MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by briHass | 2025-08-01 13:03:00+00:00
Personally, I've had good luck with Reolink cameras. I block them from the Internet at the router, just in case, but they do seem to respect your choice if you disable the cloud/mobile app feature.

The cameras will upload jpegs and mpegs to a local FTP server based on configurable triggers, which include 'AI' detection of animal/vehicle/human, all running on-camera.

I wrote a simple script to put all the daily uploaded jpegs on a HTML webpage (each linked to the video) for review. Home Assistant also has an integration that can do streaming and grabs the detection triggers as well.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-01 13:03:04+00:00
> The problem is with people not being willing to decide for themselves whether someone's behavior meets this threshold, and letting the mob substitute their own judgement.

Yes -- additionally there's also the situation where they try repeatedly to act collectively on this for themselves but the individual in question (or a compromised individual) has power over the resulting action, right?

I think it worth considering that many, if not most, of these "cancellations" occur long after serious attempts have been made to privately act that have been thwarted, often by commercial interests.
by nyeah | 2025-08-01 13:03:12+00:00
Good point. I'm not convinced that support for Israel was the issue, though.

There are lunatics in the US who seem to have completely forgotten the 1300-1400 Israelis killed by Hamas just last year, but who can see the human disaster in Gaza. I don't think those people are so politically engaged on that single issue that they deliberately stayed home from the polls and let Trump win ... in order to ... help people in Gaza? I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem to fit together.

EDIT: To be fair those same folks are notorious for shooting themselves in the foot. So who knows?

EDIT 2: Some of the lunatics above are probably anti-Semitic, despite Trump's claims that they are anti-Semitic. But again how does that drive them to help Trump right now?
by dewmi1aaih | 2025-08-01 13:03:50+00:00
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by pjerem | 2025-08-01 13:03:50+00:00
Saying those people are only there for the money is a little bit reductive IMHO.

I like computers but I actually don't like programming that much as an action.

Programming is just a tool I use and try to master because it allows me to do what I like and that's building things.

I'm happy that AI is there to help me reduce the friction in building things.

I'd also argue that people who sees programming as an end and not as a mean are also going to either don't like working in most software companies or to be pretty negative contributors despite their mastering because, in my experience, those people tends to solve inexistant problems while having a hard time understanding that what pays their salary are boring CRUDs calling tangled ORM queries.
by dsign | 2025-08-01 13:03:56+00:00
Oh yes, that most tried and tested way of destroying people by accusing them of having improper sex. Remember Julian Assange anyone? And what about the Middle Ages and all the burned people? Remember that time Philip IV of France accused the Knights Templar of having sex with each other, in order to cancel them :-) ? That was a good one, though I'm sure Philip had state reasons in addition to a drunken stupor.

I can't comment on this particular case, other than by acknowledging that, sadly, this won't be the first or last mobbing. I hope that Pretty does well and that the people who rushed to condemn him never again get laid.
by Eisenstein | 2025-08-01 13:04:05+00:00
I absolutely do not agree with public pile-ons, social media hysteria, or understandable mistakes leading to cancellation. Everyone should be able to make mistakes and learn from them -- that is incredibly important.

But shame is also incredibly important in that it causes self-policing of social norms. There is no way that society would work if everyone just did things that benefited them with no regard to others, in ways that weren't actively harmful but just annoying. That's why we have norms and enforce them with shame. If this gets broken down because people use shaming inappropriately then it will be used as a reason to do away with shaming completely. We see this trend happening and its continuation can only lead to bad outcomes.
by netcan | 2025-08-01 13:04:33+00:00
Well... unfortunately the world does not come equipped with a "figure out the truth and report back" button.

We have some truth-discovering methods... but they are hard, expensive, and often return empty handed. Science. Courts. Fact finding commitees. Etc.

So... you can't have that. What we have is heresy, and a "how to act" dilemma in circumstances where truth isn't known and will not be known.

Im going to encourage you not to form your own opinion on who is lying. Read the accusations of you want.. but don't pretend you are in a position to judge... only to execute.
AI that splits bills from a photo and voice (multilingual)
by VladCENTEA22 | 2025-08-01 13:04:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a web app that splits bills just by taking a photo and talking to it — even in different languages and with complex rules like “Anna pays for drinks, Bob only pays 20%, the rest 60/40”.

The interesting part for me was making the AI understand natural speech as if you were explaining it to a human. Friends can join the same bill from their phones and add their parts, and everything syncs in real time.

### Why I built it I was frustrated with manual bill-splitting apps. I wanted to see how far modern OCR, multilingual speech recognition, and LLMs could go if combined properly.

### Tech details - *Frontend*: React + Vite + TypeScript, Tailwind + shadcn/ui for UI, TanStack Query for data, Socket.IO for real-time sync. - *Backend*: Node.js + Express, PostgreSQL with Prisma ORM, Google OAuth, JWT for auth, Socket.IO for events. - *AI pipeline*: - OCR to extract text from the photo - Whisper for multilingual speech-to-text - LLM parses the free-form speech/text into structured math rules for splitting - *Real-time*: When you share a bill, everyone joins a Socket.IO room and sees updates live.

### Things I’d love feedback on - How well it handles tricky or “unfair” split instructions - Testing non-English voice commands - UX around collaborative splitting

You can try it here: killbill.top

(I might open-source some of the parsing pipeline once it’s stable.)
by tiagod | 2025-08-01 13:04:44+00:00
>Now, in Portugal, we're starting to see cases of "here's the price with a 3€ tip (for example), if you want to pay that", and you awkwardly get to say "no thanks I want to pay the actual price", which I find very unpleasant.

I've lived in Portugal for 30 years and I never had that happen to me. Where are you seeing this? I could only imagine it in a place that only serves tourists and foreigners.
by catapart | 2025-08-01 13:04:45+00:00
I did. In response to the thread starter, who made a generalized statement.

If I've missed an implication that limited their suggestion to specific regions, them I'm happy to retract. But what I'm seeing is a general suggestion, so I've extrapolated that out and tried to apply it to a hypothetical where the advice might be appropriate.

Feels like maybe you've assumed that the thread starter was scoping the suggestion to the regions where this offense occurred. Again, I don't see that implication in the text, but I feel like it's an entirely reasonable assumption. That being the case, I don't fault anyone for thinking only in those terms. But I also don't think I was out of line to engage with the thread starters points in the way that I did.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-01 13:05:04+00:00
Doesn't matter how you dress it up, persecuting someone on the basis of absolutely no evidence other than victim testimony is, for all practical purposes, the modern equivalent of pointing at the witch and shrieking.

> A functioning justice system for sex crime accusations would be amazing; for valid reasons, a lot of people do not trust that this exists.

They have no valid reasons. No system is perfect. Claiming that the system getting it wrong 1 out of every 1000 times is a valid reason is just stupid; no system is perfect.
by alnwlsn | 2025-08-01 13:05:24+00:00
Most of them aren't defined as rigorously as a dictionary would do, it's more like trying to come up with a plausible description for each word.

"day" might be "time in which the sun goes round the earth" even though that's not technically correct.

"sit" could be "to take a chair" and "sat" might be "to have took a chair"

"moth" is "a bug that flies and likes to eat cloth", and so on.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-08-01 13:05:37+00:00
absolutely. I'm just annoyed by the US centricism here. courts, lawyers, and the executive branch are all just people. it's not a never failing machine and it will never be one. just because there are instances of neglect doesnt mean the whole system is bogus imho. I'd even argue that it's more that the system isn't protected enough against people in power misusing it.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-01 13:05:57+00:00
This was true five years ago, not true now.

When I eat out in NYC now they almost always bring the machine to your table so you can use contactless and you select the tip amount on the screen.

The other week I went to a place that asked for my card and brought out the receipt for me to sign and I had to manually calculate the tip and was struck by how long it's been since I had to do that.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-08-01 13:06:20+00:00
I mean it is libel / defamation, but as the author describes, getting justice takes a long time and is very expensive, and that's assuming you even know who made the claims and they live in the same country as you.

Besides, there may not be a criminal case / the police may do nothing. One of the accusers only came forward three years after the end of the two-year relationship; it's not unheard of for someone to realise that what happened was wrong years much later, at which point the police is less likely to do anything because any physical evidence will be gone by then, and it's one person's words against another's.
by theptip | 2025-08-01 13:06:24+00:00
I don’t think this is true. Before GPT-2 most people didn’t think the Turing test would be passed any time soon, it’s a quite new development.

I do agree (and I think there is a general consensus) that passing the Turing test is less meaningful than it may seem, it used to be considered an AGI-complete task and this is now clearly not the case.

But I think it’s important to get the attribution right, LLMs were the tech that unexpectedly passed the Turing test.
by sokoloff | 2025-08-01 13:06:35+00:00
If you're paying a relatively high hourly wage to all of the staff, it seems unsurprising that you'd not want to be open during times of low customer traffic.

Honestly, this seems good overall; there's no more sense in having low-paid waitstaff hanging around hoping to get a customer table that will tip than in having a restaurant owner keep the restaurant open while paying the staff a reasonable hourly wage.
by asoneth | 2025-08-01 13:07:15+00:00
I have never met anyone who preferred to keep the dome light on all night even at the expense of being able to start the car the next day.

Similarly, I can't think of a use case for preferring that processes keep running all night on a closed, unplugged laptop until the battery dies at which point they all halt anyway. But if someone needs this behavior I suppose there could be an option for it.
by chii | 2025-08-01 13:07:40+00:00
> they can set their prices as high as the market can afford.

which is the correct price - because you dont need a cartel to set the price at as high as the market can afford; each individual landlord chooses to price their rental at the highest profit they can, with the lowest chance of a vacancy.

A cartel makes it possible to set the price _higher_ than the market can afford. Which is why a cartel is illegal.
by Tade0 | 2025-08-01 13:07:58+00:00
But we're not at a preschool.

Main issue with investigating child abuse is that the victim's account is unreliable as they might not yet even have the language to describe some things, so we err on the side of caution.

In an environment where all participants are adults it makes sense to at least ask the alleged perpetrator if they're guilty and analyse their reaction.

There was a notorious case in my corner of the world where a locally famous YouTuber was accused by his ex of sexual abuse. He lost a significant number of followers and of course revenue so he took her to court and won, as her story didn't add up.

Undeterred, she continued, but with increasingly wild accusations and even attempting to rope in other people.

I occasionally see a new post about this drama and it serves as a remainder that some people are just out to destroy others.
by hcfman | 2025-08-01 13:07:59+00:00
Very well written and so true. It's not even normal stress, which is fine, it's high stakes stress, plus sometime working under the duress of being insulted.

I once went to a job interview with Google. I built one of the first local (Global to the Netherlands) search engines of the Netherlands, but the guy in the cowboy hat at Google asked me to write a binary search with a marker and a whiteboard. I never write with my hand, I always use keyboards. Plus I'm being insulted to write a binary search when I designed and build a search index and retrieval engine.

[I did the binary search but was not happy with the whole process that did not want to even look at what you had actually done before, because that would take away the baseline they wanted].

I guess they must have been looking for cowboys. Tip for interviews, take your cowboy hat, just in case..
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2025-08-01 13:08:12+00:00
>People have over time seem many cases of due process being corrupted by money, power or just incompetence. Many times it has happened to them. Due process is often opaque, complex and lengthy so they decided to bring that in-house and make their own judgements.

I doubt that's the case here. People just love maltreating someone for a "good cause". It's the most delicious of moral treats.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-01 13:08:15+00:00
And yet it's the same (usually politically-aligned) interests who say:

- "the BBC let this person get away with this for years" and also "cancel culture has to stop",

- "there's too much filth on the internet" and "don't you dare demand I tell you my age",

- or the most complex and culturally nuanced one: "children are being groomed" but "she's 18 now, she's an adult and she can make up her own mind about posing nude in a tabloid".

As difficult as it is, any invitation to treat a subject with less nuance is better considered misbegotten until scrutinised much, much further.
by aristofun | 2025-08-01 13:08:38+00:00
And unfortunately it is nothing new. Way before founding modern Israel there has been a long history of regular pogroms and massacres in that region. This doesn’t excuse current Israel from some mistakes and poor judgements, but it paints a very different picture that doesn’t fit sugarcoated antisemitic victim narrative that all main media sponsored by botomless pit of oil qatar money shoves up all naive western listeners.
by imglorp | 2025-08-01 13:09:10+00:00
You might think shoppers finding their product in a store quickly would delight customers and pay for itself quickly.

But it seems instead of stores simply depending on the sale, they also now demand impulse purchases, which mean they want you wandering the store looking in multiple places for your quarry: the casino model. So if they delight a customer with direct route to the sale, they need to make up that windfall elsewhere?S

So they fall back on surveil, profile, and market plus selling your profile to others? Is this is why we can't have nice things?
by kqr | 2025-08-01 13:09:49+00:00
That is true. You'd need to expose alternative versions of system functions that deal only in parsed and not raw data, and then prohibit the native variants. A little more ceremony, but also a little more flexibility.

Edit: It might be easier to instead replace input functions with ones that return TaintedString, unusable as a regular string. But it's easier to write a linter rule that prohibits any unsafe (default) system functions than one which requires safe input functions, I suppose.
by Paul-Craft | 2025-08-01 13:10:10+00:00
> We can’t change the fact that live coding is a common practice in tech interviews. But we can try to mitigate the stress it causes.

Yes, we can. Don't do them. But, we have to replace them with something that works. That means none of these poorly constructed take home projects that are almost universally either drastically over scoped, criminally under specified, or both.
by hayali | 2025-08-01 13:10:15+00:00
This seems to be mostly useless ai hype. Firstly it's quite impolite to assume all open sources projects are hosted on github/gitlab. That said, I uploaded sydbox.git temporarily to gitlab to have it scanned. It took 10 minutes to scan the whole project and it found a single vulnerability "RCE: IRC Message Command Execution Bypass" in file dev/bot.py which is our IRC script to run commands on the CTF server. Hilarious! Please do better :)
by rpdillon | 2025-08-01 13:11:01+00:00
> It's scary, how a rational person can feel so righteous and yet be so wrong.

This is such an important idea to me. We all really only live in our own lives, and even if we read and talk to others endlessly, it's very hard to learn the full scope of the world and others' struggles. So there's some hubris to thinking that you fully understand things and can judge them absolutely.

Not saying there's no right and wrong, just that maybe reserving judgment has its place. I mostly think about this to coach myself, but I think it has use for others as well.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-01 13:11:13+00:00
> 3) Not all sexual misconduct is “illegal”. But it doesn’t mean that communities should not attempt to censor people who engage in problematic behavior.

With all respect, that's nonsense. Where do you draw the line? Your morals? My morals? The victim's morals?

This is why we have a justice system, so that there is one place where you can say "that is wrong" and "that is right".

Forming a mob because "well, that person didn't akshually commit a crime, but we don't like the way they think about sex" is a primitive and regressive viewpoint.

The correct way would be to petition to make a law against whatever act you don't like. Not to say "let's leave it legal and instead simply punish the person".

No one should be facing a societal punishment without due process.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-08-01 13:11:30+00:00
This is absolutely true, but that is exactly how culture spreads now. Through products/software/media.

American business software, American movies, American YouTube channels. They will inject American problems and solutions into your country, like it or not.

Microsoft may treat your privacy slightly better because of the GDPR, but those invasive systems are still there, toggled off. Waiting for Microsofts lobbying to chip away at the privacy laws until they can turn them on.
by benrutter | 2025-08-01 13:11:34+00:00
Live coding does suck - worst off, even if you ignore that it biases to stress tolerance, it tests "leet code" skills for things like reversing a list. Most actual development work involves things like, design work, managing a large codebase, debugging, reasoning through systems, etc.

That said, does anyone have a good alternative? If somebody has open-source work and portfolios, there's a great window into their work, but that's probably an unfair expectation.
by dv_dt | 2025-08-01 13:11:51+00:00
You're welcome. I should expand on my "professional use" comment as i think it may be overly critical. Strudel is being used professionally by some artists. What I meant by the comment is the expertise you get in Strudel as a tool is not directly transferrable to the tools that most of the other electronic music artists use professionally. All of the fundamental concepts and skills map over but how things are directly done is very different in Strudel (and its cousins - the history of Strudel is fascinating too) from other electronic music tools used by professional artists.
by nailer | 2025-08-01 13:11:53+00:00
> This has nothing to do with Jews. It has to do with Israel.

I’ve mentioned a few times but reiterating you can easily look up massacres of Jews by Arabs prior to 1948. Arabs colonised the Middle East, their religious includes fighting Jews at the end of time, and they commonly hate anyone else existing in the area. Look at what happened to the Christians and Druze.
by billpg | 2025-08-01 13:11:58+00:00
How does that work in practice?

Suppose the Table family type their son Bobby's name into a form. The Perl program now has a "tainted" string in memory - "Robert'; DROP TABLE Students --".

The Perl code passes this string through a regex that checks the name is valid. Names can include apostrophes (Miles O'Brien) and hyphens (Jean-Luc Picard) along with spaces and normal ASCII letters, so the regex passes and the string is now untainted.
by Peritract | 2025-08-01 13:12:19+00:00
There was a system for the witch trials as well; the accusations were just the starting point for the sham trials, torture, and executions. Are you okay with that because it was a system, even if imperfect?

Our justice system doesn't fail 1 in a 1000 times, particularly when talking about sex crimes. It fails far more frequently than that, given the prevalence of sexual assault and the rarity of convictions [1]. Additionally, there's an aspect that justice must be seen to be done: high profile repeat offenders walking free damages confidence in the system out of proportion to their frequency.

As above, if you want people to use a system, the system has to work.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/07/the-s...
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-08-01 13:12:23+00:00
the problem is recursion. these people are stuck in infinite loops. both, the media and the purple tractors. in order to maintain these infinite loops and escape all the breaks, they cancel just enough to never suffer a blow from overflow. if you want to stop the genocide, become a marketing monster and spread your message via all the twitchy channels. the more labels you can slap on it, the better. your message won't die just because you bought the attention by sharing others' attention. then, turn it into a multi-cultural constantly remixing franchise. Once you crack the mythical early adopter threshold, boom, one genocide down.