MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by transpute | 2025-07-01 03:08:30+00:00
There are 1000+ public research papers on machine learning + RF detection of human activity, including but not limited to breathing rate, keystrokes, body position, body motion, gestures, sleeping, biometric (identity) signals and more, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=device+free+wireless+se...

What's the economic value of remote collection of human behavioral signatures without consent, integrated with AI and robotics and "digital twins"? We're not there yet, but if the technology continues improving, what's the future value of "motion capture" of humans without body-worn sensors?

In theory, this will enable "Minority Report" user interfaces. 3D gestures could be combined with "AI" voice interfaces. Biometric authentication (e.g. heart rate) could replace passwords. Walk into a room and it adapts itself to your preferences. Etc.

There are lots of "cool" Jetsons sci-fi use cases, but ONLY IF the data and automation are entirely under control of the human subjects, e.g. self-hosted home server, local GPUs, local LLM, local voice recognition, etc.
by scythe | 2025-07-01 03:09:05+00:00
Japan's population peaked decades ago. Surely it can't be a mere lack of land that drives the cost of rice. That would have been worse in the 1990s. Plus, rice is a super high-yield crop and Japan has rich volcanic soils. Many countries have higher populations densities and export food (the Netherlands, Bangladesh). More likely it's the cost of farm labor driving up prices.

Perhaps one strategy would be to find some economic use for the byproduct biomass from rice farming. Bioplastic is going to be the highest value-add; biofuel, except possibly aviation fuel, has a low price ceiling. This could effectively subsidize rice production without drawing from the public till.
by ggm | 2025-07-01 03:09:44+00:00
I think when commodity NAS arrived and home users had some expectations of reliable storage at home, combined with ubiquitous cloud storage, to me at least, centrally managed systems became less interesting. Once I realised I didn't run CPU intensive code, the benefit was managed reliable filestore, and access to other people's data.

What I'm left with is old timer regret for time passing. The ozone rich, oily smell of a well managed machine room. A display of lights showing intensity of work on a CPU. Tapes stuttering. Well.. romance is fine. We got work to do old timer.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-01 03:10:07+00:00
I agree with the sentiment and think we don't do enough that way. However, sometimes laws (rules in general really) exist for broader reasons and there are edge cases where they don't make sense. In practice carving out every last edge case would be quite difficult and time consuming.

There's a park that closes at dusk. I walk my dog through it in the early morning hours unless I happen to see police hanging around. What's the alternative? The local residents clearly don't want people partying or sleeping in the park at night due to the crime that would invite in nearby areas. No one cares if I walk my dog through it. I doubt I'd be successful if I tried to effect change. What new wording would I even propose?
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-01 03:11:39+00:00
More scary in the hands of the government. Whether you didn’t trust the prior US government or this one - which pretty much covers the entire population - that’s the folks that shouldn’t have this technology at their disposal. I struggle to see a use a corporation will have for this even extending ad tech to the maximum potential. The most useful application is surveillance for political purposes - in the current government, how better to cross reference with the uber database of people they are building to enact political policy to know when people they want to disappear to a foreign prison? This provision doesn’t even seem to require a warrant.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-07-01 03:12:10+00:00
This is a great idea! It could also expand to testing non-food items for dangerous chemicals (lead, heavy metals, etc). Many products keep a certification on-hand confirming that the product has been tested and found not to exceed the threshold, but I always am suspicious of (1) how thorough the initial testing actually is and (2) how well these results hold up as manufacturing continues. I realize I'm just plugging my pet-peeve though, not sure if others are as concerned about this.
by saurik | 2025-07-01 03:12:13+00:00
I almost never see people "handle" errors and actually add value, though... it feels a lot like how people sprinkle timeouts throughout their logic that just serve to make the system less stable. Almost all of the time--like, seriously: almost all of the time, not 99% of the time, or 99.9% of the time, but almost every single time--you call a function, you shouldn't care what errors it can raise, as that's not your problem. In a scant handful of places throughout your entire project--in the context of a web site backend, this often won't even be in your code at all: it will be taken care of inside of the router--you will catch errors, report them, and provide a way for the operation to retry somehow; but, if you care why the error happened, either the API was designed wrong (which sometimes happens) or you are using it wrong. You have to already misunderstand this aspect of error design in order to even contemplate the existence of a language that forces people to deal with local error handling.
by xp84 | 2025-07-01 03:12:29+00:00
I was a kid right in the target demo for DKC circa 95 or so — 11. That game absolutely blew our socks off. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. I remember I had a videotape that they sent out (probably a send-away promo from a box of cereal or something) that teased the game around the time of its release and showed some behind the scenes stuff from the game’s development. I definitely watched that tape many times. I didn’t even get to own DKC, but I did get to play it at a friend’s house.
by protocolture | 2025-07-01 03:13:09+00:00
As far back as 2017 I copped a lot of flak for suggesting that the coming automation revolution will be great at copying office workers and artists but wont be in order of replacing the whole human race. A lot of the time moores law got thrown back in my face. But thats how this works, we unlock something new, we exploit it as far as possible, the shine wears off and we deal with the aftermath.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-07-01 03:13:44+00:00
> What irreplaceable apps are propping up iOS?

EV charging and smart ID (aka gov id). To lesser extent - anything thats a smart hardware - home automation, cameras, vacuums, cars, drones, etc. Then there’s services - namely ride hailing, escooter hire. Plenty of mobile webapps are pretty crippled too so you download apps.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-01 03:14:36+00:00
… I don't want every program to attempt to implement argument parsing; bespoke implementations will be lower quality than clap. Not reinventing an argument parser is an extremely reasonably dependency to take.

Clap, on the non-derive side, has approximately two dependencies: anstream/anstyle (for terminal coloring, another thing that sounds deceptively simple at first pass, if you think all the world is a VT100, but really isn't; this is a reasonable dep. for a CLI arg parser) and strsim (string similarity, again, a reasonable dep for a CLI arg parser…). And that's it¹ for clap's direct deps.

(¹I'm omitting clap_lex, as an "internal" dep.)

On the derive side, there's the usual proc-macro2/quote/syn trio, but those come up frequently in derive crates due to what they do, and other than that, there's just `heck`, which is again an obvious dependency in context.

… what is so quizzical to me about the "so many dependencies!" complaint is that when we do get examples like this, they're almost always on crates that bottle up genuinely tricky functionality (like what we see here) — exactly the sort of thing that a.) is hard to get right and b.) isn't relevant to the problem I want to solve. That's like "absolutely this is a dependency" central, to me…
by lxgr | 2025-07-01 03:15:18+00:00
> The new document is identical and even contains the same ID number.

Quite a few IDs contain a 2D barcode, and I believe at least some of these contain some offline-validateable signature over the basic data of the document, including the expiry date. That's not as trivial to forge.

On top of that, document expiry does help a bit with people trying to use a lost/stolen ID of somebody they happen to look similar to, adds a forcing function to make people eventually upgrade to newer/more secure document standards etc.
by msgodel | 2025-07-01 03:16:25+00:00
Don't know about EV stuff but I don't think normal ID cards are going anywhere. All the home automation stuff I've gotten speaks UPNP, my quadcopter doesn't have an app at all AFAIK but I shopped for an open source one. All the services seem to be moving toward the web just because dealing with the review processes is annoying and all you get from it is push notifications.
by elevaet | 2025-07-01 03:16:56+00:00
I think a really valuable feature in a photo library app would be something that can identify sets of very similar or identical photos and decide which one is the "best" and offer to discard the rest.

I must be wasting so much storage on the 4 photos I took in a row of the family pose, or derivatives that got shared on whatsapp and then stored back to my gallery, and so on, and I know I'm not the only one.
by infotainment | 2025-07-01 03:18:40+00:00
TBH, I think that wouldn't solve the core problem.

If you forced, for example, TikTok to do this right now, they would presumably add a page to their app with their recommender algorithm. Then what? Meta or other competitors might be interested in copying aspects of it, but normal users would likely ignore it and continue being addicted to TikTok.
by laborcontract | 2025-07-01 03:19:18+00:00
I wonder if this is what led to Sony forcing ATRAC down users throats. It killed their chance at any success in the mp3 player market which should have parlayed into greater success in the mobile phone market.

Crap like this can permanently alter the trajectory of a company and its products. My speculation about Google’s slowness to productize LLMs were, in part, due to the chilling effect of the Google Books lawsuit.
by msgodel | 2025-07-01 03:19:20+00:00
This shouldn't even need terminal coloring, in fact that sounds annoying because it's going to have to behave differently if you pipe it to less (or it's going to do something dumb like the rust compiler itself and just reopen the tty.)

This actually reminds me of my other issue with this kind of "oh we just get it for free" attitude that tends to result in overbuilding things that I also dislike in rust.

No I think people would be better off with a bespoke option parser actually.
by jvanderbot | 2025-07-01 03:19:23+00:00
If you got a progress bar, website, and dependency tree for every

#include <argp.h>, <stdio.h>, <sstream>, or <curl.h>

it'd feel pretty crazy too. Imagine if `make` went out and pulled latest upstream changes for `pthreads` every time any one of your dependencies used it. C++ imagine it's pulling and building boost, or abseil.

C#? The entire mono/.net toolchain and system/ FFI libraries.

Imagine if we had "dot-h.io" that tracked how many separate C projects used argp. Laughable! Millions!

Every language has gobs of dependencies. So many dependencies it'd make you sick. Thousands upon thousands of lines of code, just to make something that runs on one target and says "Hello world" to the screen. Hell, some languages require you to run a runtime on your operating system that runs on real hardware _just to launch those thousands of lines of code_. And those are written using curl.h, pthreads.h, etc etc (or similar). Bananas!

At least those with package managers allow you to see it, audit it, update it seamlessly.

If it's too big, use "nostd"
by komali2 | 2025-07-01 03:19:34+00:00
Apple and Google control the internet, through controlling web search and browsing. One pays the other to ensure this monopoly. And none of the companies you mentioned were worth 3 trillion, and last I checked they all continue to exist and hold reasonable market share, and none of them taking market share from another is a case of a garage startup knocking off a monopolist.

The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.

So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
by hamandcheese | 2025-07-01 03:25:01+00:00
I like clap a lot, however I find that clap derive is not very easily discoverable. I always have to google for the right macro incantation to get what I want. Whereas editor completions from rust analyzer get me quite far without needing to leave my editor when I'm just using an ordinary library.

I think this is more a criticism of rust-analyzer than clap itself, any macro-heavy library I have similar issues with.

(Yes I know clap can be used without derive, but I'm willing to deal with the pain to parse directly into a struct)
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-01 03:26:09+00:00
Different topic, but I was crazy impressed to see Qualcomm's dedication on getting USB audio offload going, having the audio device forward data to the USB host controller, for it to send it to the USB audio device.

Feels like a weird thing to spend so much effort optimizing but neat as heck to see. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-USB-Audio-Offload
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-07-01 03:26:23+00:00
> There's no technological reason for app developers to be restricted from using other payment processors

But there is a customer experience reason. As an iOS user, I very much appreciate that I can ask Apple to cancel some bullshit subscription that used to otherwise try to lock me in behind a labyrinth of added friction and timewasting.

Not every problem is technological.
by simonw | 2025-07-01 03:26:40+00:00
What's happening here is Claude (and ChatGPT alike) have a tool-based search option. You ask them a question - like "who won the Superbowl in 1998" - they then run a search against a classic web search engine (Bing for ChatGPT, Brave for Claude) and fetch back cached results from that engine. They inject those results into their context and use them to answer the question.

Using just a few words (the name of the team) feels OK to me, though you're welcome to argue otherwise.

The Claude search system prompt is there to ensure that Claude doesn't spit out multiple paragraphs of text from the underlying website, in a way that would discourage you from clicking through to the original source.

Personally I think this is an ethical way of designing that feature.

(Note that the way this works is an entirely different issue from the fact that these models were training on unlicensed data.)
by alnwlsn | 2025-07-01 03:27:53+00:00
Reminds me of an estate sale I went to one time. Unassuming place, one of those tiny postwar homes about the same size as the one in this article - but with at least double or triple the density of this train layout in the basement. The owner must have been a very thin person, as the narrow winding paths around the basement in places measured no more than 8 inches, and the widest parts were only about 2 foot wide. In a 900 sq. foot basement, there was probably only about 50 sq foot of floor you could actually rest your feet on. The rest was all layout and boxes of trains and train accessories of all sorts - hundreds of tiny pots of specialty paint, miniature trees, "grass powder", special linkages and wheels, and more. Probably most of it got thrown away at the end of the sale.

People have hobbies, but I can't think of any circumstance in which I'd convert my basement into a deathtrap. There was less room than those hoarder houses you see on TV (but much more organized). It was genuinely concerning that they even decided to hold a sale there open to the public.

Truly one of the more bizarre things I've seen. Also, the upstairs? Mostly normal - you wouldn't even know the guy liked trains.
by goku12 | 2025-07-01 03:28:11+00:00
Kudos to YouTube for making it to the list of a rare few websites that require browser extensions to deliver a half decent user experience. What's more? YouTube also leaves the competition in the dust in the sheer number of extensions required to achieve this. I hear that you extend this privilege uniformly to both unpaid guests and the subscribers of YouTube Premium alike. I'm sure that the lack of alternatives helped you a lot in achieving this coveted status.
by dripdry45 | 2025-07-01 03:28:25+00:00
It’s a quality I’ve run into with a couple people: young or old, once they’ve ossified into thinking they are Better and Smarter than everyone else, they stop being curious and simply start mandating their wild “truths”

I’m sure we’ve all done it at one time or another, but repeated as habit without learning seems to speak of a certain kind of personality.
by toss1 | 2025-07-01 03:29:17+00:00
>>We suffer from a problem that engineers want nothing to do with politics.

More on point, we suffer from a problem that far too many people of all walks of life want nothing to do with politics.

Plato made the most accurate point 2300 years ago: "The penalty for not being involved in politics is you will be ruled by your inferiors."

And, even though you may not be interested in politics, politics is ALWAYS interested in you.
by pseufaux | 2025-07-01 03:29:55+00:00
As someone with a psychology degree, I completely agree. It's as much of a hard science as nutrition. Most of the research is done through surveys and data aggregation out of necessity because conducting a real research is hard (and sometimes ethically impossible).

That said, it's not devoid of value. The issue comes when we treat it like a hard science. If instead we approached it more like sociology and anthropology, things would make a bit more sense.
by ethbr1 | 2025-07-01 03:30:33+00:00
You mean Q4 2024?

https://carboncredits.com/teslas-carbon-credit-revenue-soars...

Yes, because you're looking at net income vs something that is entirely profit. Of course it's going to be a large portion.

That's like saying AWS is most of Amazon: it certainly contributes a ton of margin, but there's a lot of other revenue.
by rendaw | 2025-07-01 03:31:20+00:00
I hope you don't mind me plugging my thing here, but I had the 100% same problem and made aargvark (https://docs.rs/aargvark/latest/aargvark/). When I was using clap, every time I'd need to look up how to do X, or what combination of things I needed to put an enum here, or find out that this nesting of data types wasn't supported, etc.

It's still derive macro-based, but there's only one derive (`Aargvark`) rather than `Parser`, `Subcommand`, etc, and it can handle any data structure composition orthogonally (although crazy structures may result in fairly awkward command lines).
by jiveturkey | 2025-07-01 03:31:30+00:00
> Techstars alone has 28 email-related companies with only 5 exits - an exceedingly high failure rate (sometimes calculated to be 80%+).

This is actually better than overall failure rate. At 80% I would absolutely be investing in more email companies!

The entire analysis is skewed to satisfy their own messaging or perhaps internal motivation. Mentioning Cyrus IMAP and SpamAssassin is ... being stuck in a time warp.

Being self-funded, their position is not surprising. However they really need some perspective.
by hamandcheese | 2025-07-01 03:34:51+00:00
Not OP, but more code in stdlib does indeed sound better.

I'm not against abstraction and re-use. What I don't like is that for every given thing I want to do, there are multiple crates that offer the same functionality, and it can be really fatiguing trying to vet them. And it is truly a rarity to find a crate that is past the 1.0 version milestone.

Compare to golang for example. You can get quite far in go without needing to pull in any libraries. But in rust you need a library for even a basic http request.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-07-01 03:38:37+00:00
If you go to the root cause, the reason they want to maximise user-minutes is because it is in turn proportional to ad minutes.

Banning targeted ads will greatly reduce the benefit of ads (to the social media company) since they are rendered less effective. This will tip the scales of the cost-benefit tradeoff that the company makes. In this case, the cost of the ad is that it's annoying to the user. Every ad company chooses a tradeoff. If you made the benefit smaller, then they would have to reduce the cost too, which would lead to lower ad volume, which would reduce the incentive for engagement.

Any other way to reduce the effectiveness of ads also works. I'm sure the method I suggested(banning targeting) is not bulletproof, but they key thing that needs to be done is artificially reducing the effectiveness/relevance/quality of ads.
by chronogram | 2025-07-01 03:39:00+00:00
The heavily profiled ads cost a lot more money for the advertiser to run compared to traditional ads, if those platforms turn to contextual ads they do not have their special expensive profiled ads product to sell anymore.

So it's not about the perceived effectiveness of advertisements that you feel as a user, it's about the rather more unique product that they sell to advertisers that really raises their revenue.
by dabluecaboose | 2025-07-01 03:40:11+00:00
Relevant to this is the J2 Perturbation [1], commonly used when accurately modeling the Earth as an oblate spheroid (like in the article image, but less drastic) rather than a perfect sphere. This has resultant effects on orbits, such as the "gravity wells" in the GEO belt at 105degW and 75degE. There are higher-order perturbations [2] as you closer approximate the Earth's actual shape, such as J3, J4, etc.

[1] https://ai-solutions.com/_freeflyeruniversityguide/j2_pertur...

[2] https://oer.pressbooks.pub/lynnanegeorge/chapter/chapter-10-...
by rokeyzhang | 2025-07-01 03:41:11+00:00
Full respect to Beanconqueror! It’s an amazing tool for advanced coffee folks: open source, extremely customizable and supporting Bluetooth gear like scales and refractometers. We admire what they’ve built.

We’re trying things from a different angle:

We’re building for entry to mid-level coffee lovers—people who want to enjoy better coffee, stay organized, and reflect on their brews.

Most tracking apps start with forms.We start with senses, we thinking a lot what coffee looks like in our mind.

What makes BeanBook different:

- Snap-first design: No typing required.

- YouTube/photo to recipe

- Sensory-first interface

- Zero-config start

We want to build a Coffee app as a memory, not just numbers

We think there’s room for both kinds of tools: Beanconqueror is like a cockpit for pros. BeanBook is more like a beautifully illustrated notebook that fills itself in as you brew.
by scottjg | 2025-07-01 03:41:38+00:00
i think there are a lot of folks who would be willing to have a 27% discount (allow for ~3% card processing fee) and forego those features.

if apple was saying you had to support their payment processor alongside others (so you could opt into paying +27% and getting easy cancellations), that would be one thing, but they don't allow you to have any other options available in the app, which i think is where the anticompetitive complaints start to feel more valid.