MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chrisandchris | 2025-07-17 05:10:39+00:00
> Even with motion activated cameras it could fill up in ~3 weeks to where it's no longer recording.

What are the legal aspects to it? In Switzerland e.g. the recommended duration to store recordings are "up to 72h, or as long as required to fulfil their job" (afaik, the law isn't very exactly defined) . I could see it difficult to argue "as long as the disk is not fill" as a valid duration.
by prvc | 2025-07-17 05:11:02+00:00
An interesting prospective project for a technically minded musician would be would be to find an automated way to "correct" the surviving corpus of Welte-Mignon[1] recordings. They were designed to capture the small nuances of performances (such as dynamics), and a large number of historically important musicians made recorded performances in this medium before the era of sound recording. In my strongly-held opinion, the rolls were marked in an uneven and imprecise way, making direct playback on anything but the original recording apparatus inaccurate. A common trait of modern renderings of these rolls as sound recordings (as found on CD or on Youtube) is an unevenness of tempo and a seeming lack of synchronization of voices (really piano keys). However, the mechanical quirks and imprecision in the recording apparatus must be regular enough to allow for a more accurate version of the performances to be reconstructed, without relying on unduly many aesthetic assumptions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welte-Mignon
by sandspar | 2025-07-17 05:12:56+00:00
B.F. Skinner’s former graduate students Keller Breland & Marian Breland turned behaviorism's lab ideas into a step‑by‑step training recipe at Animal Behavior Enterprises in the 1940s–50s. They used it on thousands of animals - from chickens that “danced” on cue to dolphins and pigs - and wrote it up for psychologists in 1961. Bob Bailey joined the Brelands’ company in 1965, the same year Keller Breland died. Bob became ABE’s operational head in 1969. ABE produced stage productions for many tourist attractions in the USA and abroad and conducted government sponsored free environment programs with dolphins, dogs, cats, ravens, gulls, vultures, pigeons, and many other birds and mammals. Bob and Marian married in 1976. They trained, or directed the training, of more than 140 different species, totaling well over 15,000 animals. Bob and Marian closed ABE’s doors in 1990. They continued to consult on selected projects. Marian died in 2001. Bob continues consulting and teaching worldwide.
by MangoToupe | 2025-07-17 05:13:05+00:00
> that turn into self-inhibiting labels that restrict personal development

Say more. Why do you see these labels as inhibitory rather than liberatory?

I have a complicated relationship with the label given a lack of a formal diagnosis and many years of accusations of ASD, and I haven't identified any positive side of a diagnosis and will likely never pursue one. But this doesn't mean the label hasn't helped me connect with others in my life with ASD, some very hand-wavy, and some non-verbal adults who must have live assisted. Do i actually have it? Does it even matter either way?
by RandallBrown | 2025-07-17 05:13:45+00:00
The US public library system is very big. There are over 17,000 libraries and that doesn't include the almost 100,000 libraries that are in schools.

My city (Seattle, a pretty large US city) has 27 public libraries. I only live a few blocks from the closest one but could fairly easily walk to at least 2 more.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-17 05:14:28+00:00
Yeah. The big problem with chip making is the effort to start up is absolutely monumental. China is putting all their money into it and still playing catch up. Japan is trying to get into the game and they're mostly aiming to make slightly older chips and bringing in companies that already have expertise.

Those are two of the biggest economies in the world pumping loads of money and people into that engine to try to get it started and still just starting to make some progress. That's not to say there aren't great ideas out there that we're missing which could make it all easier and cheaper, but a small team is definitely going to have one hell of a time making stuff on a nanometer scale without billions and billions of dollars behind them. Software startups are easy, but hardware is hard. Massive hardware and microscopic hardware are harder.
by guywithahat | 2025-07-17 05:14:38+00:00
It's unclear from the article, I'm just saying this is what the data shows. The economy is strong, and young people can find jobs, but the findings in the article suggest young people with degrees are having trouble getting jobs.

The example they give is a girl who has a degree in "health communications". Another, with a degree in "cognitive science", found a job in data science. A critical reader might describe these degrees as a "degree in fluff".
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-17 05:15:31+00:00
> Technology is worse, anything that requires tooling is done the least number of times possible. While small phone enjoyers are disadvantaged, they arent disadvantaged enough to force them out of the market. Larger tooling is easier to make and caters to all other preferences.

No, you're making up a claim that you know perfectly well is false. Just blank most of your day out of your mind, and then... what? Why?

You don't like pants? Televisions come in dozens of different sizes. Laptops come in dozens of different sizes. Are phones different in some way?
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-17 05:15:31+00:00
>Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen.

As a former landscaper, I can tell you that you either aren't taking the time to understand at least one of these professions at all, or simply have some very low standards for good landscaping. It is not a dime-a-dozen field that requires minimal skill, at all, and given all I've seen of GOOD pest control, the same applies, fully. You might have dozens of small contractors out there claiming to be either of these things but knowing little, sure, but those that actually know the technical balances at work and can apply those to what they're doing so that it creates durable results for your building/land/home, are people who need to know quite a few very fine nuances of their work.

I mean, unless you think that constructing external landscapes that soon collapse, flood or fill with dead plants is irrelevant, or have no problem living in a building riddled with rats, mice, cockroaches and easy domicile to all of these pests and sundry.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-17 05:16:21+00:00
What isn't true? I stand by what I said.

Having page tables (and other security features) isn't mutually exclusive with being horribly insecure in practice. CPUs have certainly had their fair share of vulnerabilities exposed within even just the past few years.

I'll freely admit that I'm going off of what other people have told me. I don't do GPU driver development (or other hardware or the kernel for that matter). But the message I've encountered has been consistent in this regard. If nothing else, ask yourself why google would go to the amount of trouble that they have to develop various GPU sandboxing layers for chromeos apps.
by oc1 | 2025-07-17 05:16:55+00:00
The 13 mini didn't solve any of these issues for me plus the worse battery life. I upgraded to 16 pro max. My laptop usage also went down from there. Total screen time probably stayed, but now i carry most of the time just a phone instead of phone and laptop. If you want something less addictive there is probably the apple watch but you still need the phone to configure and now you're strapped to a device 24/7 just for the sake to be used less.
by tbrownaw | 2025-07-17 05:17:37+00:00
> And you wouldn't expect the bad bots to play nicely just because you asked them.

Well, yes, the point is to tell the bots what you've decided to consider "bad" and will ban them for. So that they can avoid doing that.

Which of course only works to the degree that they're basically honest about who they are or at least incompetent at disguising themselves.
by esperent | 2025-07-17 05:17:40+00:00
This is incredible. It's one thing to hear numbers like gigawatts and percentages of total generation, but seeing these photos gives an idea of the scale required.

The photos of drones installing the panels especially stood out to me.

It's easy to feel that China is ahead here, but it's important to remember it's a small lead using technology and expertise that we all have access to. The only thing that matters is political will to get it done.
by ergocoder | 2025-07-17 05:17:43+00:00
I want a reliable e-ink phone. Minimal phone is good but flaky to the point that it is annoying.

Odd UX that can't be configured (and no idea why). For example, if you touch the power button, it'll unlock and wake up the phone. There's no way to turn that off and require a click. Other android phones can but not minimal. like what the hell was going through their decision making process?
by Bluestein | 2025-07-17 05:20:11+00:00
And that itself is another issue itself: When almost everything can be AI-genne'd, it casts doubt on all other human output.-

> Most humans couldn't come up with all these examples

I beg to differ on that. I bet we are all aware of these things. I just took the time to point them out, based on rather painful, and concerned, observation, somewhat systematically. Heck: HN's frontpage will give you 70% of all this on any given day.-

> We are even beginning to talk like the LLMs we created

... and, to this: Fair enough. But it goes beyond just the "human" end zone getting slopped to death, to where you can't distinguish human from machine genne'd anymore. I was getting to how human speech patterns themselves are beginning to resemble language model output (something, again, mentioned onsite) ...
by misswaterfairy | 2025-07-17 05:20:31+00:00
Australia seems to have gotten this right, after its experiences of the Black Saturday bushfires.

https://www.australianwarningsystem.com.au/

Below are the three alert levels for all hazards in Australia, including tsunami:

- Advice: An incident has started. There is no immediate danger. Stay up to date in case the situation changes.

- Watch and Act: There is a heightened level of threat. Conditions are changing and you need to start taking action now to protect you and your family.

- Emergency Warning: You may be in danger and need to take action immediately. Any delay now puts your life at risk.

The scale slides up and down, but can immediately be set to Emergency Warning if the situation demands it.

They can also be further defined with 'Calls to Action': - 'Monitor conditions' - 'Prepare now' - 'Seek shelter immediately' - 'Move to higher ground immediately'

Siren systems aren't widespread across the country, though systems are popping up in some flood-prone parts of Queensland. Sirens are typically activated when the 'Emergency Warning' alert level is reached.
by furyofantares | 2025-07-17 05:20:42+00:00
Maybe some of these will work for you; Minecraft, PayPal, GitHub, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Android, Waze.

With Apple it's harder for me to know. How do former Dark Sky users feel about the Weather app? I think it has all the features? How about Shazam, which I never used before it became an iOS feature? TestFlight retained its identity. Beats by Dre headsets did too, though Beats Music I think became Apple Music in a way.
by rustystump | 2025-07-17 05:20:51+00:00
I agree. Idk if the science is junk but the article certainly reads that way.

As kids we always walked on our toes due to material arts + wanting to be ninjas. It also helps if you want to avoid stepping on things outside like pine needles and other prickly boys. To this day I still prefer being on my toes. I have nieces who are on the spectrum and they stomp around...

If I was a teen again, in all that awkward glory, I'd imagine labeling myself to "fit in" better after reading this.

But to be fair, my generation literally cut themselves for attention/help/fitting in so perhaps a little labeling isn't all that bad.
by smolder | 2025-07-17 05:21:17+00:00
IBM left my once prosperous hometown as a kid. Others followed suit. Since then it's been in a sad state economically, just some rust belt town. Corporations abandoning communities is hardly anything new. Capital acts with 0 empathy, or rather, the people who direct it do.

I've heard on this forum of a tactic Intel employed where they broke off some people into a subsidiary, dissolved the subsidiary, and then offered to rehire them with the caveat: Oops, the pension you were promised is now gone. Then Intel's foundry business started failing. Oops!!
by Jach | 2025-07-17 05:21:17+00:00
I guess back in 2003 people would expect an email to actually go somewhere, these days I would expect it to either go nowhere or just be part of a campaign to collect server admin emails for marketing/phishing purposes. Angry emails are always a bit much, but I wonder if they aren't sent as much anymore in general or if people just stopped posting them to point and laugh at and wonder what goes through people's minds to get so upset to send such emails.

My somewhat silly take on seeing a bunch of information like emails in a user agent string is that I don't want to know about your stupid bot. Just crawl my site with a normal user agent and if there's a problem I'll block you based on that problem. It's usually not a permanent block, and it's also usually setup with something like fail2ban so it's not usually an instant request drop. If you want to identify yourself as a bot, fine, but take a hint from googlebot and keep the user agent short with just your identifier and an optional short URL. Lots of bots respect this convention.

But I'm just now reminded of some "Palo Alto Networks" company that started dumping their garbage junk in my logs, they have the audacity to include messages in the user agent like "If you would like to be excluded from our scans, please send IP addresses/domains to: scaninfo@paloaltonetworks.com" or "find out more about our scans in [link]". I put a rule in fail2ban to see if they'd take a hint (how about your dumb bot detects that it's blocked and stops/slows on its own accord?) but I forgot about it until now, seems they're still active. We'll see if they stop after being served nothing but zipbombs for a while before I just drop every request with that UA. It's not that I mind the scans, I'd just prefer to not even know they exist.
by yokljo | 2025-07-17 05:21:25+00:00
This is basically asking for a response that's just the original comment but with "KDE" and "Gnome" switched. I personally find KDE to look very nice and bring a much better and less clunky user experience than Gnome, so it's completely subjective I suppose. I congratulate the KDE contributors on continuing to make a great product even with people saying it sucks all the time.
by djaychela | 2025-07-17 05:22:09+00:00
Is it? Certainly hasn't been the experience of my two autistic daughters who had years of difficulty and which led to real problems for a decade or so each during later later schooling and early work years. Both are now doing much better but it's been a long uphill battle for them. The same of my two sons but society is much more tolerant (but bit fully) off their symptoms as they tend to be viewed as 'male' tendencies, just severely amplified.
by margalabargala | 2025-07-17 05:22:58+00:00
Unihertz's phones are unfortunately simply technologically infeasible (to use). Their software is apparently write-once update-never, and any phone you buy of theirs will be riddled with permanent bugs.

If Unihertz kept their phones up to date for a few years after launch, rather than only for the few years prior to launch, they would be an incredibly strong competitor in this space but as they are they are next to useless.
by acosmism | 2025-07-17 05:23:57+00:00
if you are hosting a house party that invites the entire world robots.txt is a neon sign to guide guests to where the beers are, who's cooking what kind of burgers and on what grill; rules of the house etc - you'll still have to secure your gold chains and laptop in a safe somewhere or decide to even keep them in the same house yourself
by ajuc | 2025-07-17 05:24:18+00:00
> 17,000 libraries

It doesn't seem like "A lot" for a country the size of US TBH.

Poland has 7541 public libraries. Which is 1 per 41 km^2, but of course big cities have many libraries, so the actual distance is larger in the countryside. But it's a number.

17000 libraries in US is like one per 580 km^2.

And yes every school has one too, there's 35 000 schools. But many of these are very small libraries that mostly carry mandatory lectures for school + some classic books. In my village the school library sucked.

I lived in a village of 500 people and had a library within 5 minute walk.
by intended | 2025-07-17 05:24:19+00:00
I have stopped using an incredibly benign bot that I wrote, even thought it was supremely useful - because it was eerily good at saying things that “felt” right.

Self help books do not contort to the reader. Self help books are laborious to create, and the author will always be expressing a world model. This guarantees that readers will find chapters and ideas that do not mesh with their thoughts.

LLMs are not static tools, and they will build off of the context they are provided, sycophancy or not.

If you are manic, and want to be reassured that you will be winning that lottery - the LLM will go ahead and do so. If you are hurting, and you ask for a stream of words to soothe you, you can find them in LLMs.

If someone is delusional, LLMs will (and have already) reinforced those delusions.

Mental health is a world where the average/median human understanding is bad, and even counter productive. LLMs are massive risks here.

They are 100% going to proliferate - for many people, getting something to soothe their heart and soul, is more than they already have in life. I can see swathes of people having better interactions with LLMs, than they do with people in their own lives.

quoting from the article:

> In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma.
by Tcepsa | 2025-07-17 05:25:13+00:00
Maybe it's spite-driven development, but I'd love to hear about someone who, upon learning that LLMs are suggesting endpoints in their API that don't exist, implements them specifically to respond with a status code[0] of "421: Misdirected Request". Or, for something less snarky and more in keeping with the actual intent of the code, "501: Not Implemented". If the potentially-implied "but it might be, later" of 501 is untenable, I humbly propose this new code: "513: Your Coding Assistant Is Wrong"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
by happymellon | 2025-07-17 05:25:31+00:00
> banking apps are getting pretty cramped

Completely agree. Although not even on "small phones", my S23 isn't small but the design of these apps has regressed so much that I barely see any useful information.

On my old WAP phone I could see bank balance and maybe the last transaction or two. Now half the screens taken up with upselling account levels, invest in shares, buy crypto, you've been pre-approved!
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-17 05:26:06+00:00
Chemical engineers are so good at distributed systems that it is almost a trope at this point. It is their specialty. Their entire discipline is optimizing aggregate throughput in decentralized systems with minimal coordination.

It maps 1:1 with the computer science but chemical engineering as a discipline has more robust design heuristics that don’t really have common equivalents in software even though they are equally applicable. Chemical engineering is extremely allergic to any brittleness in architecture, that’s a massive liability, whereas software tends to just accept it because “what’s the worst that could happen”.
by padolsey | 2025-07-17 05:26:35+00:00
>> LLM's do not possess professional experience needed for successful therapy, such as knowing when to not say something as LLM's are not people.

> Most people do not either. That an LLM is not a person doesn't seem particularly notable or relevant here.

Of relevance I think: LLMs by their nature will often keep talking. They are functions that cannot return null. They have a hard time not using up tokens. Humans however can sit and listen and partake in reflection without using so many words. To use the words of the parent comment: trained humans have the pronounced ability to _not_ say something.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-07-17 05:26:39+00:00
The center cannot hold.

We will see either one of two things:

(a) a massive market crash which nearly destroys the software industry and for a time wreaks havoc on the global economy, or (b) a soft crash due to external smoothing effects because never underestimate the power of fake billionaire money; along with a severe bifurcation of tech markets where simultaneously we see slop dominate poor quality mainstream products and then the higher-end luxury products either minimize or outright remove all mention of AI because it's become such a low-brow, tainted brand.

(On that last note, we already have evidence that consumers see that something is now "AI-powered" or whatever and they like it LESS. It will eventually become the kiss of death.)
by pzo | 2025-07-17 05:27:21+00:00
M$ was too late to open source it and too late to embrace Linux. On desktop side .NET was only for windows back then and xamarin immature. On server side in java land you had framework war so you had many choices and libraries to choose from - companies didn't want to fully embrace M$ ecosystem (windows sql server, windows deployment etc). Then Android came and adopted Java and M$ lost mobile ecosystem war.

I can see similar way why Swift eventually can loose market share - too late to open source and too late to embrace cross-platform.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-17 05:27:24+00:00
"OpenAI appears to have basically abandoned Custom GPTs since their Spring ‘24 update, and I’m a bit stumped as to why"

My guess is it was always meant as marketing scheme, having others promote OpenAI for free, while at the same time they would be able to see which topics got traction and which not, providing potentially valueable business development clues.

I think it turned out both of these turned out not to be as valueable as they hoped.
by Nursie | 2025-07-17 05:27:34+00:00
> Does everyone use their phone with two hands

A lot of us do, yes.

> and carry a bag everywhere?

As a guy in 36" waist jeans (yeah I need to lose a few kg)... I can fit an iphone 16 pro max in my pocket pretty comfortably.

> Why do people want these giant phones?

Well, one reason is that I'm getting older and don't find it as easy to read tiny text on tiny screens any more. Another reason is that I sometimes watch streaming services on there.

Also it's shiny and the battery lasts forever.
by pclowes | 2025-07-17 05:28:57+00:00
I think there are a lot of offerings out there now. Maybe not to the minute with respect to battery life but Apples chip advantage is steadily evaporating. I typically don't need more than 8 hours of battery personally.

Have heard good things about framework computers. As a more efficient chip or battery comes out you just upgrade that component if your use case requires it.
by Retric | 2025-07-17 05:29:09+00:00
At scale it does when “serious downsides” are both common and actually serious like death.

Suppose every time you got into your car an LLM was going to recreate the all safety critical software from an identical prompt but using slightly randomized output. Would you feel comfortable with such an arrangement?

> Most unfixable flaws can be worked around with enough effort and skill.

Not when the underlying idea is flawed enough. You can’t get from the earth to the moon by training yourself to jump that distance, I don’t care who you’re asking to design your exercise routine.