MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by groos | 2025-08-18 17:02:23+00:00
We, in the tech industry, go all starry-eyed when we imagine utopian futures filled with robots that will do all your tedious chores. But a dark side of this that goes unnoticed is that such automation is often just a way for money to be transferred from the poorest sections of society to the richest.

This fact was driven home to me recently when dropping my mother off at the airport. For various reasons, my mother us to use wheelchair assistance when flying, and I usually get a "gate pass" to accompany her to the gate. An airline provided wheelchair is pushed by an airline employee whom I usually tip a decent amount every time. The last time she flew, the employee insisted that we had to make a detour, otherwise they would "write him up". Not wishing to make his life hard, we agreed and he brought us to an area where they were trialing robotic wheelchairs. They insisted my mother use the robotic wheelchair and since I was with her an a little curious, we agreed. In the process of tranferring her, I forgot to tip the wheelchair pusher.

The robotic wheelchair was an unconditional disaster. In a busy airport, it stopped every time it detected anyone within 5 feet of it and took 20 min to get where it would have taken less than 5 with the cherry on top being that it stopped and told my mother to get off 3 gates away. Had I not been with her, I'm not sure what she would have done, being too weak to lift her carry-on and walking to the gate.

But thinking about it a bit, I realized that sooner or later, the robotic wheelchair would be improved to the point that it did just as good a job as the human pusher at which point, all the income earned by the humans, all of whom are from the poorer sections of society, would be transferred to the robotic wheelchair company and its shareholders, all of whom are probably in the top 2% wealth-wise.

This transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich seems to be a recurrent theme in tech. Sure new wealth eventually is made, but it seems it's mostly for the top strata, with us techies being paid well enough to prevent us from feeling too many scruples.
Readeck client for self-hosted bookmarks: simple and mobile-friendly
by potetotown | 2025-08-18 17:02:24+00:00
Readeck app is a mobile Flutter companion for your self-hosted Readeck—a simple bookmark manager. Tag and organize your saved links with rich labels, powerful search, and easy sharing. Perfect for knowledge workers, researchers, or anyone looking to manage bookmarks cleanly. Simple setup, smooth UX, built with Riverpod, GoRouter, and Freezed.
by bityard | 2025-08-18 17:02:39+00:00
There is lots of middle ground. Here in Michigan, (most) electricity and gas providers are for-profit companies. But they are heavily regulated by the state, and must get approval from the state before they are allowed to change rates. Our rates are not dirt-cheap, but they are not Coastal either.

When I lived in the capital, we got our power from the Lansing Board of Water and Light, which is 100% publicly owned. Their rates are still some of the lowest in the Midwest. The main downside is that until recently their main energy source was coal. (We used to live downwind of the smokestacks. You couldn't smell it, but lung cancer was definitely in the air.)
by pncnmnp | 2025-08-18 17:02:45+00:00
Thanks! This might be it. I looked up Henry J. Kelley on Wikipedia, and in the notes I found a citation to this paper from Stuart Dreyfus (Berkeley): "Artificial Neural Networks, Back Propagation and the Kelley-Bryson Gradient Procedure" (https://gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/1990-dreyfus.pdf).

I am still going through it, but the latter is quite interesting!
by acossta | 2025-08-18 17:02:51+00:00
Interesting to think VR worlds as open source software. Is a linux-like outcome possible / desired for VR worlds. Also, open source on built on top of proprietary platforms, seems unlikely a linux-type outcome. Or probably what meta is aiming for is to be the ubiquitous platform.

They are kicking off a $1 million contest inviting devs to build “remixable” Worlds that others can clone and iterate. The kicker is that remixable worlds go live when you publish. Besides the main prizes, they’re dangling an extra $500K for mini‑challenges like asset remixing and crafting great documentation.

Not sure, about the incentives here
by bpt3 | 2025-08-18 17:02:53+00:00
What's the point of that? A skilled developer can already develop high quality code at a normal speed?

I will use AI for suggestions when using an API I'm not familiar with because it's faster than reading all the documentation to figure it the specific function call I need, but I then follow up on the example to verify it's correct and I can confidently read the code. Is that what you're taking about?

A vibe coder without 20+ years of experience can't do that, but they can publish an app or website just the same.
by ghurtado | 2025-08-18 17:02:59+00:00
Because you can describe the chemical interactions of nicotine with the human body to a high degree of accuracy, while the psychology of human attention in the 21st century is a subject that is very far from that cut and dry.

That's why we invented a pill that helps with the former, but we might never have one that helps with the latter (although that would be nice)
by bbkane | 2025-08-18 17:03:10+00:00
Unfortunately (assuming you love with your partner), this takes relational work as much as actual cleaning work. If one of you lived in a larger house previously or maybe you have food insecurity or maybe you attach sentimental value to things you aren't actually using or maybe you see "getting your kid more things" as valuable to your self-esteem or maybe you're getting things because you plan to do something with it later (and repeat this multiple times), following this advice can be much harder than getting another shelf to put stuff or a robo-vacuum.

This work is still worth doing of course, but sometimes it requires a lot of mental work (dare I say healing) from one or both partners.

I guess my point is that switching to this mindset can be hard; and it might not be up to you.

I do really like this comment; I think it's really valuable when couples get on the same page about this.
by cdcox | 2025-08-18 17:03:11+00:00
The B2C case here seems off to me. The market of people who are going to pay the high price tag, have enough storage, and tolerate the extreme limitations and slowness of these machines seems to be: the rich, the elderly, and people with physical disabilities. The latter two categories come with a huge number of liability and regulatory costs that I think most of these companies are not willing to handle. That does not feel like a huge market.

I'll have a stronger belief in these things for consumers when we start seeing B2B adoption. Hotels have routine, highly structured cleaning tasks; hospitals have a need for extra strength, have highly structured cleaning tasks, and need to stock items; grocery stores have highly structured cleaning tasks and need to stock. Hospitals at least could tolerate the slowness of these things.

Without any B2B adoption it's hard to not see this as Roombas all over again. Cool for people who like it but low impact and still a toy 20 years later. I think generative AI makes these things better, though still perhaps struggles with long task adoption, but if you look at their movement they are still slow, weak, cognitively inflexible, and unstable. Maybe this tech is accelerating in some way I don't see and I'd love to be proven wrong here.
by malithh | 2025-08-18 17:03:44+00:00
We’ve launched Geodd for teams that can’t compromise on data privacy: • End-to-end encrypted inference (custom silicon → API) • Zero persistent storage – not even in memory • Customer-held keys: we physically can’t access your models/data • <100ms latency on dedicated nodes

Built for: Healthcare AI, legal tech, Web3 security, and sensitive workloads where compliance ≠ true privacy.

What custom models would you run if privacy/ownership were guaranteed?
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-18 17:04:05+00:00
I am 100% certain I live more in that world than you; You can check my resume if you want to get into a dick waving contest.

What I'm saying is that the two probabilities are independent, possibly correlated, but not dependent. You need some number of nines in your control plane for scaling operations. You need some number of nines in your control plane for updates. These are very few, and they don't overly affect the serving plane, so long as the serving plane is itself resilient to the errors that happen even when a control plane is running, like sudden node failure.

Proper modeling of these failure conditions is not as simple as multiplying probabilities. The chance of failures in your serving path goes up as the time between control plane readiness goes up. You calculate (Really, only ever guesstimate, but you can get some good information for those guesses) the probability of a failure in the serving plane (incl. increases in traffic to the point of overload) before the control plane has had a chance to take actions again, and you worry about MTTF and MTBR of the control plane more than the "Reliability" - You can have a control plane with 75% or less "uptime" by action failure rate but that still takes actions on a regular cadence and never notice.

You can build reliable infrastructure out of unreliable components. The control plane itself is an unreliable component, and you can serve traffic at massive scale with control planes faulty or down completely - Without affecting serving traffic. You don't need more nines in your control plane than your serving cluster - That is the only point I am addressing/contesting. You can have many, many less and still be doing right fine.
by potetotown | 2025-08-18 17:04:11+00:00
Hey all—I’m poteto, tinkerer behind Readeck app. I made this because even my browser bookmarks were becoming a jungle. So I built a Flutter client with labels, and smart search—plus good code beneath (hi Riverpod, Freezed!). Would love your feedback on mobile UX or features you’d love to see. Thanks for stopping by!

[https://github.com/linkalls/readeck_related_app](https://github.com/linkalls/readeck_related_app)
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-18 17:04:23+00:00
Well, having personally used over $120 in Claude API credit on my $200/mo. Claude Code subscription... in a single day, without parallel tasks, yeah, it sounds like the actual price. (And keep in mind, Claude's API is still running on zero-margin, if not even subsidized, AWS prices for GPUs; combined with Anthropic still lighting money on fire and presumably losing money on the API pricing.)

The future is not that AI takes over. It's when the accountants realize for a $120K a year developer, if it makes them even 20% more efficient (doubt that), you have a ceiling of $2000/mo. on AI spend before you break even. Once the VC subsidies end, it could easily cost that much. When that happens... who cares if you use AI? Some developers might use it, others might not, it doesn't matter anymore.

This is also assuming Anthropic or OpenAI don't lose any of their ongoing lawsuits, and aren't forced to raise prices to cover settlement fees. For example, Anthropic is currently in the clear on the fair use "transformative" argument; but they are in hot water over the book piracy from LibGen (illegal regardless of use case). The worst case scenario in that lawsuit, although unlikely, is $150,000 per violation * 5 million books = $750B in damages.
by shepardrtc | 2025-08-18 17:04:40+00:00
I started using it this weekend to build a greenfield project from scratch. Vibe requests ran out very quickly, so I just opened up VS Code in another window and had Copilot's Agent handle those. I just use Kiro for the Spec requests at the moment, which it does quite well. I think its a great tool, but if someone can copy what they're doing into Copilot, then I'll go back to using Copilot exclusively.

The pricing really turned me off after a fantastic initial experience.
by cgriswald | 2025-08-18 17:05:05+00:00
Can I just spend a minute to gripe about “cleaning” by stashing stuff away in the wrong place?

+ It becomes clutter in its temporary home making the things that belong there harder to see or access.

+ You’ll have to go looking for it when you need it which may take orders of magnitude more time than just putting it away properly. (And if you really need it and can’t find it you might buy another one, causing more clutter and costing money.)

+ Even if you remember where you put it you have to handle it twice to get it where it belongs, reducing efficiency over time.

I’m a huge believer in having things have a place they belong and making that process efficient. Every day frequent use things get priority.

My parents have dozens of (re-usable) plastic cups that just sit precariously balanced in a cupboard. They do use them for the occasional party but mostly they’re just a menace when you want a glass of water.

Solution 1: Keep 4 (or 6 or 8) cups in the cupboard. Store the rest in a box under the stairs until you need them for a party.

Solution 2: Re-home the extras completely and use Solo cups for parties. (Even ignoring the benefit of the extra space, this might be cheaper over time unless you really can’t leverage the space the plastic cups take by, say, buying consumables in bulk on discount.)

You shouldn’t be handling (or potentially handling) things you rarely use in order to access things you use every day.

Physical space has a use besides just storing more stuff…
by net01 | 2025-08-18 17:05:42+00:00
i would argue that _you do_ every millisecond you save is multiplied by the millions ( or billions) of users that use your product. The web browser is the most important tool in the 21st century; nothing comes close.

But it is true that we will inspire ourselves with techniques and methods used and implemented to optimize each subset of the engine build and build on the shoulders of giants.
by simianwords | 2025-08-18 17:05:46+00:00
This is not the appropriate way to respond when the poster was clearly incorrect in their main points. Dismissing people with arguments is the rational thing to do.

Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. No it doesn't and it shouldn't. Only work that provides value should matter - you don't deserve more money just for working 10x hard but when it doesn't matter to anyone.

Your entire comment hinges on a zero sum line of thinking and I don't abide by it. Things have improved for everyone as I have said above but I also acknowledged that inequality is increasing. Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.
by alistairSH | 2025-08-18 17:06:10+00:00
Culdesacs are effectively a rich person's solution to "Main Street is too fast and dangerous". They also don't answer the question of "how do I walk someplace useful" - like the local grocery store highlighted in the article.

For reference, I live in a "culdesac" neighborhood (3 big ones smushed together). The main suburban street that we use to actually get anywhere is 2-5 lanes wide, 40mph posted but 50mph actual speeds, with limited pedestrian crossings and in the 8 years I've lived here at least 2 pedestrian fatalities on a 2 mile stretch.

This is pretty typical of the DC suburbs (largely built in the 70s-present). Smaller enclaves that are "walkable" in the sense you can walk around the block. But they aren't walkable in the sense you can live your life sans car/bus/whatever.
by Grimblewald | 2025-08-18 17:06:21+00:00
I feel like a much easier solution is enforcing data provinence. Ssl for media hash, attach to metadata. The problem with AI isnt the fact its ai, its that people can invest little effort to sway things with undue leverage. A single person can look like 100's with signficantly less effort than previously. The problem with ai content is it makes abuse of public spaces much easier. Forcing people to take credit for work produced makes things easier (not solved) kind of like email. Being able to block media by domain would be a dream, but spam remains an issue.

so, tie content to domains. A domain vouches for content works like that content having been a webpage or email from said domain. Signed hash in metadata is backwards compatible and its easy to make browsers etc display warnings on unsigned content, content from new domains, blacklisted domains, etc.

benefit here is while we'll have more false negatives, unlike something like this tool, it does not cause real harm on false positives, which will be numerous if it wants to be better tham simply making someome accountable for media.

AI detection cannot work, will not work, and will cause more harm than it prevents. stuff like this is irresponsible and dangerous.
by dsr_ | 2025-08-18 17:06:34+00:00
The lesson of that is that you should wait at least 20 years before getting a device that purports to do the thing well, and maybe 40. And even then, people will still publish recipe books and cooking technique books.

Right now, people who have flat floors, not too much pile on rugs and carpets, no pets or pets that don't shed much, no stairs, and don't have much in the way of mess are quite happy with their robot vacuum cleaners. Mostly. But vacuuming is pretty much the least annoying and tedious part of cleaning your house, and modern bagless upright convertible cleaners are cheap and lightweight.

People with medium sized flat boring lawns seem happy with their robot lawnmowers.

But its faster to get a service with the big mowers to do it, and the job gets done better by the humans, especially if you need to consider edges or have bushes to trim or leaves to move.
by empath75 | 2025-08-18 17:06:41+00:00
> AI can give me five synonyms for any Latin word, because that’s just statistics, and it can regurgitate rules about metrical length of syllables, but it can’t give me synonyms matching a particular metrical pattern,

I love when people say that AI can't do things that it can do.

me: give me a synonym for overconfident that is a dactyl

GPT5: A good dactylic synonym for overconfident is arrogant.

It scans as Ár-ro-gant (stressed, unstressed, unstressed), which makes it a perfect dactyl.

Other possible dactyls, though a bit less direct, include:

Ignorant (if you want to imply careless overconfidence)

Insolent (if you want a sharper, defiant edge)

Want me to give you a list of dactylic synonyms with slightly different shades of meaning (e.g., boastful, careless, reckless)?
by gary_0 | 2025-08-18 17:07:36+00:00
It's my guess that they don't want to. A decade ago when AMD's CPUs had trouble competing at the high end, they ceded that market segment almost entirely, and now they're doing the same with nVidia. And Intel is basically a dead company. Neither of them are going to risk the capital and internal shake-up necessary to actually compete with nVidia. And anyways, there's only so much TSMC capacity for high-end chips, and Apple and nVidia have already spent infinity dollars reserving most of it.
by cs702 | 2025-08-18 17:08:28+00:00
Whatever the facts, the OP comes across as sour grapes. The author, Jürgen Schmidhuber, believes Hopfield and Hinton did not deserve their Nobel Prize in Physics, and that Hinton, Bengio, and LeCun did not deserve their Turing Award. Evidently, many other scientists disagree, because both awards were granted in consultation with the scientific community. Schmidhuber's own work was, in fact, cited by the Nobel Prize committee as background information for the 2024 Nobel.[a] Only future generations of scientists, looking at the past more objectively, will be able to settle these disputes.

[a] https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/11/advanced-physicsp...
by ridgeguy | 2025-08-18 17:08:31+00:00
Cool results and methods, but I'll disagree with one of the article's statements.

In talking about the work done on e. coli, a non spherical cell, it says the methods had to be changed due to "turbulence" attendant to the e. coli's departure from sphericity of the earlier tested yeast cells.

My rough calcs show a Reynolds number in the range of 1e-6. The onset of turbulence happens at Reynolds numbers of ~2300 for pure water. The 1% sugar solution would have a negligibly higher turbulence onset Reynolds number.

I expect the need for different methodology wasn't turbulence, but the difference in drag presented by an elongated e. coli compared to a spherical yeast cell.
by simantel | 2025-08-18 17:08:39+00:00
At $250/visit, that's just weekly landscaping and housecleaning. More than I pay for myself (we have a housecleaner that comes monthly), but not unreasonable, especially for a well-paid dual-income household.

Re: Your compensation, Levels can be eye opening: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Microsoft,Google,Am...
by aogaili | 2025-08-18 17:08:42+00:00
I think you are not the type I'm referring to.

But again for me, the appeal for software was creativity. Our ability to shape ideas and experiences.

I never cared about proving my intelligence or arguing about syntax. If the code is maintainable, readable, and works, all good. But I corporate, I was debating over PRs, mostly subjective opinions, a form of intellectual game..

And the issue, discussion is all about convention and trivialities..
by bee_rider | 2025-08-18 17:08:50+00:00
That’s 100 weeks at $100 per week. So, what, 5 hours per week, at most, for over-the-table and legit options, right?

That could be an interesting option, but realistically you’ll have to fold your laundry, do your own dishwasher, put away your/your kids’ toys, etc, unless you just want to have a clean house for one day per week.
by jcalx | 2025-08-18 17:09:12+00:00
You'll probably like this short series on fy_iceworld if you haven't seen it already: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-legacy-of-fy_iceworld-c...

But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.
by stop50 | 2025-08-18 17:10:34+00:00
Should an package not come from an company i follow these steps:

- unbox it on camera (if the package came)

- complain to the seller

- if the seller doesn't react in an reasonable time, i buy the product from another seller and i contact an lawyer to get the difference i paid too much back

Since i check the companies before buying an product, i never had any use for the videos.
by karmakaze | 2025-08-18 17:10:48+00:00
Yes, this is what caught my eye:

> West Hudson Boulevard is a high-speed arterial road with narrow sidewalks, a tiny median, and no truly safe crossings. Even a healthy, alert adult is taking their life in their hands by walking to that store. For a child, it’s playing the worst kind of roulette.

The fact that it did have a sidewalk, even a narrow one means that it's meant for walking. If it's unsafe then the existence of the sidewalk is only asking for trouble. It either has a sidewalk and is safe, or it isn't safe and shouldn't have a sidewalk. Having a sidewalk and being unsafe is the fault of the city/construction not the user.

Claiming a child was playing with roulette amounts to it also implying that lethal roulette games for kids is something that should be legal.
by alistairSH | 2025-08-18 17:11:19+00:00
The street is, in fact, too dangerous for a 10-year-old, or even an adult.

There's a skinny sidewalk on one side. No sidewalk on the other. No signaled crossings for blocks. High-ish speed traffic.

Given an option, nobody would walk that particular stretch of highway.

Should the parents have been charged? Probably not (unless there are details missing from the artcile). Should we reconsider how we build our suburbs? Absolutely.