MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-18 20:55:23+00:00
Sorry, it wasn’t my intent to argue for inaction, but rather that children will eventually come in contact with these things at some point or another. Depending on what they decide to do it might even be a requirement. Personally, I feel that it’s better if that happens while the structure, support, and guardrails provided by parents are still in place rather than shortly after they’ve left the nest and have numerous other things to figure out too. Maybe it doesn’t happen at 14, but instead at 16 or 17, and in highly controlled doses with “less bad” services, and comes with the context of discussions of the pitfalls of such services.

I respect other opinions but it’s difficult to see myself taking a zero-exposure policy as a parent for the simple reason that such policies have made for stumbling blocks and thorns in my side that I’ve been dealing with for the better part of my adult life.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-05-18 20:55:42+00:00
> As in a lot of home automation actually makes things worse. Replacing a convenient light switch with an app? 100% terrible idea and actually makes things inconvenient, don't automate those.

The key to proper home automation is not to destroy the "normal" functions already in place, but to augment them with automation.

Smart switches that do not function without connectivity are not smart. I discourage new implementation of smart-bulbs too as they break the "normal" bulb-switch function. I discourage smart plugs for the same reason. Same thing with valves. Imagine a valve that cannot be turned on or off manually. Horrific.
by DaftDank | 2025-05-18 20:55:56+00:00
I think the difference with John vs. Assange is that Assange seemed a lot more willing to take political sides/positions, whereas John was more neutral. I have visited Cryptome on/off for something like 25 years now. I have never once got the impression that he is the type of person who would selectively leak information out of political considerations.
by cyberax | 2025-05-18 20:56:34+00:00
The UL requires a switch to be able to physically break the connection in a way that can't be actuated remotely. So the switch will need an additional physical cutoff switch. Which is funny, but workable.

The deal killer is the power dissipation requirement. A solenoid, both compact and powerful enough to actuate the paddle, will dissipate too much power if it gets stuck in the "on" state. And a small geared motor is not acceptable because the switch has to be bi-stable and can't be allowed to get stuck in the middle.

So if you do an integrated device, the paddle will just end up being an input device, rather than an actual current-interrupting component. And there just isn't a lot of space inside a switch for everything without going into Apple-like engineering.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-05-18 20:56:41+00:00
The internet is not a friendly place, so a VPN is a great idea.

With modern tools like Wireguard, you can even set it up relatively easy, either as Wireguard alone or as Tailscale (or ZeroTier, though that's not Wireguard).

Wireguard (and Tailscale) allows you to setup the tunnel so that only local (RFC1918 ie) traffic is routed over it, meaning it won't eat up your battery like when just routing all traffic over it.

I have Wireguard setup like that. It enables on any Wi-Fi network that isn't mine, as well as cellular, and the battery impact is less than 2% over a day.
by jszymborski | 2025-05-18 20:57:36+00:00
"extremely uncommon" is very much not my experience when dealing with well-trained embeddings.

I'd add that just because you can achieve separability from a method, the resulting visualization may not be super informative. The distance between clusters that appear in t-SNE projected space often have nothing to do with their distance in latent space, for example. So while you get nice separate clusters, it comes at the cost of the projected space greatly distorting/hiding the relationship between points across clusters.
Show HN: AI Mobile App QA on Real Devices
by ShivamHacks | 2025-05-18 20:58:14+00:00
I built an AI agent that can do mobile app QA after working at Google for years and waiting weeks for QA results. It runs on real devices and uses an ensemble of agents (including computer use) to test like a human. Happy to answer questions and hope it helps app devs ship faster without bugs!
by Karliss | 2025-05-18 21:02:27+00:00
The main keywords here are high gear ratio and cheap parts. I am not making universal claims about all use cases. For most sane designs, sure electric motors are great at converting energy into torque. Normally you would want most of the electric energy to be turned into useful work. Which implies that electric power directly correlates with mechanical power or torque*speed. The same can't always be said about gearboxes, especially for some of those targeted at hobby/toy use cases with crazy gear ratios like 1000:1 or higher. Gear ratio can be so high that you will strip the gears or make the shaft connection slip long before you can apply sufficient torque to slow down the dc motor which is almost free spinning and spending most of it's energy to overcome friction in first few gearbox stages instead of doing useful work. In a toy or hobby project when you want something to spin slowly it might not matter that the gearbox is <10% efficient if it allows you to reuse same cheap brushed DC motor as hundreds of other toys. Increased torque is partially a side effect of slowing down the tiny motor not the primary goal, although at those slower speeds you probably want slightly higher torque but nowhere near as much as what the gear ratio gives in theory. Even some non toy use cases like cheap home appliances might occasionally use crappy inefficient gearboxes and dumbest electronics possible, especially if the 1-3W motor isn't main consumer of power. There might not even be motor controller or MCU to monitor the current.

It's not always question of lot of work for hobbyist, as it is result of using cheap of the shelf parts and modules which are optimized with different goal in mind and give very poor signal to noise ratio. Doesn't matter how much characterization you do if the change in temperature, grease viscosity and distribution, plastic flex produces higher variance in motor load than any force you can apply to final gearbox stage. I guess the more careful choice of suitable combination of parts from more specialized stores can be considered "lot of work for hobbyist" compared to picking first result on amazon or whatever you found in your junk bin so your argument still stands.

Of course high gear ratio or slow speed doesn't always mean inefficient gearboxes. There are solutions for slow rotation with or without high gear ratio which are reasonably efficient thus allowing to use motor current for estimating torque. And any serious or well designed equipment will use them. But that usually means more complex gearbox, motor controller or purpose built electric motors all of which is either more expensive or require high MOQ orders from manufacturers.
by card_zero | 2025-05-18 21:02:57+00:00
Let's say I used an AI. Actually I browsed unrelated word lists in Onelook - I think I was on synonyms for "confusion" - until I remembered the word atelier because it turns up in fantasy anime a lot. But that's a kind of machine assistance, so let's pretend it was an LLM, if that helps with where you're taking this. Now what?
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-05-18 21:03:00+00:00
> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing

Where is the limit ?

While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc.

Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes.

I am so fed up with everything turning into subscriptions, that I've just completely stopped buying things that are subscription based.

I understand developers need to make a living, but simply throwing a subscription on top of it won't convince me to buy your product. You convince me by making a compelling product, and by continuously updating it, adding new features, which will convince me to buy another version.
by breakyerself | 2025-05-18 21:03:11+00:00
If they're really working that many hours then they probably do need help. All their hours are probably going towards fixing the stupid things they're doing in a burned out stupor. They'd probably get more done working half as many hours.

Although if they can truly ship a 9,000 dollar humanoid robot that will be impressive. If their software sucks there's other options out there.
by codetrotter | 2025-05-18 21:04:37+00:00
> Would love feedback

When I go to the link, the URL is indicating that it will redirect me to a /hn page after I log in.

I write in my email and get sent a login link. I click the button to complete login. I land on a page that asks me to connect PostgreSQL or another data source.

It’s a super small thing of course, and I bet that when I click the HN submitted link again it will redirect me to the /hn since I am now logged in.

But I thought I’d point this out anyhow. Nitpicking is a tradition in these circles ;)

Edit: Clicked the submission again but it’s asking me to log in rather than seeing I am logged in so another nitpick on that also.
by boroboro4 | 2025-05-18 21:05:09+00:00
> Inflation is GOOD for the debt, which is dollar-valued and not inflation-indexed! If you inflate the currency by 20% the real value of the outstanding debt drops by 20%.

Unfortunately GDP is also dollar-valued, so debt:gdp ratio wouldn't change with inflation. Inflation wouldn't only destroy debt (which is good) it will also destroy currency and to some extent the economy. In the very end it's part of FED mandate - to keep inflation in bay.

> The discourse about the subject is cursed.

I think macroeconomics is very complicated subject, with a lot of uncertainty of how things will unfold.

Your initial claim was that servicing our debt was much harder in 80s, so it's actually not as bad (or at least not worse) these days. What I'm trying to say we can all of sudden end up in a world where interest rates are back to 80s levels, while debt:gdp ratio (which is the real amount of debt in a way) is way higher. And this would be much more complicated problem to solve. Or we would not, because it's hard to predict a) where inflation goes from now on and b) what will FED do in the same kind of scenario to 80s.

But actually scratch it, it is already bigger problem than it was back then: US needs to refinance/issue $9.2 trillion of debt this year. Current USG 10Y is ~4.5%, current GDP is 27.72 trillions. Which means after this year we will add 0.015 to the interest/gdp ratio (assuming very low current cost of the debt which is being refinanced, from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=iEiV). It will bring us above the level in 80s this year! Just this year of debt will bring the cost of servicing the debt above than it was back then. That's where huge issue is, unfortunately. And unless rates will go down it will be getting worse and worse really fast.
by keyringlight | 2025-05-18 21:05:24+00:00
I think BTX serves as the example for why a major change is unlikely, it's death is a warning to anyone thinking of doing the same. That said, even though it was led by intel back when they were in a much better position than they are now, I wonder if it wasn't against the background of Pentium4/"Preshott" and Athlon/Opteron would it have gone down better.

It's a shame as the only real personal computer desktop/tower maker that's exercised their freedom to make a significantly different design Apple with Mac Pros, and that's a different animal entirely.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-18 21:06:23+00:00
Talk is cheap, but I can't say that I am not debating the cheapest variant and am already rehearsing how to sell it wife:D.

Not that I think you do not have a point. I too worry that it seems to be a somewhat recent approach of too many aspiring platforms ( and therein may lie a problem ).

Still..
by umbra07 | 2025-05-18 21:06:32+00:00
I really, really like flash/easymotion/etc because I effectively also use the same jump motions all the time in my browser (with vimium/tridactyl). So I have double the muscle memory, and I context-switch less between my browser and neovim, compared to if I was primarily using relative line jumps in neovim
by Aloha | 2025-05-18 21:06:33+00:00
Very much agreed - and actually the fact that people can poison the water table is the exact problem we have, abstract and diffuse risks (tragedy of the commons type stuff) is treated one way, but the chance of risk to an individual is treated another. We worry very much about individual lead or asbestos exposure, but yet there is no system plan to clean it up. An example - We've spent lots of effort on trying to eliminate Leaded AvGas (which primarily effects users of it), but not as much on environmental lead from batteries.

Part of this is driven by the social media discourse and polarization - We essentially had a whole bunch of ideas which were outside of the window of normal discourse that have now been adopted as ideology and dogma by their respective camps. Once an idea is dogma/key ideological tenant it's really hard to challenge it.

Vision Zero should be viewed for what it is.. as a dumb idea.
by neom | 2025-05-18 21:06:58+00:00
I had this thought the other day, well, it's been a bunch of ongoing observations. I was a fat kid, mum had us eating healthy, but I was a really fat kid. Once I learned how to count calories, I was a regular, healthy weight young adult, as I am still today. Recently, my wife complained she'd gained a bunch of weight, I said "well yeah, your calorie intake to sedentary is out of whack" and she said "HEY! I eat healthy!" - I said, "sure, healthy but very calorie dense" - I watched her then adjust her eating a bit over the following month and then finally I asked her "do you know how to figure out about calories and stuff?" and she said "huh??" and so I explained BMR/TDEE and her mind was blown, so then I asked mum if she knew anything about calories and she said "only that they print them on the label" - funnily, my wife and my mother are both highly educated, and, I didn't know till I was in my early 20s.

Is it the case that very many people don't know about how calories work?
by liotier | 2025-05-18 21:07:08+00:00
I did that a few years ago, with the 1990 computer that I lusted over as a teenager: the IBM 8595 AKD (European reference - it is 85950KD in North America)... 486 DX, XGA display, 320 MB SCSI, 64 MB RAM... At that time my computer was a 1988 Olivetti PC-1 (512 KB 8 MHz Nec V40 with CGA and a floppy drive)...

I was awed by the beast... Everything about it screamed over-engineering - even the case was incomprehensibly robust and the power switch had a satisfyingly loud motion... I could even touch its legendary tangential fan... Touching the 20 years-old dream was an emotional moment - I'm glad I did it... The ultimate Windows 3.0 host !

But it had to go after a little while: my two-room apartment was too small for so much awesomeness, so it went to another fan.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-18 21:07:28+00:00
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".

It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
by monax | 2025-05-18 21:08:42+00:00
> There is no compiler enforced safe mode

It's still early days, but Clang can check some lifetimes, using the [[clang::lifetimebound]] attribute [1]. You can also restrict unsafe pointer usage [2] outside designated blocks of code—somewhat like Rust’s unsafe keyword.

[1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AttributeReference.html#id8 [2] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/SafeBuffers.html#buffer-operatio...
by J_Shelby_J | 2025-05-18 21:09:00+00:00
The home assistant $100 stand alone device. Pretty seamless user experience. On par with what you would expect for a consumer device as far as UX. Maybe could be a bit more polished but you can do pretty much anything with it as far extending the ecosystem. My only complaint is that writing automations in untyped yaml sucks. Fortunately, if you dump the docs in an LLM it can one shot most things - if you’re trying to do something the gui automation tool doesn’t support.

The rest is zigbee and zwave switches and sensors. You can get cheap ones from ikea. You can get nicer ones from Zooz. I like Apollo for air quality sensors. The humidifier is the German brand Ventura. Zero maintenance. But it’s not smart so I got a power outlet that reports power usage. When it runs out of water the humidifier shuts off and the power goes to zero, so I have an automation that detects that and sends a message via the HA app.

Living in California and having fans move air around from cool rooms to warmer rooms has cut our AC bill significantly as a dc fan is a fraction of power consumption of a whole house AC. And also co2 levels stay much lower. Last week I set up my window fan to blow air in whenever it’s cooler outside then inside.
by codetrotter | 2025-05-18 21:10:39+00:00
> frequency of discussion (especially within an obsessive subgroup) does not represent effective implementation

I asked the chat tool to count how many times each different programming language is mentioned in different “Show HN” post titles.

If the tool is accurate, it seems that the results diverge somewhat from what you are implying.

language post_count Python 3117 JavaScript 2545 Go 2178 Rust 1251 TypeScript 607 Java 605 Ruby 531 PHP 514 Swift 433 Clojure 229 Elixir 173 Haskell 142 Kotlin 128 Scala 122 Lua 110 C++ 101 Erlang 61 Dart 45 Perl 35
by graypegg | 2025-05-18 21:11:10+00:00
I think that would be really neat for small scale web publishing, but making it a subset of browser standards could be a really difficult sell to the people making browsers. While it's easier to build a browser to a subset of such a massive set of specs, the subset will drift towards a "similar but slightly incompatible standard" pretty soon after it's decided on. Following the development of Ladybird has given me an appreciation for just how often the "spec" for the web changes. (in small ways, daily.) That locks new browser implementations into a diverging standards track that would be very difficult to get off of.

I think something like a reference implementation (Ladybird, Servo or even Vaev maybe?) getting picked up as the small-web living standard feels like the best bet for me since that still lets browser projects get the big-time funding for making the big-web work in their browser too. "It's got to look good in Ladybird/Vaev/etc".

An idea: a web authoring tool built around libweb from Ladybird! (Or any other new web implementation that's easily embeddable) The implied standard-ness of whatever goes in that slot would just come for free. (Given enough people are using it!)
by cowboylowrez | 2025-05-18 21:11:17+00:00
I can understand the problem from the viewpoint of the big companies. How do you provide personalized support to such a huge customer base? The solution of course is to charge for it! Say for instance, I got kicked of of "ogle", but its critical to all my billing etc because of email. Its free email, there are going to be cases when you get locked out (happened to me before with another email provider, THEY got hacked so locked ME out haha, only sentimental things were lost thankfully).

But what about a $100 recovery fee? Then the problem becomes "how do you prove its your account"? There's a wide variety of jurisdictions and id mechanisms, can "ogle" manage all that? I don't know, I'm not close to even talking about "faang" or whatever let alone work at one. So many transactions happen nowadays with these systems that are long strings of rube goldberg machines helped by "AI" that is actually not that intelligent. Is it financially possible to even run these megacorps without the ability to discard problem "customers"? Can you build customer support processes and staff at this sort of scale? Even setting up new billing for what was previously a free account seems sort of daunting.

I guess I'm saying that I'm not so sure that these megacorps "have the money to spend on better customer support," except in the apple case, their customer base is so "unfree" and high margin that I don't understand why they would have a problem, even if repairing an account required a fee for some sort of id verification which seems to be the crucial thing here. They are obviously well positioned with their per customer costs and apple id stuff.
by maximinus_thrax | 2025-05-18 21:12:15+00:00
This is a blatant fluff piece for Telegram, so let me even the playing field:

- https://theconversation.com/telegram-why-the-app-is-allowed-...

- https://kremlingram.org/en/dangers/

- https://archive.is/kNnDk

And lastly, hot off the presses, happened hours ago, Durov, following the Russian tradition, tried to influence the Romanian presidential elections right on election day by spamming Telegram users https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/telegram-founder-says-h...

For the record, 'conservative voices' is a dog whistle for batshit rightwing bullshit, as both presidential candidates are conservatives.
by alihammoud21 | 2025-05-18 21:12:45+00:00
Hey everyone! I'm 14 and from Canada, and I just finished building a web-based word game called Quick Scramble. It's a fast-paced daily challenge where you find themed words in 60 seconds.

5x5 grid Themed word list Help button to guide new players Firebase authentication + leaderboard

Built with HTML, CSS, JS, and Firebase. Would love your feedback!
by wavemode | 2025-05-18 21:13:39+00:00
> In O(n^2), the size of the input is n and the amount of time, or space, or some measure of the cost has an upper bound that is proportional to n^2.

Yes, this is my point. In the article, they classify an O(n^2) startup as one which achieves n^2 results in n time, which is the opposite of how the notation is typically used.
by nine_k | 2025-05-18 21:13:42+00:00
> [The conclusion is that] O(n) companies are higher EV than O(n^2) companies. I mean that, on average, a founder will make more money pursuing an O(n) company than an O(n^2) company. And not an insignificant amount, the amount of liquidity and networth a 20m ARR O(n) company is extremely hard to match by a traditional VC backed O(n^2) company.

It's a bit like getting a regular job vs playing a lottery: the former gives you better financial results on average, while the latter gives you a chance to make it really big.

(I also wish it were "linear companies" and "quadratic / exponential companies", or maybe "snooker-cue companies" vs "hockey-stick companies".)