MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sroerick | 2025-12-16 01:06:39+00:00
I live in Truck Country, Wyoming

If you need a truck for work, you're probably going to be towing in it. Now, some of those guys who are hauling are gonna need a 250 or a 350, but a lot of them will do just fine with the 150.

Even if your job isn't hauling, per se, if you work on job sites you wanna be able to haul stuff. Imagine if you showed up to your new Tech Lead job with an 8 year old Chromebook. You'd look a little bit silly.

In addition, it's 2 hours to the nearest big city. So as a practical matter, you're adding an hour to your trip every time you go into town. I like Teslas a lot, but gave you ever been on a road trip in one? It's pretty brutal.

Plus, I feel like, aesthetically, there is a weird block. I would have no problem dumping a load of sheetrock trash in the bed of a new gas truck. For a brand new electric truck? It kind of feels wrong, don't you think? Maybe that is just me being a Luddite, but I really don't have a sense of an electric car as a tool, the way a good truck is.

I think EVs are great as a recreational car, or a useful commuter in the city. I've never seen a Rivian doing blue collar anything.

I drive a Camry btw
by wsc981 | 2025-12-16 01:06:40+00:00
I'm just a Dutch guy that emigrated to Thailand, but I'd never trade my Toyota Hilux diesel for an electric truck. I don't want to have to rely on electric to be able to drive my car. A hybrid could be ok though.

The nice thing about diesel, in case of emergency is you can have a couple of filled jerrycans around so you can always move if needed. I like the reliability, it feels more anti-fragile, if that makes sense.

I wonder if the Gibraltar company that produces Toyota trucks for UN [0] is going fully electric anytime soon, if ever.

---

[0]: https://www.offgridweb.com/transportation/toyota-gibraltar-t...
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-16 01:06:44+00:00
On the flip side, as a van owner (though not a professional "working van") ...

1. you don't need straps and bungees for the van - ours can take pipework, framing lumber and other "long" stuff up to 16', straight on the floor, fully interior.

2. you don't need the gate down - it handles 4x8' sheet goods with all the doors closed, either vertical or horizontal

3. security concerns are much better

4. weather concerns are much better

5. for some folks, you can have highly effective work space inside the van (granted, I've seen some loose equivalents on custom work trucks)

6. mileage is generally significantly better

From my POV, the two wins of the truck form factor are (a) easy of loading/unloading bulk material (e.g. the van is 100% useless for gravel) (b) tall loads. That said, I don't think I've ever need to move anything that was too tall for our Sprinter - worst comes to worst, it gets laid down.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-16 01:06:52+00:00
>However, if you are towing or carrying heavy loads, they are a bad choice

The thing has 800 lb-ft of torque, it has absolutely no problem towing or pulling heavy stuff.

The issue is if you need to tow stuff long distances. That's where is becomes a headache. But bringing your huge boat 30 miles to the lake will be no issue.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-16 01:07:15+00:00
That's the reason I switched. I had an issue where a path was not mounted correctly and we blew through our limits.

Oh, on LE the Rate Limit Adjustment Request forms the contractual things (if that's what they are?) do not load: https://isrg.formstack.com/forms/rate_limit_adjustment_reque...
by defrost | 2025-12-16 01:07:32+00:00
> something that is less deadly than hunting accidents,

Is this a lazy figure of speech?

US police have recently been killing ~ 1,100 people in the US per year.

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.

IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).

* https://ammo.com/research/hunting-accident-statistics

( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )
by kragen | 2025-12-16 01:08:36+00:00
Bitcoin had a spam transaction problem ("dust transactions") which was a bigger problem than email spam, because every transaction is received by every node. It was easy to solve because Bitcoins are minted by proof of work.

I don't think a Captcha for signup would have been much friction. Certainly less than providing a phone number.

Why would someone want to use a closed messaging service like Signal unless they knew an existing user? I don't think that the requirement for that existing user to invite them would be a significant barrier. So I think it's not going to limit its reach.
by DreadY2K | 2025-12-16 01:09:39+00:00
> I’m only claiming that it’s memory safe and I am defining what that means with high precision

Do you have your definition of memory safety anywhere? Specifically one that's precise enough that if I observe a bug in a C program compiled via Fil-C, I can tell whether this is a Fil-C bug allowing (in your definition) memory unsafety (e.g. I'm pretty sure an out-of-bounds read would be memory unsafety), or if it's considered a non-memory-safety bug that Fil-C isn't trying to prevent (e.g. I'm pretty sure a program that doesn't check for symlinks before overwriting a path is something you're not trying to protect against). I tried skimming your website for such a definition and couldn't find this definition, sorry if I missed it.

I typically see memory safety discussed in the context of Rust, which considers any torn read to be memory-unsafe UB (even for types that don't involve pointers like `[u64; 2]`, such a data race is considered memory-unsafe UB!), but it sounds like you don't agree with that definition.
by foresto | 2025-12-16 01:09:49+00:00
I was surprised to learn that Wayland still doesn't offer control of keyboard LEDs like Scroll Lock, so unprivileged programs that use those LEDs cannot be ported to Wayland.

Even if I didn't depend on such a program myself, I would find it strange that Wayland gives the compositor responsibility for only part of the keyboard: its keys, but not its indicator lights.
by jackzhuo | 2025-12-16 01:09:58+00:00
OP here. This discussion is exactly why I implemented the Box-Muller transform!

You are right that humans don't split perfectly randomly (Uniform Distribution). We tend to aim for the middle but miss slightly.

In my code, I modeled this 'human splitting action' using a Gaussian (Normal) distribution centered at 50% of the pile, with a standard deviation. This simulates the user trying to split the stalks roughly in half, rather than just picking a random number from 0 to 49.

Interestingly, my Monte Carlo simulations showed that even with this human bias (splitting near the middle), the final modulo-4 probabilities remain stable. So the algorithm is robust even against our 'imperfect' hands.
by bogzz | 2025-12-16 01:10:15+00:00
My apologies for being off-topic, but it's been a long time since a website made my jaw drop with its design. So simple, nothing extra, beautiful. The images and illustrations carry it so well. Also, there are multiple cover images per issue and a random one is shown on each page visit. And the typography-- I love everything about it. Makes me miss web dev.

edit: the typography combo is different for every article whaaat
by spacechild1 | 2025-12-16 01:10:24+00:00
Yes, this could work for simple cases, but this breaks down pretty quickly:

void checkFoo(const Foo&); Foo getFoo(); void example() { std::vector<Foo> vec; Foo foo = getFoo(); if (checkFoo(foo)) { // *We* know that checkFoo() does not store a // reference to 'foo' but the compiler does not // know this. Therefore it cannot automatically // move 'foo' into the std::vector. vec.push_back(std::move(foo)); } }

The fundamental problem is that C++ does not track object lifetimes. You would end up with a system where the compiler would move objects only under certain circumstances, which would be very hard to reason about.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-12-16 01:10:31+00:00
.... and the second US civil war starts up and one side has hacked into the automobile kill switches ...

"security" and "war" come in all sizes and shapes. Even inter-national warfare can be of the "cold" variety, in which nobody is nuking anybody else, but making automobiles randomly unreliable could be extremely effective (for a while, anyway).
by agentultra | 2025-12-16 01:10:56+00:00
Yeah. I used to manage a team that built a kind of low-code SaaS solution to several big enterprise clients. I sat in on several calls with our sales people and the customer’s IT department.

They liked buying SAP or M$ because it was fully integrated and turnkey. Every SaaS vendor they added had to be SOC2, authenticate with SAML, and each integration had to be audited… it was a lot of work for them.

And we were highly trained, certified developers. I had to sign documents and verify our stack with regulatory consultants.

I just don’t see that fear going away with agents and LLM prompts from frontline workers who have no training in IT security, management, etc. There’s a reason why AI tech needs humans in the loop: to take the blame when they thumbs up what it outputs.
by hexad74 | 2025-12-16 01:11:01+00:00
Thank you for the tips, I only mentioned the .NET portion just because it seems to struggle with wanting to find definitions for calls against code provided by nuget packages. We are currently running a large Blazor project that has a Service class for each route in the project. When specify a specific service as an example, it seems to just get really hung up on trying to search for specific unnecessary details rather than using the complete example it has. Specifying in the prompt to only use the given example doesn't seem to matter. It keeps attempting to fire of bash commands.

Anyways, I do appreciate the tips. I am going to attempt to not use Sonnet 4.5 for planning and see if opus does a better job of limiting scope.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-16 01:11:08+00:00
>You could just go over there and live for a few years, you can be your own source.

No I can't. First of all single anecdotes do not equal national numbers and secondly the truth may be hidden away from westerners and not easy to gleam even if I live there. I experienced this when moving to Europe. I thought WOW this place has every potential to be a strong equal to the US. They got (enough)money, so much bright talent, they can do anything the US can do and then some. But I missed the structural problems at a macro level and it wasn't until I left and many years passed that I finally understood. I just want that insight without having to go through all of that.
by DavidPiper | 2025-12-16 01:11:09+00:00
> When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels familiar and you stop noticing it.

> Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so effort feels right and ease feels wrong. ...

This is the first time I've seen in writing something I've felt deeply for a long time.

I have a long history of (sub-clinical) stress and anxiety problems and experimenting with mindfulness and embodied exercises etc it hit me so strongly that it feels alien/wrong to be relaxed, and that very fact makes it harder to be so.

It sucks.
by andrekandre | 2025-12-16 01:12:10+00:00
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.

if instead of being in conflict with capital/management, the workers owned the companies/schools etc (iow a cooperative), i wonder if they would be against automation and the rest of it in that case? perhaps in that structure automation would be welcomed relief from drudgery and fear of being let go...?

> The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here.

they can vote if its a consumer cooperative, no?

https://ncbaclusa.coop/resources/co-op-sectors/consumer-co-o...
by RajT88 | 2025-12-16 01:12:13+00:00
My wife's university has a totally egregious contract which is exclusive to a food provider for cafeteria food and event catering.

If you want to, say, have a student group sell cookies or whatever, the provider has to approve and you have to pay to host it.

The contract is for 10 years. No freaking way somebody signed off on that without money under the table.
by _russross | 2025-12-16 01:12:46+00:00
I bought one of the first 2022 Maverick Hybrids and took delivery in January 2022. At the time my build came in at MSRP of $25k (+ tax). I just built the closest equivalent on the Ford website (several standard features then are options now) and it came out to >$34k. Not double, but that feels like whole different price category for the same truck in 4 years.
by hatthew | 2025-12-16 01:12:47+00:00
The article states "Suppose we have calculated the expected information gained by potential truth booths like below: Expected information: 1.60 bits ..." This is impossible because of the general fact in information theory that (p(true) * bits_if_true) + (p(false) * bits_if_false) <= 1. If they had said "Suppose we have calculated the maximum information gained...", then 1.6 bits would be valid. They said "expected information" though, so 1.6 bits is invalid.
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-16 01:13:10+00:00
This all hinges on the presupposition that our solar system is unique in its configuration and location in the galaxy.

We haven't surveyed nearly enough other planetary systems to have any real idea if our system is unique. We barely have the ability to even see systems like ours in the first place. There's so little data available that it's not reasonable to draw a conclusion either way.
by tooltalk | 2025-12-16 01:13:29+00:00
>> they'd at least let in the Chinese manufacturers that are interested in them.

China's anti-market tactics in EV/battery supply-chain past 15 years haven't exactly helped promote EVs outside China -- they are now countervailed not only in the US, but also the EU, Canada, Turkiye; even in China-friendly nations, such as Brazil and Russia now are imposing restrictions on Chinese EV imports. Not very realistic.
by smallmancontrov | 2025-12-16 01:13:30+00:00
But Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics and Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party assured me that mergers and trusts were good for me! Look, the companies even have self-serving rationalizations scribbled with crayons on butcher paper saying the same thing!

Seriously, though: I cannot believe how high and how far these utterly dogshit arguments flew without pushback and the amount of damage that consolidation has done to the American Experiment. The best time to get a Lina Khan in the FTC was 40 years ago but the second best time was 4 years ago. I just hope the next president picks up the project... though I'm sure the (by then) trillionaires will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.
Show HN: PasteClean – Desktop app to strip tracking parameters from clipboard
by Iblockedthem | 2025-12-16 01:13:48+00:00
I built a small desktop tool called PasteClean to solve a personal annoyance: sharing URLs filled with tracking garbage (utm_source, fbclid, etc.).

It runs in the background and automatically cleans URLs in your clipboard when you copy them. It handles 50+ tracking parameters and can also unshorten links (bit.ly, t.co) to reveal the destination and clean them before pasting.

Tech stack is Electron/React/TypeScript.

The core privacy features are free. I added a "Pro" lifetime license for some advanced features (unshortening, batch mode) to support development.
by ancillary | 2025-12-16 01:13:55+00:00
I'm not sure if "options" is the relevant word in your post, but it does seem like capital gains tax is significantly reduced in inheritances? Here's an example source that says the cost basis gets reset to its value at approximately the deceased's death [1], and gains relative to that cost basis are likely much smaller (and thus a much smaller tax burden) than those relative to their initial acquisition price possibly decades earlier, no?

[1] https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/life-events/cost-ba...
by sh34r | 2025-12-16 01:14:02+00:00
The EV pickup obsession is so bizarre. Even moreso than the gas pickup obsession. The obvious next step was to take their brilliant EV Transit and scale up production. You don’t have to convince truck bros. There’s no cultural hang-ups. No issues with towing. Just make a nice cargo van with 120v hookups for $50k that’s easy to drive in the city and easy to convert into a camper. Could’ve built three vans with the lithium it took to build these obscenities.

And you know, I’m already compromising here, because it really ought to be a wagon instead of a van, if Detroit had any brains left.

Can’t wait until someone figures out how to smuggle those $15k BYDs in from Mexico. The North American car market needs to be disrupted badly. By China, not by some meme stock.
by jtha | 2025-12-16 01:14:11+00:00
https://monofocus.lovable.app/

Yup, it's another task manager.

I made it for myself to help me focus on one task at a time, hence the name.

It implements my number one productivity hack of picking a task and setting a timer. Time spent on a task increments.

Data is stored locally in the browser although there is a sync option i wouldn't shake a stick at if I hadn't built this myself.

Plus it's a PWA! Those are lovely.
by picki | 2025-12-16 01:14:32+00:00
Hi everyone, I am just validating an idea if a project like susmeter.ai is actually needed at all? It can detect AI/Deepfake signatures in images and videos, and it does it for free, however, there is already soooo much AI generated content that it doesn't even feel like such projects are needed... What do you think? The detector scans the signatures within files and the accuracy is actually quite good, tbh.
by MillironX | 2025-12-16 01:15:33+00:00
> I don't think Julia really solves any problems that aren't already solved by Python.

But isn't the whole point of this article that Matlab is more readable than Python (i.e. solves the readability problem)? The Matlab and Julia code for the provided example are equivalent[1]: which means Julia has more readable math than Python.

[1]: Technically, the article's code will not work in Julia because Julia gives semantic meaning to commas in brackets, while Matlab does not. It is perfectly valid to use spaces as separators in Matlab, meaning that the following Julia code is also valid Matlab which is equivalent to the Matlab code block provided in the article.

X = [ 1 2 3 ]; Y = [ 1 2 3; 4 5 6; 7 8 9 ]; Z = Y * X'; W = [ Z Z ];
by rendx | 2025-12-16 01:15:45+00:00
> Effective January 20, 2026, readers can download EPUB and PDF files of your DRM-free books from their Manage Your Content and Devices page on Amazon. Only verified purchasers who have bought your book can access the EPUB/PDF files. Customers who borrowed your books through Kindle Unlimited or other services can’t download the EPUB/PDF files, even if the books are DRM-free.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GDDXGH9VR22ACM8U
by tehjoker | 2025-12-16 01:15:55+00:00
In America, democracy is defined as liberal democracy to preclude other forms as legitimate. Liberal democracy means theoretically that anyone can contest for political power regardless of political viewpoint. This means that anyone from a monarchist, to a fascist, to religious fundamentalist, to a liberal, to a communist and anything in-between may run in elections. In practice, various devices are used to ensure there is a window of acceptability, and that fire is primarily directed at the left. I used to think at least fascists and monarchists would also be precluded, but I have been shown to be wrong. In this sense, outside of tight parameters, liberal democracy has inherent contradictions that can easily destroy itself and transition to a different point of (usually temporary) stability, such as has been seen in France when the 1st republic became the French Empire under Napoleon, became a republic again, then switched back to monarchy, and so on and so forth.

I'm not sure what the phrase used for what China is doing is (well, there is "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics"), but as an outsider, my understanding is the idea is that a very broad portion of the population should be involved in the communist party and that democracy should be encouraged within a framework of marxism. Nonetheless, several opposition parties are allowed to run in elections though parties too far to the right are excluded. Still, these opposition parties can be fairly critical and given that China is using a significant capitalist mode of production, some elements of capitalist ideology are allowed. It is a little confusing to be sure.
by moduspol | 2025-12-16 01:16:10+00:00
Nah man I'm with you. I've gone chest-deep into this pool and still get issues 5-10% of the time with pretty simple use cases. And I've got a top-of-the-line TV and a pretty good receiver. It's maddening that such conceptually simple use cases don't "just work" even when you DO sink hundreds or thousands of dollars on the stuff you're supposed to.
by teleforce | 2025-12-16 01:16:59+00:00
> If they're taken offline, they stop working.

If people ask me what's wrong with the so called modern technology, this is it.

Local-first system paradigm should be made mandatory and default, not optional [1].

[1] Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
by mcswell | 2025-12-16 01:17:06+00:00
I have very limited experience with LLMs, and no recent experience teaching. But every time I hear about the problem of students using LLMs, I have two thoughts:

1) When they get out of school, no one can stop them from using LLMs. So preventing them from using them now is not a way to teach them how to cope in the future.

2) LLMs are (duh!) often wrong. So treat what the LLMs say as hypotheses, and teach the students how to test those hypotheses. Or if the LLMs are being used to write essays, have the students edit the output for clarity, form, etc. Exams might be given orally, or at least in a situation where the students don't have access to an LLM.
by nebula8804 | 2025-12-16 01:17:29+00:00
This is not true. I was recently reminded of this during the recent small elections that occured. The parties have "internal polling" that was significantly more accurate such that it caused shifts in actions (see the recent surge in efforts by Trump and his party to maintain control of the TN house seat).

Furthermore we saw Musk's and his buddies confidence in the 2024 election. We now know he had internal applications built to better understand what was really going on and access to better analytics than what was shown in the news.

The regular people (like me) were left to rely on pollsters and our confidence come from the fact that many of these pollsters had decades of experience getting things right. This was then regurgitated among all the news (and political youtubers) about how things were going only to have all their predictions be wrong and these esteemed pollsters deciding to retire.

Looking back it may have been all a scam and that its possible that these pollsters were getting ready to retire anyway and gave into party pressure to make Kamala look better than she really was. The end result is that we wasted our time believing nonsense and I am done with it.