MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-17 13:38:33+00:00
> The hard reality is that there is no PAYING market for such a device, because when it comes to the point-of-sale, most people still choose the normal-size device with better screen/battery/camera.

This kind of over-generalization is always annoying me deeply.

Of course there IS a market for such a product, because at the very least I exist (as well as a good fraction of the 320 other people from HN who upvoted this submission so far).

The problem is that this market is tiny, and even a smaller share of this market is willing to make massive concessions on other aspects of the phone to have a smaller phone, so you end up with a much harder design space (because size is a big engineering constraint) for a minority market, and the endeavor is often not profitable enough for that reason.

It doesn't mean there's no market, it just means addressing this particular market is a tough business, these two statements aren't equivalent.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-07-17 13:38:36+00:00
The definition of an agent is so vague now. What is the agentic promise and why wouldn't a workflow tool with LLM steps cannot deliver on this promise? Also what vulnerability are you referring to? I have no stakes in n8n or node red, but being able to embed LLMs in a workflow and conversing with a "workflow" seems to solve a lot of agentic/assistance problems (Make a report of revenue, and send an email report to these people,for example)

What is the completely different approach you are suggesting?
by justinclift | 2025-07-17 13:38:47+00:00
> LLMs are non-deterministic; that is each time you run something you might get a different answer.

That's a choice. With (at least) Ollama, you can set the temperature parameter so the results will be deterministic based upon the seed value. Which you can set.

It's used for things like running test cases, but there are likely other uses too.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-17 13:38:56+00:00
I now write all of my bots in javascript and run them from the Chrome console with CORS turned off. It seems to defeat even Google's anti-bot stuff. Of course, I need to restart Chrome every few hours because of memory leaks, but it wasn't a fun 3 days the last time I got banned from their ecosystem with my kids asking why they couldn't watch Youtube.
by franga2000 | 2025-07-17 13:39:04+00:00
DNT and GDPR was just an example. In a court case about tracking, DNT could be found to be a clear and explicit opt out. Similarly, in a case about excessive scraping or the use of scraped information, robots txt could be used as a clear and explicit signal that the site operator does not want their pages harvested. It all but certainly gets rid of the "they put it on the public web so we assumed we can scrape it, we can'task everyone for permission" argument. They can't claim it was "in good faith" if there's a widely-accepted standard for opting out.
by mtlynch | 2025-07-17 13:39:06+00:00
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668912

Funny quote from the discussion (9 years, 2 months ago):

>But you know, I'm willing to bet that in 10 years from now WhatsApp and Slack will be both dead, just like Yahoo Messenger and ICQ before them, while email and IRC will still be around.
by em-bee | 2025-07-17 13:39:15+00:00
pedagogy is borderline quackery

maria montessori developed her education methods using scientific experimentation with good outcomes.[0]

various ways to teach have been tried and we know the results. it is baffling to me why the ones that work aren't applied more.

of course not all of them are universally suitable. waldorf for example apparently also has decent results, but if there is one that i would put on the top of the list of education quackery, then waldorf would be it. so where do the good results come from? because they do one thing right: "Its educational style is holistic, intended to develop pupils' intellectual, artistic, and practical skills, with a focus on imagination and creativity. Individual teachers have a great deal of autonomy in curriculum content, teaching methods, and governance."[1], which is something that could be applied without basing it on steiners esoteric ideas.

it looks like it is not just quackery that is the problem. it is politics, NIH, probably the unwillingness to admit that they are wrong. unwillingness to change. in that context it is surprising that ITA got even off the ground. but it is also wierd that apparently the reason ITA fell out of fashion was not because it failed on its own but because that educational theory turned away from phonics.[2] that's like one mistake cancelling out another. even more surprising is that the ita foundation appears to be still active.

WAT?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
by sjw987 | 2025-07-17 13:39:57+00:00
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

In hindsight, I really miss using the Pixel 5 and semi-wish that I'd kept using it and just switched Google Pay/Wallet for card. The form factor and size was perfect.

I changed to a Pixel 9 because I had an opportunity around the same time to get it cheaper, and thought I may as well go to the latest model to keep security updates up to 2030. Even after a few months, I can't get used to the weight, size, the back case design (slippery glass and fingerprint magnet), and sticking out camera block. I still use the phone minimally, but now I carry around a brick everyday.
by NoGravitas | 2025-07-17 13:40:21+00:00
I got a Pixel 8, and it's not small, but it's reasonably sized. About the same as the Moto G7 I replaced, much smaller than my kid's current Moto G Power. The good thing about the Pixel 8 is that you can run LineageOS on it, which was the main thing that determined my choice.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-17 13:40:33+00:00
The people affected are not all brown people, so even if I held that low a view of the Supreme Court, no I would not bet on that.

Sitting on it until 2030? Well... it won't be the Supreme Court sitting on it until 2030. It will be:

- You can't go to court (usually) on a hypothetical. You usually need someone who has been actually affected. That can't happen until the law actually takes effect (September).

- Then you need a court case, in federal court (probably, since it's a first amendment argument). That has to reach completion, which can take a year or three.

- Then you need an appeal to the district court, and for that appeal to be accepted, and for that court case to run to completion. I have less of a feel for how long that takes, but I would guess at least half a year, maybe longer.

- Then you need an appeal to the Supreme Court, and for it to be accepted, and for the Supreme Court to hear the case and decide. That can take a year.

So, yeah, you're not going to see a final resolution until 2030 or so. That's not because the Supreme Court is sitting on it, though - at least, not most of it.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-17 13:41:08+00:00
>Looking to take on more risk in equity investments is just as likely to end up with you going broke as it is to get outsize returns.

You should look at the chances of your business becoming that successful. They are equally slim. And you have a lot more personal exposure if your business fails vs. if one fails that you only invested your money in and not your time and health.
by memsom | 2025-07-17 13:41:25+00:00
When I was in school in the 80's, I remember seeing these books stacked up at the back of the classroom. There were other Ladybird books in English standard spelling (they were really common), but these were weird. The teacher just told us to ignore them. But weirdly, the text is really easy to read int he examples given. I never used or even read the ones in my youth, so it must just be easy for my brain to process (disclaimer, I am a speaker of basic Swedish and a little Norwegian, so I am used to reading words with odd spellings and going "oh right, that is X in English.")
by mfro | 2025-07-17 13:41:26+00:00
I found very quickly when I started associating with philosophy majors, reading the material usually does not correlate to understanding it, and many people simply don't want to put in the effort to understand something that isn't clear at first glance.

I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace. I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.
by arevno | 2025-07-17 13:41:51+00:00
I was also around, and I concur.

NVDA has a P/E of 55, which is definitely elevated, but nowhere near the 230+ that CSCO had at that time. TO say nothing of SUNW.

The big AI labs are definitely losing money, but they're doing it on the back of tens of (rapidly growing) billions of dollars in ARR, versus the dot com e-commerce and portal flameouts who would go public on (maybe) a million in revenue, at best.

We also have large AI teams at FAANG who are being funded directly by the fat margins of these companies, whose funding is not dependent on the whims of VC, PE or public markets.

These times are not really comparable.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 13:41:54+00:00
That was my hunch. My initial post on robots.txt: https://evgeniipendragon.com/posts/i-am-disallowing-all-craw... - revolved around blocking AI models from doing that because I do not believe that it will bring more traffic to my website - it will use the content to keep people using their service. I might be proven wrong in the future, but I do not see why they would want to let go of an extra opportunity to increase retention.
by ethagnawl | 2025-07-17 13:42:23+00:00
> Ultimately I hope AI will force us to decide on an updated paradigm of who owns ideas and it won't be a case of me receiving a cease and desist letter if I type a ChatGPT prompt that includes Mickey Mouse or "Miyazaki".

I've been thinking a lot about this lately since I've had some ... questionable images generated by Gemini. If it outputs infringing material is that on me, them, both of us? Does it depend on my prompt/context, what I do with the output, etc.? My instinct (in opposition to your comment about C&Ds) says it's on them because they're charging money for the service and it's _clearly_ been trained on copyrighted material. I think this question and related ones are going to be answered fairly quickly, especially because of how egregious some of the output I've seen is.

I don't want to get into specifics right now because, IMHO, this particular "trick" is an exploit, as it's reproducible and systemic. Google has a bug bounty for Gemini but this scenario (i.e. output containing copyrighted material) is "out of scope" and they request that you submit individual tickets for every infringing instance. It's not clear to me if end users are supposed to do that or copyright holders but that's not a scalable or practical solution to a systemic problem. I would prefer to be responsible and be compensated for my trouble but I may wind up writing a blog post or something about this if I can't get their attention.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-17 13:42:26+00:00
It is ridiculous, but it is what you get when you have conflicting interests and broken legislation. The rule is that tracking has to be opt-in, so websites do it the way they are more likely to get people to opt in, and it is a cookie banner before you access the content.

Do-not-track is opt-out, not opt-in, and in fact, it is not opt-anything since browsers started to set it to "1" by default without asking. There is no law forcing advertisers to honor that.

I guess it could work the other way: if you set do-not-track to 0 (meaning "do-track"), which no browser does by default, make cookies auto-accept and do not show the banner. But then the law says that it should require no more actions to refuse consent than to consent (to counter those ridiculous "accept or uncheck 100 boxes" popups), so it would mean they would also have to honor do-not-track=1, which they don't want to.

I don't know how legislation could be unbroken. Users don't want ads, don't want tracking, they just want the service they ask for and don't want to pay for it. Service providers want exactly the opposite. Also people need services and services need users. There is no solution that will satisfy everyone.
by bavell | 2025-07-17 13:42:26+00:00
You are certainly correct that it's a matter of lifestyle preference.

> You don't need half an acre to sleep.

Where do I put my vegetable garden and fruit trees?

How can I relax on my back porch listening to the birds and creek?

How do I get away from all the hustle and bustle of dense city living?

> plenty of stuff available at walking distance. And you can't have that without high population density and yeah "pods".

Exhaust, brake dust, sirens, litter, concrete jungle, noisy neighbors with thin walls, massive crowds/traffic... there are tradeoffs to living in a dense city.

I think the Pareto optimal living conditions in the US today are the suburbs bordering the rural outskirts. Especially now with WFH prevalence.
by amluto | 2025-07-17 13:42:56+00:00
Thermal inertia can be a benefit: while it largely prevents you from benefiting from turning off the heat when you’re not home, it smooths out diurnal fluctuations and lets your control just the average temperature. So your windows can provide lots of solar gain, for example, without overheating you during the daytime.

The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.
by devinprater | 2025-07-17 13:43:25+00:00
I play video games through emulation, mainly because if I were playing, for example, Dissidia Final Fantasy on a regular Playstation Portable, I wouldn't be able to scan the text with my screen reader, or get AI image descriptions. I tried to buy all the PSP games I wanted to play, but that store was shut down. So now I don't think I could pay Sony for these games even if I wanted to.

Blind people use audio description to watch television and movies. And yet, none of the streaming services have Doctor Who with audio description, for example, in the US. So even if I paid to watch it, I'd have to pirate the audio description track.

And yet, companies can pirate all the books, videos, art and music they want, and have the best lawyers on staff to remind the courts who are really in charge. May the rich be brought low, or the poor be lifted up.
by immibis | 2025-07-17 13:43:31+00:00
Cloudflare doesn't do things that send them to jail, like ignoring court orders. They'll log whatever the court tells them to log.

Cloudflare does plenty of sketchy stuff, like deliberately hosting DDoS-for-hire sites because it increases the demand for anti-DDoS products. But they will take them down if they are ordered to - and reveal their origin IP. They are not going to jail for you.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-17 13:43:47+00:00
Weather predictions are very different than economic predictions.

Weather predictions are made and shared out only at the level of what will happen over the next few days. Weather predictions aren't used to predict exactly why it rained, only that it did rain (though surely the why is used as feedback for modelling).

Economists take a different tact, they attempt to claim why GDP, CPI, wages, etc changed. With predictions they look much further out than weather and attempt to not only claim what economic indicators will do, they attempt to claim precisely why it will have happened.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-17 13:44:06+00:00
> You can't control what the person does with it or who they share it with. For all I know they are just uploading it straight to ChatGPT. Therefore sharing files is loosing ownership.

Maybe they are feeding it into a screenreader or a local LLM because that is what works for them, or because they suffer from challenges you aren't aware of and don't need to be. You still have the same "ownership" of any files on your computer and data within, from a legal perspective. What you are talking about isn't ownership, it's control. Control to hamper others' usage of data which they're already allowed to access.

That desire for technical control is an exercise in futility: If I wanted to share a piece of sensitive info, aside from copying it via a number of technical means, I can just talk to someone in person and say "I saw...", or perhaps a malicious actor will hack my computer and gain access to it via screenshots, packet captures, arbitrary logging, etc.

Thus, if you don't trust me to secure the contents of a file (whether due to incompetence or malice), and aren't willing to risk it, don't send it to me. Most people in the world don't send me their files, and I'm ok with that. Alternatively, and also common, is to send the file to people who are contractually bound to use it in accordance with a set of terms. For example: an employment contract; or a partnership agreement.
by ryry | 2025-07-17 13:44:23+00:00
Ah yes! So this is something I'm struggling with from a UX perspective (could use some feedback from anyone here).

News tied to a specific place gets pinned there (like an article about the Blue Jays being pinned at the Toronto Skydome). For stuff in cities, or larger areas like states, it tries to place it within the bounds of the state randomly, and if that fails, a random radius (which I think is what's gone wrong here).

The problem though is with the Toronto Star reporting on news in Jersey. The way I'm going about this right now is a filter I'm calling "Lens" which is just the country. Right now the only lens is Canada, but I want these to be filterable so you can easily see what other places are writing, or just get home grown news (but again, something I'm struggling with how to represent it).
by gsck | 2025-07-17 13:44:51+00:00
We had something like this in our school called Accelerated Reader. Read books answer a quiz on it get points, best class/student got rewarded.

Was really easy to game though. Our school library had a selection of books for what I can only assume were for special needs kids, really really simple books very few words with even fewer pages. These books rewarded an appropriate amount of points however so you got less, but you could easily bang out 20 of those books in one class and get a lot more points than you'd be rewarded for reading a real book.

A few of us would just go over grab a bunch of those books and read through them in like 2 minutes and complete the quiz.

They ended up not letting those books get used for AR
by cjbgkagh | 2025-07-17 13:45:07+00:00
I think people hold on to such hopes due to an aversion to the pain from empathy. The 'bad thing is actually good'. Related to the Just-World-Fallacy. I think this is a very natural human response, a psychological defense mechanism, especially for the set of circumstances that we can do nothing about. I get it, no one wants to feel bad and impotent.

For the post 2008 bounce back to happen the rents more than halved and hackerspaces could make use of temporary availability for even less money. Now we have a tech crash and rents are still going up. Additionally AI is unbounded - who knows if and when it'll plateau and what that would look like, that uncertainty alone prevents investment. And price is set at the margin - even if you use AI to make a product that you can sell, what is to stop someone else from doing the same and undercutting you. This is great from a consumer surplus point of view but increases in efficiency will lead to greater income inequality and that's going to really suck for people who can't compete in this new world.
by Spooky23 | 2025-07-17 13:45:12+00:00
It’s one of those scenarios where the high level value prop is obvious and compelling, just like the dotcom bubble.

80% of the hype is about 20% of the bullshit. And the bullshit attracts 80% of the dollars. The current cohort of leaders are Jedi at separating sovereign wealth and markets from their treasure.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-07-17 13:45:16+00:00
I have in the past taken to saving a copy of a web page or document and just keep it in my downloads directory for this very purpose, files aren't big or problematic to use usually. There is a lot more space on a local machine than is usually allocated in enterprise drives and email its a much better place to keep most things, all be it you have to do another backup solution if they matter.

One organisation I worked for published the bonus scheme as a web page and I saved it and a year later when they were paying those bonuses they had changed the page silently without any notice it had changed. They refused to admit it changed when people called it out, until I provided the copy that matched everyone’s memory exposing management as liars. I was the only person that saved it, the workers were being short changed for £100,000s.
by yorwba | 2025-07-17 13:45:57+00:00
It says that the legal basis for the investigation is article 171 ter of the Italian Copyright Law, which lists a lot of things that boil down to selling what you have no right to sell. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/477668 The one part that is different is "c) promotes and organizes the unlawful activities under paragraph 1" which might also apply to a reviewer who does not directly sell things. But it's not just "promotes or organizes" either, so I think they'd want indications of quite substantial involvement before launching an investigation.
by ghc | 2025-07-17 13:46:03+00:00
> Data has only driven advertising

This is not remotely true. I mean it's so incredibly not true I wonder how you came to believe this.

Haven't you ever heard of how hedge funds pay for cellular data to understand retail store traffic, or how satellite photos help them estimate the fullness of gas tanks at ports to predict pricing?

Or how data about predicted electrical pricing based on usage helps factories schedule energy-intensive production during times of low pricing?

Or how aircraft maintenance companies like AAR rely on "big data" to position replacement parts in a globally distributed system of warehouses to reduce the time it takes to repair aircraft (their contracts are based on airline uptime), thereby reducing passenger delays due to mechanical issues?

Or how farms use weather and satellite data to deal with droughts, identify areas to spray, and estimate competitor yields for the purposes of planning?

Or how governments now conduct surveillance of pathogens and drug use through sewer water data?

Or how semiconductor companies use massive amounts of data collected from production line sensors to massively increase yields and reduce chip prices, despite the complexity of chip production having increased massively?

You benefit directly or indirectly from companies using data all the time.
by bananapub | 2025-07-17 13:46:23+00:00
why do you think it's poor drafting? there's a clear cross-country campaign by the American right that's seized control of many states and the federal government to end free speech as a concept by creating laws and regulations and policies like this, so that favoured groups can do whatever, and anyone who finds themselves disfavoured will be in violation of stuff like this.
by seb1204 | 2025-07-17 13:46:23+00:00
I know this from sport events but often the lottery or prize draw are organised by external marketing companies. So likely this is one reason for not making it a subdomain.

The other is that Germans seem very bad at this kind of stuff. Why the heck would the application for the German passport or Ausweis be published by some random GmbH and not Bundesregierung.gov?
by gwbas1c | 2025-07-17 13:47:02+00:00
I find there are a lot of people who just don't "get" written communication.

Once I got a vaccination, and in order to do it I had to fill out a form where I chose the arm. The form said to circle either "right or left."

The word "right" was on the left and "left" was on the right.

I pointed this out to the nurse and she laughed, and then realized her error, because she made the form.