MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BurningFrog | 2025-12-26 05:15:52+00:00
The accident rate isn't even the biggest advantage over human drivers.

The big game changer is that the computer doesn't need sleep!!

Human truck drivers in the US are only legally allowed to drive 10-12 hours per day. Which usually means the truck is parked half the time. With a computer driving, trucks can run non stop 24/7.

This is revolutionary change! Twice the delivery speed at half the cost. Should improve a lot of things across the economy. Unless some luddites find the power to stop it.

> How will this affect transportation jobs?

The human long distance truck driver will fade away as a career. It will probably take a decade or two, so people will have time to adjust.

The transportation industry should end up substantially larger, which normally creates a bunch of new jobs/professions, but I won't pretend to know how that will play out.
by araes | 2025-12-26 05:19:10+00:00
Had to look up the rules on bows and arrows in the European Union when I got to [4.17.4] Bows and arrows. "bows offered for sale with arrows are to be considered as toys" Wait. What? Like, all bows and arrows?

[4.17.4] https://law.resource.org/pub/eu/toys/en.71.1.2014.html#s4.17...

Took a bit to find, yet eventually [Directive 2009/48/EC, Annex 1] "List of products that, in particular, are not considered as toys"

9. "bows for archery over 120 cm long"

[Directive 2009/48/EC, Annex 1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

Pfew. Not, quite that crazy.
by dsmark | 2025-12-26 05:19:17+00:00
The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, said: "The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers."

The move is the latest in a broad crackdown on US immigration by President Donald Trump, who has dramatically stepped up deportations of immigrants and sent enforcement agents into cities across the country to carry out arrests. The change also follows moves earlier this year to curb the number of applicants for the H-1B visa, which is popular among technology and professional services companies, including charging an additional $100,000 fee.

Beryl Howell, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, late on Tuesday ruled the White House could move forward with the application charge after the US Chamber of Commerce had sued in October to block the six-figure fee.
by imron | 2025-12-26 05:19:32+00:00
How are you using AI and what sort of software are you building?

I have similar years experience and regularly try out AI for development but always find it’s slower for the things I want to build and/or that it produces less than satisfactory results.

Not sure if it’s how I use the models (I’ve experimented with all the frontier ones), or the types of things I’m building, or the languages I’m using, or if I’m not spending enough, or if it’s just my standards are too high for the code that is produced but I usually always end up going back to doing things by hand.

I try to keep the AI focused on small well defined tasks, use AGENT.MD and skills, build out a plan first, followed by tests for spec based development, keep context windows and chats a reasonable length etc, but if I add up all that time I could have done it myself and have better grasp of the program and the domain in the process.

I keep reading how AI is a force multiplier but I’m yet to see it play out for myself.

I see lots of posts talking about how much more productive AI has made people, but very few with actual specifics on setup, models, costs, workflows etc.

I’m not an AI doomer and would love to realize the benefits people are claiming they get.... but how to get there is the question
by codys | 2025-12-26 05:20:56+00:00
In that case, I can just refer back to my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46388948

And then note that memorysafety.org says this (in case folks haven't read it):

> Memory safety is a property of some programming languages that prevents programmers from introducing certain types of bugs related to how memory is used.

They then provide an examine of out-of-bounds read/write. Which is the exact example I noted in my linked comment.

(Note: memorysafety.org does not provide a concrete definition of memory safety, but we get enough from what it says in this case)

The site does not require the known existence of an exploit in popular software (and does not require that _any_ exploit be possible, a bug is sufficient), merely that the language fails to block "certain types of bugs".
by lrvick | 2025-12-26 05:22:12+00:00
NixOS made a decision to tolerate single party supply chain security to support as many packages as possible even if it means nixos cannot be used for high security applications. This is a perfectly acceptable stance IF they communicate their single-party-risk tolerant threat model honestly so people know they cannot trust nixos in high risk situations.

It absolutely does not have the supply chain security guarantees it is widely believed to have and that is my core problem with it.

Also you wanted to use stagex for haskell today anyway and accept the risks you totally can but you would want to make a docker build layer to import a pre compiled binary from the internet like nixos does, and then it is very explicit that your resulting software has single party trust. We should have all dependencies of haskell but we cannot safely offer it as a precompiled package. That said as an end user you can of course use stagex in any way that suits your own project threat model.

Happy to help if we can!
by zjp | 2025-12-26 05:22:39+00:00
This is sophistry. Of course no one disagrees word choice matters. The quibbles over which words are the entire ballgame. "We all agree words matter, we just disagree about which ones" is true in the same way that "we all agree policy matters, we just disagree about which policies" is true. Yeah! That's what political disagreements are! Collapsing a disagreement on principles into a disagreement over degree is basically changing the venue of the argument.
by teekert | 2025-12-26 05:22:48+00:00
First of all, I appreciate and respect you coming here and defending your choices. That said:

I think that bar-lowering is not really something that Terminal users want, if they wanted simplicity they wouldn't be in a terminal in the first place, at least that holds true for a large portion of the Terminal users.

Sure there are always the new users, who may benefit from some hand-holding. But why don't you ask first if people want their hand held? Normal terminal users are looking for a way to control their computer in a more direct fashion, which makes them faster. They seek a more predictable interface, by moving closer to the true language of the computer itself, by learning a bit about how it works inside and subsequently adapting oneself to it.

You have chosen to alienate a large group of highly knowledgeable users for a user group that may be mostly a myth.

What would make more sense is to provide a switch for "noob mode", while leaving the core experience alone. I for one already hate the difference between my normal terminal when it comes to ctrl-c/ctrl-v and pasting with select/middle-click. This current change feels like a slap in my face.
by quantumcotton | 2025-12-26 05:23:17+00:00
Open AI as big as problem as they keep trying to live in the future. The problem is eventually these language models are going to be sufficient for most people and they're going to be capable of being ran on their personal computers. A few years ago, 16 GB of vram couldn't really do s**. Today I can actually use it for decent amount of stuff. I do use my apis. But I mean you fast forward a few more years if memory doesn't become ridiculously expensive. Everyone's going to be able to have their own language model they won't need to pay a monthly fee. By the time they get where they want to be. 99% of people are going to be able to run it personally.

Of course we're still going to need Enterprise level language models. We are still going to be using those apis. But significantly less often. Imagine having opus 4.5 level abilities of coding on your personal computer at all times. Within 2 years that'll fun on the average GPU.

They are going to have a really harsh reality in the future. Nothing against GPT. It is a great language model. I am having some issues with codex and 5.2. it likes to think too much. But it's not bad especially when you drop thinking after creating the task list.

I don't think they're worth that much though because of all that. They aren't really holding that much other than assets. Are they really holding on to 800 billion in assets? I guess you could argue that the vram prices have went up so maybe lol
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-26 05:24:22+00:00
Generally, high standards can only be achieved through enforcement, not merely through begging and pleading.

I like to add myself as a mandatory reviewer of all PRs and then reject changes that don't come with some explanatory comment or fail to update comments.

Even if huge swaths of the codebase are undocumented boring boilerplate, you still have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise you get madness like ten pages of authentication and authorization spaghetti logic without a single descriptive comment.
by jd172 | 2025-12-26 05:26:28+00:00
in Michigan there is a recently proposed piece of legislation that aims to ban content that "corrupts the public morals“ (which includes pornography, manga, and talking about trans people). It labels VPNs, proxies and encrypted tunneling methods as "circumvention tools" and would make it illegal to use them to access such content.

I hope people will start to see these blatant censorship proposals for what they are, but honestly I'm not too optimistic...
by exac | 2025-12-26 05:26:44+00:00
In my career I've seen startups "shut down" and lay off the NA team.

I've seen venture capital acquire startups for essentially nothing laying off the entire product team aside from one DevOps engineer to keep everything running.
I've seen startups go public and have their shares plummet to zero before the rank-and-file employees could sell any shares (but of course the executives were able to cash out immediately).
I've seen startups acquired for essentially nothing from the lead investor.

In none of these scenarios did any of the Engineers receive anything for their shares.

Yet every day people negotiate comp where shares are valued as anything more than funny money.
by FarmerPotato | 2025-12-26 05:26:48+00:00
Write an operating system in Forth.

I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book.

Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:27:08+00:00
Author here. That’s a fair reaction, and I agree with part of it.

You’re right that almost no one literally believes “every person in America” is their market. My point isn’t about what people consciously believe, but about how decisions actually get made once a country label enters the discussion.

In practice, phrases like “the U.S. market” or “the Asian market” often function as decision placeholders. They signal progress, but they also delay the harder choices that determine whether an entry works at all: who specifically buys, under what constraints, through which channel, and what is explicitly excluded.

That’s why the argument can sound obvious in hindsight. Before launch, the country label compresses complexity. After failure, teams acknowledge the fragmentation retroactively.

This critique also applies unevenly. For low-involvement, highly standardized goods (mass retail, commodity hardware), broad assumptions can hold longer. The article is aimed much more at B2B and constraint-heavy products where purchasing situations narrow quickly and vary dramatically even within the same country.

So yes, your one-sentence summary isn’t wrong. The issue is that many teams act at that level while believing they’re being more precise. That gap between intent and execution is what the post is calling out.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-26 05:27:30+00:00
I ended up getting the mWave from Kinesis which seems at least 85% great. My problem with the InCase version of the sculpt is that for the price, it would have to be much better build quality than the original. Incidentally, I gotta give credit to Matias on the palm rest upgrade in their version; despite the rest of their troubles, the palm rest material is way better than the original.

Problem with the original, is that it's a perfect shape, but it wears down too quickly and becomes a paperweight if the dongle is lost. The price is insultingly high for the almost exactly original
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:28:25+00:00
Author here — this is a great example of exactly what I was trying to get at.

What’s interesting in cases like yours is that population density looks like the obvious explanatory variable before launch, but after the fact it turns out to be a proxy for something else entirely: institutional density, learning culture, distribution norms, or even how people discover and legitimize educational products.

San Francisco and certain European capitals often share very specific conditions: higher tolerance for self-directed learning, stronger peer signaling around education, and shorter distance between “interest” and “action.” None of that shows up if you frame the market as “the U.S.” or “Europe,” even though it decisively shapes outcomes.

This is why I argue that markets are defined by purchasing situations, not demographics or geography. You didn’t find a cultural preference so much as a repeatable context where the same offer could travel through similar constraints and still work.

Your experience is a good illustration of how misleading country-level reasoning can be, even for products that seem universal on the surface.
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:29:21+00:00
Author here. That reaction is fair, and I won’t argue taste.

This wasn’t written as an SEO play or a lead-gen piece, and it’s not meant to be a comprehensive framework. It’s closer to a framing memo I’ve used internally with teams that were about to say “we’re going global” without having made the decisions that phrase quietly skips over.

If you already operate at a level where “global” is never confused with a market, then the post won’t offer much. Where it tends to resonate is with teams who say they know this, but still let country names substitute for concrete choices in planning and execution.

Totally fine if it didn’t land for you — appreciate you reading it seriously enough to react.
by araes | 2025-12-26 05:29:54+00:00
From research on a comment in another area, the European Union at least says "no" on the toy claim. Things in the EU "not considered as toys". [Directive 2009/48/EC, Annex 1] 14. "Electronic equipment, such as personal computers and game consoles, used to access interactive software"

[Directive 2009/48/EC, Annex 1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

Only exception is stuff that's kind of a "specially designed personal computer" meant to "have a play value on their own".

Weirdly, even specially designed console like a Switch, Playstation, or XBox are not really legally a "toy" in the EU.
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:30:13+00:00
Author here. That’s a fair critique.

You’re right that concrete case studies would be more interesting if the goal were to teach tactics or prove a specific playbook. This piece wasn’t written to do that. It’s intentionally a framing piece, not a case study collection.

The reason I avoided named cases is that the failure pattern itself is remarkably consistent across industries and regions. Once you anchor on a specific company or outcome, the discussion tends to drift toward “what they did wrong” rather than the earlier decision failure the post is trying to surface: using country names as a substitute for market definition.

As for the consulting angle — I get the skepticism. The intent here wasn’t “hire us because we’re smart,” but “here’s the exact reasoning error we see before expensive expansion failures.” If that error is already obvious or already handled well in your work, then the post won’t add much value.

Case studies are useful once the frame is agreed on. This was written for the moment before that, when teams still believe they’re aligned because they’ve named a geography.
by bongodongobob | 2025-12-26 05:30:59+00:00
I've never in my life (25 years in the business) seen a system that was so utilized things needed to be cut. Every single cluster/DC I've worked with has been at 50-85% utilization tops. I mean, they might hit 100% during a report generation period or something, but the 95% avg I've seen has never exceeded maybe 80%.
by LoganDark | 2025-12-26 05:31:16+00:00
To me, OLED being self-emissive is a far bigger deal than the contrast ratio. With LCDs, even the laminated ones in MacBooks, you get backlight shimmering, bleed, halos (especially with Mini-LED), and general inconsistency. With OLED, the pixels are a single, nano-thin layer, the display looks directly printed onto the surface (because it is), there are no backlight issues because there's no backlight, and there's no polarization or enclosure to create viewing angle artifacts. (Note: QD-OLED is inferior in this regard, especially with ambient light, but that doesn't bother me that much; WOLED however is trash.)

The OLED iPad Pro is one of the best screens I've ever seen, besides the awful pixel density. Even if deactivated pixels weren't fully dark, it'd still be far superior to any LCD.
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:31:48+00:00
Author here. Fair enough — though for the record, if I were going to offend anyone with AI prose, I’d at least be consistent and say I used Gemini, not ChatGPT.

Jokes aside, I get the fatigue. The post wasn’t trying to win on voice, just to surface a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly in expansion decisions. Totally fine if the style alone is a dealbreaker.
by tzury | 2025-12-26 05:32:48+00:00
Check out this:

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=alpine-x86.cfg&mem=1...

and

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

By the famous Fabrice Bellard who is the creator of QuickJS, QEMU, FFMPEG and many other brilliant and fascinating tools!

https://bellard.org/
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:33:09+00:00
Author here. This is a really good thread, and the Walmart Germany example is exactly the failure pattern I had in mind.

What went wrong there wasn’t a lack of effort or even a lack of localization budget. It was that the core choices never changed. Language, signage, and surface behavior were adapted, but the underlying assumptions about how work, trust, and retail interaction should function were treated as universal.

That’s why “translation-first” expansion fails so consistently. It preserves the original offer and operating model and only swaps the interface. But markets don’t reject foreignness in general; they reject mismatched constraints. In Germany, Walmart didn’t fail because it was American. It failed because it tried to export a specific social and organizational contract that simply didn’t survive contact with local norms.

The Aldi / Trader Joe’s contrast is also telling. That wasn’t just better localization. It was a deliberate decision to let the local market define what should remain and what should be abandoned, even if that meant the brand looked very different from its origin.

This is the distinction I was trying to surface: changing language is cheap. Changing choices is expensive. Most expansion failures happen because teams do the former and avoid the latter.
by Rperry2174 | 2025-12-26 05:35:04+00:00
Agreed... also fwiw I don't think that langauge-dependent games are as much of a barrier as it used to be. I've built a game recently that I easily localized first with real-time AI translations and then later with more static language translations.

Anyway I think this would be an amazing thing to let other people contribute to as this is an entire industry of hypercasual games which could easily be ported to this minus the annoying ads
by oswarld | 2025-12-26 05:36:06+00:00
Author here. I think this thread is mixing two very different kinds of markets, so let me clarify the scope of the argument.

I agree with the point that markets are often defined by legal and operational systems — how contracts work, how labor is regulated, how payments and compliance function. That’s exactly why country or jurisdiction boundaries sometimes matter a lot.

Where I think we’re talking past each other is the Home Depot / McDonald’s examples.

Those are low-involvement, highly standardized, commodity-style businesses. Their products, pricing logic, and purchasing situations are intentionally broad. In that world, a white-collar worker in NYC and a small business owner in suburban Texas can absolutely be treated as “the same market” for many decisions, because the offer is designed to ignore sharp differences.

The article isn’t arguing against that. It’s explicitly about sharper products — especially startups, B2B tools, workflow software, education, compliance-heavy or behavior-changing products — where the purchasing situation narrows quickly.

In those cases, what matters isn’t whether two people can physically buy the same thing, but whether the same offer survives the same constraints and produces the same outcome. Authority to buy, risk tolerance, institutional expectations, and default alternatives diverge much faster there, even within the same legal system.

So yes, commodity retail is a valid counterexample — but it’s also a special case. The failure pattern the article is pointing at shows up when teams implicitly assume their product behaves like a Big Mac or a box of nails, when in reality it behaves more like a change in how work, learning, or decision-making happens.

That mismatch is where “same country = same market” becomes dangerous
by bigyabai | 2025-12-26 05:36:51+00:00
> I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. [0]

I can't help but think Pike somewhat contributed to this pillaging.

[0] (2012) https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/
by jibal | 2025-12-26 05:37:53+00:00
Even if that were true (and it obviously isn't), what then would be the point of expending tremendous time and energy to "dam it off and keep it dry"?

These are alternative ways to keep the tents dry ... which entails that they were never soaked in the first place.

> A tent that’s been in a lake

The tents were never in the lake. A few inches of the campsite was in the lake at high water.

> sounds like a throwaway to me

Do you have any experience with this? I've been on trips where tents and even sleeping bags ended up in a river. They don't dissolve ...they can be dried in the sun. And a tent with a wet floor can be wiped down.

> “Just take the tents out of the water”.

Those words don't appear anywhere. Try looking at the actual words and not just your mental images.
by bl4kers | 2025-12-26 05:38:04+00:00
Here's the 3-year-old, 1k+ comment discussion that begs to differ: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/1353-using-rcs-with-google-...

It's gotten inoperable on AT&T recently, and the Graphene team doesn't seem to care because RCS isn't completely E2EE (due to Apple dragging their feet) and therefore not a priority