MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-15 12:59:36+00:00
As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete, they are faster, cheaper, have better yield, and don't really need to be profitable.

Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.

That's the current reality of hardware in the western world. About 5 or 6 years ago I developed a product that cost me $75 in parts per unit (probably $60 if I could get to scale). The Chinese counterparts competing in the same category cost $70. I needed to sell at $200 to make a profit.

People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.
by uncircle | 2025-08-15 12:59:43+00:00
> there should be a function where the keyboard reports both the labels on its keys as well as the physical layout

You can move the keycaps around, though you'll find they don't all have the same height. Or wait until someone releases a keyboard with a small e-ink display in each keycap that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

QWERTY is not a problem. I have a dedicated layer just for games, which is actually a QWERTY/Colemak hybrid. The left side is QWERTY, as most game keys are bound near WASD, while the right side matches closely my Colemak key maps, so whenever I have to write text in QWERTY mode, I just have to mentally map from QWERTY the left-side. In practice, this is not a problem. Non-rebindable games are just small indie ones I find on itch.io that only use WASD. The rest that have in-game text chat I rebind, and Colemak anyway is very close to QWERTY not to make that effort too onerous. 99% of games are just WASD + TEF.

Re: QWERTZ and AZERTY: those are abominations and shouldn't exist. I use QWERTY everywhere + a dedicated Compose key for diacritics.

This is my layout: https://imgur.com/a/TpJMTBH
by Fokamul | 2025-08-15 12:59:48+00:00
Citation from blog: > The fact you hold a prior art in your hand, doesn’t mean much. The patent will still prevent you from importing/selling etc of the “infringing” stuff.

Could you please explain this to me? Let's say, they (Chinese) patent some complex part of my open-hw 3D printer, how this prevents me from importing parts of my 3D printer from other countries? Let's say from China. Company, which originally patent trolled me, must sue me first, no? And they care about patents? Since when?
by darrenf | 2025-08-15 13:00:07+00:00
I mean … is it not a relief that “””offensive””” speech isn’t actually a crime?

There’s widespread recognition right up to the Lords that this is a shitty situation, dangerous/chilling, and a waste of police time. We all think it's nonsense, and it’s being called out for being nonsense in parliament. Literally no-one, AFAICT, thinks it’s a good thing that arrest numbers are rising for non-criminal speech.

TBH I would hope when the dust settles that more people will get in shit for wasting police time — either reporting non-crimes to the police, or not actually wanting any (further) action taken. Feels like in many cases the “victims” are just playing the system as it (rapidly) develops, to take an online beef offline, rather than totalitarianism. If it were totalitarianism they’d be locking folk up, or at least convicting them of something, but that’s where we came in — those numbers are falling.
by code_runner | 2025-08-15 13:00:24+00:00
I think you may be looking past the point they are making. Rideshare was better, it was cheaper, it was nice. Its no longer better, cheaper, or nicer. They're doing fine for sure.... like the AI companies will be doing fine... but once the prices go up the ROI for AI agents won't be as appealing to every company. It may raise the bar higher for new companies/products rather than lower it.
by aetherspawn | 2025-08-15 13:01:08+00:00
It will be difficult to understand the human condition without properly understanding universal law.

For example, what authority did Satan have to torture Job in Job 2:1-7 for no reason?

Well, Luke 4:6 clearly shows Satan is the king of the earth, and he gives power to whomever he pleases (1 John 5:19).

Okay, but how did it happen? Humans rejected God’s support in Eden and sided with a rebellious sect (Satan, meaning “resistor”) and as long as humanity sides with that sect they will be dealt as co-conspirators along with that rebellion under universal law.

We now harbour the demons on earth (Rev 12:7-9) and there is apparently a Demon pulling strings behind every nation (Dan 10:13, Dan 10:20,21). This bodes badly for us, although Michael, also called Jesus, is very fond and cares greatly about humans and wishes to spare many.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-15 13:01:09+00:00
You're definitely looking in the wrong places. A large number of companies are basically entirely remote at this point, for instance I know chess.com is, and they have vacancies at this very moment. You can also go indie or freelance. If you can think of something you would want to buy, somebody else probably would too. You might not make much off of it, but even a little is a lot in places outside the EU/US.

There's also lots of possibilities outside of software. High end rates for online English lessons are around $40/hour though that's if you go independent, self promotion, etc - which is kind of tedious. But if you can tap into that huge booming middle class in e.g. China, you'll have basically endless students around those rates. Working for a company you can hit around $20/hour, which is quite lucrative in most of the world, and you'll generally have less prep and other meta-issues to deal with.

Similarly you can also sell skills. For instance there's a huge market for chess coaching. And while I haven't tried this myself, I'm fairly certain there's some market out there for teaching/tutoring people in coding. Also if you excelled in mathematics or whatever, there's another possibility. And doing this stuff at a school, or even university, is also completely viable - in most places a bachelors is acceptable for teaching at a university.

This is really what I mean with the world being your oyster. There's so much out there but most people just don't realize these possibilities even exist.
by jdhwosnhw | 2025-08-15 13:01:40+00:00
I’m not sure what you mean by “higher population” but fyi what determines the required number of samples is a function of the full shape of the underlying distribution. For instance the Berry Esseen inequality puts bounds on the convergence rate as a function of the first two central moments of the underlying distribution. But the point is that the convergence rate to Gaussian can be arbitrarily slow!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry%E2%80%93Esseen_theorem
by hopelite | 2025-08-15 13:01:43+00:00
What people like you seem to miss or maybe simply lack the sophistication (if I may say so) for, is understanding the nature of the ruling system and how far it will go to achieve its aims, which are also hidden from you. The ruling class are obviously a rather small group, so they inherently and by necessity rely on extreme manipulation, gaslighting, lying, deception, etc. to keep everyone off balance and not looking at them for causes or even accountability, let alone doing anything about them. It is why those who are extremely adept at manipulation and abuse are the ones who keep the ruling class in power in all places in the West, where the ruling class defers to them for that skill of manipulation and abuse.

It seems impossible to you that a government and its actors would e.g., not only allow, but even facilitate something like terrorist attacks specifically for the very purpose of making incremental, ratcheting moves towards an authoritarian system more palatable… for your safety of course.

It’s really not any different than how all abusers will incrementally test and press with various cycles of pressure and relief on their target of subjugation and abuse.

All the signs of manipulation, subjugation, and abuse are there in basically all western countries. Have you ever heard of Biderman’s chart of coercion[1]?

[1] https://www.strath.ac.uk/media/1newwebsite/departmentsubject...
by watwut | 2025-08-15 13:01:47+00:00
> It is rare for that message to be delivered to either side,

Not true, I see it constantly deployed to the not-right-wing side. Constantly and pretty much everywhere where left of center and center mix.

> It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.

I did read conservative writings, forums and what not. It is indeed rare in that space. Center is simply not invested in telling conservatives to have empathy as much as they are invested in promoting empathy toward conservatives.

> for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad.

I do agree that overall in aggregate it is increasingly clear it was bad advice. And the one sided application did not helped.
by vhab | 2025-08-15 13:02:00+00:00
This could have been an interesting take from anyone but Prusa. While they've earned themselves a great deal of goodwill from past contributions to the ecosystem, they're a failing company pivoting to dark patterns in an attempt to cling to relevance. It's heart breaking to see they still haven't been able to take a good hard look at themselves, and understand their own role in why they are scrambling.

Blog posts like these might be heralding the beginning of the end for Prusa.
by cluckindan | 2025-08-15 13:02:07+00:00
That’s a misframing of the situation explained in the post.

Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.

Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.

They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.

”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?
by risico | 2025-08-15 13:02:11+00:00
Coming from a country where piracy was the norm, I was very happy when Spotify and Netflix finally arrived. I even went through the trouble of accessing them via VPN just so I could pay for them.

Unfortunately, that excitement didn't last long. Shows started disappearing from Netflix, so we signed up for another service, then another, and so on. Prices kept going up, and I eventually realized I was paying a lot of money for very little in return.

At the start of the year, I cancelled everything. With the help of a few scripts, I've essentially replaced Netflix and the rest, without any downsides and at virtually no cost. I now have 4K streaming, instant playback, no device limits, offline viewing, and access to what's essentially the world’s entire media library.

The moment a company offers all that at a fair price (I’d even pay $50+ per month), I’ll gladly switch back.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-15 13:02:27+00:00
This is a microcosm of what's happening all over the physical device world, and manufacturing: Everyone (Except Prusa; thank you for your service!) outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.

My Raise3D printer is high quality and reliable. It's a nice piece of hardware. The PCBs I order from JLC are high-quality, built-to-specs, and whenever there's an error, it's a design fault. They are cheap, and arrive in 10 days.

I don't like the idea of being this dependent on China, but it's where we are. Weaponizing patents a risk? Problem. Placing the knowledge of how to build civilization in a single country? Problem. At least someone is carrying the torch forward, so it could be worse.
by ipaddr | 2025-08-15 13:02:38+00:00
"They pick a year in the future - 2045, say - and ask: what should the national train timetable look like then, if we want to meet our national objectives as a country"

The agile way. You end up getting nothing you really wanted done but everything is on time vs the method where you get everything you want at some unknown point in time.

What if it was done waterfall style where you put in as much in the time frame and released at random marketing moments.
by CodingJeebus | 2025-08-15 13:02:49+00:00
Certainly not the first time something like this happened. During Vietnam, the US Army sent soldiers into combat with the M16 knowing that it had major issues that often caused it to jam. We’ll never know exactly people were killed by such a bad decision, but it quickly became infamous early in the war.[0]

0: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/m16-rifle-viet...
by shepardrtc | 2025-08-15 13:03:21+00:00
Note that not only has Sig Sauer lied about this and attempted to gaslight people[1], they have also sued organizations to force them to continue using the pistol after they chose to discontinue use due to the dangers[2]

----

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DG6RkWCpkdw/#

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/gunmaker-sues-washingtons-p...
by pjmlp | 2025-08-15 13:04:17+00:00
Javascript is a protoype based OOP language, and the DOM that any Web UI depends on is OOP.

All commercial browsers are written in a mix of JavaScript OOP and C++, nowadays they might have some tiny percentage of Rust, which might be using traits and dynamic dispatch anyway.

Kotlin runs on top of a OOP based VM, and uses a OOP class library. Compose has plenty of classes on its implementation and Android Studio interop.

SwiftUI infrastructure relies on OOP code written in Objective-C and macOS frameworks.

People are usually so eager to bash OOP that they overlook the details.
by mooxie | 2025-08-15 13:04:18+00:00
> In most cities at the airport I just walk outside and get an old fashioned taxi at the rank vs dealing with all the nonsense

Not the primary point of your post, but I am always evangelizing to my friends about this 'hack.' I can't believe that people are willing to walk half a mile and queue up in the rain/sun/snow to be driven by some random person who will probably make them listen to their demo tape, instead of just taking the myriad taxis that are sitting right there.

Takes probably 20-30 minutes off of my airport commute.
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-15 13:04:39+00:00
Great point! The issue with hotkeys is a series of hardcoded keyboard shortcuts is likely to fail due to unexpected popups which are quite frequent. Cyberdesk can automate entire workflows with keyboard shortcuts only, and we typically push for that, but where it really shines is its ability to handle anomalous situations and ensure the workflow works every time. As for webapps, Cyberdesk is equipped to automate them just as much as it can automate desktop apps, and it's been performing just as well on web apps as it is on desktop apps. To our agent a webapp and a desktop app are the same thing. just a bunch of shapes and text on the screen. We just emphasize the legacy apps in our messaging because there's a strong need for that. Almost every customer we've talking to has tried RPA but to no avail
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-15 13:04:50+00:00
"But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature.

The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-15 13:05:10+00:00
Sure they are - the big companies are dumping billions in capital on it, and the small companies are getting a firehose of venture, sovereign and pe to build stuff.

The way the big AI players are playing supports the assertion that the LLM is plateuing. The differentiator between OpenAI, Gemini, Copilot, Perpexity, Grok, etc is the app and how they find novel ways to do stuff. The old GPT models that Microsoft uses are kneecapped and suck, the Copilot for Office 365 is pretty awesome because it can integrate with the Office graph and has alot of context.
by vidarh | 2025-08-15 13:05:17+00:00
That is true anywhere, and one reason why I think UK constitutional law is fundamentally broken in that, as some will tell you, the UK does have a constitution; but also, that constitution includes the principle of "parliamentary sovereignty" which means that parliament can at any point strip away all rights and privileges - the most important element of a functioning constitution, and a functioning democracy, is how it protects against government over-reach - even when supported by the majority (perhaps especially then), but as you allude to, not just now but also in the future.

And this is also a key argument when people try to justify oppressive laws by appealing to their own good nature: Protecting speech and protecting agaisnt the government isn't always - or even usually - against protecting against the present, but protecting against every future potential government, and especially protecting against those who might be attracted by tools of oppression created in the present to seek power.

I'm quite free-spoken most places, and usually feel more constrained by not wanting to be too controversial for potential employers etc. when writing under my own name.

But the shift in the UK recently has been particularly troubling to a degree I haven't experienced first-hand before, and while it makes me more cautious about how it will be interpreted now, you're right:

It's scarier to consider how these tools will be abused in the future.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-15 13:06:11+00:00
Slightly unrelated, but I wonder why the "Linux desktop maintainers" (whoever that is - and that this is even a question is probably the main problem) haven't come up yet with a minimal shared 'interface library' that's mandatory on each Linux desktop installation, and which provides a standard API (but no implementation) to create a window, get input events and probably also a set of simple UI widgets (buttons, sliders, checkboxes, lists - basically what Win32 or X11 provides).

KDE, GTK or any other concrete UI toolkit register 'drivers/plugins' with this interface library to do the actual work.

Minimal 'framework-agnostic' UI apps can then use this standard shim library and always look fully native, while applications which require the full KDE or GTK feature set can still use those frameworks directly.

Call it Common Desktop Environment or something idk...
by Etheryte | 2025-08-15 13:06:20+00:00
More and more people are moving out of smaller cities every year in favor of London. Building new cities that no one wants to live in does not solve the problem, no matter the cost. Look at Italy for a good example, there are places where the local municipalities are offering houses for 1€ if you come and live there permanently, but there's still nearly no takers.
by wtcactus | 2025-08-15 13:06:48+00:00
Well, this is the result of more than 2 decades of the West shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly and willingly in the name of some twisted extreme left ideology that convinced part of the population that if they didn’t drastically reduce their energy independence the planet would be destroyed. All, while that same people didn’t bat an eye while China and others took the advantage to surpass us without hindering their industry the slightest - in fact, by taking advantage of our madness so that they could sell us crappy replacements for the products we used to build at home in a much cleaner and sustainable way.

Trump has a lot - a real lot - of negatives. But playing these idiotic games is not one of his shortcomings. No seriously, it should all make us sick to our stomach having politicians, putting forward those big announcements where they tell us they are going to forbid some type of car, imposing even heavier regulations on our industry, taxing us even more, or destroying even more of our energy production capacity, and do it with some smile in their lips claiming some “environmental target”, like they are doing us some favour by destroying our - actually - progressive societies to make space for some backwards autocratic regimen.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-08-15 13:07:00+00:00
It's both. There are still lots of people having interesting conversations on X, but the second anything gets even the smallest amount of reach your replies will be full of really crummy (and promoted) blue-check trolls interrupting and being angry. The site in general also makes my adrenaline spike in an unpleasant way if I use any of the public feeds for more than about thirty minutes, which seems to be the goal they're optimizing for. I'm happier just avoiding the place.
by devinprater | 2025-08-15 13:07:20+00:00
Piracy also offers audio description, allowing blind people to enjoy described media, for shows movies that don't have them on streaming services, like Doctor Who. An audio description site offers audio description for the original and revival series. Streaming offers none of that. They also do third-party audio description cause studios can't be bothered.

It also offers video games that can be emulated, and with OCR nd AI image descriptions, can be played by blind people. It also offers EBooks in many different formats which can b loaded onto accessible apps or Braille displays and read, without needing apps which may or may not be accessible, but which will always need connection to a phone or computer. And you can read all this offline.

So when I find companies, like Big Finish and Graphic Audio, which offer their stuff in downloadable, DRM-free formats, I pay them good for their stuff, because they respect me.
by I-M-S | 2025-08-15 13:07:22+00:00
Absolutely. Asocial behaviour in the West comes at far too low of a price. For example, here's how NIMBYs are dealt with in places like Serbia: https://n1info.rs/vesti/porodici-iz-kragujevca-investitor-za...

If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you, not others
by mahmoud-almadi | 2025-08-15 13:07:42+00:00
I appreciate your skepticism. At the end of the day we're focused on delivering real value while taking every security precaution we can reasonably take and build new technology at the same time. Eventually as we grow we'll be able to do full self hosting for our customers and perhaps even spin up our own LLMs in our own servers. But until then, we can only do so much.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-15 13:08:00+00:00
Very well said. For what it’s worth, it’s the exact same “logic” public cloud providers also used to get customers off the hardware they already owned and onto hardware they’d rent forever. Some of the most successful businesses out there - tobacco companies, casinos, SaaS, fossil fuel providers, car companies, cloud providers, etc - are masterfully adept at weaving narratives that keep their customers focused on short or mid-term results over long-term costs, and AI is no different.

Sure, if all you ever look at are the token costs, the inferencing costs at the edge, then the narrative that this will never skyrocket in price and the gates to the walled garden won’t ever close seems believable. Once you factor in the R&D, the training, the data acquisition, the datacenters, the electricity and water and real estate and lobbying and shareholder returns…

It’ll be the most expensive product your company pays for, per seat, by miles, once the subsidy period ends and the real bills come due. Even open-weight models are likely to evaporate or shift to some sort of Folding@Home type distributed training model to keep costs low.