MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrese | 2026-03-09 16:22:23+00:00
There is another dimension to this. All of the legacy auto manufacturers, without exception, have been dragging their heels on EVs. Lots of people talk about corporate inertia and shareholders and whatnot forcing the companies to be irrational, but I don't think that's entirely correct.

I think the executives at these companies have long since identified that EVs are a far more fundamental existential challenge than people normally understand. The reason I think so is that Internal Combustion Engines are the primary barrier to entry into the car market. In an all electric world they are once again open to competition from startups who can source the same commodity motors, batteries, controllers, and the like. The barriers to entry drop and it becomes a brand new world of competition from all sides. The only major stumbling block being regulatory (crash testing, etc...). Nobody in the industry wants that, so the best solution is to fight the EV adoption as long as they can. Had Tesla not been a company they would still be dragging their heels with compliance cars to this day.

Of course countries without existing ICE manufacturers to protect, like China, are free to take control of the EV market and dominate the auto industry in the coming decades. An existential crisis for legacy automakers.
by xienze | 2026-03-09 16:22:31+00:00
> Could they not have upstreamed those features in the first place?

This can be harder than you think. Some time ago I worked a $BIGCORP and internally we used an open source library with some modifications to allow it to fit better into our architecture. In order to get things upstreamed we had to become official contributors AND lobby to get everyone involved to see the usefulness of what we were trying to do. This took a lot of back-and-forth and rethinking the design to make it less specific to OUR needs and more generally applicable to everyone. It's a process. I'm not surprised that Facebook's initial approach would be an internal fork instead of trying to play the political games necessary to get everything upstreamed right off the bat. That's exactly the situation we were in, so I get it.
by kindkang2024 | 2026-03-09 16:22:32+00:00
This reminds me of ䷀ Qian (Heaven), one of the 64 hexagrams from the I Ching — one of the most ancient books from China, written 3000 years ago. I think it speaks directly to this:

上九："亢龙有悔" — The arrogant dragon will have cause to repent. Honestly, what you described — people around you hating EVs, hating renewables, hating cables — that's exactly this. This arrogance always leads to regret.

用九："见群龙无首，吉" — A flight of dragons with no single head brings good fortune. China catching up isn't zero-sum — it's 群龙无首 in action. Multiple strong players competing drive knitting machines from 60k to 20k at equal quality. No monopolist — the consumer, the market, humanity wins. That's literally what the I Ching calls "good fortune."

天行健，君子以自强不息 — Heaven moves with relentless power; so must we strengthen ourselves ceaselessly. The answer isn't protectionism or nostalgia. It's joining the flight of dragons.

Competition, when no single dragon monopolizes the sky, brings fortune for all.

Curious about the I Ching and want to know more? Visit https://ichingdao.love/i_ching/hexagrams/01 ^_^
by Matl | 2026-03-09 16:23:05+00:00
I perhaps get where the author is coming from at a very surface level, but the US is acting like a drunk Culture where the Minds face credible accusations of all sorts of abuse, are named something like 'I Got Small Dick, Wannu Make Everyone Think Is Big', have no goal beyond self-enrichment and ships that dump their human passengers into empty space with the promise that if they somehow survive the next time they come onboard, everything is going to be even more BIG, GREAT and BEAUTIFUL!

So not sure I buy the analogy.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-03-09 16:23:06+00:00
The "article" (I don't know what else to call it; "fantastical screed"?) has also gotten ahead of events a little bit. The operation in Iran doesn't seem like it was planned by a superintelligent AI. It seems as though it was an impulse decision, and poorly thought out at that, with the end result likely to be far worse than its planners anticipated. As for Venezuela, that was literally an inside job, lol.
by waffletower | 2026-03-09 16:23:14+00:00
Freud had a lot to say about excrement and shame -- I think cultural fears are still very resonant here. With modern washers cloth diapers clean extremely well -- you can bury your nose into them afterwards with confidence and not notice the faintest evidence what the diaper was like prior to washing. If you feel you can't, I think that is culture speaking, not reality. You are definitely already well exposed to your family's intestinal bacteria strains so any phobia here is purely psychological. While I admit it was difficult for me to consider buying used cloth diapers, after raising two children I think I wouldn't have a problem doing it now. We found buyers for all of our children's used cloth diapers. They were in great condition. One thing to also keep in mind, typically children have difficulty with bedwetting at the late stages of diaper training, so our diapers at least, were washed dozens of times without being soiled by excrement prior to re-sale.
by odiroot | 2026-03-09 16:23:38+00:00
> Another big problem is the mentality. "We have always done it this way" and "I don't want to change it" is extremely prevalent. I say this as a German.

Interestingly it's not only the domain of the conservatives (e.g. CDU/CSU) to cut any discussion this way.
Social democrats (and their voters) use the same argument, just in instances where it fits their program (e.g. labour laws).

> I really don't see a solid economic future for Germany when enough other countries implement more progressive economic policies.

The only party suggesting any such policies consistently fails to clear the 5% threshold as of late. Evidently, the electorate is satisfied with the status quo.
by Rochus | 2026-03-09 16:23:56+00:00
Well, what is AI music? I uploaded many of my songs I produced over the last three decades to Suno and very much enjoy the new arrangements and great solos (see e.g. https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1350). So yes, I hear AI music, and no, it's not fake at all. If you consider it fake, you should also consider all the singers fake who don't hit a pure note without autotune, or all the kids who just turn some knobs or press some buttons. I think that's just the way music develops. AI is just another instrument, like the Synclavier in the eighties or its much cheaper siblings in the nineties, or more recent "aids" like Melodyne before there were music generating models.
by recursivedoubts | 2026-03-09 16:24:17+00:00
"constantly put pressure on the human"

In my experience this is the big difference with AI vs humans. It's not superhuman intelligence (although it does have a massive working memory) but rather the ability to just grind on anything you throw at it, long past the point when any reasonable human would have taken a break or given up.

"It can kind of be be bargained with. It can kind of be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear but it will fake them! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are absolutely right!"
by keybored | 2026-03-09 16:24:20+00:00
Rust is complex enough as-is. There is definitely a learning curve.

But these top-comments sometimes paint with a broad brush. As in this case.

> I admit the skill issue on my part, but I genuinely struggled to follow the concepts in this article. Working alongside peers who push Rust's bleeding edge, I dread reviewing their code and especially inheriting "legacy" implementations. It's like having a conversation with someone who expresses simple thoughts with ornate vocabulary. Reasoning about code written this way makes me experience profound fatigue and possess an overwhelming desire to return to my domicile; Or simply put, I get tired and want to go home.

Two paragraphs in and nothing concrete yet. We can contrast with the article. Let’s just consider the Effects section.

It describes four examples: functions that 1) don’t unwind, 2) guaranteed termination, 3) are deterministic 4) do not “call host APIs”, which is “IO” somehow? (this last one seems a bit off)

The first point is about not panicking (keyword panic given). Point two is about not looping forever, for example. Point three can be contrasted with non-determinism. Is that jargony? A fancy-pants term for something simpler? The fourth point seems a bit, I don’t know, could be rewritten.

All of these at least attempt to describe concrete things that you get out of an “effects system”.

> Rust's safety guardrails are valuable until the language becomes so complex that reading and reasoning about _business_ logic gets harder, not easier. It reminds me of the kid in "A Christmas Story" bundled so heavily in winter gear he cant put his arms down[0]. At some point, over-engineered safety becomes its own kind of risk even though it is technically safer in some regards. Sometimes you need to just implement a dang state machine and stop throwing complexity at poorly thought-through solutions. End old-man rant.

This is just a parade of the usual adjectives with an unexplained analogy thrown in (how will these additions cripple Rust usage?). “So complex”, “over-engineered safety”, “complexity” (again), “poorly thought-throught solutions”.

TFA is about concrete things. OP here is a bunch of adjectives. And a bunch of words about complexity and not understanding would be fine if TFA did not have any understandable, practical parts. But as we’ve gone over it does...

People see Rust. Then they see a comment reacting to nondescript complexity. The rest is history.

A good anti-complexity comment would address something concrete like Async Rust. And there are plenty of such comments to vote on.
Show HN: Qiyaas – a word game based on numbers
by xamed | 2026-03-09 16:24:22+00:00
I'd like to introduce you to a novel new word game (Qiyaas). It's sort of a logic driven version of Hangman where you:

1. Get 3 numbers
2. Deduce the clues
3. Solve 3 different words (a noun, verb, and adjective)

It combines all the classic elements of other logic and word games with a built in hint system as you progress.

Enjoy!
by paulhebert | 2026-03-09 16:24:30+00:00
This is something I’ve been grappling with.

I’ve automated parts of the process. Once I have the words and clues I can autogenerate crosswords and pick the best one.

I’m hesitant to automate the creation of the theme, words, and clues though. I worry that the quality would go down but there may be some opportunities to speed up brainstorming there. I’ve been noodling on this.
by danans | 2026-03-09 16:24:37+00:00
> If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.

That may work if you are a sole proprietor or small business person, but that's not how shareholder owned corporations work.

A sole proprietor is willing to work more if business drops (effectively lowering their compensation rate) because they are the beneficiary of any future gains that may (or may not) result from their short term sacrifice. If they want their employees to do the same they have to give them the same deal.

A large corporation can't easily make its employees work much longer for the same pay (except in the very short term), nor can it easily get shareholders to be OK with increasing spending on labor. This usually ends with massive layoffs when it can't sustain itself anymore.

That's one reason that smaller companies can be more nimble.
by AstroBen | 2026-03-09 16:24:51+00:00
I'm not. I don't think it's going to change much outside of junior level work, which I'm well past. AI works best when:

1. The problem case is very well specified

2. There's a verification harness it can work with

3. You don't care about long-term maintainability or security

Producing the things that solve for these is 90% of the job.

Consider what goes into setting up automated verification: how do you write unit tests when the units aren't built yet? You need to understand and design them. That's the entire premise behind TDD. You design the code through writing the tests first.

I don't see AI improving on this area. Encoding business invariants into high value automated verification isn't itself a verifiable task. Neither are code quality, security, or knowing when something is under-specified.

For production work specifically I think the future may look like developers doing mostly specification, verification and review with the AI doing the plumbing. I'm not actually convinced this is a long term win as there are a lot of trade-offs, but we'll see.
Show HN: Pacto – A runtime contract for cloud-native services
by edu-diaz | 2026-03-09 16:25:08+00:00
Author here.

I work as a platform engineer and kept running into the same issue: the operational behavior of a service is never defined in one place.

Parts of it live across different tools:

APIs in OpenAPI
Deployment assumptions in Helm values
Runtime details in Kubernetes manifests
Configuration in env vars
Dependencies in READMEs or tribal knowledge

So platforms end up reverse-engineering how services behave.

Pacto is an attempt to define a machine-readable runtime contract for services.

A contract can describe things like:

interfaces (HTTP, gRPC, events)
runtime semantics (stateless, stateful, hybrid)
service dependencies
configuration schema
scaling expectations

All of this lives in a single pacto.yaml file that can be validated, diffed, and distributed as an OCI artifact.

The CLI currently supports:
• validating contracts
• detecting breaking operational changes (pacto diff)
• resolving dependency graphs
• packaging contracts as OCI artifacts

One thing I found particularly useful is making state semantics explicit, for example:

runtime.state.type: stateless | stateful | hybrid

This allows platforms to reason about storage, lifecycle and scaling without relying on implicit assumptions.

The project is still early but already usable. Curious to hear feedback from other platform or infrastructure engineers.
by anonym29 | 2026-03-09 16:25:16+00:00
Many farm animals aren't bred specifically for killing them. Think egg-laying hens and ducks, milk-producing cows and goats, etc.

Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
by abustamam | 2026-03-09 16:25:20+00:00
Well sure. I have a blog that no one reads. That's textbook definition of talking to oneself in public.

> you've just wasted all your time if you were talking to a bot.

Not really. If the person I was responding to was a bot, it doesn't mean that humans can't read the thread and engage similarly. Most of the time when i respond to someone on HN, someone else responds to me with something compelling. I mean this thread is a prime example of that! Your comment I was responding to was a reply to someone else's comment. Let's say that person was a bot and neither you nor I are bots. We're still two humans connecting that wouldn't have otherwise connected if the bot hadn't posted that comment.
by ryandrake | 2026-03-09 16:25:26+00:00
> It's getting harder for me to deny.

Congrats on letting it finally sink in, but I honestly don't understand how this fact wasn't clearly evident from even his first term. His base absolutely eats up any rhetoric around making the country 1. more white and 2. more christian. You don't even really have to be listening for subtle dogwhistles anymore. They're saying these things openly now.
by Macha | 2026-03-09 16:25:28+00:00
Because at the moment wind has been the winner in the Irish climate, especially when you look backwards long enough to account for the time scales over which energy buildouts occur. Renewables have grown to 40% of the overall supply, resulting in the most expensive plants (currently coal plants, and before that peat) closing. Solar is entering the market rapidly though, it grew from like 1% to 4% in the last 3 years. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see some gas plants closing in the next few years, given the more expensive options are now already gone
by YesBox | 2026-03-09 16:25:34+00:00
Thanks! The vertical axis is also broken down into a grid in a sense. Each "cell" is placed in a specific floor as far as the engine is concerned.

So like (C++):

vector<uo_map<int, ObjStruct>>

Each vector element is a floor. You just need to move the sprite up in screen space to position it.

Though I wish I went with a vector<vector<vector<ObjStruct>>> approach now a days <chunk_id>, <floor>, <object>
by dtolnay | 2026-03-09 16:25:44+00:00
> It's not a good option for library crates, e.g.

Author here. Yes, it is. It was literally made for libraries. Notably https://github.com/dtolnay/zmij and https://github.com/dtolnay/itoa use it to enforce that the libraries' public API is absent of panicking.
by zer0zzz | 2026-03-09 16:25:47+00:00
> Could they not have upstreamed those features in the first place?

Often when you are working on a downstream code base either you are inheriting the laziness of non-upstreaming of others or you are dealing with an upstream code base that’s really opinionated and doesn’t want many of your teams patches. It can vary, and I definitely empathize.
by swsieber | 2026-03-09 16:26:11+00:00
To be honest, we should probably go into injection molding. We do have a pretty long tube in there that might be a bit problematic for injection molding from what I've read (1 degree draft means the tube size inside changes by 1/8 of an inch), and the orientation of the magnets is pretty important, and they can repel each other pretty hard to. So part of it is the unknowns.

The other part is the upfront cost. I bet we'll get to injection molding in the next few months as revenue allows, and we're going to start exploring it this month I think. We'd like to keep things local, though we know we'll still have to contend with knock offs sooner than later.
by texuguito | 2026-03-09 16:26:19+00:00
Hi HN,
I recently started learning Rust and decided to build ApexStore to put the language's safety and performance concepts into practice. It is an embedded key-value storage engine based on the Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM-Tree) architecture.
My goal was to implement a functional storage motor from scratch to understand the trade-offs in write-heavy systems and how to apply SOLID principles within the Rust ecosystem.
Technical details:
SSTable V2 Format: Block-based storage with sparse indexing and LZ4 compression.
Durability: ACID-compliant Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) with configurable sync modes.
Read Path: Optimized using Bloom Filters and a block cache to minimize disk I/O.
Performance: Currently reaching ~1M ops/s for batch writes on an NVMe drive (Ryzen 9 5900X).
It is published on Crates.io (apex-store-rs) and I have documented the architecture using mdBook.
As someone still getting comfortable with Rust idioms, I would love to hear your feedback on the architecture—especially regarding the orchestration between the MemTable and the WAL during flushes.
GitHub: https://github.com/ElioNeto/ApexStore
Documentation: https://elioneto.github.io/ApexStore/
Thanks for taking a look!
by eudamoniac | 2026-03-09 16:26:40+00:00
I would just like to interject for a moment. Mapo tofu does not use 'hot sauce' as understood in the common parlance. It uses doubanjiang, a very specific fermented paste of chilis and broad beans. It is not saucy; it's very thick like gochujang. I take issue with calling doubanjiang hot sauce and I really don't want anyone to try to make mapo tofu with normal hot sauce.
by sosodev | 2026-03-09 16:26:41+00:00
I didn't intend to. I think that domesticated animals have long had a harmonious relationship with humans so I find it a bit difficult to believe that it's always an ethical dilemma. Pets are just the most obvious lens to identify that.

I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
by TimorousBestie | 2026-03-09 16:26:51+00:00
> I always thought of the Culture as closest to the European Union: Seemingly harmless but if anyone ever picked a fight with them, they’d find out that the EU can get its act together very quickly and can very quickly stand up the strongest army in the world.

This is either a misreading of the Culture (which for all its fictional foibles is not a federation of nation-states), a misunderstanding of what the European Union is, or both.
by bArray | 2026-03-09 16:26:51+00:00
To build a Gigawatt AI data center in 2025 is reported to cost $35bn [1]. If you're not going to build it to top specs, why even bother. Given that this is the UK, once all the bureaucracy is done, it'll be at least 50% more expensive.

A large business is estimated to use 50MWh at £14,706 a year [2]. It'll cost in excess of £300k per year just to run electricity, not that the grid has that in spare capacity [3]. It's completely in contrast to their green energy campaign.

Then, they don't even have any kind of contract actually in place:

> Asked about the terms of the contract that Nscale had signed to build the supercomputer by the end of this year, the government did not reply directly. Instead, it said that Nscale’s entire $2.5bn investment was “not a formal contract, rather an intention to commit capital”, and “may well include equipment and capital funding”.

There's not enough serious capital invested to get this off of the ground (or even to break ground seemingly). And then there are basic questions, like:

1. Why would build a data center that is supposed to create tonnes of jobs, in a location where it costs a lot to employ people?

2. Why would you outsource your data center if you live in the US or EU, when there are better options available locally? These data centers sure as hell won't be used by British companies because the government are crushing them with tax.

3. The energy cost is far too high compared to locations with nuclear or hydro electricity generation.

This whole thing stinks. I think it's a complete and utter lie.

[1] https://uk.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/how-much-doe...

[2] https://www.moneysupermarket.com/gas-and-electricity/busines...

[3] https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tig...
by SauciestGNU | 2026-03-09 16:27:24+00:00
Israel perhaps used to project that sort of facade. With Bibi and the authoritarian ultranationalists in government, combined with the lack of a written constitution restraining power and protecting rights (for whatever that would be worth), I think that facade is forever gone. Israel is descending into an expansionist theocratic ethnostate and rapidly illiberalizing. Just look at the recent criminalization of women praying at a certain holy site.
by tambourine_man | 2026-03-09 16:27:31+00:00
Not everyone uses Electron apps exclusively.

The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps.

But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
by mrwh | 2026-03-09 16:27:43+00:00
The UK has been chronically bad at providing jobs and training for its young people. I saw that 20 years ago when I was there. That is a key reason, perhaps the primary reason, for its long term productivity malaise. And the response is to lean into a technology that will make this situation profoundly worse? It's another lazy quick fix that is neither quick nor a real fix. The UK needs to invest in its people, not funnel yet more money to big tech.