MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: DepositGenie – stop unfair deductions with photos and AI reports
by Zach_Dreamsmith | 2025-11-02 04:28:40+00:00
Hey everyone! I’m a solo founder building a tool I wish I’d had years ago.

If you’ve ever rented a place, you’ve probably worried about your security deposit. You take move-in photos, cross your fingers at move-out, and hope the landlord doesn’t decide the scuff on the wall is “$400 worth of damage.” I’ve been there..and it sucks.

That’s why I built DepositGenie: Deposit Armor — an iOS app that helps renters actually keep their deposits by making documentation dead simple.

What it does: - Organize your move-in and move-out photos by room, with timestamps and notes.

- AI highlights possible deductions, like comparing before/after shots and flagging what looks new or changed.

- Export everything into a clean, court-ready report if you need to dispute charges.

- Track key deadlines so you don’t miss refund windows or inspection dates.

Basically, it’s a pocket-sized armor kit for renters.

Why now:

More people are renting than ever, and most of us don’t know what to do when deductions happen.

You don’t need a lawyer, you just need organized proof. DepositGenie gives you that.

Tech & business side:

I built it with Flutter + Firebase, designed everything myself, and launched it on a shoestring.

The app is free to try with optional in-app upgrades for full features.

I’m not a big company, just one person trying to fix a tiny but expensive pain point.

Looking for feedback:

I’d love your honest thoughts on: - Whether this scratches a real itch you’ve had - What would make it more useful - How you’d price something like this - Any pitfalls I’m not seeing (legal, UX, trust, etc.)

Even better if you’ve had your own “deposit nightmare” stories, those inspired half the feature set.

Thanks for reading, and if you check it out, I’d really appreciate any feedback or critique.

— Zach Founder @ Dreamsmith LLC
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-11-02 04:29:14+00:00
In my experience (lately), the cost difference between a zero deductible plan and the high deductible plan is about the out-of-pocket max of the latter. Pretty much a wash.

So high deductible it is! Only met the out of pocket max once and it was glorious.

Before Obama, the zero deductible plans were only slightly more expensive than the high deductible plans. (Just an observation)

Seems crazy I was able to make an appointment directly with a specialist and only pay the copay back then…
by doctorpangloss | 2025-11-02 04:29:37+00:00
I really like the Hugging Face guys, but...

> Modify one thing at a time

> Change only one variable per ablation while keeping everything else constant. If you change multiple things and performance improves, you won’t know what caused it. Test modifications individually, then combine successful ones and reassess.

This is an unintentional microcosm of what is flawed with the document.
by leoh | 2025-11-02 04:30:16+00:00
Related essay https://www.jefftk.com/p/yudkowsky-and-miri

>In talking to ML researchers, many were unaware that there was any sort of effort to reduce risks from superintelligence. Others had heard of it before, and primarily associated it with Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and MIRI. One of them had very strong negative opinions of Eliezer, extending to everything they saw as associated with him, including effective altruism.

>They brought up the example of So you want to be a seed AI programmer, saying that it was clearly written by a crank. And, honestly, I initially thought it was someone trying to parody him. Here are some bits that kind of give the flavor:

>>First, there are tasks that can be easily modularized away from deep AI issues; any decent True Hacker should be able to understand what is needed and do it. Depending on how many such tasks there are, there may be a limited number of slots for nongeniuses. Expect the competition for these slots to be very tight. ... [T]he primary prerequisite will be programming ability, experience, and sustained reliable output. We will probably, but not definitely, end up working in Java. [1] Advance knowledge of some of the basics of cognitive science, as described below, may also prove very helpful. Mostly, we'll just be looking for the best True Hackers we can find.

>Or:

>>I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone's reckless youth against them - just because you acquired a doctorate in AI doesn't mean you should be permanently disqualified.

>Or:

>>Much of what I have written above is for the express purpose of scaring people away. Not that it's false; it's true to the best of my knowledge. But much of it is also obvious to anyone with a sharp sense of Singularity ethics. The people who will end up being hired didn't need to read this whole page; for them a hint was enough to fill in the rest of the pattern.
by refurb | 2025-11-02 04:33:43+00:00
This isn’t new under Trump. But it’s entertaining watching everyone pretend it is.

Obama had similar rules around standing deportation orders and how quickly they could be executed once an alien was in custody.

If you’ve stood before a judge, argued why you should be allowed to stay and lost, you have a standing deportation order. That’s due process. Nothing has been denied.

It makes for a great talking point but is a pretty shallow analysis of what is going on or their historical relevance.
by 827a | 2025-11-02 04:33:46+00:00
Sorry, yeah, replace every time I say "LLM" with "AI".

I've forced myself into the habit of always saying "LLM" instead of "AI" because people (cough Elizer) often hide behind the nebulous, poorly defined term "AI" to mean "magic man in a computer that can do anything." Deploying the term "LLM" can sometimes force the brain back into a place of thinking about the actual steps that get us from A to B to C, instead of replacing "B" with "magic man".

However, in Elizer's case; he only ever operates in the "magic man inside a computer" space, and near-categorically refuses to engage with any discussion about the real world. He loves his perfect spheres on a friction-less plane, so I should use the terminology he loves: AI.
by mannyv | 2025-11-02 04:34:37+00:00
The author talks about Java and cache coherency, but ignores the fact that the JVM implementation is above the processors caches and per the spec can have different caches per thread.

This means you need to synchronize every shared access, whether it's a read or write. In hardware systems you can cheat because usually a write performs a write-through. In a JVM that's not the case.

It's been a long time since I had to think about this, but it bit us pretty hard when we found that.
by qwerpy | 2025-11-02 04:35:31+00:00
I had fun doing this over the summer with a 100W panel, a 1kWh battery (1500W max output), and various cooking appliances: rice cooker, hot water kettle, instant pot, induction cooktop. On a sunny Pacific Northwest day I could charge the battery around 50%, more if I rotated the panel diligently. Rice cooker and hot water kettle (5L) would use about 40-50% of it per usage. So during the summer it was handling all of my power needs for those two appliances. It was always fun getting to full charge and frantically finding novel ways to "not waste" the sunlight. Charging my power tool batteries, etc. One time I even charged my EV 1% but that wasn't very practical.

Some other interesting things I learned: the battery passively eats about 5-10W, and on a cloudy day the solar panel would only get 10W during the day. So in the cloudy PNW winters it can't even maintain the battery let alone charge it. The inverter eats another 30-50W or so, so you have to turn it off when you're not using the AC outlets. My battery lets me separately power AC and DC (USB-A and USB-C) so I was charging devices via USB and not wasting energy powering the inverter.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-11-02 04:36:47+00:00
It’s actually extremely motivating to consider what LLM or similar AI agent could do for us if we were to free our minds from 2 decades of SaaS brainrot.

What if we ran AI locally and used it to actually do labor-intensive things with computers that make money rather than assuming everything were web-connected, paywalled, rate-limited, authenticated, tracked, and resold?
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-11-02 04:37:04+00:00
Ironically what you describe was air travel in the 1980s-1990s, despite several high profile airline hijackings.

The hijackings didn’t make people go crazy.

Unticketed passengers even could walk up to the gate.

Identification wasn’t even checked while boarding — just a ticket was required.

How far we’ve fallen…
by refurb | 2025-11-02 04:39:27+00:00
You’re ignoring the cases where people produce fraudulent documentation proving they are a citizen.

Do you just throw up your hands “i guess there is nothing we can do”?

What I find entertaining as a non-US citizen is how border enforcement is table stakes in every other country I’ve lived in (5 so far). Even the left doesn’t question it, it’s a basic function of a government.

Even the less developed countries have relatively straightforward enforcement. You produce proof you’re there legally or you’re put on the next flight home.

Since I lived in the US people keep asking me why some Americans don’t want border security. I don’t have a good answer.
by EionRobb | 2025-11-02 04:42:13+00:00
We had that thought too. I'll have to try dig out what the tablets were to find out exactly what type - this would have been 3 or 4 years ago now. We sort of ruled that out because:

The other workaround to get a speed boost was the user to uninstall and reinstall the app (and then wait for all the data to download again) but that didn't fly because the users would delete before they'd synced off all their data and then data would go missing.

This was all despite having VACUUM running whenever the app started.

Whether it was bad flash or no, we still had to try resolve it as the client wouldn't buy new hardware until we could prove that we had the knowledge to make the problem go away first :/
by DaSHacka | 2025-11-02 04:43:36+00:00
I'm not gonna waste effort on a fool's errand. So far, neither claim has been backed up whatsoever.

It's obviously more likely it's just fans of the language with a knee-jerk reaction of "ackshully you're totally definetely wrong, but uh... don't ask me how, you just are" than legitimate talking points.
by runarberg | 2025-11-02 04:43:49+00:00
I suspect you may be either underestimating how efficient our brains are at computing or severely underestimating how much energy these AI models take to train and run.

Even including our system of comfort like refrigerated blueberries in January and AC cooling a 40° C heat down to 25° C (but excluding car commutes, because please work from home or take public transit) the human is still far far more energy efficient in e.g. playing go then alpha-go. With LLMs this isn’t even close (and we can probably factor in that stupid car commute, because LLMs are just that inefficient).
by t0lo | 2025-11-02 04:43:50+00:00
LLMs are also anthrocentric simulatuon- like computers- and are likely not a step towards holistic universally aligned intelligence.

Different alien species would have simulations built on their computational, senses, and communication systems which are also not aligned with holistic simulation at all- despite both ours and the hypothetical species being made as products of the holistic universe.

Ergo maybe we are unlikely to crack true agi unless we crack the universe.
by speff | 2025-11-02 04:44:42+00:00
I appreciate the links. Though I think OP got some wires crossed mentioning that Fox was reporting the SNAP->Drugs conversion - since that video with the Fox reporter came from Tiktok. Though they did end up incidentally reporting other fake AI videos as real, so... yea.

Regarding your second link - it's pretty surreal to see. Reminiscent of "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy".
by scrps | 2025-11-02 04:44:49+00:00
Ah haven't looked at their current offerings in a while, I am still on the first gen USG 1000fdx but hand-rolling a 2.5 router (Radxa E52C, it's nifty) to replace it when I stop being lazy.

You are right about Unifi's software being pain and I love that they keep changing the UI, the controller on the server side is dependency hell, and mongodb to boot just in case you need to manage n^webscale deployments.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-02 04:47:44+00:00
> The GPL protects the freedom of the users while MIT-licensed software can be easily rug-pulled or be co-opted by the big tech monopolists.

That is not at all true. If someone were to change the license of a project from MIT to something proprietary, the original will still exist and be just as available to users. No freedom is lost.
by LavenderDay3544 | 2025-11-02 04:47:45+00:00
They shouldn't have to. OS interfaces including commandline ones should be user oriented not bogged down by Unix dogma that was created wwhencomputerss used physical text terminals as their primary I/O device. It's not the 60s anymore and modern PC, servers, and embedded devices aren't ancient mainframes with physical terminal hardware where making everything appear to be a file and using convoluted scripting interfaces like the Unix shell made at least some sense.
by timr | 2025-11-02 04:48:24+00:00
Meh. The context stuff is changing by the day, so whatever you're saying now will be out of date by next week. Regardless, you're basically saying that GHC is trying to optimize for cost, which is true for any provider.

Even if there's some slight immediate performance advantage for Cursor over GHC, the ability to trivially switch models more than makes up for it, IMO.
by refurb | 2025-11-02 04:48:41+00:00
If the computer system says you are not a citizen but you produces then clearly one is wrong.

It’s no different than a US citizen having an arrest warrant but then showing the cop a final disposition from the court showing the charges were dismissed.

Whats next? It’s certainly not the cop just walking away.

You detain the person until the discrepancy can be resolved.

Are some innocent people going to be held in custody? Yes, in both cases. But until a better approach can be found (other than just ignoring it), it’s how it works.
by metacritic12 | 2025-11-02 04:50:47+00:00
Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-11-02 04:50:48+00:00
One problem with HPOP is the chicken-egg adoption problem: There is little reason to implement HPOP because nobody will have a client for it, and little reason to build a client because nobody has implemented HPOP.

Part of this is the friction required to implement a client for a bespoke API that only one vendor offers, and the even bigger friction of building a standard.

AI and MCP servers might be able to fix this. In turn, companies will have a motivation to offer AI-compatible interfaces because if the only way to order a pizza is through an engagement farm, the AI agent is just going to order the pizza somewhere else.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-02 04:53:51+00:00
Why with Tahoe did they get rid of the volume indicator that popped up middle of screen that they’ve had for 20+ years - a critical indicator that the volume controls are even working in the first place - in favor of a tiny set of bars at the top right of my screen in the menu bar where I can barely make them out? It’s also less precise about my volume level now. Why?

That sure seemed random. It sure isn’t functional.
by Ukv | 2025-11-02 04:54:45+00:00
> In order to use Privacy Pass for per-user rate-limiting, it's necessary to limit the number of tokens issued to each user (e.g., 100 tokens per user per hour). To rate limit an AI agent, this role would be fulfilled by the AI platform. To obtain tokens, the user would log in with the platform, and said platform would allow the user to get tokens from the issuer. The AI platform fulfills the attester role in Privacy Pass parlance.

If it's up to the AI platform to issue limited tokens to users, and it's also the AI platform making the web requests, I'm not understanding the purpose of the cryptography/tokens. Couldn't the platform already limit a user to 100 web requests per hour just with an internal counter?
by rincebrain | 2025-11-02 04:55:39+00:00
I was running Debian unstable on my 64-bit SPARC up until I moved a few months ago and haven't set the system back up again while unpacking.

It's been somewhat useful for finding weird edge cases in software where for whatever reason, it doesn't reproduce easily on AArch64 or x86, but does there. (Or vice-versa, sometimes.)

I don't know that I'd say that's sufficient reason to motivate dozens of people to maintain support, but it's not purely academic entertainment or nostalgia, for that.
by refurb | 2025-11-02 04:55:41+00:00
Yelling fire in a crowded theatre actually isn’t illegal.

And your idea of court ordered ban on speech? What is a good example? That Covid absolutely 100% didn’t originate from a lab in China? How about the fact that Covid vaccines stop transmission of the virus?

Both of those were actually banned on major social media sites, then turned out to be true.

So what you’re suggesting is banning speech that isn’t untrue. Just inconvenient to those in power.

Sounds horrible.
by fsckboy | 2025-11-02 04:56:47+00:00
ideology plays little role in these conflicts, they are partially religio-ethnic but mostly about pure power, where religion and ethnicity are levers pulled to leverage power.

the people seeking power would sell out their own mothers if that's what it took.

the ideologies here are the ideologies of the HN commenters who try to fit the facts into their predetermined narratives.

and "visible from space" means absolutely nothing meaningful. can we read license plates from space or not yet? I don't know, but in this context, who cares

(way back in the 1980s a china-zealot was telling me that the Great Wall of China was "the only manmade thing visible from space." I had the presence of mind to say back, "isn't it more significant to be able to get to space to see what's visible?")
by merlyn | 2025-11-02 04:57:36+00:00
Correct, what RFC2317 brings you, is an example of you creating a new namespace in some structured format (IIRC, there are three different example formats given in this RFC), and you just have the upstream ISP, which has the reverse delegation done on the zone cut boundary for the IP ranges it controls inserting a CNAME out to your new namespace on nameservers you control for the reverse PTRs so the reverse PTRs can be formed that way.

Running a long time ISP, I found extremely few customers wanting to do something like RFC2317, or could actually figure out and do it effectively. Almost all were content with control panel/API and having the ISP do it after I pointed them to this informational RFC asking them if this is what they wanted.
by anilgulecha | 2025-11-02 04:57:49+00:00
The object notation format that's going to win is the one that's going to maximally support LLM output. I've come across BAML before, but it's not widely used for some reason.

Today JSON is winning, but for more complex structures, there's still syntax issues in output. XML does reasonably well (given the deep react jsx/HTML in the training corpos), so perhaps that will make a comeback.

Are there benchmarks on this? I think the SOTA models are fine -- they can work with most models, but the fun is that models that are 90% of SOTA performance and cost 90% less - which output format do they work best with. This is where the winner will be found.

TLDR: probably JSON or XML will remain the config format for a while.
by harshreality | 2025-11-02 04:57:50+00:00
https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-is-using-automati...

Are you confusing their comments about (paraphrased) "horrible but legal" (up to a point) sites like dailystormer, 8chan, and kiwifarms, with actual blatant phishing sites?

I find it very difficult to believe they won't remove sites involved in clear phishing or malware delivery campaigns, if they can verify it themselves or in cooperation with a security team at a company they trust. That's different from sites that are morally repugnant and whose members spew vitriol, but aren't making any particular threats (and even in cases where there are clear and present threats, CF usually seems to prefer to notify law enforcement, and then follow court orders, rather than inject themselves as a 3rd party judge into the proceedings).
by heavyset_go | 2025-11-02 04:58:19+00:00
The British historically had an extensive travel document system that kept the poor bound to their parishes, feudal relations -> capitalist relations came with changes to internal travel and criminalization of unemployment/poverty to address the want for a mobile, landless and dispensible workforce divorced from feudal obligations.

I don't think freedom had much to do with either their passport system or changes to internal travel policy, they were used to enforce relations even through the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

There was certainly rhetoric about liberty regarding passport reform among thinkers and the mercantile class later in London, Adam Smith talks about it in The Wealth of Nations, but I would not say there is a history of a liberatory British passport system.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-11-02 04:59:11+00:00
Assuming you take intelligence to mean something like "the ability to make accurate judgements on matters of fact, accurate predictions of the future, and select courses of action that achieve one's goals or maximize one's objective function", then this is essentially another form of the Is-Ought problem derived by Hume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
by martin-t | 2025-11-02 04:59:26+00:00
You're right that feelings are the key to convincing people but your comparison is wrong.

Search engines help website owners, they don't hurt them. Whether the goal of a website is to inform people, build reputation or make money, search engines help with that. (Unless they output an excerpt so large visiting your website is no longer necessary. There have been lawsuits about that.)

LLMs take other people's work and regurgitate a mixed/mangled (verbatim or not does not matter) version without crediting/compensating the original authors and which cannot easily be tracked to any individual authors even if you actively try.

---

LLMs perform no work (creative or otherwise), no original research, have no taste - in fact they have no anchor to the real world except the training data. Literally everything they output is based on the training data which took possibly quadrillions of hours of _human work_ and is now being resold without compensating them.

Human time and natural resources are the only things with inherent value and now human time is being devalued and stolen.