MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alias_neo | 2025-07-20 21:43:40+00:00
Wholeheartedly agree. We have 2x Gen 3 Yotos and 2x Yoto Mini, my children (3 and 5) use them every night and my 5yo in the day time, the Minis are stored for when we travel.

We were aware of Tonie before Yoto because our children's friends had them and we decided to go Yoto instead, they're amazingly simple, the app is great with well thought out features, and we've even convinced some of those families with Tonies to switch to Yoto and they've also been very happy.

There's a pretty good market for second hand Yoto cards too in the UK though don't expect much in the way of deals, many of them sell for RRP or higher, though we have found some cards our 5yo really wanted but are only available in the US by buying them second hand.

When my 5yo was about 3 we gave her a CD player and bought lots of CDs, funnily she grew to think that was the height of cutting edge technology and digital (virtual) audio was the old tech. Needless to say, the CDs didn't last in the hands of a 3yo, then followed by a little sibling, they ended up scratched to pieces and wouldn't play any more, the card based approach of Yoto is much more suitable for young children, and the kids are learning lots, they particularly love the audio adventures.

As much as I'd love to hack the thing, I feel the same way another commentor does, that it shouldn't be touched, though I did manage to grab the URL from my OPNSense for the night time radio so I can stream it in my office because it's pretty good.

I am a little cautious that the cards only contain a URL and we don't actually have copies of any of the audio for the cards we've bought (other than what's in the device's cache); we have somewhere in the region of 200+ cards now; which is quite an investment, and it's very much at the mercy of Yoto and their servers remaining active and accessible.
by landl0rd | 2025-07-20 21:44:09+00:00
It's a case study of how you can either work to assume those costs and build them into the price of the product, rather than being willfully blind and claiming they don't exist or should remain externalities, and maintain relationships with processors. It's also a case study of when you can just bypass them and use other payment methods.

This isn't an "American solution", it's an example of ways around a problem with the industry.

I'm not sure how refusing business (which, if these costs weren't real, would reduce "profits to the foreigner") is supposed to contribute to "misunderstand[ing] and even abuse."

I guess I can understand why they're sensitive, but they have multiple homegrown sets of payment rails they can use. If they want to use the foreign ones they can reasonably accept that a large multinational is "less Japanese" than the Japanese ones.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-07-20 21:44:18+00:00
Timely reminder to all UK people - your system is 100% set up to allow you to easily and legally change your government without bloodshed. This is the benefit of a constitutional monarchy.

By "changing your government" I don't mean "shuffle people in and out of parliament" or even "elect your 6th Prime Minister in 10 years".

I mean change your government.
by to11mtm | 2025-07-20 21:44:48+00:00
FWIW There's a local regional chain that does in fact operate in a way similar to what you describe with CloudKitchens.

The main difference is that in practice, you go to the store and pick up meals for the next 2-3 days (I'm fine with this FWIW) and then you select meals (this is where it fell apart, often the 'good stuff' that I could eat with my diet wasn't available). The overall quality after microwaving per instructions was 'like you got a local restaurant dish but it tasted better than if you reheated that'.

Ironically, I actually appreciated it overall, and if nothing else it was really good portion control for myself and my partner. They were healthy meals with a proper portion for a normal adult, and frankly comparing said portion vs cost to 'leftovers' from a restaurant I think it was a... not bad value prop. Our only problem was the aforementioned 'not having the stuff that was gluten free and not overly bland in stock enough'.

I think the other problem is the sort of wool over everyone's eyes, where at-home meal prep for the week can be extremely simple so long as you've got a good process to follow and are willing to make various compromises.
by fghorow | 2025-07-20 21:45:25+00:00
For those worried about tiny COPs from these gizmos, trawling through the actual paper -- as well as the PR from JHU APL -- in this HN post [1] shows claims of COPs of ~15 for Delta Ts of 1.3°C.

A compressor based cooler gets a COP of about 4 in the real world. I'm pretty sure this is an apples to oranges comparison to an expert (I am not one of those) but a factor of 3+ increase in COP is fairly noteworthy -- if it holds up.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424087
by jniles | 2025-07-20 21:45:40+00:00
In an employment context, do we consider the user to be the employer or the person using the computer? I would think it would be the device owner, which generally would be the employer.

If so, then I would think the previous statement about adblocking being opt-in would still hold. It is just that advertisers are trying to indivually track and monetize employees on company devices and time. On my work machines I am generally not allowed to run software that my employer does not approve, why should ads be treated differently?
by mort96 | 2025-07-20 21:46:01+00:00
> Normal fridges just let the temperature have a wider swing which is good enough for most needs.

These wide swings annoy me. You hear that you shouldn't let your fridge go above 4°C, because that's dangerous. And you obviously don't want your fridge to go below 0°C. But finding a setting where the hottest part of the fridge doesn't go above 4°C (or even 5°C or 6°C) during the hottest part of the cycle and the coldest part of the fridge doesn't go near 0°C during the coldest part of the cycle is really pretty difficult, in my experience.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-20 21:47:08+00:00
No, my problem is with bool().

str(False) == 'False' is entirely logical.

So therefore bool('False') == False would be consistent.

And bool('foo') would produce an exception the exact same way int('foo') and float('foo') already do.

Who on earth thought it was a good idea that 'foo' could or should be interpreted as a boolean...?? The entire concept of 'truthiness' outside of ints is unhelpful. It's just asking for bugs. That the length of a string, rather than its content, should determine a boolean value is one of the more bizarre things I've come across in programming languages. Use len() if you want that. It's only 5 extra characters.
by daenney | 2025-07-20 21:48:21+00:00
In the mean time, the author:

* Has claimed to quit Replit only to be back at it the next day.

* Asked the agent 6-7 times to generate apology letters.

* Is apparently spending $8000/month on "AI agents"

Like I'm not sure but it doesn't seem like this person should have any access to production either, much less the AI.
by creata | 2025-07-20 21:48:48+00:00
> But come at rust with a use case (cyclic data structures here) for which it's a poor fit

I'm not even disagreeing in general that Java is likely to be better for most problems. But the options in Rust for cyclic data are actually fine:

* You can use integer indices into an array instead of pointers.

* You can use unsafe and raw pointers, and be in the exact same situation as C++. The doubly linked list in the standard library is a cyclic data structure does that.[1]

* You can use reference counting (std::rc)[0]. This is literally a garbage collector in the standard library, equivalent to C++'s std::shared_ptr.

These are all simple. None of them is as complicated as "write your own GC".

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/rc/

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.LinkedList....
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-20 21:49:04+00:00
https://archive.ph/BI6Cl

(The original link broke with my ad-blockers turned on, the archive though is missing one photo from the original article.)

A very powerful read. I lost my mother two years ago and this resonates.

Just realized I read one of the author's books, "How to Get into the Twin Palms".
by weinzierl | 2025-07-20 21:49:30+00:00
"If you’re colorblind, I don’t think these will work, though I’m not sure."

Should work for anomalous trichromats (by far the majority of people with color deficiencies) but probably with less intensity.

"Folks with deuteranomaly have M cones, but they’re shifted to respond more like L cones."

I don't think this is true. What would the difference between deutan and protan then be?

"Why do you hallucinate that crazy color? I think the red circle saturates the hell out of your red-sensitive L cones. Ordinarily, the green frequencies in the background would stimulate both your green-sensitive M cones and your red-sensitive L cones, due to their overlapping spectra. But the red circle has desensitized your red cones, so you get to experience your M cones firing without your L cones firing as much, and voilà—insane color."

I think only people with missing L cone (Protanopia) or M cone (Deiteranopia) would not experience the phenomenon at all.

Maybe this could be used as a new type of color deficiency test?
by breakyerself | 2025-07-20 21:51:24+00:00
I think when energy hits a certain price point and stays there for a long time it makes sense to try to squeeze more productivity out of the same quantity of energy, but then when energy comes down in cost it opens up possibilities that were cost prohibitive before. The short term trend was towards lower per capital use, but over the long term new cheaper forms of energy drive demand up.
by optymizer | 2025-07-20 21:51:34+00:00
> but the experience was pretty good.

Our experiences do not match. I used Borland Delphi to build business apps 20 years ago just using the UI builder. I've been using Android Studio to build apps at FAANGs for 10 years now and I cannot remember the last time the Design tab was useful - it was always faster and more reliable to just edit the XML file.

Yes, Delphi didn't do resizing windows and crashed half the time, but I was pretty happy with the WYSIWYG / UI building functionality for production apps.

Android Studio's UI builder is nowhere near that level of usefulness. I have a hard time believing anyone is using the UI builder in Android Studio for anything other than tutorials or entry level Android apps. It doesn't render the layout properly 90% of the time, or just renders some placeholders with no content and calls it a day.

For a modern IDE, Android Studio is somewhere between just OK and bad, mostly because it has features the other IDEs didn't at the time, but the dev experience is behind Turbo Pascal in the 90s on MS DOS. The editor is laggy. The debugger is slow and hangs often. The list goes on, but I'll stop the rant here.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-07-20 21:51:54+00:00
Right, this didn’t make much sense to me either. Who’d still recommend copy-and-paste-into-chat coding these days with Claude Code and similar agents available? I wonder if he’s got agents / IDEs like windsurf, copilot, cursor etc where there is more complexity between you and the frontier LLM and various tricks to minimize token use. Claude Code, Gemini CLI etc aren’t like that and will just read in whole files into the context so that the LLM can see everything, which I think achieves what he wants but with all the additional magic of agents like edits, running tests, etc. as well.
by shayway | 2025-07-20 21:52:12+00:00
It's worth pointing out that the post in question was made in the past half hour amidst the wave of activity from HN. Not to say your point isn't valid, but I think this is more an example of trolls who will say anything and everything to cause anger and insult; it's not representative of those who believe in free speech, or the site itself for that matter.
by alwa | 2025-07-20 21:52:21+00:00
Fair, fair. I'm over-accustomed to markets where standards and expectations are tilted far in the "caveat emptor" direction—where people are still working on big things like "don't use poison to make your turmeric look yellower."

I think what made me react (with fondness, not criticism, to be clear) was the framing: casually noting the departure from the technical standard specifically regulating "hole diameter adequate for sufficient airflow upon accidental swallowing in baby-facing bead-related amusement products" or what have you.

Not only have they thought about that very specific aspect of a choking hazard, but they've figured out what the right parameters are, published them, and hold manufacturers to them—and that specific dimension of the problem is common enough knowledge that a Guardian journalist just tosses it off casually for a general audience.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-20 21:52:39+00:00
Even if UBI is set so low that it's not sufficient to live, change still happens at the margin. You will have people who were thinking about retirement that may now realize that with UBI they can bridge the gap until they get their full pension a few years from now. There will be people who are unmotivated and will now choose temporary work for part of the year and rely on UBI to make meets end. People work because they want money; reduce that incentive and fewer people will work.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-07-20 21:53:09+00:00
They did consider the provider size, it is probably the main element of this law: the problem is that the consideration was to assume that you are always dealing with mega-large companies with teams of lawyers...because these companies have been lobbying regulators and civil servants (not Parliament so much, they don't matter anymore) for years. This is extremely common in the UK (very low corruption by historical methods but when decisions are actually made, there is corruption almost everywhere). The provider size was an active choice.

It isn't populist either, no-one supports this. The UK has media campaigns run by newspapers, no-one reads the papers but politicians so these campaigns start to influence politicians. Always the same: spontaneous media campaign across multiple newspapers (low impact on other kinds of media), child as a figurehead, and the law always has significant implications that are nothing to do with the publicly stated aim.

Democracy has very little to do with it. Elections happen in the UK but policies don't change, it is obvious why.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-20 21:53:15+00:00
> and it seems doable to use standard NFC cards and associate them with content I own

It's not, I've tried.

When you buy their blank cards (~£2 each last I checked) they come with a unique URI pre-flashed, that contains a form of unique identifier, what you're buying when you buy their blank cards is a licence (to the online storage, 500MB I think), when you scan it, it activates on your account and you now have a physical card linked to a virtual card/allowance; though you can also link existing digital cards (already scanned on your phone) to a physical card (still has to be one of theirs), in which case you don't benefit from the storage.

I ripped one of my daughter's favourite CDs and uploaded it through the app to link to a blank card I bought from Yoto.
by joshka | 2025-07-20 21:53:50+00:00
> It seems a bit silly to suggest, but perhaps we need a whole set of LLM-enhanced CLI tools or a custom LLM shell? The user experience (UX) field could even branch into AI experience and provide us a whole new information architecture.

Not silly at all. I think we actually need the various parts of the software development inner loop (compiler, linter, typo check, unit test runner, ...) to have much fewer levels of abstraction so that they can integrate well into IDEs as well as agentic AI tooling (whether CLI or otherwise). MCP is just a start on the right direct, but we can probably do better.
by nine_k | 2025-07-20 21:53:56+00:00
Not at all. Square, Stripe, PayPal all outright refuse to deal with anything porn. Visa and Mastercard put out severe limitations, and (AFAICT) refuse to process payments to sites like pornhub.

This is not only due to reputation risks (even though these are real), but also because of the higher rates of fraud and chargebacks.

I'd say that anything that by its nature materially hampers the customer's ability to think rationally is risky for a payment processor, because it will always be a fertile ground for fraud and scams. Porn and gambling are obvious examples; alcohol is another, but (strong) alcohol is usually pretty strictly regulated, down to state-run monopolies in a number of countries.
by MattGaiser | 2025-07-20 21:54:01+00:00
When people oppose adding technology and AI to the mix, they often do it under the assumption that human judgement is generally of high quality.

> Another study, although small, found that when doctors predicted in the first 72 hours that a patient would not recover from a traumatic brain injury, they were frequently wrong.

As evidenced here, it is not.

I am all onboard with not letting AI pull the plug by itself, but adding it in the mix with the mediocre humans as an "are you sure?" check seems like it should be a priority.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-20 21:54:29+00:00
> not being a creepy weirdo who tracks anyone who visits your website is such a difficult thing

This is easy. Confirming compliance is not.

Also, there are content laws other than GDPR. If you’re a small-budget website and need to certify you’re compliant with all laws and regulations you’re subject to, it’s cheaper to block than confirm you’re up to date with the latest Brazilian or German content codes.
by godelski | 2025-07-20 21:54:47+00:00
I'm going to refer you to my other comment, because you did the same thing[0]

Second, let's actually check the math. Just divide the two numbers

- M1 135 million transistors per mm2 - M3 149 million transistors per mm2

So no, the increased die size did not allow for that. If we had the same ratio the M3 would have 22.7 billion transistors. (22.7-16)/(25-16) = 74.4%. I'll give you that this is "most" but 25% is not a rounding error. You gave yourself wiggle room, but that wiggle room is exactly the thing I was talking about and what you're arguing against.

Don't just cherry pick things from what people said and stroke your ego. Sometimes other people aren't completely clueless.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44628144
by iLoveOncall | 2025-07-20 21:55:08+00:00
> How do you ensure your kids aren’t skirting any blocks you put in place, looking things up with their friends, getting access to a VPN, etc.?

I don't, because I don't need to.

I had unrestricted access to internet when I was my kids age and I turned out just fine, just like the extreme majority of my generation.

I know that serious discussions about important topics are enough to make sure that even if my kids do access content that's not meant for children, they're not negatively affected by them, just like I wasn't.
by julianfkelly | 2025-07-20 21:55:08+00:00
Hi, appreciate the note! I'm Julian, I do all the design at Melty. I try to design our software to be functional, visually subtle, and chromatically warm. I don't know that the aesthetic has a name, but I've spent a lot of time studying manuscripts from the early middle ages so that might have seeped in - the logo for Conductor is actually a variant of insular majuscule (you can see the ductus in the animation)
by ocharles | 2025-07-20 21:55:38+00:00
This keeps getting parroted but it's flawed/overly idealistic/frankly naive. An awful of children are, unfortunately, poorly parented. This is not a new phenomenon, nor something we seem to be improving. OTOH, exposure to extreme material for young children is increasing, and has consequences beyond that child. Exposure to extreme pornography leads to a warped view of sex which affects everyone this child might have sexual encounters with. Exposure to extreme violent material leads to the murder of other innocent children.

I don't know where I stand on this legislation - my gut is that it's too heavy handed and will miss the mark. But I think we need to stop saying this falls solely on parents. The internet is far too big, and parenting is far too varied for this to work. I wish it would, but it won't. There simply aren't enough parents that care enough.
by rafram | 2025-07-20 21:55:39+00:00
> eg the past decade has seen us remove “that” as a qualifier, and the word literally has become interchangeable with figuratively

The latter didn’t happen just in the last decade, and the former hasn’t happened at all.

But no, I can pretty confidently say that the English language still has capitalization and punctuation in it, it’s mostly just on Twitter and in AI-related blog posts where people write like this.
by latexr | 2025-07-20 21:55:42+00:00
> I am, in fact, pro free speech.

You can be pro free speech and still not condone hate speech, or libel, or doxxing, or a myriad of other problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything in literally any context. Not, not even in the “land of the free”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

Additionally, XKCD reminds:

https://xkcd.com/1357/

> A problem with a subset of people who like free speech or something? I don't get it.

I don’t think those people particularly care about free speech, they just want to be able to say whatever they want with no repercussions. The more of a “free speech absolutist” they claim to be, usually the worse they are. It’s a common pattern to see those same individuals clamour for free speech in one post and then in another call for banning books or try to silence someone else.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-07-20 21:55:49+00:00
There was an election, both parties said this Act was going to happen.

It depends what you mean by government but elected officials in the UK are almost completely irrelevant in this (and in most other things, their job is to get in front of a TV camera say how appalled they are that it has happened, no-one could have foreseen this, don't look back in anger, and that they are going to select from the same policy options that the Civil Service presented the last government with...which results in the same conclusion: more civil servants, more regulation, more corruption).

Ofcom has been making a massive power grab, this bill and other recent regulations are granting them massive new powers, and the UK has a system in which ministers have no functional capacity to block this.
Ask HN: How do I prevent AI from reading/training off my content?
by blindriver | 2025-07-20 21:55:55+00:00
How can I prevent AI (ChatGPT, etc) from reading and training on the blog posts, reddit posts, or code that I post online like on Github?

Is there a license that I can use that specifically prohibits AI companies from reading and training off my content? Or do I need to put my content behind a login?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 21:55:57+00:00
The premise is that the thing consumers want is "chargebacks and various other consumer protections" but in practice the problem is that those things are really hidden costs, i.e. merchants have to pass on the cost of chargebacks and fraud to honest customers. In a normal market this would result in the merchants passing on those costs to the customers who require a payment method that incurs them, i.e. there would be a 5-10% discount for using a different payment method, or more than that for industries with a high rate of customer chargeback fraud.

But then the payment networks prohibit merchants from providing the full value of the discount to people not insisting on payment methods that impose those costs, which ought to be an antitrust violation because it's obviously uncompetitive to prevent an alternative with lower costs from actually passing those lower costs on to the customer. And then fraud is rampant, costs billions of dollars, makes certain types of services non-viable, but gets folded into the price of ordinary goods and services to keep ordinary people from realizing that they're still paying it.