MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dalyons | 2026-01-02 03:44:25+00:00
point taken on the motors. But perhaps drivetrain was the wrong word for what i was trying to focus on - perhaps "platform" is closer? As an elaboration - the legacies are still proudly talking up their upcoming "unified platforms", that allow them to build models in a single factory and interchange ICE and EV powertrains in the same model based on demand. Same cars in everything but drivetrain.

That's the sort of thing that sounds great to a legacy incumbent (yay think of the reuse!), but inevitably leads to building bad EVs compared to the new companies who are building reimagined EV-only platforms from the ground up. Handling, suspension, range, battery integration, software are always going to be better in an EV-first design. The incumbents are trying to have their cake and eat it too - building EVs, but not cannibalizing their main ICE profits.

So, they will lose. Its their kodak moment.
by jarito | 2026-01-02 03:44:54+00:00
This doesn't seem that useful? Svalbard would require significant, continued supply. Unless the Russian navy is able to own the Barrents Sea, any force on Svalbard could just be waited out. Once the diesel is out, the defenses go down and they freeze. Not to mention that it is well in range for medium range ballistic misses from Greenland, Iceland and the Nordics.
by mrheosuper | 2026-01-02 03:45:19+00:00
I guess what she was trying to say is "Anything wireless is bad in term of security". We don't really know whether the bad guy already has technology to decode wireless protocol we are going to use, so it's best to assume they already have and reduce the attack surface for them.

There is little encryption being done by bluetooth, while wifi, many layers add their own encryption to the data.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2026-01-02 03:46:30+00:00
The part I don't get is, why shouldn't Western companies be able to out compete the Chinese state at mass-producing cars?

My whole life, I only heard about how much better private companies are than governments at making products. How could we be suddenly behind?

OK, Xiaomi and BYD are state-backed private companies. But what advantage does the state-backing get them, exactly? How is it better than the familiar state-backed advantages western companies have (like regulatory capture, tax breaks, tariffs, or TBTF bailouts)?

The Chinese government can subsidize them. But that's just moving zero-sum money around; it might give them a boost in cars, but it must come at a cost to semiconductors, robotics, solar energy, raw materials, defense, or other things like that.... in theory at least? So why does it feel like they're somehow subsidizing every sector at the same time?
by justarandomname | 2026-01-02 03:46:41+00:00
> We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low.

Oh. my. gosh. This has been driving me NUTS recently. Please please please here me out. The first dozen or so records I bought were of albums I already owned digitally, as FLAC so I was one of those kinds of people that didn't redeem the downloads. I wanted to buy my faves, stuff that I knew I'd love to listen to on vinyl forever. Now that I'm buying brand new stuff, that I don't have digital copies of I've noticed they rarely, rarely, if ever include a download link and so I had to renew my dang apple music subscription to listen to albums I already own when I'm away from my record player and its started to really turn me off from buying any records outside of bandcamp (where you always get the digital version too.)
by EnPissant | 2026-01-02 03:47:13+00:00
Then again, I have a RTX 5090 + 96GB DDR5-6000 that crushes the spark on prompt processing of gpt-oss-120b (something like 2-3x faster), while token generation is pretty close. The cost I paid was ~$3200 for the entire computer. With the currently inflated RAM prices, it would probably be closer to the dell.

So while I think the Strix Halo is a mostly useless machine for any kind of AI, and I think the spark is actually useful, I don't think pure inference is a good use case for them.

It probably only makes sense as a dev kit for larger cloud hardware.
by key_aavoja | 2026-01-02 03:47:17+00:00
Also, AWS and Cloudflare do not prioritize performance, nor correctness, which is why they choose Rust.

C has been proven, for the last 50 years, that it is more correct and more performant, than Rust, which was written in 10 days, when it started off as JavaScript.

When Rust was forked from JavaScript, it was rewritten in Python.
by otterley | 2026-01-02 03:47:22+00:00
That’s not the law, and never has been. Devices are combinations of hardware and software. The fact that a device maker allows you to install software subject to limitations is a privilege, not a right. Some device makers, like automobile and medical device manufacturers, often give you no such privileges at all. Others, like general purpose computer makers, give you nearly unlimited privileges — although even then, there is frequently embedded firmware that you cannot touch.

And most of the market is happy with the existing bargain.
by devnullbrain | 2026-01-02 03:47:41+00:00
When you (try to) use libre software, the problems you run into tend not to be related to insufficient engineering, but more societal and economic, where they would be less likely to appear if there were more people in your cohort.

Examples:

- An important document is sent to me in a proprietary format

- A streaming service uses a DRM service owned by a tech giant that refuses to let it work with open source projects

- A video game developer thinks making games work on Linux isn't worth getting rid of rootkit anticheat

The downside is Windows users would have to live in a world without subscription-based office suites, locked down media, and letting the CCP into your ring 0.
by analogpixel | 2026-01-02 03:48:18+00:00
> For example, California’s high-speed rail costs approximately $200 million per mile on the route between San Francisco and Los Angeles (hoover.org, 2022). On the other hand, the construction cost of the Beijing-Shanghai HSR was $11–$13 million per mile (mdpi.com, 2019). https://www.easycargo3d.com/en/blog/high-speed-rail-460-km-h...

Was just curious on how much public transportation you could have gotten for $540 million dollars, I guess the answer is it depends, either about 50 miles or 2 miles
by key_aavoja | 2026-01-02 03:48:21+00:00
I wrote a majority of FFmpeg and 80% of it was written in ASM, proving that C is the fastest language.

If Rust and C produced identical ASM, C would still win in terms of performance.

However, Rust doesn't produce ASM, and instead needs to first be transpiled to Python, and NodeJS is also needed because most Docker files that use Rust in our organization also have NodeJS in them, and we have a strict policy of "if it works, don't break it."

Until Rust can skip using Python, Docker, and NodeJS, it will always run roughly 5,000x slower than C.
by chii | 2026-01-02 03:48:52+00:00
the OP isn't wrong about insider trading - it's just that it lacked the crucial bit about being _transparent_ about insider trading.

Current insider trading laws are about _preventing_ it (but it still happens). This makes it so that insiders who do trade and get away with it make bank, but this does little to benefit the over all market information equilibrium.

What needs to make insider trading "good" (instead of bad), is to make the insider's trades 100% transparent and instant (instead of the months of SEC filing currently needed before it becomes public info). Doing this will ensure that insider's trades immediately gets reflected and copied/arbitraged against, and will allow the price of a stock to reflect information not yet released but is acted upon by insiders.
by eru | 2026-01-02 03:49:36+00:00
People seem to like Temu stuff and want to buy it.

> 1. Run other companies outside of China out of business

Why?

> 2. Keep people employed even if what they produce is worth less than their labor and energy/materials input.

Why don't they have them do something with positive utility, like sweeping streets or providing elder care, or a myriad of other jobs?
by kawfey | 2026-01-02 03:50:19+00:00
My blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham radio” has received the most hits out of all of my other posts. It got me an interview with IEEE Spectrum and basically cemented my name as a ham radio influencer.

Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.
by pwdisswordfishy | 2026-01-02 03:50:53+00:00
This is a strange comment. It doesn't even count as unfalsifiable, just unsupported.

Elon Musk has actual children (lots, in fact). If we want to know what he "would" do, we can just look. We don't have to use our imaginations (or entertain the fanciful claims of prognosticators and soothsayers).
by nine_k | 2026-01-02 03:51:43+00:00
POSSE is a great principle, but I'm talking about a different phenomenon: being voted onto the front page of HN, /., or featured on a huge subreddit, a tweet by some influencer with 100k subscribers, etc. The 15 minutes of fame, which hopefully leave a bit of a lasting audience, connections to sister sites mentioned in the resulting threads, etc.

The biggest problem of any indie publishing is obscurity; not that nobody cares, but rather nobody has an idea, and has no way to have an idea.
by maxpert | 2026-01-02 03:51:54+00:00
Author here! Every time I post my own stuff here it seems to sink, so hopefully this actually reaches some of you.

Marmot started as a sidecar project using triggers and polling to replicate changes over NATS. It worked, but I hit a wall pretty fast. Most people really want full ACID compliance and DDL replication across the cluster. I realized the only clean way to do that was to expose SQLite over a standard protocol.

While projects like rqlite use REST and others go the page-capture route, I decided to implement the MySQL protocol instead. It just makes the most sense for compatibility.

I’ve reached a point where it works with WordPress, which theoretically covers a huge chunk of the web. There are scripts in the repo to deploy a WP cluster running on top of Marmot. Any DB change replicates across the whole cluster, so you can finally scale WordPress out properly.

On the performance side, I’m seeing about 6K-7K inserts per second on my local machine with a 3-node quorum. It supports unix-sockets, and you can even have your processes read the SQLite DB file directly while routing writes through the MySQL interface. This gives you a lot of flexibility for read-heavy apps.

I know the "AI slop" label gets thrown around a lot lately, but I’ve been running this in production consistently. It’s taken a massive amount of manual hours to get the behavior exactly where it needs to be.
by eru | 2026-01-02 03:52:43+00:00
Insider trading is already perfectly legal (by US law), if you do it with consent of your company. So the rules are not about protecting the public at all.

In any case, I'm not making some innovative new argument or hot take. This is pretty standard, orthodox academic stuff. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading#Arguments_for_...

What's an Epstein? Is that some other company you don't like?
by mrheosuper | 2026-01-02 03:53:09+00:00
>A) the device is designed to let you do that

This is simply wrong. Apple airpod was not designed to replace battery(they use tons of glue), yet many repair shop still offer service to replace battery for them.

>B) the battery is still in production

The industry is kind of converging into using standard "coil cell" battery for their headphone
by chii | 2026-01-02 03:53:20+00:00
> your eBPF program triggers

but how does the anti-cheat know that the kernel is not modified such that it disables certain eBPF programs (or misreports cheats/spoofs data etc)?

This is the problem with anti-cheat in general (and the same exists with DRM) - the machine is (supposedly) under the user's total control and therefore, unless your anti-cheat is running at the lowest level, outside of the control of the user's tampering, it is not trustworthy. This leads to TPM requirements and other anti-user measures that are dressed as pro-user in windows.

There's no such thing in linux, which makes it inoperable as one of these anti-cheat platforms imho.
by calmbonsai | 2026-01-02 03:53:24+00:00
The literal title is "Python Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" which implies the level of detail in the article (down to the values of the numbers) is important. It is not.

It is helpful to know the relative value (costs) of these operations. Everything else can be profiled and optimized for the particular needs of a workflow in a specific architecture.

To use an analogy, turbine designers no longer need to know the values in the "steam tables", but they do need to know efficient geometries and trade-offs among them when designing any Rankine cycle to meet power, torque, and Reynolds regimes.
by nh2 | 2026-01-02 03:54:42+00:00
What is the actual difference?

As a maintainers, if you want to be be able to tell real issues from non-issue discussions, you still gave to read them (triage). That's what's taking time.

I don't see how transforming a discussion into an issue is less effort than the other way around. Both are a click.

Github's issues and discussions seem the same feature to me (almost identical UI with different naming).

The only potential benefit I can see is that discussions have a top-level upvote count.
by dalyons | 2026-01-02 03:56:16+00:00
Consumers in the US haven't actually been given a chance to show what they "want". The cheap EVs have been kept out, of course the $100k ones arent selling that well. Remove the tariffs and import restrictions, and then people will show you what they actually want!

> An EV is better than no car at all, but they're a downgrade from an ICE in most cases.

Totally disagree. ~70% of americans live in single family homes. If you can charge at home which they can, and you dont have some edge case super distance driving needs, EV is better in every way.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-02 03:57:40+00:00
That isn’t true at all. You need to take your insider trading again (every bigcorp makes you do it) and learn what insider trading actually is, and why it is illegal, and why you’ll probably get caught. I’ve heard too many sad stories where immigrants from a country with looser laws came to the USA for very high paying tech jobs, and throw them away for just $100k of insider trading gains.
by LewisVerstappen | 2026-01-02 03:58:38+00:00
Have you not seen Tesla's stock price? Autopilot? Robotaxis?

(I say this as a Tesla owner who literally doesnt drive anymore since I just use autopilot. I also live in downtown austin and see Robotaxis everywhere)

Lol I've pretty much checked out of HN since the discussion here is reddit r/technology level of competence.

The idea that TSLA is failing is so completely moronic that it's astonishing.
by jarito | 2026-01-02 03:58:39+00:00
This is...not true. Attacking key infrastructure is an act of war. Just because they try to do it secretly doesn't change that fact. 'Grey zone' tactics doesn't make any difference here. Green men, intel services, etc. are still government entities acting at the behest of the leadership to commit acts of war.

The argument here is about appeasement or not. If you allow continued acts of war to pass without response, you get more of them. This is the lesson of bullies from the playground to WW2. I'm more than willing to have a conversation about what sort of response is the best, but saying that Russia is not a warmonger is incorrect - they are committing acts of war. Just because no one has called them on it yet doesn't make it not warmongering.
by willtemperley | 2026-01-02 03:59:44+00:00
> We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks'

As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates:
“There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.

Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.

I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.
by chii | 2026-01-02 04:00:09+00:00
> I don't consider it "malware" anymore than I consider a driver for my graphics card to be "malware" even if they do operate in kernel mode.

the bloggers/journalists calling it malware is doing the conversation a disservice. The problem is only really the risk of bugs or problems with kernel level anti-cheat, which _could_ be exploited in the worst case, and in the best case, cause outages.

The classic example recently is the crowdstrike triggered outtage of computers worldwide due to kernel level antivirus/malware scanning. Anti-cheat could potentially have the exact same outcome (but perhaps smaller in scale as only gamers would have it).

If windows created a better framework, it is feasible that such errors are recoverable from and fixable without outages.
Show HN: LeaveNote – A privacy-focused instant messaging QR code application
by noteable | 2026-01-02 04:00:11+00:00
Hi HN

I built LeaveNote because I kept running into the same real-world problem:

I wanted to be reachable when I wasn’t around — but I didn’t want to put my phone number or email on my door, car, or mailbox.

LeaveNote lets you create a simple QR code that strangers can scan to send you a message instantly, without seeing any of your personal contact details.

Typical use cases:
• Door notes (“I stopped by, please contact me”)
• Parking issues (“Your car is blocking the exit”)
• Package delivery messages
• Lost & found (pets, items)
• Short-term contact without exchanging numbers

How it works:
1. You create a note template (door / parking / delivery / custom)
2. LeaveNote generates a unique QR code
3. A stranger scans it and sends a message
4. You receive the message via Telegram (more channels later)
5. Messages are forwarded instantly and not stored

Design principles:
• No phone numbers or emails exposed
• No account required for the sender
• Minimal UI, works on any device
• Built for offline, real-world scenarios

The project is currently free to use.
I’m sharing it early to get feedback from the HN community:
• Does this solve a real problem for you?
• Are there scenarios I missed?
• Any privacy or UX concerns?

Demo: https://leavenote.me

Happy to answer any questions or discuss the design decisions.
by rockskon | 2026-01-02 04:00:13+00:00
You are the one that replied to my comment demanding I research sources for your argument which you repeatedly made false assumptions on.

It's quite probable I read some sources that were dated or had some more nuance to it that I don't recall off the top of my head because it was 15 years ago. New information. Doesn't immediately replace old information in the minds of the entire populace - that's not how news consumption works.

I suggest you stop starting out arguments with such hostility and maybe you won't get it in response.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-02 04:00:53+00:00
China has been working on amphibious and naval capabilities for a decade now. The trick for the PLA is not to just successfully take Taiwan, but to do it in a way that doesn’t leave the whole island as a smoking crater. Geology and topography isn’t China’s friend in this, they can’t just roll some tanks into Taiwan, and all of Taiwan’s infrastructure is on the west side of the island, with the ryukyus way too close for comfort.
by key_aavoja | 2026-01-02 04:01:11+00:00
Furthermore Rust was not designed to run on computers that are more than 15 or 20 years old.

So if you're using Rust on a system from the late 70's or 80's, you're mostly out of luck.

Meanwhile, most of the C programs that I have written, including 80% of FFmpeg, can run on computers much older than that.
by onethought | 2026-01-02 04:01:50+00:00
Or we could realise that they still have that lead, and they were limited in the US by US government policy that propped up Detroit for union/votes rather than economics/environment.

Meanwhile BYD had US money with a a friendly government enhancing it.

You shouldn’t be angry with Musk, you should be angry with Trump/Biden (ignore left/right they both let Asia take Battery and chip technology on their watch).

Not defending Elon, he’s clearly got some flaws, but Telsa’s expansion has been phenomenal, even with massive head winds against it, just look at Rivian, VW, Lucid, Ford, GM… or anyone if you want to talk about “squandering”.
by drob518 | 2026-01-02 04:02:19+00:00
Agreed. IMO, it makes sense to have a way to triage possible issues, confirm that they are, in fact, legitimate, and then create issue records to reflect them. As long as users have a way to report anomalous behavior, then, as you say, it’s really no different than using tags on issues. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
by maxpert | 2026-01-02 04:04:58+00:00
Right now I've started off with full replication of every database in cluster. On my roadmap I have:

- Ability to launch a replica on selected databases from main cluster.

- Ability for replica to only download and replicate changes of select databases (right now all or nothing).

- Ability for replica to proxy DML & DDL into write cluster transparently.

- Custom set of commands for replicas to download and attach/detach databases on the fly.

This will instantly solve 80% of the problems for most of consumption today. I will probably go after on demand page stream and other stuff once core features are done.

Not to mention this solves majority use-cases of lambdas. One can have a persistent main cluster, and then lambda's coming up or going down on demand transparently.
by key_aavoja | 2026-01-02 04:05:51+00:00
I designed the POSIX standard when I wrote most of the 80% of FFmpeg in ASM, but Microsoft decided they did not want to adopt POSIX but wanted to use portions of my 80% of FFmpeg in ASM in their Windows Media Player.

So that's why Windows didn't embrace POSIX.

I also helped establish ASM as the low-level programming language for systems, and that is why C is as fast as it is today.

C is extremely fast because 80% of FFmpeg is written in ASM.
by zerocrates | 2026-01-02 04:07:39+00:00
As someone else says, for Firefox (and Thunderbird) I just uninstalled the package manager version entirely and dropped Mozilla's regular distro-agnostic binary tarballs in my home folder. Using the built-in update systems also avoids that problem from .deb versions where updating the package could make the browser yell at you that it needs to be restarted when you try to open a tab.
by SamDc73 | 2026-01-02 04:07:45+00:00
> Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.

Dubai isn’t sold as a place to belong long-term. Most people move there knowing it’s temporary.
The Bay Area is drifting in the same direction too with the increased cost of living around here. (but the same could be said about most big cities, maybe?)
by ok123456 | 2026-01-02 04:07:46+00:00
> In other words, the Linux desktop as a whole is a Bazaar, not Cathedral.

This was true in the 90s, not the 2020s.

There are enough moneyed interests that control the entirety of Linux now. If someone at Canonical or Red Hat thought a glibc version translation layer (think WINE, but for running software targeted for Linux systems made more than the last breaking glibc version) was a good enough idea, it could get implemented pretty rapidly. Instead of win32+wine being the only stable abi on Linux, Linux could have the most stable abi on Linux.