MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-11-09 16:41:10+00:00
I set up one with Ubuntu for my seven year old.

1. It's in the living room next to an SNES and an N64.

2. I showed her vscode, did a short HTML tutorial, and printed out some HTML cheat sheet.

3. Some modest games.

4. No YouTube or social.

Most of the buzzwords are not important (power, freedom) but I want something "unrefined". That is, a little bit of the 1980s, 90s "neat creative toy" experience but nothing with a Recommender Engine. No "digital crack".

As an entertainment product, it's definitely 100% inferior to modern software, but you actually don't want it to "win" a contest against:

1. yourself

2. other children

3. healthy activities

Recommenders and modern games are really strong. Do not invite strong, self-interested parties to compete for your child's time and life against yourself, their siblings, their friends, their neighborhood and their own developing bodies.

Common pattern: Wake up; play one cup of Mario Kart 64; leave it behind and go outside for ten hours. Or play it together. A cute little nice thing in its little proper place.
by 4bpp | 2025-11-09 16:41:21+00:00
The post, at least, seems to have no word about a web interface, though? I'm aware of a number of CalDAV/CardDAV servers, but they all seem to be designed for a workflow where you only access the calendar from a mobile app. Conversely, standalone web calendars like the fullcalendar.io thing linked in a sibling post make no mention of any support for CalDAV or other ways to synchronise with phones and calendar apps.

It's the integration of both that makes Google (and, I guess, Nextcloud) useful: you can add an event on your computer (which is where most of the scheduling and planning happens), and then inspect and be alerted of it on your phone (which is with you when you are in a random location and need to be reminded of an event).

Even if there does exist a standalone JS calendar application that can sync with CalDAV, you would be left with an awkward setup when self-hosting, since now for no obvious reason you need to have two services on the same machine (the database and the frontend) that maintain a copy of the same state and need to sync with each other constantly.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-09 16:41:36+00:00
> If someone with limited English asks where I'm from, they're more likely to understand if I say "America" than "United States". And no one has ever asked "oh but which country in America?".

That's interesting! In my experience, meeting people from the US outside of the US mostly, when you ask where they are from, they tend to always say the city or the state, but never actually specify either "United States" or "America". If you don't happen to know that that state/city is in the US, and they never specified the country, you're usually safe to assume they're from the US :)
by benoau | 2025-11-09 16:42:56+00:00
Those other smart TV companies write shit software that performs terribly on bad hardware and may have ads - YMMV but that's not really "worse" than Apple's anti-steering clauses concealing massive fees on ATV apps like Plex or ESPN and causing half the western world to revise their competition laws to outlaw many of their practices. It's just bad for different reasons.
by 4bpp | 2025-11-09 16:42:57+00:00
I don't see anything about CalDAV, sync or mobile integration on that site, though. The thing that actually makes Google/Nextcloud calendars useful is that they enable a workflow where you schedule events on your computer (where most scheduling happens, at least for me) and then are reminded of it on your phone (which is with you when/where scheduled events actually happen).
by db48x | 2025-11-09 16:43:03+00:00
Making the traffic controller load a flight plan into the plane’s computer merely changes who will make the mistake. If you want to suggest changes, suggest something that actually has a chance of reducing the rate of errors.

Besides, pilots don’t just blindly follow the waypoints on their computer. The pilots would have spent half an hour before they even got in the airplane reviewing the plan for the flight. This includes reviewing the published departure information for the airport. In that briefing they would have specifically noted that the direction they will turn after takeoff depends on which runway the tower tells them to take off from. They cannot necessarily guess which runway that’ll be in advance.
by xp84 | 2025-11-09 16:43:51+00:00
And don’t forget it was the EU regulators who threw away the opportunity to try to establish social media as a paid service as a thing, when they slapped Meta for trying to even offer it as an option.

And yes, I realize they rejected it when it was raised as the alternative to data collection, preferring the regulators’ plan of making it still universally $0 and funding the whole operation on rainbows and wishes.
by _the_inflator | 2025-11-09 16:43:59+00:00
I think the article is missing two points: if the latest layoffs aren't related to AI, then this doesn't mean AI won't have or has an impact on head count.

And investment and experiments by definition include the risk of failing. In almost everything lies a survivorship bias and no one talks about the 100+ car makers that went into goldrush mode 100+ years ago. This is life. Netflix vs Blockbuster - already forgotten?

Also the "fail rate" - so what part is failing and why? What's with the 5%? If we have a look at exponential functions this might be a really good deal, if the 5% can account for the losses. After all, benefits compound over time.

I witnessed first hand in FAANG some quota hires and I believe that now that no one gets paid for contrived and artificial business advantages, we are back to a more merits based evaluation of workers.

But AI should not be written off as fancy something with no impact. That's the wrong take. Whether it will be a springboard to new jobs that compensate for losses or replacements - I am not yet sure, but tent to be in the former group. ML engineers take care of ML - something new that takes care of something new.

We will see.
by jedimastert | 2025-11-09 16:44:12+00:00
Samsung still makes regular fridges too, although I'm confused by the fact that you put water-dispensing/ice-making and screens together.

I have a Samsung Bespoke, for example, and you can 100% turn the ice-making off and just use that part of the freezer for more freezer space. No screen, the from it blank because all the water dispensing stuff is on the inside and I think (?) you can get one without it
by dahart | 2025-11-09 16:44:18+00:00
If Amazon’s layoffs aren’t AI driven, and AWS is making more money than it’s spending on AI infra… how is Amazon evidence of AI spending replacing jobs? This is an interesting topic, but this particular article left me pretty unsatisfied, it feels like juxtaposing a bunch of barely related numbers with some very popular talking points, but no new information? It hints at “AI washing” without doing any digging at all, and cites the MIT study without noting that it’s getting a ton of legitimate criticism. Is AI really a sideshow or an excuse for layoffs that big companies were hoping to do anyway, is it taking the blame for low confidence in the economy?

https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/why-we-dont-believe-m...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/04/white-collar-layoffs-ai-cost...
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-11-09 16:44:22+00:00
If my memory serves, this is the same wolf in sheep’s clothing that the attestation based Web Environment API was, from the same kinds of very interested parties. (Edit: I may be misremembering the name of that proposed API.)

It’s not about efficient, effective solutions. It’s about control. Something you have to look at with WICG and W3C is the source of proposals and drafts.
by portaouflop | 2025-11-09 16:44:34+00:00
I use docusaurus and am happy - any reason I should switch to this or does it make more sense if you have a greenfield use case?

I don’t really care how long it takes to build as long as it’s not minutes. Also don’t care about “modern” look whatever that means really. And I have lots of custom components that (I assume?) would be hard to migrate
by jbreckmckye | 2025-11-09 16:44:36+00:00
Buried half way down,

As part of the Family Hub™ software update, we are piloting a new widget for select Cover screens themes of Family Hub™ refrigerators. The widget will display useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements.[11]

Wow!! Elevating!!!
by darth_avocado | 2025-11-09 16:44:57+00:00
Bah, all of that is still employing people. Companies have completed almost $1T of stock buybacks this year. Since 2018, with the exception of 2020, that number has been between $800B and $1T every single year. And that number has been more than $500B since the 2008 recession. AI spend is bad but it’s not even close to how much stock buybacks have ruined the employee wages and employment prospects.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-09 16:45:03+00:00
I did it in 2018 and it was wonderful. It wasn't incredibly expensive (about the cost of a roundtrip flight, for the one way trip). Food was great, we had the good fortune of being on a Blue Note Jazz special so the music was incredible. Not sure I ever want to do it again - felt more like one of those one-and-done lifetime experiences - but I have nothing but good things to say about it.

Also, unlike cruise ships, the QMII is a bona fide ocean liner, capable of crossing the N. Atlantic even in winter storms.
by toast0 | 2025-11-09 16:45:39+00:00
I used to get email for an org that had a similar domain as me (they had an extra letter in the middle). Thankfully, not a very big org, I would just bounce addresses that got a lot of misdirected email and I think they shut down and that really solved the problem.

Still annoying, but not as bad as gmail. I just got an email, in Italian, about someone adding a passkey to their ebay account. No way to tell ebay it's not their address / it's not my account.
by busyant | 2025-11-09 16:46:32+00:00
> I want to know who is buying ads on fridges and what the roas on a fridge ad is.

Who knows, really? But maybe the same people who put ads on the gas station pumps that I use?

Those things blare at max volume and I still have no idea what they're selling.

Amusing anecdote: About 60 years ago, my grandfather (immigrant who was not well versed in mass-production) wrote a letter to the local newspaper asking that they omit the advertisements when they built his copy of the paper. "I never read them" he said.

My mother had to explain to him how his copy was gonna be just like everyone else's.
by fukka42 | 2025-11-09 16:46:56+00:00
Feel free to clarify what you think is abusive about this. It's a simple observation of fact, and if you were to read the rest of this thread objectively you'd see it is accurate.

Why are you not yelling at the people hurling insults at the UK? Is it because you're American and this hurt your feelings so it's bad, but hurting others their feelings is fine?

The Americans are literally threatening violence and war in this thread. It's utterly insane. But I see you didn't bother to talk down to them.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-09 16:47:13+00:00
My brother did this (Southampton -> Baltimore). It's a lot slower than the Queen Mary. He told me when he arrived "You don't know what time is until you've already watched all the movies you bought with you, read all the books, done all the work, and you realize you've still got 5 days left".

And he's probably the most able-to-handle-boredom human being that I've ever known.
by AnonC | 2025-11-09 16:47:40+00:00
I don’t know if this will be useful for me (on a phone right now and need to see the details on a Mac). I was intrigued as well as surprised by a “one day trial” offer. I’ve usually seen seven day trials, 30 day trials, etc. One day seems too short to me. A longer trial and/or based on number of launches may be better.
by Bocajmai | 2025-11-09 16:47:46+00:00
I started researching how Michelin-starred restaurants coordinate their teams - not because I care about fancy food, but because they solve exactly this: small specialized teams creating something complex together under pressure.

The parallels to software are exact. Front of house/back of house coordination. Pre-service meetings. The "pass" as a coordination point. Station ownership. The quiet kitchen principle.

Then I discovered Basecamp's Shape Up is essentially their version of the brigade de cuisine system. 6-week cycles, betting table, appetite setting, cool-down periods. It maps perfectly.

I wrote this to work through what small bootstrapped software companies can learn from how these organizations actually operate. Would love feedback from others dealing with this coordination problem.
by rectang | 2025-11-09 16:47:49+00:00
I'm thinking more about a systemic approach rather than a one-off — in other words, surveying all units to identify potential targets rather than evaluating the risk for a single target. Recently we have seen a rise in criminal organizations who target high-profile targets known to be away (e.g. sports figures and entertainers whose schedules are known), and it seems like such a tool could be of use to such orgs as an additional signal — and to broaden their target base to non-celebrities.

Also, while "smart" Samsung fridges are the topic of this article, the concept generalizes to any internet connected devices within "smart" homes which exhibit a combination of "hackable" and revealing-of-occupancy. Samsung refrigerators are unlikely to be the most attractive vector when there are e.g. "smart" light bulbs out there which are vulnerable and never going to be patched because the manufacturer went out of business.

FWIW, I'm not a pen tester or security specialist — just a security-conscious generalist software developer. I see evidence left behind of scanning attacks in web logs, but haven't actually crafted such mass attacks myself.
by _the_inflator | 2025-11-09 16:49:20+00:00
No one gets fired for tuning out of temporary tuning out of his smartphone or doing chores the classic way I guess. ;)

I use mobile services timeboxed and in conjunction with blockers for certain services. I also went back to use old-school pencils and paper for work whenever possible. It is helpful - and fun.

Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/2/pgaf017/80160...

Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-09 16:50:54+00:00
This should shock no one.

Over the last 20 years of tech, the giants have taken the smartest folks out there and put golden handcuffs on them. You could hire up all the smart folks and put them to work, or leave them out there and have them compete with you. With the launch of cloud providers and (expensive) dynamic scaling the problem only got worse. Think about hiring in the pandemic. Every one at home, with a stimulus check and nothing to do. Rather than a flurry of new software you got mass hiring.

But now we are in a capital intensive hardware cycle. Where in order to compete you need to have lots of $$$$ as well as software know how. It does not matter that there are smart people out there, without hefty backing they wont get very far.

I suspect that software is about to enter its "punk" era. We have software for small businesses that will help with accounting, HR, customer service, and cloud providers are starting to see some interesting competition. Much like the old punk poster showing you 3 chords and telling you to start a band it is entirely possible to find three friends and start a business that makes 1-10 mill a year with little effort and lower costs. The moment you stop thinking "unicorn" and start thinking "sustainable" the economics shift radically.
by curioussquirrel | 2025-11-09 16:51:04+00:00
Although I loathe ads, I think that for new products where the presence of ads is disclosed clearly upfront, this is acceptable. Especially if this comes with a discount. We have Kindles with and without ads and people are generally fine with it.

But the fact that this gets retrofitted to fridges that people already bought, without any way of opting out or other mitigation, is criminal. Is this a lawsuit in the making? Am I naive?
by Glyptodon | 2025-11-09 16:51:24+00:00
As a recently laid of senior engineer, to the extent that my job was replaced, it was replaced with offshore junior devs who'd already been working with the company for over year with a pretty rough level of productivity by man-hour, though maybe taking 3x the time to get things done is worth it if they're cheap enough. Which is to say I see my layoff as as cost cutting backed by a premise that there is no value in retaining senior level talent, to try and keep operating in the black, not because AI was materially producing a lot of benefits. (Because to the extent it was, I was the one reaping them compared to the offshore folks and less experienced onshore ones.)
by Polizeiposaune | 2025-11-09 16:51:44+00:00
The big dish antenna at Stanford University (visible from I-280) was, among many other things, used to monitor Soviet radar signals from Sary Shagan in Kazakhstan, that bounced off the moon some of the time.

The wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Dish

links to:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201108114110/https://www.cia.g...

which has this tidbit which explains why it works as well as it does when it works:

"Fortunately for us, the moon appears only slightly rough to radio waves; most of the reflected energy comes back from an area at the near point just a few miles in diameter. The bulk of the energy striking farther around on the side is reflected out into space and never returns to earth."
by simonw | 2025-11-09 16:52:39+00:00
I blogged about this here, including running your benchmark against gpt-5-codex-mini which did the worst example I've seen by far: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/9/pelican-on-a-bike-raytr...

Here's the codex-mini attempt: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/povray-pelican-...
by neilv | 2025-11-09 16:53:05+00:00
To technologists with societal awarenesses, this whole direction of Samsung is concerning.

But a personally funny thing about this particular episode, to me, is that when I left a very nice CS PhD program, to switch schools, to work on AI+HCI for software agents (before the enabling AI tech was ready)... the most common soundbite that the PI gave to prospective corporate sponsors who visited most days, was something like... "You could have a 'digital butler', who knows what you have in your fridge, and orders milk when you're running out."

(Aside: The students working on agents and wearable computing at the time were actually disproportionately ones also interested in privacy, at the university. Maybe because we were Internet-savvy from shortly before the dotcom gold rush (default Internet person sentiment was pro-privacy, pro-altruism, etc.), or maybe because we tended to be technical and thinking forward about emerging networked applications, and could guess where this was going.)

On HN, we always see a bunch of loud voices about various facets of IoT dystopia, but that doesn't reflect the broad population, yet. And as more people start to become aware, they tend to get sold diversionary snake oil solutions by influencers (e.g., "keep buying and deploying these devices, just set up a PiHole, and you'll totally be OK; like and subscribe"), while dystopian product movements march onward.
by Bender | 2025-11-09 16:54:09+00:00
Everyone knows that OpenAi blatantly violated copyright during training but no one really cares

That was the purported reason [1] and I do not care about copyright either. Some believed that could be a threat to a potential 10 billion to 100 billion dollar industry. I do not know if that is enough for one to take preemptive measures.

[1] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/what-did-s...
by pfannkuchen | 2025-11-09 16:54:13+00:00
Ironically, your interpretation of what I said as “white people are… better” (which isn’t what I said, or what I meant) is itself deeply Eurocentric.

If we assume there are many, or even infinite, valid ways to structure a large human group, and the structuring of the large human group depends on the humans executing certain behaviors, then, unless we assume that all humans have completely identical natural instincts and behaviors, an assumption which has no basis in fact, then structures developed by a particular group may not be equally operable by another group, because the two groups may have differing instincts or behaviors. If particular behaviors are required to operate the large human group structure, then humans who have an easier or harder time performing these behaviors will tend to produce a version of the implemented structure with higher or lower fidelity with respect to its abstract design.

No structure of humans is “better” or “worse” than another structure. That is the Eurocentrism in your frame. The style of societal structure we live in is highly contingent. It was developed by Europeans. Can it be operated just as well by other groups? We don’t really know for sure, but the attempts we see around the world have had quite mixed results. That doesn’t mean those people are “bad people” or whatever, or “inferior”, it just means they may be better suited for a different sort of social structure than the one that was developed by our ancestors and people similar to them.

This issue is so highly moralized these days from childhood brainwashing (unintentional, I think) that people’s minds simply won’t go there in a calm and rational manner, absent substantial deprogramming (which is not a fun experience, let me tell you).
by exasperaited | 2025-11-09 16:54:33+00:00
This is absolutely crucial to understand.

Because in any country with poor worker protections, the outcome is layoffs regardless.

AI succeeds? Layoffs of unneeded roles.

AI fails? Layoffs to cut expenditure to make up for the written-off expenditure.

In the UK, if AI makes a well-established employee redundant, the employee is entitled to redundancy pay. And if the company fucks up and overspends on chasing a ridiculous Macguffin they can't just fire people without making them formally redundant.

The damage that is going to be done in the USA if the AI bubble bursts is going to be generational.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-09 16:54:55+00:00
Sounds like the general "LLMs are net useful or not" sentiment here too. Personally Rust+LLMs work great, and workflow is rapid for as long as you can get the LLM to run one command to say "good or bad" without too much manually work, then it can iterate until it all works. Standard advice for prompting like "Don't make tests pass by changing assertions" tends to make the experience better too, but that's not Rust specific either.
by aborsy | 2025-11-09 16:55:06+00:00
The situation with firejail is different. There are a lot of profiles, and they are easier to customize and write.

But firejail needs root privilege, so there are arguments that it may actually reduce the security, because even though it sandboxes some applications, non-privilege processes may gain privilege if there is a flaw in the fire jail itself.

Firejail is also criticized for complexity.