MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fcpk | 2025-04-15 14:03:51+00:00
One overlooked variable here is that price is a huge consideration factor into IoT acceptance. Convenience is one thing, but having to pay 10x more is another.

China(up to now, now with tariffs stuff... who knows) has been exceptional in that they produced IoT devices for many use cases at very reasonnable prices. Want a water leak detector that's zigbee connected? that's only 5 bucks. if I want to buy one from a "western" company(still produced in china) it instantly gets marketed to a premium market and costs 10x or 20x more.

They have no incentive to make their products work in pure local when companies like Tuya provide SDKs, chips, and frameworks at a low price and easy entry barrier. But of course that locks into their ecosystem.

It's possible that a company making an open toolkit with easy integration for esp32/etc could gain enough traction to get many devices to use that, but at this point it's unlikely.

As for HA... I love it and run it locally, but it's not for the faint of heart. And spending dozens of hours modifying devices and configuration to get everything running is a priviledge few have the skills, time and knowledge to do.

As always... this is a case of "the only incentive is money and hence the system will lock itself".

Wouldn't it be great if the EU could force these companies to surrender local control?
HugCore – A modular AI skeleton designed for emotional presence, not just answer
by bramblestudio | 2025-04-15 14:04:05+00:00
Hey HN,

We just launched HugCore, a minimal framework for building emotionally adaptive, conversational AI companions. It’s built around a simple idea: what if AI could offer presence, not just performance?

Key features:

Modular emotional state engine ("Little Partner Mode")

Lightweight semantic processing via BSE (Bramble Semantic Engine)

Designed for play, presence, and daily companionship

Our goal isn’t AGI for optimization – it’s AGI for belonging. If you’ve ever wanted an AI who remembers you, bickers with you, or just watches movies badly with you… this might be it.

Landing page: https://hug-core-landing-uodh.vercel.app/

Would love to hear your thoughts, especially on how we can make this even more meaningful and usable.
by fastglass | 2025-04-15 14:04:09+00:00
I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created.

It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.

There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.

This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
by kasey_junk | 2025-04-15 14:04:31+00:00
Yes. And the current precedent is very clear that these independent agencies are constitutional.

The current court has not, yet, overturned that precedent. There is lots of reason to believe they will, in an extremely contentious ruling. But for now they haven’t.

We are going to find out one way or another though because this admin is pushing hard up against the question.

Of course it’s also pushing hard up on the question of if the courts can constrain it at all so the grade school understanding of separation of powers is real.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-15 14:04:43+00:00
No, not necessarily.

CT scans are likely overused; my spouse has several chronic conditions and after receiving dozens a year for a while, we started asking if a CT was clinically indicated, or just precautionary. Mostly the response is "just in case". I wish EMRs did a better job of highlighting how many CTs someone's had recently for this sort of decision making.

There've also long been problems with kids getting unnecessarily high adult doses of radiation. My dad's a peds radiologist and was heavily involved in the founding of https://www.imagegently.org/.
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-15 14:04:57+00:00
> What's wrong with Signal? Or, worst-case scenario, Telegram?

IMO from a technical perspective nothing but more of how do you get your entire network to migrate from one chat app to another. Everyone here says just get your parents, siblings, friends to switch but it's far more complicated than that.

My wife is from Brazil and uses WA all the time. Getting her to switch would mean getting her entire network of family and friends to switch and you would have to make that pitch to everyone in the "network". All of a sudden it goes from getting a few people to switch to getting literally thousands to switch which is next to impossible.
by jpbryan | 2025-04-15 14:05:25+00:00
Last November, I published "On Building Git for Lawyers" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137391) about building Version Story, the first concurrent version control system for lawyers. Overwhelmingly, the response to my essay was positive! Many people across industries empathized with the problems we’re solving. One response stood out, however. Can’t lawyers just use Google Docs?

In this essay, I address this question and argue that the legal workflow requires a fundamentally different technology solution than what Google Docs provides.
by dashundchen | 2025-04-15 14:05:31+00:00
Don't forget the whistleblower intimidation!

> Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.

I'm so sick of the endless attempts to downplay or misdirect on the outrageous things Republicans/Trump/DOGE happening everyday.

If a Democratic admin were to do this they would be howling and rightly so. Trump and the GOP are turning the federal government into an authoritarian mob state.

Everyone should be outraged - even if it's for only the fact that you yourself may be a target of this or future administrations as it becomes normal practice.
by omneity | 2025-04-15 14:05:34+00:00
For most low-resource languages, support in LLMs is trained through translation pairs between english and the other languages, because translation data is easier to come across than say, conversations about coding, history, physics, basically the kind of data that is usually used for instruct training.

This kind of training data typically looks like ChatGPT style conversations where all the prompts are all templated like “Translate the following text from X to Y: [text]” and the LLM’s expected answer is the translated text.

LLMs can generalize through transfer learning (to a certain extent) from these translation pairs to some understanding (strong) and even answering (weak) in the target language. It also means that the LLM’s actual sweet spot is in translation itself since that’s what was trained in, not just a generalization.
by AIPedant | 2025-04-15 14:05:48+00:00
This is still authoritarian bullshit. Your argument is that you think independent agencies are a bad idea, and therefore it's a-okay for Trump to simply ignore 80 years of law and Supreme Court rulings.

More generally, nobody in the executive branch serves any master. They serve the law and are legally obligated to refuse and report illegal orders. The idea that they serve Master Donald Trump (or Vizier Elon Musk), and that illegal orders must be enforced because it is Trump's will, is precisely why Kilmar Abrego Garcia was illegally deported and why Trump is musing about doing the same thing to US citizens.
by pc86 | 2025-04-15 14:05:53+00:00
I looked through the filing cited in this comment and every instance of the word "background" just says that backgrounds for a given employee are either complete or in progress, plus the quote. Nothing indicates anyone failed any background check (to the contrary just by count it seems like about half of them have been completed), and certainly nothing indicates that "most of them could never pass" one. Which again just by virtue of about half of them having been completed already seems to be false on its face.

It's not unusual to give an otherwise-qualified person limited access to certain data while their background checks are completed.
by vFunct | 2025-04-15 14:05:56+00:00
Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories. We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or cleaning toilets.

Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders? What is our competitive advantage then?

Economics works when the people do the things they are most efficient at. If a person in China can make iPhones for cheaper than an American, LET THEM. Our citizens should be designing them instead, because that's what we train our citizens to do.

Trump and the Republicans really do think of our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.
by germanosin | 2025-04-15 14:06:21+00:00
We brought Kafbat UI back to life — a clean, modern UI for Apache Kafka (kafka-ui), originally built by the core team that created the widely used Kafka tools you may have seen before.

Key features:

Built by the original maintainers

Instant cluster introspection and topic browsing

Zero-config local startup (Docker support included)

Actively maintained & open source

GitHub: https://github.com/kafbat/kafka-ui

We’d love your feedback and contributions — let’s build the Kafka UI we all wanted back.
by gtirloni | 2025-04-15 14:06:31+00:00
That's a good question. I don't know about the author's credentials but it seem very high and indeed I'm sure they would find a job anywhere they apply to.

But from the PoV of a higher up making layoff decisions, the sooner they severe the organization from the rest of the company, the less traumatic it will be when the time comes. I think at this point they realize it's better to start treating Chrome et al more like Waymore, which seems to have some isolation from the borg collective.
by leros | 2025-04-15 14:06:46+00:00
I agree. It takes the user out of their intended action (using your product) and puts them somewhere distracting (their email).

I've also seen it confuse users who aren't used to it.

It's great from a tech/security perspective but I wouldn't put it into my own product for those reasons. I definitely would not make it the only login mechanism.
by arunabha | 2025-04-15 14:06:47+00:00
I am not sure how it's possible to defend the kind of stuff DOGE is doing anymore. Even the veneer of looking for efficiency is gone. There have only been claims of 'fraud' with no real evidence backing up the claimed scale of fraud.

At this point it simply looks like DOGE is yet another attempt to use a popular trope (Govt fraud and waste) to push through changes specifically designed to give unchecked power to one individual.

This much concentrated, unchecked power opens up vast opportunities for fraud and corruption and there are pretty much no instances in history where it turned out be to a good thing in retrospect.

Also, very surprised this story made it to the front page. Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-04-15 14:06:56+00:00
Its the integration and overall combined effect of the entire industrial pipeline that makes China so incredible. It processes all the raw materials and the recycling/reuse of off cuts through every possible way to turn those raw materials into components and then into goods with very little need for import from other countries. Its the complete system for a huge variety of goods.

To compete with that the entire pipeline from raw materials through components and final product needs to be reproduced and its taken China 40+ years to build up to this capacity and capability.

I think its something more countries should consider and do for certain pipelines but we are in a world with vast international trade and the winner(cheapest) takes most of the trade so whatever it is needs to be worth while within country.
by senfiaj | 2025-04-15 14:07:10+00:00
> My own hypothesis: any serious JS engine is going to recognise the [a, b] = [b, a]

This. As the author of this blog I actually run a benchmark, the loop body was only doing swap, I remember the penalty was around ~2%. But yeah, if it's a critical path and you care about every millisecond, then sure, you should optimize for speed, not for code ergonomics.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-15 14:07:26+00:00
I bought a bunch of off-brand Lego kits usually with Chinese themes (pagodas, nine-tailed foxes) from Temu. What I thought was hilarious about Temu was that the size of things was usually different from you had in mind. Most of the time Temu items were smaller than I imagined but once in a while you'd get something much bigger.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-15 14:08:37+00:00
Its also worth noting that the NLRB has a proposed budget of $320M for the the 2025 fiscal year and a total of around 1,300 employees [1].

I'm a strong proponent of small government and don't know enough about the NLRB to say if I would find them useful, but that is well within the range of a small federal department today.

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...
by lesbolasinc | 2025-04-15 14:08:52+00:00
I dont understand why twitter is so prevalent in the tech community; and it's not like you can just 'not use it' - you are at a true disadvantage if you aren't on twitter because of how much discourse around new tech, private equity, etc transpires on it.

I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
by turnsout | 2025-04-15 14:09:06+00:00
I agree with the author… We need to stop pathologizing behavior that is developmentally natural. We over-medicate kids, full stop.

The ADHD self-diagnosis trend amongst adults also needs to stop. People are now ascribing any minor challenge in life to ADHD. Everyone procrastinates. Everyone forgets people’s names. Everyone has trouble focusing sometimes. It’s not ADHD, that’s called life.

My worry is that by giving it a label, it lets people give in to negative behavior because “that’s just the way I am,” or “I’m neurodivergent.” But even people with severe emotional and behavioral challenges can navigate life. It’s not an excuse to be inconsiderate.
by omneity | 2025-04-15 14:09:23+00:00
See my other comment. The answer is transfer learning: leveraging massive amounts of data in one language like Python, a few bridges to another language like Ruby, and obtain a “native” result in the other language.

But in this case the LLM is not exposed to explicit translation pairs between these two languages and rather by seeing enough examples in similar contexts, LLMs transfer some of their learnings in Python to Ruby (for better or worse results)
by pixl97 | 2025-04-15 14:10:00+00:00
>meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.

No. Really not much at all.

The US cut 330 million or so people out of a market of billions setting it up so the rest of the world starts getting a competitive advantage over the US.

>it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.

LOLOLOL. You do not think like a capitalist. They didn't go "oh no I have to cut corners". They saw they could cut corners on costs decades ago. China has been building your name brand products for as long half the people on HN have been alive. If you look at Tiktok now, they are out right showing the factories building products you are paying hundreds/thousands for in the US for 20-50 dollars.

The US screwed itself with huge consolidations and rent seeking behaviors. We are paying huge amounts for products and not getting the value we deserve.
by alnwlsn | 2025-04-15 14:10:01+00:00
Compared to plain wires with your intended voltage and your choice of any 2-pin connector, USB-C is not so basic. SMD resistors imply you have a PCB or something to put them on. Which means that your power connector is no longer just a couple pieces of stamped metal and some plastic. It's also a tiny connector with close together pins. For everything else since the introduction of electric lighting, you can just solder two wires on the back and call it a day.

Not that I'm making excuses here - there's some weird stuff going on inside that lamp. There's a PCB for the battery charger, but the USB-C socket isn't on it, it's on a wire pigtail that connects to the board with another connector. And I don't usually see so many removable connectors inside something made so cheaply. They clearly could have done it correctly in this case, but didn't.
by vishnugupta | 2025-04-15 14:10:05+00:00
No kidding!

Beyond the obvious skilled labor there’s supply chain network, maintenance, townships and supporting system around them.

And all of this needs human labor which is taken from somewhere else. How do you incentivize them? Just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it either. Because more often than not it’ll attract charlatans who will promise the sky, take the money and move away.
Show HN: Proflect – A personal growth platform built around reflection
by Bramhoven | 2025-04-15 14:10:07+00:00
Hey HN!

I’ve been working on a side project called Proflect, a platform to help people grow personally and professionally through reflection, not just action.

The idea came from a simple frustration: I was setting goals, journaling separately, and getting feedback from people I trust, but none of it was connected. So I built something that brings it all together. Hopefully ensuring that you stopping to ask, “Is this working?” or “What am I learning?”.

Here’s what Proflect does:

- Set goals and break them into subgoals

- Journal daily and link entries to specific goals

- Request feedback from friends, colleagues, or mentors

- Tag entries and feedback as positive/negative

- Track patterns and get reminders to reflect or take action

It’s not live yet, but I’m opening a closed beta later this month, and there’s a waitlist open now at https://proflect.io.

Would love feedback on:

- The concept — would you use it?

- The landing page — does it make sense?

- Any features you’d love to see?

Happy to answer questions or exchange side project tips too. Thanks for checking it out!
by like_any_other | 2025-04-15 14:10:28+00:00
Related:

Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. [1,2]

Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs [3]

Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn't Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity [4]

Researchers Axed Data Point Undermining ‘Narrative’ That White Doctors Are Biased Against Black Babies [5,6]

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...

[2] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001

[3] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

[4] https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...

[5] https://dailycaller.com/2025/03/31/exclusive-researchers-axe...

[6] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/10/27/the-data-...
by suraci | 2025-04-15 14:11:12+00:00
America's tariff move under Trump is a symptom of mass psychosis. But I think China's response is a huge gamble that the psychosis can be broken with careful application of pain - before that pain hurts China even more.

There is some hope that they'll revolt against Trump if things get bad enough, the way there's some hope for democracy in China, I suppose. But at the same time, I don't know that China's aggressive response is going to politically move things in that direction, because it's so easy for the nationalists to rally around the flag - regardless of the economic pain they're experiencing. China itself knows this and leverages it with its own nationalists. And this response is going to cost China dearly.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-15 14:11:33+00:00
I think its more complicated than this. People don't want to work in factories per se, but what a world where labor has actual power. The big thing that offshoring did was strip the power of local labor to enforce certain reasonable conditions on employers and this allowed normal people to live stable, even comfortable lives.

Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet. What Americans really want is more control over their lives and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for that ideal.

I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest that power back from a system which has leaned ever more towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and labor.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-15 14:11:50+00:00
What about Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton, Dorothy Sayer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or Josef Pieper?

These were in fact some of the intellectual greats of the 20th century. Like many today, they wouldn't necessarily closely identify with "the right" as much as they'd disagree with and argue against the current ideology of the left.
by api | 2025-04-15 14:12:07+00:00
The problem with an exclusively intellectual economy is that it easily loses touch with reality entirely. You end up with generations of people who have no idea how anything works or how to actually make anything or do things in the real world.

Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-15 14:12:26+00:00
it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market.

A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.