MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Offline AI Photo Search (local VLM and semantic search)
by Pankaj4152 | 2025-11-26 22:34:45+00:00
I built a small offline photo search tool that uses a local vision-language model (NexaAI Qwen3-VL-4B) to describe images and sentence-transformers to generate embeddings for semantic search.

Everything runs 100% on-device (no cloud, no API keys).

GitHub repo: https://github.com/pankaj4152/smart-photo-finder

You can try it with: 1. python app.py 2. Choose "Process images" 3. Choose "Search images"

Would love feedback on architecture, performance, and improvements.
by jovial_cavalier | 2025-11-26 22:35:01+00:00
Generally agree with the sentiment, I basically only have banking apps, messaging apps, and a browser on my phone.

I am skeptical, though, of the price discrimination claims. If McDonald's decides that the right price of a Big Mac for me is $1 and for you $4, that creates an arbitrage opportunity. You can pay me $3, and I pocket $2. The result is that I buy more big macs, and they bump my price up. You buy less, and they take your price down. Now it just trades at the market rate it was before, but with more steps.
by foofoo12 | 2025-11-26 22:35:47+00:00
"voluntary" can also be pretty meaningless depending on the context. In the UK, if the police suspects you of shenanigans, they'll politely invite you for an "voluntary interview".

Of course you can decide to not go, it's voluntary, right? Yes, you can. Your choice. And when you reject their kind offer they'll come and arrest you so you can attend the interview.
by bigyabai | 2025-11-26 22:35:48+00:00
I don't think it was an anything post. You are an Apple customer upset at the status quo, which is understandable, but your post is not.

If "think of the children" feels like manufactured consent for the erosion of rights, spending money supporting Tim "Client Side Scanning" Cook isn't going to yield some moral reprisal from Apple. Emotionally manipulating you into accepting conditional surveillance is part of Apple's security model. They're the "good guys" and they don't need to prove it.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-26 22:36:31+00:00
Unless I'm missing something, this is a complete nonsense comment.

Obviously you have to install the app, that's true for any app. But you only have to do it the first time around.

Are you just saying that this payment app has the first time friction of downloading the app. That's the same for all apps. Are you just saying that friction exists, and is a barrier to entry?
by enbugger | 2025-11-26 22:36:55+00:00
Yet another one. Along with Stride, Godot, Unigine, O3DE, Flax and tens more. All look like they just want be clone of UE: generic dark UI with inspector, scene hierarchy, asset browser in the bottom and play button in the top. Zero creativity and innovation. Where's Emacs or Vim of game engines which brings its own unique philosophy?
by llm_nerd | 2025-11-26 22:38:00+00:00
"I know Apple engineers working on the phone"

Groan. Come on. Cite one. A single "Apple engineer" to support this ridiculous claim of insider knowledge. What year do you think it is?

You understand that the SoC and I/O blocks are largely shared between the Mac and the iPad / iPhone now, right? This invention of some big bifurcation is not reality based. The A14 SoC (which became the foundation for the Mac's M1) had I/O hardware to support USB-C all the ways back to the iPhone 12. Which makes sense as this chipset was used in iPads that came with USB-C.

Pretty weird for hardware that is largely the same to "not like each others standards".
by namibj | 2025-11-26 22:41:15+00:00
That's kind of that ZNS is for: make the SSD dumb but in exchange predictable; let the database on top that already uses some type of CoW structure handle the quantization of erasure blocks; expose all overprovisioning from the start and just give back less usable capacity after an erasure block for erased and skip over any read access sized blocks that got killed off there when mapping logical addresses to physical ones. That has to exist anyways because due yield reasons some percentage of blocks is expected dead from the factory.
by some_furry | 2025-11-26 22:41:50+00:00
You cannot look at Cendyne's blog, nor mine, and have any understanding of what either of our kinks even are. It's not a topic we really write about.

And, no, furry isn't a kink.

(Yes, I know literally anything CAN be a kink to some people, but there's a difference between "hypothetical individuals" and general truths that apply broadly to a group of people.)

Further reading for the peanut gallery: https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post...
by mattmanser | 2025-11-26 22:41:54+00:00
Previously you had a few choices, go with:

1. PayPal, who wanted to own the customer relationship

2. A payment processor who all had awful APIs and you had to do lots of setup around having a merchant account. Authorize.net I think was one of these. Recurring payments were often a nightmare to get to work.

3. An intermediary processor, who didn't need you to have a merchant account, nochex, Worldpay, sagepay, etc. who again generally all had awful APIs and hard to embed widgets and complicated setup processes. Again, recurring payments a nightmare.

Stripe solved all these pain points, and the API was great. It wasn't one pain point they solved, it was many.

You controlled the customer relationship, it was easy to embed the stripe widget, it had a great API, you didn't need a merchant account and the setup was quick and easy. Recurring payments were (fairly) easy to set up. Oh, and great documentation! That was another big thing.

And then they brought out a little widget you could attach to your phone/tablet to allow easy in-person card payments!

It probably seems a bit incomprehensible now, but this was a time when everyone did everything slightly awkwardly. Integrating with any third party was a big job. Documentation was terrible. Formats were all over the place. SOAP, XML, JSON was only just emerging as the defacto standard. For example, the APIs. Great APIs were rare, as far as I remember twilio and I think MailChimp really blazed the way there. Companies like Google were putting out absolute dogshit, complicated APIs, often strict REST with weird header requirements, or strange signing with private keys. If you've never dealt with it, strict REST really, really sucks.
by KK7NIL | 2025-11-26 22:42:07+00:00
> USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime.

USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that?

> The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.

This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.

Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
by swat535 | 2025-11-26 22:42:33+00:00
I'm so torn on this, because on one hand smart phones have been a net positive in many aspect of my life. I get instantly access to maps, I have my bank in my pocket, I get notified of my bills, check my emails, communicate with friends and family, order stuff online..

Yet there is also the toxic stuff, constantly scrolling X, Facebook or Instagram, bombarded with ads, subscriptions and trash..

I think smart phones can be great devices but their use should be limited to useful functionalities rather than dopamine hits.
by gambiting | 2025-11-26 22:43:08+00:00
>> which they were already almost completely done doing

Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?
by vel0city | 2025-11-26 22:43:16+00:00
I think there's a good chance people would watch an entirely generated character read the news, so long as they find the presentation reliable according to their world view.

Tucker Carlson or Wolf Blitzer or Lester Holt might as well be cartoon characters to me. There's practically zero chance I'll ever meet them in person, especially more that we'd have any kind of real human connection. What one cares about is if they think the overall source is reliable and what kind of information (or disinformation) their orgs are pushing to the people. Having them be actual meatbags is a liability, they'll pop too much ambien one night and say some pretty terrible things on social media compared to only ever being a highly curated output of the organization. Unless they pull a Tay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom
by 360MustangScope | 2025-11-26 22:43:37+00:00
Why would weather really be an issue? The city in the article has people cycling in the winter in the snow and also during the rain.

Realistically once you get fitter and fitter from riding the bicycle, your commute times will drop and if you’re in a city like the article, your trips aren’t even very far anyway. If anything driving is more annoying.
by dr_hooo | 2025-11-26 22:44:42+00:00
Sadly, another attempt will likely be made at some point. At least the regulation is quite explicit:

> This Regulation shall not prohibit, make impossible, weaken, circumvent or otherwise undermine cybersecurity measures, in particular encryption, including end-to-end encryption, implemented by the relevant information society services or by the users. This Regulation shall not create any obligation that would require a provider of hosting services or a provider of interpersonal communications services to decrypt data or create access to end-to-end encrypted data, or that would prevent providers from offering end-to-end encrypted services.
by lelandbatey | 2025-11-26 22:45:00+00:00
No, cause the folks detecting the problems typically do so by actively scanning new releases (usually security companies do this). Few such problems are detected by people who do a "normal" update and receive compromised code, investigate, and then report the problem. It does happen, but it's not the "usual" way these supply chain attacks are discovered, especially not the really big ones.
by aylmao | 2025-11-26 22:45:41+00:00
The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a billionaire in the first place— one that not only doesn't care about people today, but also doesn't care about future generations of humans, let alone other living beings.

Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc) or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and expansionism was unfettered.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-11-26 22:45:41+00:00
Data landlords have no reason to invest in their own models when they can license their content to all vendors and offer integrations with them. Their business models are enhanced by AI, not threatened by it. For Google and Meta it’s different: they offer entry points to data and chat apps are direct competitors. So chat apps with good integrations can be as big as largest ERPs, for example.
by jdhwosnhw | 2025-11-26 22:47:02+00:00
Thats like saying the grocery store is ok with me eating some of the grapes while I shop so they must be ok with me walking out without paying for my groceries.

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I really want to understand some sort of reasonable moral justification for actively avoiding paying for a service that you are using / circumventing the mechanism by which the business makes money.
by snet0 | 2025-11-26 22:47:17+00:00
You can read the proposal and found out, if you're interested.

> In the light of the more limited risk of their use for the purpose of child sexual abuse and the need to preserve confidential information, including classified information, information covered by professional secrecy and trade secrets, electronic communications services that are not publicly available, such as those used for national security purposes, should be excluded from the scope of this Regulation. Accordingly, this Regulation should not apply to interpersonal communications services that are not available to the general public and the use of which is instead restricted to persons involved in the activities of a particular company, organisation, body or authority.
by sambuccid | 2025-11-26 22:47:18+00:00
In my experience I saw the complete opposite of "juniors looking like savants", there are a few pieces of code made by some juniors and som mid engineers in my company(one also involving a senior) that were clearly made with AI, and they are such a mess that they haven't been touched ever since because it's just impossible to understand, and this wasn't caught in the PR because the size of it was so large that people didn't actually bother reading it.

I did see a few good senior engineers using AI and producing good code, but for junior and mid engineers I have witnessed the complete opposite.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-26 22:47:18+00:00
PWAs can be good, but for a lot of social media, they're only as good as their website experience. Many (most) companies seem to make their website intentionally slow and buggy, probably with the idea that users only need to use their web UI for a short while because they lost access to their apps or something.

For instance, I've installed Mastodon as a PWA and it performs great. Photoprism also works so well I haven't even bothered to look for an app.
by someone7x | 2025-11-26 22:47:52+00:00
Thanks for the paper.

It starts boldly by redefining the “american dream” into “line must go up” which ironically sounds like boomer logic being projected onto millennials.

I don’t know about the Fed but my dream as an American isn’t to accumulate more wealth than my parents.

Fwiw, the American dream in my neck of the woods is financial independence from landlords and bosses.
by wvbdmp | 2025-11-26 22:48:31+00:00
I don’t understand this take. The abundance of game engines has never been greater, both open and proprietary. As has the abundance of indie games. Some people make a distinction between more batteries-included engines with editors etc. and “game frameworks”, which are supposedly more bare-bones libraries such as Bevy or Babylon.js. Maybe that’s what you’re after?
by lysace | 2025-11-26 22:48:33+00:00
This is a major win! Basically: It's now (still) voluntary for services to implement scanning for CSAM material. Not mandatory. End-to-end encryption will continue to be legal.

Source: Swedish national public service radio (Sveriges Radio) interviewing Jon Karlung, CEO of Bahnhof AB - a major privacy-centric and politically outspoken ISP in Sweden. Think XS4ALL (RIP) but in Sweden. Here's the interview: https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/efter-flera-ar-eu-overe... (Swedish speech).

Here's their blog post (in Swedish, use browser translation tools):

https://bahnhof.se/2025/11/26/eu-bromsar-chat-control/
by reedlaw | 2025-11-26 22:49:00+00:00
I feel sorry for juniors because they have even less incentive to troubleshoot or learn languages. At the same time, the sheer size of APIs make me relieved that I will never have to remember another command, DSL, or argument list again. Ruby has hundreds of methods, Rails hundreds more, and they constantly change. I'd rather write a prompt saying what I mean than figure out obscure incantations, especially with infrequently used tools like ffmpeg.

Advent of Code (https://adventofcode.com/2025/about) says:

> Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles? No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind.

I would advocate for Advent of Code in every workplace, but finding interest is rare. No matter how much craft is emphasized, ultimately businesses are concerned with solving problems. Even personally, sometimes I want to solve a problem so I can move on to something more interesting.
by notatoad | 2025-11-26 22:49:22+00:00
this was supposed to be the business model for alexa. amazon had all the pieces - they had the product listings, marketplace, ordering infrastructure, the smart speaker in your home always listening to you, and they built exactly that product.

it hasn't exactly taken off, and i don't think OpenAI has addressed any of the problems that prevented amazon's version from being a success. and that was without taking advertiser money to choose which product to sell you, amazon was happy to just make a sale. if the product choices the AI shopping assistant makes are driven by advertiser dollars instead of product quality, i really don't expect consumers to accept it.
by mcmoor | 2025-11-26 22:50:11+00:00
Since this is scooters who rarely even reach >150cc, it's actually quite safe since it's slow and light. There are always high risk when we want to go to very rough roads that are also full of trucks (common in rural areas), but in well maintained roads like lots of Jakarta, it's mostly fine.

Though it really isn't helped by attitude of people around here who aren't even wearing helms.
by aeturnum | 2025-11-26 22:50:57+00:00
Because amazon doesn't have a web search service but they do have a product recommendation service? Even if they do pay OpenAI they would certainly be competing with their own service and keeping prices down via that. OpenAI needs Amazon (or some other fulfillment company) to deliver products. Amazon does not need OpenAI - they can build their own recommendation engine or work with another.
by doctor_radium | 2025-11-26 22:51:07+00:00
As a teenager I worked at a discount store, and sometimes ran the service desk, which (among many other things) involved processing returns. The returns form included a spot for "phone number", to which some customers would respond, "my number is unlisted". We honored that. Today in the USA, it seems the phone number is the new Social Security Number, which everybody wants to use for tracking. Stores used to give out physical discount cards (which I wasn't keen on either...) but now (obviously because it saves them money) so many stores have switched to a system where your account is tracked through a phone number or an app or both. No thank you.
by llm_nerd | 2025-11-26 22:51:47+00:00
Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change.

And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users.

In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.
by neilv | 2025-11-26 22:51:57+00:00
> How do you know when people are not aligned or honest,

I'm not an expert on this, but do have some conventions and thoughts, so partial off-the-cuff answer...

Of course, at some point, actions will speak pretty clearly about alignment or honesty.

Before that, a lot of tech workers aren't deceptive by default, even if they're approaching the culture assuming a mercenary environment, and they will tell you straight what they are thinking. Maybe especially more if they think you are straight with them. I tend to think you can discuss and find common ground with these people.

Some tech workers have a "California nice" persona that can obscure a few distinct categories, some fine or innocuous, one of them non-deceptive mercenary (once you start talking with them), only one of them deceptive mercenary.

IMHO, just treat everyone honestly, and they will often meet you there, or often indicate when they aren't meeting you there. If you don't meet people honestly, some people will immediately adapt to that too.

I think if you create an alignment-nurturing culture, and communicate and demonstrate it consistently from very first contact, you will scare away a few people, and onboard a lot of people who either are looking for that, or willing to try this unusual thing.

As soon as you start introducing perverse incentives (e.g., individual performance metrics), or mercenary culture (e.g., why is this option pool so small and have worker-hostile terms), or signs of misalignment yourself, or even just sound like more of the same (e.g., "<we're-arm-fuzzy> <we're different> oh btw leetcode frat hazing bro do you even lift"), I think people will revert to the default pretty mercenary tech industry worker culture. And that's rational of them, because the worker's dominant strategy for a mutually-mercenary tech industry environment was figured out a couple decades ago, for a reason.
by vel0city | 2025-11-26 22:52:00+00:00
Yeah, considering Teslas upload imagery from their cars to datasets their employees have been known to access (and abuse that access as well) there's practically 0% chance I'd ever let a Tesla camera inside my home. Its bad enough they're recording me when my neighbors drive by and when I walk around, I wouldn't want them in my home on a device that's designed to be able to go through my stuff.
by ninth_ant | 2025-11-26 22:53:20+00:00
I’m not suggesting sympathy.

I’m disambiguating between your projected image of a cartoonish villain desperate to do anything for a buck, vs humans having a massive blind spot due to the inherent biases involved with trying to make a team project succeed.

Your original comment suggests a simplistic outlook which doesn’t reflect the reality of the experience. I was trying to help you understand, not garnish sympathy.
by sorenjan | 2025-11-26 22:54:07+00:00
Qualcomm has confirmed it's coming to Snapdragon phones soon[0], which maybe hints that it's dependent on the SoC drivers? Samsung uses a mix of Snapdragon and their own Exynos, but I can't see them not releasing it to their Snapdragon phones when others do, and then they pretty much have to release it to their Exynos phones too.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-confirms-Quick-Share-...
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-26 22:54:12+00:00
By the stopwatch it takes 3x longer for me to upload a photo to the Instagram web app than it does to Mastodon. Facebook's blue website works pretty well but the Instagram site comes across like something that was vibe coded in a weekend or maybe a straw man that was made to prove SPAs are bad. Contrast that to the Mastodon application produced by a basically unfunded application that's fast and reliable.
by holden_nelson | 2025-11-26 22:54:35+00:00
> OpenAI is facing off against Google, Meta and Amazon, all of which have existing relationships with advertisers.

I will point out that these companies have existing relationships with advertisers because they have massive, sticky userbases and advanced targeting tools. The average consumer is absolutely using ChatGPT for personal use, and maybe Copilot at work if applicable. And they're using Google's AI by proxy when they perform searches.

If OpenAI were to roll out advertising tooling, I have no doubt advertisers would flock there to try it out.

Additionally, the other thing I think OpenAI leads in is Product. Google is amazing at creating technologies and awful at creating products. I think OpenAI can be positioned to win based off of that alone.