MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Findazon – Reverse image search for Amazon products
by anthonytorre | 2025-05-03 15:37:11+00:00
Hey HN,

I just launched findazon.com, a small tool that lets you take a picture of a product (or upload one) and instantly find similar items on Amazon.

It uses visual recognition + AI prompting to generate Amazon search queries, and supports multiple languages and regional Amazon domains. If the image doesn't contain a product, it returns nothing.

There’s no login, no app store — it works as a PWA and can be installed on mobile.

It’s mostly a weekend project I built out of frustration after constantly trying to find clothes and gadgets I saw online without knowing how to describe them.

Would love feedback, suggestions, or edge-case breakage. All thoughts welcome.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-03 15:38:22+00:00
If the gov 1) shows that it's willing to take extreme action that is outside the bounds of the law or at the least accepted practice, and 2) makes it clear that it's not afraid of getting sued and is even willing to ignore the courts, then 3) threats of the type described in the article are very effective because you have to assume that the government will take things to the next level if you don't comply, regardless of the legality of their threats.

That is how authoritarianism works. It's been very effective in China where companies and institutions are cowed into compliance. For example, censoring by social media companies. Companies self-sensor their users' content so the government doesn't have to. Why? Because if they don't, they know they will get in trouble in some way, and it may on the surface be completely unrelated (like these veiled threats about tax status).
by _heimdall | 2025-05-03 15:38:54+00:00
This is effectively Jevans paradox[1] in action.

The cost, in money or time, for getting certain types of work done decreases. People ramp up demand to fill the gap, "full utilization" of the workers.

Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.

My hypothesis (I'm sure its not novel or unique) is that very few people know what to do with idle hands. We tend to keep stress levels high as a distraction, and tend to freak out in various ways if we find ourselves with low stress and nothing that "needs" to be done.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
by vik0 | 2025-05-03 15:39:33+00:00
>Cromwell ravaged through and tried to cleanse them

I don't think you realize just how weak central states were back in the day. To even call them states in the same vein as how we would today call a state a state is a bit of a misnomer

Cromwell lived in the 17th century, a time when there was no instant access to information between large (or small) spans of geography. A time when commands couldn't be given and executed right away

>you live a life free of strife or serious concern for bodily harm

Like in Cromwell's time, for the majority of even his opponents. Good luck finding your enemy who has no phone or any other device that emits signals. And if you do find him, good luck getting that information to your superiors before he can escape again

And to go a bit off-topic:

I don't understand why there is a tendency here where people think we live in these semi-perfect, vaguely utopian Times where life is so much better in every way compared to even 100, or god forbid, 500 years or more; and that these Times will only get better and better as the clock keeps spinning

People lived and flourished and did just fine back in the day. People weren't breaking down every day because they had no electricity, vaccines (im not anti vax before someone accuses me of being one), or any other things we have today that they didn't have back then

Sure, maybe life was shorter on average (mainly thanks to things like stillbirth), but I think we should question if our comparatively longer lives today (propped up artificially for the vast majority) are any more meaningful or better in quality just because they're quantitatively bigger

- just think of how many people rely on things like blood pressure medication to squeeze out another day instead of making meaningful changes to their lives (and most people could; exceptions exist, though very few) which would actually make their lives much better and more enjoyable
by rainsford | 2025-05-03 15:39:49+00:00
One additional factor to consider is that in most cases those setting the leisure hours (i.e. employers) are not the same ones enjoying the leisure (i.e. employees). While the leisure/productivity tradeoff applies to an individual, an economically rational employer only really values productivity and will only offer as much leisure time as necessary to attract and retain employees. So while social forces do generally push for additional leisure over time, such as shorter work weeks, it's often challenging for people to find the type of employment situation where they have significant flexibility in trading off income for leisure time.

As an example, I have a pretty good paying, full-time white collar job. It would be much more challenging if not impossible to find an equivalent job making half as much working 20 hours a week. Of course I could probably find some way to apply the same skills half-time as a consultant or whatever, but that comes with a lot of tradeoffs besides income reduction and is less readily available to a lot of people.

Maybe the real exception here is at the top of the economic ladder, although at that point the mechanism is slightly different. Billionaires have pretty infinite flexibility on leisure time because their income is almost entirely disconnected from the amount of "labor" they put in.
by ornornor | 2025-05-03 15:39:52+00:00
TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts.

And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved.

I’ll never fly TK again and tell anyone whenever this came up. Look reviews up for yourself online, hundreds of people report being stranded, abused, and disrespected in IST by TK the way we were.
by amluto | 2025-05-03 15:40:19+00:00
As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative.

So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.
by Linux-Fan | 2025-05-03 15:40:48+00:00
One key benefit of putting up an own server is that there are no limitations on file types and much fewer restrictions on what kind of content you can create.

For serving static files, I can (and have) lived a long time with one of the "free hoster" sites -- from times before Github Pages or S3 were a thing I guess, today I'd go for Github Pages.

A key advantage of moving to an own server was that I can enable the odd feature or technology any time. E.g. most recently I wanted to have some "private" subspace with fancy authentication and it was easy to add with proper access to the server config.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-03 15:40:48+00:00
> Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue".

"We" phrasing is an empathy hack for CS, because it lets you continue to be nice to the person you're talking to AND be persistent about "our" issue being solved.

It's kind of like judo, especially when faced with an apathetic, resistant, or adversarial rep: "This isn't just my problem. This is our problem. So how can we fix it?"

PS: In the same way that my favorite cancellation reason turns the situation on its head. Don't play the game they've rigged up for you to lose. "Why are you cancelling?" -> "Personal reasons." There's literally no counter-response.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-03 15:41:42+00:00
I think we may be reaching a point where tech is better at almost everything. When I look at my workplace , there are only a few people who do stuff that’s truly creative. Everybody else does work that’s maybe difficult but fundamentally still very mechanical and in principle automatable.

Add to that progress in robotics and we may reach a point where humans are not needed anymore for most tasks. Then the capitalists will have fully automated factories but nobody who can buy their products.

Maybe capitalism had a good run for the last 200 years and a new economic system needs to arise. Whatever that will be.
by tzs | 2025-05-03 15:42:11+00:00
I wonder if you could make a DMD [1] where instead of mirrors the tilting part is tiny solar panels?

The panels would only have two positions, but you could install half the DMD devices so that the two positions are south and southeast, and half so they are south and southwest. You could then have half your panels southeast and half south in the morning, all of them south midday, and have southwest and half south afternoon.

That would get you at least some tracking and it should be mechanically a lot more reliable than the systems that move large panels.

DMDs were designed for use in video projects, where they have to move the mirrors more times in 4 hours of video than a solar array would need to move the panels in 1000 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_micromirror_device
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-03 15:42:32+00:00
I speculate that the group of users that are both A: Willing to install something beyond Pip for package management, and B: aren't willing to install a proper dependency resolver (uv, etc) is small.

If you are willing to use a third-party package tool (big leap), I think it's a small step to use one that fixes all of pip's limitations, vice a single one.
by MarkusQ | 2025-05-03 15:42:49+00:00
I suspect what happened here (and possibly in other similar cases) is that some author glossed a body of work in a way that made sense in context, and others mistook it as a quotation. It's as if I remarked that Isaac Asimov said a lot of prescient things about robots, and people saw that and started quoting it:

> A lot of prescient things about robots.

> -- Issac Asimov
by dahart | 2025-05-03 15:43:17+00:00
What do you mean? @plotics wasn’t talking about remuneration for products or services, nor equity. “Capital ownership” in the sentence you quoted is referring to the company, the ol’ ownership of the means of production. “Granting full access to work-created value” means the owners (investors, CEO, etc.) would split profits among workers rather than keep the profits for themselves.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-03 15:43:25+00:00
I wish people could handle an idle mind, I expect we'd all be better off. But yeah, realistically most people when idle would do a lot of damage.

Its always possible that risk would be transitional. Anyone alive today, at least in western style societies, likely doesn't know a life without high levels of stress and distraction. It makes sense that change would cause people to lash out, maybe people growing up in that new system would handle it better (if they had the chance).
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-03 15:43:41+00:00
mandatory rant:

mathematics did NOT give anything to anything.

mathematics found out way to express naturally occurring pattern, without knowing what phenomena is behind creation of that pattern.

mathematics is not creating worlds, universes. mathematics in not physics. mathematics is not biology.

"good" language leads to "good" and logical thinking in every area of human endeavor.
by pythonguython | 2025-05-03 15:43:58+00:00
AI can’t do our jobs today, but we’re only 2.5 years from the release of chatGPT. The performance of these models might plateau today, but we simply don’t know. If they continue to improve at the current rate for 3-5 more years, it’s hard for me to see how human input would be useful at all in engineering.
by thegrim33 | 2025-05-03 15:44:07+00:00
I had an interesting experience recently where I was sick with a virus for an entire month, ending up in multiple urgent cares followed by the ER for 24 hours.

They took blood from me seemingly every 10 minutes and ran every test they could and in the end couldn't figure out what it was. The doctors (in a very major hospital in a very major city) didn't even seem surprised, they just shrugged and said I had some unknown virus that they didn't have a test for. The way they acted it seemed like a regular occurrence. Just some mystery virus.

It was just so shocking for me that there could be some virus out there that had me horribly sick for an entire month, much sicker than covid or the flu ever made me, and there's not even a test for it, it's just spreading out there doing its thing. Makes me wonder how little we really know.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-05-03 15:44:46+00:00
Thank you! I didn't know this had a name. I remember thinking something along these lines in seventh grade social studies when we learned that Eli Whitney's cotton gin didn't actually end up improving conditions for enslaved people.

I suspected this would be the case with AI too. A lot of people said things like "there won't be enough work anymore" and I thought, "are you kidding? Do you use the same software I use? Do you play the same games I've played? There's never enough time to add all of the features and all of the richness and complexity and all of the unit tests and all of the documentation that we want to add! Most of us are happy if we can ship a half-baked anything!"

The only real question I had was whether the tech sector would go through a prolonged, destructive famine before realizing that.
by atonse | 2025-05-03 15:45:14+00:00
Tough to say how it maps but with cinema, you have so many different skill sets needed for every single film. Costumes, builders for sets, audio engineers, the crews, the caterers, location scouts, composers, etc.

In live theater it would be mostly actors, some one time set and costume work, and some recurring support staff.

But then again, there are probably more theaters and theater production by volume.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-03 15:45:22+00:00
I think a lot of people would be fine being idle if they had a guaranteed standard of living. When I was unemployed for a while, I was pretty happy in general but stressed about money running out. Without the money issue the last thing I would want to do is to sell my time to a soulless corporation. I have enough interests to keep me busy. Work just sucks up time I would love to spend on better things.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-03 15:46:10+00:00
>technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work

I'm kind of ok with doing more work in the same time, though if I'm becoming way more effective I'll probably start pushing harder on my existing discussions with management about 4 day work weeks (I'm looking to do 4x10s, but I might start looking to negotiate it to "instead of a pay increase, let's keep it the same but a 4x8 week").

If AI lets me get more done in the same time, I'm ok with that. Though, on the other hand, my work is budgeting $30/mo for the AI tools, so I'm kind of figuring that any time that personally-purchased AI tools are saving me, I deduct from my work week. ;-)

>very few people know what to do with idle hands

"Millions long for immortality that don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
by jasongill | 2025-05-03 15:49:31+00:00
Have not used Node Red in production and only played with it briefly, but n8n is more of a Zapier replacement whereas Node Red I believe is more of an IoT automation platform.

n8n is made so that you can set it up and give your staff access and they can manage their own workflows (like "when a customer opens a support ticket, update their Salesforce record to increment the number of tickets they have opened").

It's clearly aimed at non technical users being able to develop their own solutions to problems (for better or for worse), more so than Windmill which is made for developers to solve their own problems or develop solutions that non-technical people can use. Node Red if I remember correctly is more heavily weighted toward real time events for dev (especially hardware/IoT dev) use than "let the support team manage their own workflows for routing customer complaints"
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-05-03 15:49:44+00:00
> And people wonder why EU ( and UK ) doesn't allow much US agriculture import.

I mean, this is completely false. 8% of all EU agriculture imports is from USA and has grown year over year for decades.

> U.S. agricultural exports to the European Union reached a record $12.8 billion in 2024, a 1-percent increase from 2023

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
by yusina | 2025-05-03 15:50:47+00:00
The world is not black-and-white. One can have more or less issues.

And the same goes for improving the situation. Stopping the world and rewriting everything is never going to fly. The only viable approach is gradual introduction of safer techniques, be it a language or verification options, that step by step improve things and make the bar of adoption minimal. Nobody is going to get convinced if this is cast as a culture war. The folks annoyed by the status quo need to bring the skeptics along, everything else is doomed to fail (as well-illustrated by all the discussions here).
by kotaKat | 2025-05-03 15:50:55+00:00
All of our communications at my organization that have clearly been run through Copilot (as we seem to keep championing in some kind of bizarre wankfest) lead me to have to waste a significant sum of time to read and decipher the slop.

What could have been a single paragraph turns into five separate bulleted lists and explanations and fluff.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-05-03 15:51:07+00:00
> Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews

We literally have the minutes of the Wannsee conference, in which the Nazis decided to kill all Jews.

The German state carried out a massive logistical operation of moving millions of people to specially built camps and gassing them to death. Comparing that to a famine is insane.

You're drawing an equivalence between patently absurd, factually false denialism about the Holocaust on the one hand, and the dominant scholarly view that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s was not a deliberate attempt to kill Ukrainians on the other hand.
by shakna | 2025-05-03 15:51:14+00:00
listFiles is not sorted. It provides the files in the order that the OS provides them. That it's ordered on your machine, probably has to do with when the underlying nodes were created. But that's not going to much work in production.

dirInfo, err := dir.Readdir(0) if err != nil { return nil, err } names := make([]string, len(dirInfo)) for i, fileInfo := range dirInfo { names[i] = fileInfo.Name() }
by ludwik | 2025-05-03 15:51:40+00:00
We used to have this in the form of a pair of HTML tags: <frameset> and <frame> (not to be confused with the totally separate <iframe>!). <frameset> provided the scaffolding with slots for multiple frames, letting you easily create a page made up entirely of subpages. It was once popular and, in many ways, worked quite neatly. It let you define static elements once entirely client-side (and without JS!), and reload only the necessary parts of the page - long before AJAX was a thing. You could even update multiple frames at once when needed.

From what I remember, the main problem was that it broke URLs: you could only link to the initial state of the page, and navigating around the site wouldn't update the address bar - so deep linking wasn’t possible (early JavaScript SPA frameworks had the same issue, BTW). Another related problem was that each subframe had to be a full HTML document, so they did have their own individual URLs. These would get indexed by search engines, and users could end up on isolated subframe documents without the surrounding context the site creator intended - like just the footer, or the article content without any navigation.
by chiph | 2025-05-03 15:51:56+00:00
We ran into the same thing back in the dot-com era. The development group had a sample customer set up as "Master Bait & Tackle", which had an outdoor outfitter theme. With items like fishing reels, lures, backpacks, etc. Entirely innocent (apart from the name).

Sales & Marketing got wind of how consistent the data was in it and wanted a copy they could use in presentations and for trade-show exhibits. We all said absolutely not. But they went around us and got a copy anyway.

It did not go well when a potential customer made a comment about the name during a demo.

Lesson learned. Always use the word "Test" in your test data. Always.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-03 15:52:12+00:00
Would you be kind enough to give an example of this?

I disagree, but I'm open to being convinced

I just don't think you can solve a problem in any way without understanding it first, at least at a high level

I think if you know a solution you want to reach then you can work backwards from it in a brute force way to reach the solution you want

But I don't think you can take a problem where you aren't sure what the solution is and brute force the solution without understanding the problem
by fzysingularity | 2025-05-03 15:52:14+00:00
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by menturi | 2025-05-03 15:52:41+00:00
It's comments like these that sadden me. It's this mindset that make me pessimistic about the long-term viability of humanity as I think it is shared among many people. When we (individuals/groups/society) don't plan far ahead (even for the loosest sense/meaning of the word "plan"), that will tend to lead to short-term benefits with long-term detriments. That even applies even for things that can occur past our lifespan. In my opinion, we should strive to benefit/help our decedents. Climate change is the most obvious case of this, but it applies to other cases like solar flares on the scale of the Carrington event or greater or like Kessler syndrome here (both perhaps on the order of hundreds of years). If Kessler syndrome is a legitimate concern to be a problem in the not crazy distant future, we shouldn't dismiss it outright just because the issue is unlikely to be a problem within our lifetime.
by naasking | 2025-05-03 15:52:53+00:00
> "Includes" functionality is considered to be server-side, i.e. handled outside of the web browser. HTML is client-side, and really just a markup syntax, not a programming language.

That's not an argument that client-side includes shouldn't happen. In fact HTML already has worse versions of this via frames and iframes. A client-side equivalent of a server-side include fits naturally into what people do with HTML.