MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by websiteapi | 2025-12-06 03:29:17+00:00
immich is neat, but I tire of fiddling around with computers more than necessary so I pay for iCloud for the family because I don't want to be Oncall 24/7/365. I do self host home assistant sadly, just because certain things I want to do are just not possible with SmartThings. planning on moving to their hosted solution for that eventually too tho.

I actually did the math earlier and the iCloud 12TB plan for a family is way cheaper than the equivalent s3 storage assuming frequent access, even assuming a 50% discount. so that's nice.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-06 03:30:23+00:00
> PFHO

Here we go again with the PFAS. It is the stuff to prefer the least, not the most.

> I'm getting D3 and A from multivitamins

That fails completely because they almost always don't have softgel oil-dissolve forms or the right dose at all. They're generally very far from it. It is exactly what leads to the autoimmune issue of dry eyes in the first place.
by krick | 2025-12-06 03:30:56+00:00
I never even used Google Photos (because, you know), so if somebody could explain more concretely: how do you use it? Is it actually a backup app (and if so, is it really much different from using a generic backup app or even just syncthing), or does it somehow magically allow you to keep the preview gallery and search on your device, while your actual 200 GB of photos are somewhere in the cloud and the local storage is basically just auto-managed cache, where everything you didn't access in the last 6 months gets deleted? Does it preserve all this additional data Android cameras add, like HDR, video fragments before photos, does it handle photospheres well, etc? I'm asking because I don't even fully understand how the camera app handles it itself, and if all the data is fully portable.

FWIW, I also don't use any fancy collection management and barely understand what all these Lightrooms and XMP files are for. Maybe I should, but up to this day photos for me are just a bunch of files in the folder, that I sometimes manually group into subfolders like 2025-09, mostly to make it easier on thumbnail-maker.
by echelon | 2025-12-06 03:30:58+00:00
A new client-facing encoding scheme would break utilization of hardware encoders, which in turn slows down everyone's experience, chews through battery life, etc. They won't serve it that way - there's no support in the field for it.

It looks like they're compressing the data before it gets further processed with the traditional suite of video codecs. They're relying on the traditional codecs to serve, but running some internal first pass to further compress the data they have to store.
by foobarian | 2025-12-06 03:32:28+00:00
I have a homegrown app too. It's too tinkery for anyone else. I throw whole iOS device backups at it so it can pluck out media from texts. Then the frontend has an efficient bulk sorting workflow with vi keys to navigate a grid of photos and tag with a few different tags or delete. I feel like this is not the same use case as immich, it's maybe a curation step before exporting a refined set of media.
by jadenPete | 2025-12-06 03:33:06+00:00
I work one of these teams! At my company (~300 engineers), we have tech debt teams for both frontend and backend. I’m on the backend team.

We do the work that’s too large in scope for other teams to handle, and clearly documenting and enforcing best practices is one component of that. Part of that is maintaining a comprehensive linting suite, and the other part is writing documentation and educating developers. We also maintain core libraries and APIs, so if we notice many teams are doing the same thing in different ways, we’ll sit down and figure out what we can build that’ll accommodate most use cases.
by cyberax | 2025-12-06 03:33:20+00:00
> You have absolutely no idea of what you're talking about.

I do.

1. "PFAS" is a technically incorrect term. 2. It's ridiculously broad. Teflon is PFAS, sevoflurane is PFAS, and so on.

> If you actually think the scare is overblown, I dare you to drink the whole bottle of that eyedrop.

They literally use the same liquid to FILL THE EYEBALLS after retinal surgery. It's been approved for 25 years. A bottle of eyedrops has 4 milliliters of it, and it would do essentially nothing if swallowed.
by Darmani | 2025-12-06 03:34:13+00:00
I can write a similar article that: most people problems are technical problems.

This article hits on a pet peeve of mine.

Many companies and individuals can benefit from better processes, communication skills, and training.

And also people who proclaim "Most technical problems are people problems" and "It's not what you know, it's who you know" are disproportionately those who are attempting to influence others that "My skillset is more valuable than your skillset." The people who believe the opposite are heads-down building.

The truth is that nearly all problems are multifactorial and involve long chains of causality. They can be patched at multiple points.

And so while there are standard stories about "If you do the 5 Why's and trace back causality, the issue becomes a deeper human problem," you can nearly always do something else and find an alternative technical solution.

The standard story goes: "This thing failed because this this other thing crashed, because this thing was misconfigured, because the deployment script was run incorrectly, because no-one trained Bob how to use it." See, the human problem is the deepest one, right?

But you can find an alternate technical fix: why was it possible to run the deployment script incorrectly?

Or you can ping-pong it back into a technical problem: he wasn't trained because everyone is stressed with no time because things keep breaking because of bad architecture and no CI. So actually the technical problem is deepest.

But no, because that only happened because the CEO hired the wrong CTO because he didn't know anyone who could evaluate it properly....

...which only happened because they didn't use <startup that helps you evaluate engineers> (technical problem)

...which only happened because said startup didn't have good enough marketing (human problem)

...which only happened because they were too slow to build from their own tech debt and didn't have the money (technical problem...)

And so on. Ping, pong.

The article says: we had too much tech debt because humans weren't trained enough.

One can also say: we had too much tech debt because we didn't have good enough linters and clone detectors to keep out the common problems, and also we had made some poor technical choices that required hiring a much larger team to begin with.

If you have a pet problem, you can always convince yourself that it's responsible for all woes. That just keeps you from seeing the holistic view and finding the best solution.
by dcre | 2025-12-06 03:35:05+00:00
Really weird intro about the increase in auto fatalities, for two reasons:

1) fatalities have declined a lot from their pandemic peak. It looks kind of like a reversion to trend

2) exactly none of those fatalities were caused by a Waymo, because there has never been a Waymo fatality

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
by komali2 | 2025-12-06 03:35:19+00:00
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.

Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?

Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!

I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
by alsetmusic | 2025-12-06 03:35:32+00:00
> Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets.

Interesting in that I thought about their purchase of $1B of solid state memory at the height of their iPod run. The difference is that Apple had a hit product that was selling as quickly as they could be produced and there was a legitimate need if they wanted to meet the demand.

FTFA:

> No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM!

I don't consider this legitimate. It's not illegal, but it sure seems unethical and scummy and it pissed me off. OpenAI throwing its weight around is harming ordinary people who aren't competing with them.
by cyberax | 2025-12-06 03:36:04+00:00
Yeah, yeah. Sure.

> That fails completely because they almost always don't have softgel oil-dissolve forms or the right dose at all

I tried tons of forms. My current ones are gel-filled capsules. Rather large ones, at that.

Sorry, but there's a huge amount of scholarly literature on this question. I've read tons of it over the years, and there is NO magical supplement that does anything but mildly improve the situation.
by jamesbfb | 2025-12-06 03:36:18+00:00
I’m always fascinated by how heat pumps (or reverse cycle units for Australians) are not the defacto standard in other countries and somehow come up for debate in the US. I remember watching one of the many TechnologyConnections videos on the subject and was wondering although interesting, what is with this focus on heat pumps being better than XYZ? Is the resistance to change really that great?

Being Australian, at least in Victoria, I don’t know of many houses that have gas heating. I also think it’s been a hot minute since I’ve seen household evap cooling, which I find has slowly been replaced by reverse cycle units given the climate has changed for us in VIC that the humidity increase over the years tends to make the evap units far less effective.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-12-06 03:36:52+00:00
No offense to the OP (what you did is great - as someone who had to pick up expo/RN on the fly for my newest job, it can be a bit annoying, and that is before all of the compliance nightmares associated with push provisioning) but the title does seem a bit disingenuous - it is phrased to make it sound like the app he built specifically is processing $6M/Month, where it is actually the platform that the app was built for that is
by blu3h4t | 2025-12-06 03:37:36+00:00
I use Linux for 20 years and I study programming for 10 years, bought 100 programming books, so a linux distribution is basically a programming language container. Slackware was for lisp. Now instead of kiss its simple ain’t easy with clojure. Debian is very tightly tied to perl with both communities bent on reproducibility. (Tho rust is replacing perl). Red hat and ibm is a Java shop. Centos is a scala platform at cern. Ubuntu and Python is a data science platform. Sure is a better Debian like ruby is a better Perl. And here we come to arch, when 10 years ago after a brief stunt with Perl basics I started learning c# the first thing I did is try to run the excercises on the raspberry pi. But because of some hard float soft float something they didn’t work. So I had to jailbreak the raspberry pi and run this new distro on it, the arch Linux. Where it just worked. You see ethics of ai and maybe like data science require the system to be fsf endorsed free system that’s what Debian gnu linux reason detre is. And Debian as Steve Jobs with Java were like against mono, you shall not pass. But for a gaming platform that’s a little bit different. Ex red had ceo now works at unity this mono fork. Ms bought blizzard, they want into this gaming thing badly. So that’s why steam os is arch now, less strict than Debian on the Libre side of things. The rest is history. :D
by defrost | 2025-12-06 03:37:54+00:00
The full context risk assessment is that Denmark is "doing it better" for their population as a whole.

Trump and RFK Jr. looked at the Danish policy of fewer mandated vaccines at birth and copied that one single feature from a larger broader public health scheme.

What the Danes do is much better follow up post natal care for all newborn babies.

There's treatment at the first sign of (say) hepatitis B in Denmark, put in place early enough to avoid any severe liver disease.

The US would be better off, across all newborns, with a mandatory hep-B vaccine as a great many US newborns have no follow up post natal care to catch those cases that will result in liver damage for life.

If the US wants the Danish outcomes and reduced use of vaccines then the US also needs much better broader accessible affordable and effective post natal care.
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-06 03:37:58+00:00
That just seems like an arbitrary limitation. Its like asking someone to do answer a math calculation but "no thinking allowed". Like, I guess we can gauge if a model just _knows all knowable things in the universe_ using that method... but anything of any value that you are gauging in terms of 'intelligence', is going to actually be validating their ability to go "outside the scope" of what they actually are (an autocomplete on steroids).
by heavymemory | 2025-12-06 03:38:54+00:00
Right, associativity is the simplest case because the structure is visible directly in one example.

The system needs multiple examples when there is more than one varying part and a single example is ambiguous. A simple example is wrapping a function call. With:

doThing(x) → log(doThing(x)) process(y) → log(process(y))

the system learns that: the function name varies the argument varies he outer log(…) is constant

From that it infers the general rule and applies it to new inputs. A single example would not be enough to disambiguate that pattern.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-06 03:39:47+00:00
The incumbent are trying to fully control the market but they don't have a justification for that. A company like Google which already had a monopoly over search needs to convince the market that this will allow them to expand past search. If the narrative is that anyone can run a specialized model on their machines for different tasks, this doesn't justify AI companies selling themselves on the assumption of a total market monopoly and stranglehold over the economy.

They cannot sell themselves without concealing reality. This is not a new thing. There were a lot of suppressed projects in Blockchain industry where everyone denied the existence of certain projects and most people never heard about them and talk as if the best coin in existence can do a measly 4 transactions per second as if it's state of the art... Solutions like "Lightning network" don't actually work but they are pitched as revolutionary... I bet there are more people shilling Bitcoin's Lightning network than they are people actually using it. This is the power of centralized financial incentives. Everyone ends up operating on top of shared deception "the official truth" which may not be true at all.
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-06 03:39:51+00:00
Sure you can.

Just as easy as you can live in a wealthy enclave, far from the messy logistics of processing immigrants while virtue signaling that the unfortunate hosts are bad people for saying ‘slow down’. The level of entitlement is appalling.

Just exactly where do you propose the immigrants should live? Designated places far from the nice, wealthy enclaves?
by Animats | 2025-12-06 03:40:56+00:00
I'm seeing Youtube summary pictures which seem to be AI-generated. I was looking at [1], which is someone in China rebuilding old machines, and some of the newer summary pictures are not frames from the video. They show machines which are the sort of thing you might get by asking a Stable Diffusion type generator to generate a picture from the description.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@linguoermechanic
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-06 03:41:18+00:00
I used to work very heavily with local models and swore by text completion despite many people thinking it was insane that I would choose not to use a chat interface.

LLMs are designed for text completion and the chat interface is basically a fine-tuning hack to make prompting a natural form of text completion to have a more "intuitive" interface for the average user (I don't even want to think about how many AI "enthusiasts" don't really understand this).

But with open/local models in particular: each instruct/chat interface is slightly different. There are tools that help mitigate this, but the more you're working closely to the model the more likely you are to make a stupid mistake because you didn't understand some detail about how the instruct interface was fine tuned.

Once you accept that LLMs are "auto-complete on steroids" you can get much better results by programming the way they were naturally designed to work. It also helps a lot with prompt engineering because you can more easily understand what the models natural tendency is and work with that to generally get better results.

It's funny because a good chunk of my comments on HN these days are combating AI hype, but man are LLMs really fascinating to work with if you approach them with a bit more clear headed of a perspective.
by Groxx | 2025-12-06 03:42:41+00:00
I'll throw in another "+1, quite satisfied with immich" comment, because I'm honestly that impressed.

The project as a whole feels competent.

Stuff that should be fast is fast. E.g. upload a few tens of thousands of photos (saturates my wifi just fine), wait for indexing and thumbnailing to finish, and then jump a few years in the scroll bar - odds are very good that it'll have the thumbnails fully rendered in like a quarter of a second, and fuzzy ones practically instantly. It's transparently fast.

And the image folder structure is very nearly your full data, with metadata files along side the images, so 99% backups and "immich is gone, now what" failure modes are quite easy. And if you change the organization, it'll restructure the whole folder for you to match the new setup, quietly and correctly.

Image content searching is not perfect (is it ever?), but I can turn it on in a couple clicks, search for the breed of my dog, and get hundreds of correct matches before the first mistake. That's more than good enough to be useful, and dramatically better than anything self-hosted that I've tried before, and didn't take an hour of reading to enable.

It's "this is like actually decent" levels that I haven't seen much in self-hosted stuff. Usually it's kinda janky but still technically functional in some core areas, or abysmally slow and weird like nextcloud, but nope. Just solid all around. Highly recommended.
by mraduldeodhiya | 2025-12-06 03:42:52+00:00
Quick Reminder is a fast, simple menu bar app designed to help you stay on track throughout the day. When a task is due, it shows a full-screen reminder that appears above all other apps, making it easy to notice and hard to miss.

The app is especially helpful for users who benefit from clear, high-visibility cues and stronger prompts to remember tasks, routines, and to-dos -ideal for busy minds, deep-focus work, and ADHD-friendly workflows.
by echelon | 2025-12-06 03:45:26+00:00
As soon as people start paying Google for the 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour (2022 figure), then they can dictate what forms of compression and lossiness Google uses to save money.

That doesn't include all of the transcoding and alternate formats stored, either.

People signing up to YouTube agree to Google's ToS.

Google doesn't even say they'll keep your videos. They reserve the right to delete them, transcode them, degrade them, use them in AI training, etc.

It's a free service.
by fsmv | 2025-12-06 03:46:27+00:00
It auto uploads all your photos to the cloud and you can delete them locally and still have them. The biggest feature is the AI search, you can type anything and it will find your pictures without you doing any work categorizing them. It can do objects or backgrounds or colors and it can even do faces so you can search by people's name. That and there's share links to albums and multiplayer albums.

It keeps the originals locally when it uploads forever unless you delete them. There's a one click "free up space on this device" button to delete the local files. It's actually somewhat annoying to export in bulk, you pretty much have to use takeout.
by aw1621107 | 2025-12-06 03:47:01+00:00
> "You're holding it wrong" doesn't uphold when one of the language's touted characteristics is having a bitchy compiler designed to save devs from their own stupidity.

The thing is that Rust's promises are more tightly scoped to very specific types of (mis)behavior. I don't believe it has ever claimed to prevent any and all types of stupidity, let alone ones that have non-stupid uses.
by RossBencina | 2025-12-06 03:47:23+00:00
Awesome. I'd love to know more about instrument making techniques of the era -- especially for precisely calibrated analog computing applications like this. I know that by the 1890s machine tools were commercially available (e.g. Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing were incorporated in 1868 and were operating earlier[1, preface]) but presumably precision instrument makers evolved from clockmakers -- using hand tool techniques perfected much earlier. (Obligatory link to ClickSpring [2])

[1] https://archive.org/details/practicaltreati00cogoog/page/n8/...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXI9KLImC4&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
by adzm | 2025-12-06 03:47:53+00:00
A few big things and lots of small things.

Big performance wins recently optimizing some core operations:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1994067 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1995626

which brings it near chrome performance without the new v8 optimizations.

Still more work to do, including avoiding extra copies just like v8, and exploring more simd etc. Generic slow items for toBase64 and fromBase64: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2003299 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2003305

extra copying of results: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2003461 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1996197

No reason all browsers would not be able to be similar in performance eventually. Pleased this was noticed and being worked on by both v8 and Firefox team
by Klonoar | 2025-12-06 03:48:45+00:00
> Rust won't help, people will always make mistakes, also in Rust.

They don't just use Rust for "protection", they use it first and foremost for performance. They have ballpark-to-matching C++ performance with a realistic ability to avoid a myriad of default bugs. This isn't new.

You're playing armchair quarterback with nothing to really offer.