremely easy.

No port forwarding, no VPNs, no servers in the middle — just a direct, end-to-end encrypted connection between two peers using a simple connection key.

It supports both UDP and TCP and runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, Android and iOS.

The goal is to make Holesail the go-to solution for developers, hobbyists, and teams who need fast, reliable, private connectivity: hosting dev servers for teammates, sharing localhost, enabling LAN-style multiplayer, remote access, SSH, self-hosting or P2P features in applications without managing networking complexity.

It is the perfect alternative to Tailscale and Cloudflared.

Would love to hear feedback from anyone working with networking, P2P systems, or tunneling tools.

Happy to answer any questions!

Thanks
by avdelazeri | 2025-12-03 08:20:38+00:00
While I never measured it, this aligns with my own experiences.

It's better to have very shallow conversations where you keep regenerating outputs aggressively, only picking the best results. Asking for fixes, restructuring or elaborations on generated content has fast diminishing returns. And once it made a mistake (or hallucinated) it will not stop erring even if you provide evidence that it is wrong, LLMs just commit to certain things very strongly.
by mtts | 2025-12-03 08:20:38+00:00
I'm as bearish as anyone on the current AI hype, but this particular ship has sailed. Research is revealing these humongous neural networks of weights for next token prediction to exhibit underlying structures that seem to map in some way to a form of knowledge about the world that is, however imperfectly, extracted from all the text they're trained on.

Arguing that this is meaningfully different from what happens in our own brains is not something I would personally be comfortable with.
by bheadmaster | 2025-12-03 08:22:33+00:00
As a Go programmer, I find it quite puzzling that Rust didn't handle panic edge cases as well as Go did with defer keyword. Defer executes at the end of a function, regardless of whether it returned or panic'd, so you can write safe mutex code just by doing something like:

mutex.Lock() defer mutex.Unlock()

And if you need to unlock the mutex in one of multiple places, you can wrap it into a sync.Once.

There must be a reason Rust doesn't do something similar...
by IshKebab | 2025-12-03 08:22:48+00:00
Lack of investment more like. There are a ton of simple and obvious bugs that have persisted well before the AI crazy, e.g. this annoying bug from 2021: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874

This one is almost a one-line change (technically they need an extra flag in the YAML but that's hardly difficult): https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12882#discussi...

That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
by bdbdbdb | 2025-12-03 08:22:56+00:00
Glad to see someone refute the AI water argument, I'm sick of that one. But I do not see how the displacement argument fits. Maybe you can elaborate but I don't see how we can compare AI usage to watching Netflix for any length of time. I can't see a situation where someone would substitute watching stranger things for asking chatGPT questions?

The writing and illustrating activities use less energy, but the people out there using AI to generate ten novels and covers and fire them into the kindle store would not have written ten novels, so this is not displacement either
by bsder | 2025-12-03 08:23:02+00:00
People driving "Brodozers(tm)" can't see shit near the vehicle due to both the big hood and being super high up, while the gigantic, flat front grille kills people rather than crumpling them over the hood.

And while I call them "Brodozers" to be derogatory, a significant number of really tiny females are driving them as well in the name of "safety". And they REALLY can't see anything over the hood.

The combination of gigantic blind spots and complete energy transfer is good at killing unarmored people.
by jalapenos | 2025-12-03 08:23:29+00:00
Yes yes workers of the world unit yada yada 100 million dead from communism isn't enough let's do it again yada yada.

Of course somehow only the person with capital exploits the person with labour, never other way. I "exploit" the taxi driver when I use the capital in my wallet to pay for his labor, but he doesn't equally exploit me somehow.

And of course it's impossible for workers to start their own businesses and become "exploiters" themselves, because... some Chomsky shit or whatever
by CalRobert | 2025-12-03 08:24:06+00:00
True, France does too of course, but Germany has been particularly stubborn. There's infighting within Europe, for that matter - note Polestar opposing Merz's attempts to weaken Europe's phase out of combustion vehicles. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsbirmingham/volvo-and-pole...
by jack_tripper | 2025-12-03 08:25:15+00:00
Stubbornness to change is part of Germany's national identity, more often than not towards its own detriment.

But also, Merz is not alone in this, but a lot of Eastern Europe can't afford EVs at current EU prices so the EU has to make some concessions. People in Romania or Bulgaria can't afford to buy a Polestar like people in Netherlands can.

EU leaders needs to account for the massive disparities of purchasing power between places like Nordics and Romania/Bulgaria for example when they make sweeping legislation like that.

Sure it would be nice if all of EU was like Norway with only EVs everywhere, but this way you'd basically be bankrupting and turning against you the people in the poorer countries of the union who are already disproportionately affected by the CoL crisis of the EU, who are effectively paying German energy and grocery prices but at Eastern EU salaries and pensions. This is not sustainable.

Not to mention the disparity in public transportation infrastructure where a car is basically mandatory for commuting outside big cities in place like Romania.
by consp | 2025-12-03 08:25:21+00:00
Afaik the payout is determined by your insurance, not the opposing party if you are not the cause. They will usually just stick to the standards set by the companies and not argue.

They are all business vehicles as the premiums would be so insane no person would pay it (which is a hint why they should not be in the road). The problem comes when the crash out costs the business and then you get nothing due to type of insurance (pretty much we pay nothing you pay everything yourself), or the ability of companies to fight endless court battles which your insurance likely does not cover.

My way of middle fingering them is reporting them every time they are either on the curb when there is a parking spot (not legal, blocking pedestrian access is only partially legal when there is no parking pace nearby and you leave enough space), or when they overextend onto the road which is a judgement call and up to the enforcing officer.

You also need to keep notice of people trying to get the municipality to widen parking spots and block that.
by snake_doc | 2025-12-03 08:25:41+00:00
China added ~90GW of utility solar per year in last 2 years. There's ~400-500GW solar+wind under construction there.

It is possible, just may be not in the U.S.

Note: given renewables can't provide base load, capacity factor is 10-30% (lower for solar, higher for wind), so actual energy generation will vary...
by written-beyond | 2025-12-03 08:25:56+00:00
I'm just as much of an avid llm code generator fan as you may be but I do wonder about the practicality of spending time making projects anymore.

Why build them if other can just generate them too, where is the value of making so many projects?

If the value is in who can sell it the best to people who can't generate it, isn't it just a matter of time before someone else will generate one and they may become better than you at selling it?
by nbadg | 2025-12-03 08:26:08+00:00
I'm not trying to say that there aren't plenty of applications for small scale mechanical devices, but rather that the applications where FDM-style 3d printing would be an appropriate manufacturing process are likely to be largely biological.

Biological applications (of which tooth and bone would of course be included) are extremely well-suited for additive manufacturing because they're frequently one-offs, and therefore cannot scale, and oftentimes highly insensitive to price. Mass market products are a whole different ball game; even for applications where there isn't currently an economical manufacturing method, I'm very skeptical that there's a path where AM could be scaled out to the volumes required to sell the end component at a commercially viable cost.

To be fair though, I didn't do a good job expressing that, because I just took it for granted that it would be clear that large ratios between feature size and nozzle size are rarely economical for FDM-style AM, which isn't necessarily an obvious observation.
by vidarh | 2025-12-03 08:26:53+00:00
You could play music on the C64 by sampling the tape ports 1bit input and twiddling the sound chips volume accordingly.

You could of course store the samples too, to play back later, but doing realtime sampling into 64KB of RAM didn't exactly let you store much... And a 1MHz CPU didn't let you do much compression if you wanted to keep up..
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-03 08:27:19+00:00
I fixed a bunch of nitpicky PR comments just by saying "PR 69 has some comments, fix the issues" to Claude.

It opened the PR automatically, took the comments and applied the fixes (renaming a few things, simple refactoring and added a few unit tests).

Effort from me: maybe 5 minutes going through the PR comments and deciding they were super simple monkey work and 10 seconds typing instructions for Claude.

Then maybe 5 minutes of checking the work, commit and push.

All of this could've been done with a Github integrated Claude tbh without me in the loop more than accepting the changes one by one.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-03 08:27:24+00:00
Paying $600 plus a subscription for a poo camera is a bit embarrassing in itself.

> promising to track and provide insights on gut health, hydration, and more.

While I'm sure this theoretically could be 100% device side and handled only in encrypted format on the servers, that would be a gigantic pain in the arse (heh). At least, on-device inference is going to be a bit crap (heh) for some time. Since anyone gullible enough to think this was a good buy is probably up to their neck in 419 scams already, telling them "nah yeah it's E2EE, it's fine bro trust us" should cover it.

People who think this though probably aren't numerous and aren't going to be customers anyway (but I'm sure AI Rate My Dump is or will be a YC thing eventually).
by gmueckl | 2025-12-03 08:27:32+00:00
European living in the US here. Around my mostly suburban area, I see mainly SUVs and crossovers with a few vans and pickups sprinkled in. Outside the urban areas, pickups and other monsters like nine seaters seem more common.

I also see a lot - and I mean a lot - of people holding a phone while driving, even in dense city traffic. Add to that non-walkable streets in some places and unsafe rules like legal right turns on a red light. Cyclists often have to squeeze into a narrow bike lane that is level with the car lanes instead of raised onto the sidewalk. That adds up to a much higher amount of latent dangers than in Europe.
by teekert | 2025-12-03 08:28:01+00:00
I once rented a small Kia (cheapest car I could get), drove from Houston to New Orleans and back. Apart from my eye balls popping at the sight of all the weapons on people and in shops, seeing some of the most obese people ever in my life (even in commercials it's ok to be obese), the 3x portions of all the food, and the variety of [drive-through-x for x in [ATM, pharmacy, funeral, etc]], I was in constant fear of someone not noticing my tiny Kia and driving over me.

I was stopped by police while taking a walk and shouted at and treated like a criminal when walking in to a Wendy's drive through (even though only the drive through was open at that hour!) But, other than that, the people were incredibly kind! The culture shock though... It is very hard to imagine if you've never been there. I think as someone from western Europe I have more in common with people from Thailand.

Cars are really a must-have in the US, biking is just a hobby. It's more the other way around here. Everybody is a "cyclist" (not even a word we use here) some of the time. It means "carists" have respect and understanding of how it is on a bike, and drive carefully around people on bikes (in general, there are always exceptions). Our infrastructure and law demands it (ie, a car-owner is always financially responsible in an accident with a pedestrian or person on a bike here, insurance for this is mandatory).

Here people in massive US sized cars are really seen as anti-social, in general I'd say. Hope it stays that way. For now I think some of those cars can't even fit into city-center parking garages here (ie [0], btw if you look around there you see separated bike lanes, crossings where pedestrians always have priority (ignoring that is instant fine), very narrow lanes for cars. Go forward in time and you see they added "statues" that look like they are about to cross the street to make drivers aware of this.)

[0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/tVaeHa4SNAz3iQ4x9
by simianwords | 2025-12-03 08:28:14+00:00
I kind of agree but this is missing a big part in my opinion. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?

There might be certain number of deaths we can accept for increased cost but how is it so obvious that this tradeoff was worth it?

What if cars got 2x costlier in EU due to the regulations to give you a .01% increased chance in safety?

Edit: here are some back of envelope numbers from chatgpt

A single, ordinary car ride carries an extremely small chance of death:

USA: ~1 in 7.7 million

EU: ~1 in 20 million

Its not super clear that optimising these numbers is obviously worth the increased costs.

Edit2: people can make the choice to buy Volvo cars that are ~40% safer. Why isn't every car buyer buying only Volvo?

The assumption you have to make is that regulation would make it much cheaper to buy a safe car than just buying Volvo. It is somewhat true but not sure on the extent.
by kelnos | 2025-12-03 08:28:15+00:00
As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration.

So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is.

A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
by apexalpha | 2025-12-03 08:28:17+00:00
Dutch car taxes are based on CO2 emissions and weight, these 'cars' from the US will be pricing themselves out of market anyway.

> Yet, EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%.

WOW! That's massive
by janitor77swe | 2025-12-03 08:28:23+00:00
"EU vehicle safety regulations have supported a 36% reduction in European road deaths since 2010. By contrast, road deaths in the US over the same period increased 30%, with pedestrian deaths up 80% and cyclist deaths up 50%."

Of course, we are talking about two completely different sets of traffic cultures here (urban design, laws etc.) but I wouldn't be surprised if this gets accepted fully as part of a trade deal. EU isn't a strong negotiator, caves easily under American pressure and Trump has a firm hand and knows how to get the best deal for himself.

The only place on the entire continent where I've seen American cars being driven is the Netherlands and they stick out like a sore thumb. They are too big, too loud, too heavy, emit massively more CO2, usually don't have good acceleration (which you need into/out of roundabouts). Just not a good fit for European roads and streets. God forbid you crash into a pedestrian or a cyclists, you kill them instantly. They are built like a tank whereas European cars will self-destroy to preserve pedestrian life.
by koliber | 2025-12-03 08:28:32+00:00
NOTE: People pointed out that it's $800 billion to cover interest, not $8 billion, as I wrote below. My mistake. That adds 2 more zeroes to all figures, which makes it a lot more crazy. Original comment below...

$8 billion / US adult adult population of of 270 million comes out to about $3000 per adult per year. That's only to cover cost of interest, let alone other costs and profits.

That sounds crazy, but let's think about it...

- How much does an average American spend on a car and car-related expenses? If AI becomes as big as "cars", then this number is not as nuts.

- These firms will target the global market, not US only, so number of adults is 20x, and the average required spend per adult per year becomes $150.

- Let's say only about 1/3 of the world's adult population is poised to take advantage of paid tools enabled by AI. The total spend per targetable adult per year becomes closer to $500.

- The $8 billion in interest is on the total investment by all AI firms. All companies will not succeed. Let's say that the one that will succeed will spend 1/4 of that. So that's $2 billion dollar per year, and roughly $125 per adult per year.

- Triple that number to factor in other costs and profits and that company needs to get $500 in sales per targetable adult per year.

People spend more than that on each of these: smoking, booze, cars, TV. If AI can penetrate as deep as the above things did, it's not as crazy of an investment as it looks. It's one hell of a bet though.
Show HN: Sid– tiny portable system info tool for Windows.
by gexos | 2025-12-03 08:28:56+00:00
Hi all,

I’ve built a small Windows utility called *System Information Dashboard* and I’d love some feedback.

It’s a portable system info tool that shows at a glance: - CPU usage - RAM usage - Disk usage - OS version and build - System uptime - Basic device/system details

A few design choices: - *Portable*: just an EXE, no installer, no registry changes. - *No network calls / telemetry*: it doesn’t phone home, no tracking, no ads. - *Lightweight*: written in AutoIt, meant to be quick to open, check info, and close. - *Optional sensors*: for temperatures/sensors it can open LibreHardwareMonitor as an external app instead of reinventing that wheel.

Motivation: I work as an IT technician and I wanted a small dashboard I can quickly run on a client machine to see the basics without installing heavyweight suites like AIDA64/HWInfo or digging through multiple Windows panels.

Links: - Download / info page: https://www.gexos.org/system-information-dashboard-lightweig... - GitHub (code, README, changelog): https://github.com/Gexos/System-Info-Dashboard

I’m mainly looking for feedback on: - UI/UX (too simple? missing obvious info?) - Any red flags in how I’m gathering system info - Features you’d expect from a minimal sysinfo tool that I may be missing

Happy to answer questions and hear criticism. If you spot bugs or weird behaviour on your setup, please let me know your Windows version and hardware.