MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyberax | 2025-12-27 23:08:12+00:00
> The dominant automobile oriented transportation system is very unaffordable and requires high costs of entry.

Wait until you hear about the true costs of transit. A transit ride in a large city is typically MORE expensive than a car ride. Even when you take into account the cost of depreciation, insurance, financing and other related expenses.

The transit ticket price in the US is typically covers just around 15-20% of the _operational_ _cost_ ("farebox recovery rate"). And the capital costs for transit are off the charts. Seattle is going to pay $180B (yes, that's "B" for "billion") for about 20 miles of new lines. And for one mile of subways in Manhattan, you can build 1500 miles of 6-lane freeway.

It's THE real reason we have a failing democracy. Thoughtless social experiments with subsidizing transit have led to distorted housing and job markets. You can't just subsidize one facet of life and hope for it to work.
by mcv | 2025-12-27 23:08:20+00:00
There's a weird thing happening on my current project. Sometimes I merge main into my branch and it fails. What fails is the pre-commit hook on the merge commit. Changes in main fail the linting checks in the pre-commit hook. But they still ended up in main, somehow. So the checks on the PR are apparently not as strict as the checks on the pre-commit hook. As a result, many developers have gotten used to committing with `--no-verify`, at which point, what is even the point of a pre-commit hook?

And sometimes I just want to commit work in progress so I can more easily backtrack my changes. These checks are better on pre-push, and definitely should be on the PR pipeline, otherwise they can and will be skipped.

Anyway, thanks for giving me some ammo to make this case.
by woodruffw | 2025-12-27 23:08:25+00:00
I mean, it’s an ephemeral VM that you have root on. You don’t own it, but you control it in every useful sense of the word.

But also, that’s an implementation detail. There’s no reason why PyPI couldn’t accept attestations from local machines (using email identities) using this scheme; it’s just more engineering and design work to determine what that would actually communicate.
by roenxi | 2025-12-27 23:09:18+00:00
It isn't cetiris paribus, the Fed rate tells us nothing about demand because they purposefully devalue the dollar. The entire world could be refusing to accept US debt except Broke Boris and they could technically negotiate a 4% rate with just him. Assessing demand for US debt has to be linked to real goods/services/assets somewhere along the line or there just isn't anything to say. The BRICS arguably make up around 40% of the world's economy and they appear to be either slowly evacuating or less-interested in treasuries [0]. It is by no means clear that US debt demand is up or even stable.

Great time to own gold, unfortunately. I wish mine had been a bad purchase but with all the "real growth" it has been experiencing I'm probably going to need a bigger vault box.

[0] https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
by phantasmish | 2025-12-27 23:09:52+00:00
One of the two things I mentioned is already happening, and it’ll be pretty surprising if the Republican army isn’t used for voter intimidation. Why even have it, if not for that kind of thing?

It’s not like they didn’t already use both covert and overt means to try to overturn an election, and get caught red-handed on both (I mean, one was televised live, so…) Much cleaner to put in the effort on Election Day itself.
by caseysoftware | 2025-12-27 23:10:26+00:00
As I've cited elsewhere on this thread:

> With that information, the British newspaper calculated that BEVs [battery electric vehicles] could expose roads to 2.24 times more damage than gas cars.

Ref: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/bevs-could-also-damage-ro...

If that's true, then 12-15k miles in an EV would be equivalent to 27-33k miles in a gas car in the externalities of road wear & tear.. so "taxes equivalent to 35k miles" is at most 25% higher in a "damage per mile equivalent" but could be as little as 6% using the averages.

If your actual mileage is over 15625/year, then you're paying less than the equivalent.

What's your annual mileage?
by tomhow | 2025-12-27 23:11:03+00:00
This comment is not cool, and is not welcome on HN.

You had a history of guidelines-breaking comments and moderator warnings up until a few years ago, and we've not seen any comments from you until the past month or so, and now you're back into those bad old patterns. You are of course welcome to participate here. But this is only a place where people want to participate because we have clear guidelines, and most people take care to observe them. Please do your part to raise standards here rather than dragging them downward.
by thephyber | 2025-12-27 23:11:36+00:00
Which country doesn’t tax their companies or people? Whether it be tariffs, income taxes, sales taxes, VAT, property taxes, minerals taxes, etc., all countries tax.

Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers.

You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
by rldjbpin | 2025-12-27 23:12:01+00:00
> If I had a dollar for every time I've helped somebody untangle the mess of python environment libraries created by an undocumented mix of python delivered through the distributions package management versus native pip versus manually installed...

macos and linux usually come with a python installation out of the box. windows should be following suite but regardless, using uv vs venv is not that different for most users. in fact to use uv in a project, `uv venv` seems like a prerequisite.
by Shalashashka | 2025-12-27 23:12:08+00:00
"If we have the resources for abundance and we don't use them, the statement "We live in a world of unavoidable scarcity" is a lie. If we maintain systems that kill people through lack of access to energy or medicine when those things could be made ubiquitous, the statement "We are a civilized society" is a lie."
by cjs_ac | 2025-12-27 23:12:57+00:00
Everyone knows what’s going on. Europe is slowly reacquiring pants (too slowly for my taste).

The US has this ridiculous belief that Europe has no military ability. The truth is that Europe is far too skilled at war, and collectively disarmed after the Second World War and let the US make the decisions and pay for it all because that was the only way to achieve a lasting peace. European armed forces aren’t ready for war, but they are skeletons on which wartime forces can be reconstituted.

Now that the US is dropping its responsibilities it’s also losing its privileges, but everyone is moving quietly so that the amateurs in the White House don’t cotton on. The world doesn’t need a sheriff; it’s just going to have a bunch of players looking after their own interests. The historical attitude to war already prevails: ‘it’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect us.’
by Izkata | 2025-12-27 23:13:42+00:00
It is not possible to manually document everything down to individual lines of code. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to do so (and good luck getting anyone to look at that massive mess), and that's not even counting how documentation easily falls out of date. Meanwhile, we have "git blame" designed to do exactly that with almost no effort - just make good commit messages while the context is in your head.

CI also doesn't necessarily help here - you have to have tests for all possible edge cases committed from day one for it to prevent these situations. It may be a month or a year or several years later before you hit one of the weird cases no one thought about.

Calling svn part of the problem is also kind of backwards - it has no bearing on the code quality itself, but I brought it up because it was otherwise forcing good practice because it doesn't allow you to erase context that may be useful later.

Over the time I've been here we've migrated from Bugzilla to Fogbugz to Jira, from an internal wiki to ReadTheDocs to Confluence, and some of these hundreds of repos we manage started in cvs, not svn, and are now slowly being migrated to git. Guess what? The cvs->svn->git migrations are the only ones that didn't lose any data. None of the Bugzilla cases still exist and only a very small number were migrated from FogBugz to Jira. Some of the internal wiki was migrated directly to Confluence (and lost all formatting and internal links in the process), but ReadTheDocs are all gone. Commit messages are really the only thing you can actually rely on.
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-27 23:13:44+00:00
> A government right now is using its power to selectively defund and wipe out big chunks of scientific research and communications that ultimately exist to protect your future.

This is the significant point. The govt is defunding yet another scientific research institute. To me it seems more productive to get more specific and more substantive from there: How much of the research presently carried out at NCAR will continue? Are there alternative institutes or sources of funding that might save some of it? What are the likely tangible implications? Is the whole place even closing down or just some of it?

Going in the other direction, less specific, more amorphous abstraction about whether or not this is a free speech issue risks derailing the conversation into semantics.

There are interesting questions about wider meaning of free speech than what's protected by the first amendment, but getting moralistic because someone doesn't consider this a free speech issue, while you both agree that it's government defunding a research institute, and that it's bad, seems unnecessarily fractious
by avidiax | 2025-12-27 23:14:23+00:00
Don't make this an emergency-only thing. It needs to be every flight during takeoff and landing. Otherwise people will be confused why they can't open the bin during evacuation and fight with the attendants, etc.

A more comprehensive set of policy changes:

* All tickets required to include one checked bag in the fare. Less pressure on overhead bin space and less tendency to have one big bag instead of a personal item with important documents.

* Overhead bins lock during takeoff and landing. And it needs to be a sturdy lock, not something that a lunatic can pry open and entice the entire plane into trying to break their stuff out.

* Fine passengers that take luggage during an evacuation. $5k + the value of the item. That makes it so that even people with valuables should leave them behind. And people complaining about their $5200 fine will be mocked for risking everyone's lives for $200.

* Evacuation tests for new seating arrangements must assume that all personal items and accessible overhead items will be taken unless that is rendered impossible by policy or locks.
by firesteelrain | 2025-12-27 23:15:01+00:00
The proprietary injector mechanism like for Mounjaro makes it really easy for users. Even compounded versions of it use tiny insulin needles that have near zero pain when injected into the subcutaneous portion of like the stomach while pinched.

Source: I took compounded Mounjaro and compounded Ozempic/semaglutide.
by mcswell | 2025-12-27 23:15:26+00:00
BOM is normally used with UTF-16, not with UTF-8 (both of which, along with UTF-32, are encodings of Unicode).

I've worked with lots of minority languages in academic situations, but I've never run into anything that couldn't be encoded in Unicode. There's a procedure for adding characters (or blocks of characters) for characters or character sets that aren't already included. There are fewer and fewer of those. The main requirement is documentation.
by bri3d | 2025-12-27 23:15:45+00:00
It's the shape of the delivered artifact that's driven the way things are implemented in the ecosystem, not a really fundamental architecture difference.

The shape of historically delivered ARM artifacts has been embedded devices. Embedded devices usually work once in one specific configuration. The shape of historically delivered ARM Linux products is a Thing that boots and runs. This only requires a kernel that works on one single device in one single configuration.

The shape of historically delivered x86 artifacts is socketed processors that plug into a variety of motherboards with a variety of downstream hardware, and the shape of historically delivered x86 operating systems is floppies, CDs, or install media that is expected to work on any x86 machine.

As ARM moves out of this historical system, things improve; I believe that for example you could run the same aarch64 Linux kernel on Pi 2B 1.2+, 3, and 4, with either UEFI/ACPI or just different DTBs for each device, because the drivers for these devices are mainline-quality and capable of discovering the environment in which they are running at runtime.

People commonly point to ACPI+UEFI vs DeviceTree as causes for these differences, but I think this is wrong; these are symptoms, not causes, and are broadly Not The Problem. With properly constructed drivers you could load a different DTB for each device and achieve similar results as ACPI; it's just different formats (and different levels of complexity + dynamic behavior). In some ways ACPI is "superior" since it enables runtime dynamism (ie - power events or even keystrokes can trigger behavior changes) without driver knowledge, but in some ways it's worse since it's a complex bytecode system and usually full of weird bugs and edge cases, versus DTB where what you see is what you get.
by amamuwala | 2025-12-27 23:15:56+00:00
Hi HN

I built MakerLinks because I wanted a clean, simple way for indie makers and builders to share all their projects, socials, and products in one place—without heavy customization or marketing fluff.

It’s a free profile page where you can:
- Add all your important links
- Highlight projects and SaaS products
- Share one simple URL everywhere

I built this mainly for indie hackers, solopreneurs, and makers who want something faster and lighter than most link-in-bio tools.

Would love feedback from the HN community—especially what’s missing or what you’d expect from a tool like this.
by mixmax | 2025-12-27 23:16:14+00:00
I've been sitting here in front of my keyboard for a while thinking of a nice way to say it, but I just can't come up with anything. So I'll just state the plain and obvious seen from a European (Danish) perspective:

America is moving fast towards some sort of fascism, and noone seems to be doing anything about it. So if you are American this is the time for you to rise up and show the rest of the world that there is another America. If you don't noone else will, and things will only get worse.

I'll leave you with a few quotes to get you started on your journey back towards a functional democracy:

"A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical" - Thomas Jefferson

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they've tried everything else" - Winston Churchill

Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" to Which Benjamin Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Godspeed. I wish you the very best as a country.
by themafia | 2025-12-27 23:16:16+00:00
That's only if you completely ignore all the positives. More efficient economy, more citizen capabilities, better access for emergency and maintenance equipment.

It's so clearly a net win for society and humanity to have open and available roads.

Aside from that if you want to tax me then just charge me more for a license plate. Don't stop me in the middle of driving to hustle me for a buck and some change. Utterly ridiculous management of the problem.

Meanwhile... private jets exist...
Show HN: Waycore – an open-source, offline-first modular field computer
by DGrechko | 2025-12-27 23:16:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m building Waycore, an open-source project exploring what a flexible, offline-first field computer should look like for outdoor, survival, and off-grid scenarios.

The core goals are adaptability and resilience:

modular hardware (external sensor/tool modules)

extensible OS with support for external apps (guidelines in progress)

no required internet connection — maps, models, and knowledge work offline

optional LTE/Wi-Fi when available and explicitly enabled

A major focus is on-device agentic AI, not just chat or image recognition. The AI is intended to:

read live sensor data (GPS, compass, environment)

reason over offline knowledge

use apps and core APIs

assist with navigation, safety checks, logging, and communication

Main project repo (OS & architecture):
https://github.com/dmitry-grechko/waycore

There’s also a separate repo curating freely downloadable survival & outdoor PDFs for offline use:
https://github.com/dmitry-grechko/waycore-knowledge

I’m looking for feedback and contributors around:

UI/UX for rugged touch devices

hardware modularity & interfaces

offline/edge agent architectures

small models that work well without internet

high-quality public-domain or permissive survival knowledge sources

Happy to answer questions or hear critique.
by jghn | 2025-12-27 23:16:58+00:00
There are two halves here. Up until the PR is open, the author should feel free to have 20+ "wip" commits. Or in my case "checkpoint". However, it is also up to the author to curate their commits before pushing it and opening the PR.

So when I open a Pr, I'll have a branch with a gajillion useless commits, and then curate them down to a logical set of commits with appropriate commit messages. Usually this is a single commit, but if I want to highlight some specific pieces as being separable for a reviewer, it'll be multiple commits.

The key point here is that none of those commits exist until just before I make my final push prior to a PR.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-27 23:17:25+00:00
They're not the first with this line of thinking.

> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then - yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!

-- Joseph Goebbels, 1935
by moralestapia | 2025-12-27 23:17:26+00:00
* sigh *

On the Fentanyl thing:

(from an account named "Liberal Marine")

https://x.com/lessguns/status/1945937461403701330

https://x.com/JFranklin45806/status/1972856978331644003

https://x.com/KellyTardi86112/status/1972482615660970319

https://x.com/SefaTiny93953/status/1972138314678550552

On the Marijuana thing:

https://x.com/Rexflexasaurus/status/2001756557676077460

https://x.com/DonnaBowe10/status/2001777937117331619

https://x.com/xray_media/status/2001758215936315663

https://x.com/cmpstOperator/status/2001756159473258660

https://x.com/earley_jun14512/status/2001982462415733053

and right here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46406484

Again, I could go on but it would just be spammy.

The lesson here is that in a country with ~250 million adults you will find all of the following sets:

* Conservatives in favor of X

* Conservatives opposing X

* Liberals in favor of X

* Liberals opposing X
by somat | 2025-12-27 23:17:34+00:00
> point-like

Oh, your going to love this theory.

https://fondationlouisdebroglie.org/AFLB-222/MARK.TEX2.pdf

In summary, There is a way to model electrons as a twisted self enclosed em field.

A decent digest summary of the paper is this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYyrgDEJLOA (Huygens Optics: Are Electrons made of Light? )
by dangus | 2025-12-27 23:18:31+00:00
Sure, the point is, what about 10-20 years from now when there are enough drivers where the cost doesn’t matter?

It’s like Disney World. They can fill the parks with people willing to pay $200 a day for tickets alone. If you can’t afford it then it doesn’t matter that other people get to get in.

Highways just don’t scale well. Two train tracks can move about the same number of people as 15 lanes of highway.
by epistasis | 2025-12-27 23:20:01+00:00
> It seems you're unaware just how many people are climate change sceptics

What does the number of people that oppose the science have to do with anything in my comment?

People are stopping th research because they don't like the results, and make up lies about it (like calling it "alarmism") in order to censor further results.

They are willing to stop all sorts of basic weather results because of it.

How could I not be aware of the number of people, and what does that have to do with anything? Your comment seems to be operating on some logic that is not explained and that I can not guess.
by thephyber | 2025-12-27 23:20:15+00:00
As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.

The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.

The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.

And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.

The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.

When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.

This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
by zahlman | 2025-12-27 23:20:19+00:00
> It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well.

I'm usually the one telling everyone else that various Python packaging ecosystem concepts (and possibly some other things) are "really not that hard". Many FFMpeg command lines I've encountered come across to me like examples of their own, esoteric programming language.

> Case in point: "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux.... Similarly, "ffmpeg extract audio from video.mp4" will unconditionally reencode the audio to mp3, again losing quality.

That sounds like a bug report / feature request rather than a problem with the approach.

> The quality settings are also hardcoded and hidden from the user.

This is intended so that users don't have to understand what quality settings are available and choose a sensible default.

> and that some of this complexity is necessary in order to not make stupid mistakes

For example, the case of avoiding re-encodes to switch between container formats could be handled by just maintaining a mapping.

In fact, I've felt the lack of that mapping recently when I wanted to extract audio from some videos and apply a thumbnail to them, because different audio formats have different rules for how that works (or you might be forced to use some particular container format, and have to research which one is appropriate).
by camillomiller | 2025-12-27 23:20:25+00:00
Yet you can still have a very decent middle class educated person existence with no anxiety of debt or illness. If you think you can just go to the us and be in the 1% by all means do and be happy (at the expense of the majority of others).
Otherwise stay, and enjoy social democracy’s unsung success in guaranteeing stable live to hundreds of millions by making it hard to get to the capitalistic excesses of the us.