MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bityard | 2025-07-21 22:24:11+00:00
Anker is above average, but the bar for average when it comes to Chinese electronics is, "might not burn down your house immediately."

For reasons probably bordering on OCD, I watch a LOT of teardown videos of various electronics. And one thing that always strikes me is how a company with a product will routinely and often change what's inside, while the model number and exterior appearance stays the same.

For example, I wanted to buy a big 12V LiFePo4 battery and all of the cheapest ones are on Amazon. Amazon reviews are generally garbage because they're all borderline fake (from useless Viners, or wanna-be useless Viners). The only "honest" reviews of these I could find were YouTube teardowns where they basically have to destroy the case in order to take it apart. I would watch a teardown of one popular battery, and then run across a different teardown of the same model from someone else and the internals of each would be completely different. Completely different cells, battery management board, wires, construction everything. But they both looked identical on the outside.

Finished product manufacturers in China rarely have a consistent supply chain. They are negotiating suppliers and batches of components constantly, and are constantly re-engineering everything about the product, except for the external appearance of the case. This Luma Field article confirms what I've already run across myself.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-21 22:24:23+00:00
No but the living conditions were atrocious, dangerous, unsanitary, and probably quite psychologically traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems)

Edit: Since HN contrarians who'd never want their children living in some particular conditions find it so confusing how others might not too:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01452...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3805127/

Overcrowded living quarters is a well known vector for a huge array of problems. Academic underachievement, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mood disorders, abusive relationships, the list goes on. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status!
by rstuart4133 | 2025-07-21 22:24:38+00:00
I can say as an Australia our governments have always been very enthusiastic about controlling what we can read, see, and hear. It was true 60 years ago with our movie rating scheme ("not given a rating" was the newspeak for "banned"), 30 years ago with games, and lots of books.

The internet has more or less rendered these efforts moot in recent times. This was highlighted when they tried to impose a rating system on games a couple of decades ago. I asked a school kid about the effect on him. He said it didn't effect him, as he downloaded his games from the internet. It all fell apart about then. Consequently we had the opportunity to see seen the flood of porn would do to society, and noticed nothing of consequence. The flood of conspiracy theories for life hacks on the other hand was completely unanticipated and it's impact badly underestimated.

Collective Shout is an excellent illustration of the effect. It's effectively a one girl band, yet her shouting on the internet about her desire to force her Baptist pro-life maternal morals down everyones throats has now been heard across the world.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-07-21 22:24:58+00:00
That's intelligence gathering. I don't personally have any problems with the CIA's literal spying and intelligence operations. That's what the voters were sold on when it was set up. Gathering accurate information for our democratically elected officials to use to make their decisions can only be a good thing, assuming they follow the rules and leave Americans and America alone (which they of course don't).

The entire issue I and most people have with the CIA is that it isn't just a bunch of guys having coded conversations on park benches in foreign capitals and writing thick reports. Yes, those guys are there, but mainly its an unaccountable army that ignores the rules of war and does tons of illegal assassinations, blackmail, etc. These are the lowest of the low. These are people that, in any just society, should be tried and publicly executed while the citizenry packs a picnic lunch and lights off fireworks to celebrate.

We can have the fake-mustache guys without the extralegal murder-for-hire and using-computers-to-industrialize-domestic-political-blackmail guys.
by zahlman | 2025-07-21 22:25:04+00:00
> but it actually creates one which is shared between all of the objects

More precisely: it creates one which belongs to the class. Everything inside the `class` block is thus - both data and methods. After all, the methods are not special - from the class' perspective, they are just functions, and functions are objects, and they become attributes of the class object the same way as "ordinary data". (Further: the `def` statement is a form of assignment.)

"Methods" don't really exist ahead of time; they're created on demand when they're looked up from an instance, found in a class, and furthermore discovered to implement the descriptor protocol. The interesting part is that looking up an attribute on an instance can find it in the class. That's what allows method calls to work properly (in Python's implementation) without storing per-instance data — objects representing the "bound" method are instead created on demand (and typically thrown away right after)! This is necessary because anywhere that `foo.bar()` is valid, `foo.bar` must also be valid, and furthermore needs to evaluate to something — since it's a subexpression of a valid subexpression, and Python has no "void return values", only a strong expression/statement distinction. This feature also enables you to do `baz = foo.bar; baz()`.

(There are several sources I could quote for all of this, but usually it's tangential to what the source is actually trying to discuss.)

More fundamentally, Python beginners often fail to distinguish assignment from mutation. So they are further surprised when `instance.items.append(item)` affects the other instances, but `instance.items = [item]` does not. But this is entirely to be expected: assignment to an instance attribute only ever stores it within the instance, and does not look it up or replace it in the class. Of course it doesn't — if it did, there would be no way to implement `__init__`. And now that the instance has a separate attribute with the same name, that shadows the class' attribute, and will be found by future lookups on that instance only.
by runxel | 2025-07-21 22:25:24+00:00
It's not my words. There is a 1.5 hour long video of a maintainer chat uploaded to their YouTube channel a while ago. There one dev explains it very carefully and in depth – "ugly hack" is their words, not mine! Seems a lot of work to untangle that mess. They are already a long time over their estimates of how long it would take.

Not sure what you mean by that you see your own response. In the current "conversation" (thread) view the chain will only display incoming answers, but never your own outgoing emails – which well... would make it a true conversation view.
by pessimizer | 2025-07-21 22:25:29+00:00
> Housing market financialization can only "work" if housing tends to go up over time, which results from housing scarcity.

This is not true. The art market is financialized and tends to go up over time, but this does not result from art scarcity. You can make a market go up by making huge institutional cash buyers 30% of the buyer's market, and by getting even independent sellers to collude on price. Independent buyers in that market are irrelevancies, because they bought on credit borrowed against a house at an artificial value.

Also, that little property bubble we had in the first decade of the 2000s was not a result of a sudden population increase.

edit: also, it's important to mention that "if housing tends to go up over time" is within a window. It can lose all of that false value in a day, and the government will respond by directly subsidizing all of the institutional losers, and their stockholders.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-21 22:25:46+00:00
Ideally we'd be able to get a little of both. A proof of such magnitude should likely come with new definitions that are easy to search for in the code and start to reason about independently. Even without looking at the rest of the proof, I imagine we'd be able to deduce a fair amount of the structure just by understanding the new things that are being defined, what existing theorems are being imported, and connecting the dots.

Your comment reminds me of Tao's comment on the ABC conjecture: usually with a big proof, you progressively get new tools and examples of how they can be applied to other problems. But if it's hundreds of pages of formulas that just spits out an answer at the end, that's not how math usually works. https://galoisrepresentations.org/2017/12/17/the-abc-conject...

If these provers do end up spitting out 1000-page proofs that are all calculation with no net-new concepts, I agree they'll be met with a shrug.
by Adityav369 | 2025-07-21 22:25:49+00:00
You can ask the model to describe the image, but that is inherently lossy. What if it is a chart and the model gets most x, y pairs, but the user asks about a missing "x" or "y" value. Presenting the image at inference is effective since you're guaranteeing that the LLM is able to answer exactly the user's question. The only blocker here becomes how good retrieval is, and that's a smaller problem to solve. This approach allows us to only solve for passing in relevant context, the rest is taken care of by the LLM, otherwise the problem space expands to correct OCR, parsing, and getting all possible descriptions to images from the model.
by pvtmert | 2025-07-21 22:26:17+00:00
Quite interesting and nice. A bit delves into a "mass surveillance" like theme though.

Would be great to have some sort of local-only RF synchronization between the devices to "confirm" these events and issue alerts without requiring any connection at all...

P.S: Local-only RF synchronization, as in accelerometer and gyroscope data encoded directly (analog) 2.4ghz signal.
by oblio | 2025-07-21 22:26:41+00:00
I think people are doing one of several things to get value:

0. Use it for research and prototyping, aka throwaway stuff.

2. Use it for studying an existing, complex project. More or less read only or very limited writes.

3. Use it for simple stuff they don't care much about and can validate quickly and reasonably accurately, the standard examples are CLI scripts and GUI layouts.

4. Segment the area in which the LLM works very precisely. Small functions, small modules, ideally they add tests from another source.

5. Boilerplate.

There can be a lot of value in those areas.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-21 22:27:45+00:00
On top of "hard to find" I think it also displaces the market for real art, there are lots of blogs (or splogs?) like this one that are full of AI slop art, like this one

https://zxonline.net/from-bytes-to-billions-how-the-zx-spect...

maybe the whole article is AI generated, but the second image from the top is just awful. If people get the idea that crap like that is acceptable, how can anybody sell real work?

This blog post is legit

https://frankonfraud.com/sms-blasters-the-fraud-machine-anyo...

so far as I can tell and the AI generated image on it is actually pretty funny and it really problematizes the idea that you could sell art to that kind of market.
by tolien | 2025-07-21 22:29:39+00:00
> There ARE thousands.

And here you're getting in on the dishonesty.

How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.

> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.

None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.
by david-gpu | 2025-07-21 22:29:50+00:00
> The ultimate reason I think is that what really lights a fire under most mathematicians is the desire to know why a result is true; the explanation is really the product, much more so than just the yes-or-no answer

Of course, but a formal system like Lean doesn't merely spit out a yes-or-now answer, it gives you a fully-fledged proof. Admittedly, it may be harder to read than natural language, but that only means we could benefit from having another tool that translates Lean proofs into natural language.
by pilooch | 2025-07-21 22:30:00+00:00
True but modern models such as gemma3 pan& scan and other tricks such as training from multiple resolutions do alleviate these issues.

An interesting property of the gemma3 family is that increasing the input image siwmze actually does not increase processing memory requirements, because a second stage encoder actually compresses it into fixed size tokens. Very neat in practice.
by xp84 | 2025-07-21 22:30:05+00:00
Practically speaking, the outsides of envelopes addressed to you are much more like unencrypted HTTP traffic were: Trivial for many people other than sender and receiver to become aware of, therefore it's advisable to not print interesting secrets on the outside of mail in the first place (and indeed, you can just address mail without any front-facing return address or any return address if you don't want a chance of that data leak through any means).

Probably half of people get their mail in an unlocked mailbox that anyone can casually open and peek at before you get home from work. And every postal worker can of course see the information as they handle the mail.

Not saying that's ideal, but just pointing out that this doesn't represent a tremendous loss of privacy.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-21 22:30:08+00:00
ChatGPT is consistently fast now and gives me much better results than Google. IMO Google has damaged their brand with their "AI Overview" which apparently is a meme/laughingstock amongst the middle school crowd at least at my kids' school.

It's weird because I love the Gemini models; they are very good; Google is fumbling this.
by ReddBird | 2025-07-21 22:30:19+00:00
Hi @hammy havoc,

Thank you for your feedback. I plan on adding your recommendations when I have some time over next weekend. You’re absolutely right, the site needs to be compliant. I have it taken down until I make it compliant. I really appreciate you taking the time to bring those items to my attention.

Not sure if you picked up on it, but I was joking about the .txt file database. I have an appropriate, popular SQL based database engine to store the data.

If you want to, the site will be up by Sunday with your recommended changes. Thank you!
by neom | 2025-07-21 22:30:29+00:00
I agree, hence the heavy couching, so to your point I'm def just ranting a bit, because: I just think it would be more valuable to see some kind of MoA, I guess what I'm talking about is a bit of a different measurement, thinking in terms of economic outlook and understanding where we are and what can be done. I suspect more of this will shape our ability to understand how frontier models will impact the economy. Maybe I should just do my own evaluation, heh. :)

Edit: although to argue against myself, I suppose once a model can one-shot this stuff, my MoA comments become moot.
by Zak | 2025-07-21 22:30:41+00:00
I actually have a Bluetooth speaker that takes a removable 18650. It was branded "Polaris V8", but I think it's a white label product that's no longer in production. It still works, and most other ten year old Bluetooth speakers probably don't.

I'm with you on the risk/benefit calculation. E-waste is bad, and the option to bring a spare battery makes a lot of products more useful. A Li-ion cell can be dangerous if mishandled, but less so than a jug of gasoline or larger power tools.

This can be considerably mitigated by sticking a protection circuit on the end of a cell, which makes it no more dangerous than the proprietary Li-ion batteries used in things like cameras.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-21 22:30:51+00:00
The Telegraph article does seem a bit ridiculous but the others seem fairly fine to me. One of them wasn't even an arrest, it was just a politician pressing charges which is his right.

I think it's fair to demand that people follow laws on the internet as in person. Germany has laws against supporting nazism and for good reason. I don't give a crap about those people's right to free speech. The laws against insulting politicians seem a bit less reasonable but honestly just don't call people names online. Can't say I'm bothered by these articles.
by echelon | 2025-07-21 22:30:53+00:00
In the name of "Show, Don't Tell," here are some fun examples:

Super Mario Bros 3 (NES + Game Genie) equipping Hammer Suit / Invincibility:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FUVOM3rxZ5U

Super Mario World (SNES + Game Genie) causing weird memory distortion glitches, enabling swimming anywhere, and other more useful things:

https://youtu.be/o7_eFcpwq24?si=_io5oSzpRxdvuEMp&t=164

Super Mario RPG (SNES + Game Genie) enabling the hidden developer debug menu:

https://youtu.be/bH-uh9BnIfU?si=0L7qviRp5T-Nokjs&t=402

Pokemon Red (Game Boy SP + Game Genie) unlocking the unobtainable Mew (which Nintendo only gave away at rare in-person tournament events) at game start:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yzqTRbixnak

Zelda Link's Awakening (Game Boy + Game Genie) changing the value of "1" rupee to "255" rupees for effectively infinite currency (the creator isn't aware of the significance of "255"):

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRFqU_Dz3M8

Super Mario 64 (N64 + Gameshark) adding Dorrie the Plesiosaur to Lethal Lava Land:

https://youtu.be/DVBMdwn8Kc0?si=cUZ5ioG1GEvY0l-H&t=84

Super Mario 64 (N64 + Gameshark) showing off the Gameshark menu and a bunch of Mario character animation swaps:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AptK2MbqLXQ

Banjo-Kazooie (N64 + Gameshark) replacing the main characters with the Rareware logo and adding an "infinite jump by pressing A" hack, which adds displacement or velocity with a button press (yes, this is totally absurd):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF6pwm00vtY

Zelda Ocarina of Time (N64 + Gameshark) spawning a hidden developer-only enemy, the Starfox Arwing, which shoots lasers at Link:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KOQUhm1cNu8

Smash Bros 64 (N64 Emulator) spawning Master Hand (final boss) as a playable character in a standard stage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1i9TRLifaw

Zelda Majora's Mask (N64 + Gameshark) spawning special items, equipping the wrong items, using the wrong weapons, manually adjusting the clock, etc.:

https://youtu.be/ae2q9CjqXsc?si=IPB7XcPFWZyzpbh3

Smash Bros Melee (Gamecube emulator) spawning infinite items and damage for total chaos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDZZiL4rqlk

Quick Game Genie hardware overview:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WzHokvjdvDc
by bobthepanda | 2025-07-21 22:31:38+00:00
China has been building them at a relatively lukewarm pace compared to its solar and wind expansion

> China installed 1GW of nuclear last year, compared to 300GW of solar and wind, Mr Buckley said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...
by Ethee | 2025-07-21 22:31:54+00:00
Except that's not really true. Take OPs example of the search bar, in most shops as a UI/UX designer you put a search bar on your figma page and hand it off to the engineer who then implements it. It's entirely up to the engineer how the search functionality is going to work, am I going to query my backend on every keypress? Depending on how big your database that could be anywhere from 50ms-1s for a response PER KEYPRESS, which is exactly OPs problem. I don't see how the UI/UX designer is going to fix or solve that.
by nobody9999 | 2025-07-21 22:32:06+00:00
>I've definitely gotten the sense that the flip side of that is happening - in many cases, items get marked as "shipped" when the label is printed, but often shippers don't hand the package off to the carrier until days later.

AIUI, Amazon's policy is that credit cards don't get charged until the order ships.

As such, some shadier folks will create the label long before the item is actually shipped. However, since the label has been created, the order is now marked as "shipped" and the credit card is charged even though nothing has been packed, let alone actually shipped.
Ask HN: Thinking About a Health Analytics Startup. Would Hospitals Even Use It?
by prism_wisdom | 2025-07-21 22:32:11+00:00
Hey everyone, not trying to pitch or sell anything here, just exploring an idea and would love your thoughts.

I’m thinking about building a health analytics platform that connects to a hospital’s EHR system and provides actionable insights using clinical data (e.g. risk scores, readmission prediction, population health metrics, etc).

The goal is to help hospitals make better care decisions through better use of their data. I know there are players like Epic (with in-built analytics), Arcadia, Health Catalyst, etc., but I’m curious if there's still a gap, especially in terms of usability or customization.

If you’ve built in the healthcare space or worked with hospitals:

1. How hard was it to access or integrate with clinical data from EHRs?

2. What are the biggest blockers to adoption in hospital analytics?

3. Are there specific analytics that hospitals wish they had but don’t get from existing tools?

And if you’re a provider, analyst, or care team member:

1. Does your team do any analysis on EHR data today?

2. Do those analytics actually change how care is delivered?

Open to all thoughts, even if it’s just a sentence. Appreciate your time and perspective
by robocat | 2025-07-21 22:32:12+00:00
Please don't tell other people how they should live.

Personally I love travelling light (<10kg carry-on pack for 2 months last year to South America) but it isn't for everyone.

> Laundromats exist everywhere.

Only if you value your time at nearly $0. They are incredibly annoying when travelling - too often a 10 or 15 minute walk each way to one. Great for backpacking, but a complete waste of time if you only have a limited amount of time for your holiday.
by em-bee | 2025-07-21 22:32:36+00:00
in the early 90s i was interested in a better webserver than the ones from ncsa or cern. i read something about a webserver written in common lisp and acquired a common lisp implementation for linux from franz inc.

then i started this server and discovered that it could not serve files out of the box like ncsa and cern did. it expected me to write code to serve (dynamically generated) pages.

i kept looking and then discovered spinner/roxen, which did serve static files and had a different approach to dynamic pages which was more similar to server side includes and thus easier to approach than the common lisp server.

if that common lisp server would have been able to serve the static files that i already had out of the box, allowing a slow transition to more dynamic pages, i might have stuck with it...
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-07-21 22:33:05+00:00
… traumatizing (e.g. kids growing up in households where adults would have sex in the same room have all sorts of problems

Sure, to my western/puritanical upbringing that is weird, but I suspect for the majority of human history: parents have being having sex in very close proximity to their children. Separate bedrooms, even separate beds are a modern luxury.
by krupan | 2025-07-21 22:33:09+00:00
I agree. It's an interesting side note that it was cited in the Anthropic case, but the way it was used in that case is so weird that it really took away from the whole thing. It just kinda made me angry (again) about LLMs using all the information for free and with no citations instead of happy and nostalgic for the game genie (which still didn't help me make it past level 2 in Ninja Gaiden, dang it!)