MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bdangubic | 2025-12-26 02:06:15+00:00
Cant believe I have to answer these questions but here we go

- lego is a toy

- model plane that requires assembly is very likely a toy

- some drones a toy

if you meet a family with a baby or a toddler do not buy them a fucking toy, it is simple as that. it pollutes the planet and brings nothing good to anyone, not a child, not a parent and not you wasting money on stupid shit
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-26 02:06:30+00:00
Personally I'm most excited about "Don’t look up: There are sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites" with Nadia Heninger & Annie Dai. Harald Welte's "ISDN + POTS Telephony at Congress and Camp" covers how they're doing telephone infrastructure at congress/conference itself, and will surely be interesting too:

> Just like at this very event (39C3), the last few years a small group of volunteers has delpoyed and operated legacy telephony networks for ISDN (digital) and POTS (analog) services at CCC-camp2023 and 38C3. Anyone on-site can obtain subscriber lines (POTS, ISDN BRI or PRI service) and use them for a variety of services, including telephony, fax machines, modem dial-up into BBSs as well as dial-up internet access and video telephony.
by mlazos | 2025-12-26 02:09:22+00:00
This is the absolute biggest grift of the century by the groq team. They never shared actual TCO, and I remember a Seminalaysis article about the power consumption being actually insane - this makes sense because they scale the number of chips to fit a single model when they have no dram. They have good inference latency but there was no way the economics were going to work out. Meanwhile Nvidia with every advantage in the world decides they’re worth 20B? It actually doesn’t make sense at all. The only scenarios the groq system would be worth it is in the exact throughput-optimized scenarios Nvidia already thrives in.
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-12-26 02:10:01+00:00
Comparing one billion exact copies of the exact same thing to a different thing that shares some superficial qualities doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when the GP is simply saying that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms.

Edit: to phrase it differently, GP stated that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms. The short form
content on both platforms isn’t all good, but there is so much variety that some of it is. You responded that Coca Cola isn’t an Imperial Stout. It isn’t, but that has absolutely nothing to do with GP’s point.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-26 02:10:13+00:00
> if at some point they request you to provide the code they sent to the phone you don't have for the last 10 years

AFAIK once 2FA is up, you can remove your phone number from GMail.

I know it takes time to set up a recovery account (in case the account is inactive for x months), to remove a phone number, etc. but if one's GMail is important it could be worth doing both now if it hasn't already been done.
by riskable | 2025-12-26 02:11:29+00:00
Not even grammar correction? That's lame and kinda evil.

When you submit your manuscript to a big publisher I guarantee they're using AI to check it (now). At the very least, AI is the only tool that can detect a great number of issues that even the best editors miss. To NOT take advantage of that is a huge waste.

It sounds to me like they're just trying to push out independents and small publishers. Because you know they're not going to ask big publishers if they use AI (who will likely deny it anyway... Liars).

FYI: AI is both the best grammar checker ever as well as the best consistency checker. It'll be able to generate intelligent lexical density report that will know that you used "evasive", "evaded", and "evading" too much (because it knows they're all the same base word). They're also fantastic at noticing ambiguities that humans often miss because they're like-minded and "know what you mean." (Our brains are wired like that to improve the efficiency of our repetitive tasks like reading words).

AI tools can help you improve as a writer and enhance your craft in a lot of ways. To not take advantage of that—to me—feels like burying your head in the sand and screaming, "LA LA LA LA! I don't want to think about AI because it can be used for bad things!"

I've chatted with many writers about AI and nearly all of them don't understand the technology and assume it's literally just taking chunks of other writers works and spewing them out one sentence at a time.

I literally had a conversation with a writer that thought you could take ten sentences written by AI and trace them back to ten books.
by darreld | 2025-12-26 02:11:38+00:00
Synology 923+. Turns out I’m the only one that connects to it in the house. I don’t actually need it. I’m now retired and really only need some external drives or some HDD’s in a hard drive docking station. I just got a docking station. I’ll grab a couple HDD’s and be done with it. Sell the Synology
by moepstar | 2025-12-26 02:12:16+00:00
My Apple Watch (Gen 6).

Really not getting much value out of it, despite being all-in on Apple otherwise (iPhone, Mac, AppleTV, Homepods).

I really feel like it absolutely should be more integrated into the other devices. Set a timer on the phone? Can’t see on watch. Stuff like this bugs me like hell. And I think there’s too much of it.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-26 02:12:34+00:00
Can you help share more of how we can know more about these claims? The only thing I could find related to this was https://x.com/jaredlholt/status/1757799398707188046 and the replies don't add any clarity to understanding what is real and what is not. I'm not saying that's all there is, just that I don't know how to find more and figure out one way or the other what is up where.
by mingus88 | 2025-12-26 02:12:57+00:00
Eh, our Roborock vac has been a net positive

It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.

Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
by esjeon | 2025-12-26 02:13:18+00:00
Given the speed of the progress that Apple has made on their hardware (from M1 to M5), I think the project was already doomed since the very beginning. Reverse engineering per-se is a huge talent drain that wastes tremendous amount of man-hour on a closed problem. Also, the strong SW-HW integration of Mac is sophisticate and fragile, that is difficult to analyze and replicate. Nailing all those details is not only time consuming, but also limited in the scope, and never yield anything beyond status quo.

I’m quite glad that those talented guys finally escaped from the pit hole of reverse engineering. It maybe fun and interesting, but its future was already capped by Apple. I wish they find another fashion, hopefully something more original and progressive. Stop chasing and push forward.
by dinkumthinkum | 2025-12-26 02:13:27+00:00
You don't even know what that word means. Does it make you so sad and upset and very, very angry that this kind person disagreed with you politically? Is this really the place to show how awful a person you are? You've apparently been a member of HN for about 5 minutes. You leftists call anyone that thinks Europeans have a history and culture that has contributed anything positive to the world is one of those people you all constantly prattle but know nothing about. I hate even responding such detritus as this but this defaming of those that have passed particularly at such inappropriate times is so foul. I think the majority of people completely tired of people like you and your epithets carry no weight anymore.
by bigiain | 2025-12-26 02:15:40+00:00
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.

For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.

From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
by password-app | 2025-12-26 02:17:54+00:00
Browser automation finally works reliably enough for most tasks. Vision models have gotten good enough that AI agents can navigate dynamic websites without breaking on every UI change.

I've been using this for automated password rotation after breach notifications. The agent handles navigation while credentials are injected locally—LLM sees the page but never actual password values. When 2FA is required, OTP extraction happens via local regex, not AI.

~89% success rate on standard sites. Turns 6+ hours of tedious credential rotation into 40 minutes of supervision.

The gap between Google's research and "AI that saves me time today" is closing fast.

https://thepassword.app (Mac app I built for this)
by somat | 2025-12-26 02:17:56+00:00
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.

The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.

My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
by currency | 2025-12-26 02:18:17+00:00
Alexa. I use Alexa constantly, except my Echos drop off the network and have to be manually restarted by unplugging them. And I curse every time one of them starts up with, "by the way...."

I have several smart power strips that stopped responding; I have had better luck with individual smart outlets.

Digital audio players with Wi-Fi radios that support AirPlay. I've purchased three, two from Hiby and one from FiiO. The idea was to stream AirPlay to the DAP from one of my PCs, getting quality audio over wired headphones, while I walked around the house. The Hiby models would drop the stream occasionally and both had batteries that died in a year or less. The FiiO would accept streams from Apple devices, but not third-party AirPlay streams. I ended up listening to my phone.

I found bone conduction headphones don't come anywhere close to audiophile quality.

Wi-Fi in general, living in a row home in a neighborhood crowded with 2.4 GHz transceivers.

I bought and stored away a large drawer full of microphones, headphones, mice, and keyboards before I settled on the models I like.

I've never used a Windows trackpad that was worth spit. I can't use a Mac without a trackpad next to my keyboard and mouse. The difference on Windows is maddening.

I was getting frustrated with the battery in my old Apple watch as it got older, but now that I have two watches and can switch between them, I wear one or the other 24 hours a day.
by basilikum | 2025-12-26 02:18:40+00:00
The easy way to get tickets is via local hackspaces that are somewhat (not necessarily formally) associated to the CCC. There is a ticket contingent for people active in and around the wider chaos community that gets distributed via the hackspaces. They all handle things slightly differently, but the way to get tickets is usually to show up at a hackspace once in a while (or knowing someone who is active there) and getting tickets from there in the presale phase.

The other guaranteed way for tickets is to volunteer enough as an angel at the Congress the year before to get an angel voucher. But you obviously need a ticket for a Congress in the first place do to that.
by chasing0entropy | 2025-12-26 02:19:21+00:00
Aren't part of the cost Yet :) actually upgradeable components were priority when motherboards and CPUs were too expensive to upgrade, it was ram ssds and memory that were changed out...

Soon, now actually, it is the inverse. Ram, ssds, high speed network, consumer GPUs, and anything else that needs a modest amount of DRAM.
by araes | 2025-12-26 02:19:47+00:00
The "terribly sad" part doesn't seem like it really got enough. 3,000 direct losses, and 7,000 with projected secondary / tertiary losses is pretty devastating in a town of 11,000.

There's jobs in the local area. At 50 miles nebraska.gov Jobs has ~2,500 [1], Indeed has ~1,000 [2], and ZipRecruiter has ~500 [3]. However, not many that a Tyson Food cattle worker can probably easily qualify for. Most tend to be at least somewhat specialized, and quite a few that require something like nursing, healthcare, education, or otherwise.

American Foods Group LLC in Kearney, NE apparently at least has jobs that are related "Beef Production, $19.65 - $26.00, 4500 employees, process 4 million pounds of beef a day". [4] Looks like maybe the best available in the area.

Still, even if several thousand leave, that's still a pretty enormous hit on 11,000. Lose a 1/4 - 1/2 your population in a couple months or so.

[1] https://neworks.nebraska.gov/vosnet/jobbanks/joblist.aspx?en...

[2] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Lexington%2C+NE&radius=50&s...

[3] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/jobs-search?search=&location=Le...

[4] https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=30014a5bd9219934&from=shar...
by II2II | 2025-12-26 02:19:54+00:00
Question: why is a union memory unsafe?

My meager understanding of unions is that they allow data of different types to be overlayed in the same area of memory, with the typical use case being for data structures that may contain different types of data (and the union typically being embedded in a struct that identifies the data type). This certainly presents problems with the interpretation of data stored in the union, but it also strikes me that the union object would have a clearly defined sized and the compiler would be able to flag any memory accesses outside of the bounds of the union. While this is clearly problematic, especially if at least one of the elements is a pointer, it also seems like the sort of problem that a compiler can catch (which is the benefit of Rust on this front).

Please correct me if I'm wrong. This sort of software development is a hobby for me (anything that I do for work is done in languages like Python).
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-26 02:21:15+00:00
If you knew about China, you would know that local governments are basically the kids of the emperor. You can complain to the emperor about his kids. You cannot complain to the emperor about the emperor.

But even that aside, the emperor still has ultimate say in the final ruling from whatever court. Please show me the stories of courts shooting down Xi. I can show you tons shooting down Trump...
by cpburns2009 | 2025-12-26 02:21:39+00:00
Yeah, I don't see how Python is fundamentally different from JavaScript as far as dynamicism goes. Sure Python has operator overloading, but JavaScript would implement those as regular methods. Pyrhon's init & new aren't any more convoluted than JavaScript's constructors. Python may support multiple inheritance but method and attribute resolution just uses the MRO which is no different than JavaScript's prototype chain.
by iamleppert | 2025-12-26 02:21:57+00:00
DTMF was designed to interoperate with human voice and the tones were chosen on purpose to be unlikely or impossible for human voice to trigger. If there is no human voice, you don't need to use DTMF you could use any number of tones. I wonder if you could use base64 or base58 with 64 or 58 unique tones and be able to send text at a reasonable rate?
by themaninthedark | 2025-12-26 02:22:04+00:00
RING THEIR BELLS

(aka "The Munchkin's Theme" )
(to the tune of "Jingle Bells")

Slashing through the Orcs

With a good two-handed blade

Over corpses we go

And through the gore we wade

Mace on helmet rings

Making bodies fly

What fun to sing our Slaying Song

And watch these suckers DIE!

https://hack.org/~mc/writings/hackerdom/ring-their-bells.tex...
by iJohnDoe | 2025-12-26 02:22:07+00:00
Well said. It’s like human assembly lines being replaced with robots. Humans did those jobs for a really long time. Then they were replaced by automation.

We’re on a slippery slope, because what happens when AI gets even better over the next 5 years? Robots took time to fully replace one person on an assembly line; it didn’t happen overnight.

Basic income seems more like a reality soon. Or you’re going to have slums and the wealthy.
by didgetmaster | 2025-12-26 02:22:32+00:00
If you are bilingual, with one language being stronger than the other one; try reading something in the language you are least comfortable with. I do this (e.g. reading LoTR in Dutch) and it forces me to pay closer attention to each sentence.

There are words you don't know or know how to use them properly. It will help you learn the second language better, while also helping you to not gloss over whole passages.
by vel0city | 2025-12-26 02:22:37+00:00
20 years ago I was hopping from Intel to AMD and then back to Intel. After that practically every decent jump in CPU performance on the Intel side of things meant a new socket (LGA775, 1156, 1155, 1150, 1151...). AMD typically kept sockets for a bit longer but wasn't as competitive until Ryzen which had a few jumps in chipset compatibility in there.

In the last 20 or so years if I wanted a few years newer CPU for whatever reason it usually meant I needed a whole new motherboard, and that often (but not always) also meant new RAM.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-26 02:22:40+00:00
I have a first.last email, but it's created quite the interesting situation. Turns out some dude in Australia has the same first+last name as me, and he's been using firstlast@gmail.com. As far as I can find from Google's documentation, the email with no dots should be the primary and the one with dots an alias, but I'm guessing because I registered mine ages ago (back in 2006) it takes precedence. I have no idea how he hasn't noticed that his gmail emails are going to another inbox - maybe Google delivers them to us both or something? Regardless, I've gotten very personal emails (like from his therapist) and tried to reach out explaining the situation and asked these parties to let him know he needs to stop using that email, but to no avail.

Honestly the one who is at fault here is Google. If first.last and firstlast are treated as aliases, they straight up should not allow people to create them once the first exists, rather than just send emails to someone else. I've tried to respect my Australian brother's privacy (like not reading his therapist's emails and such), but not everyone is gonna do that.
by olowe | 2025-12-26 02:24:35+00:00
Couple of anecdotes from the dev side.

I worked on an IoT project at one of the big German car makers and it was a mess. More money than sense. They didn't really have any idea why they were putting software into stuff. Just some vague notion that some software systems needed to exist to then present its existence to the next boss up; presumably all the way up and out to investors. Discussing the actual functionality or how the product(s) would actually be experienced in the real world was essentially taboo.

There was a podcast called garbage.fm [1] with one of the hosts working for General Electric at the time it was recorded. It sounded like GE were yet another one of those incumbent companies doing "smart" Internet of Things products just because they were worried about being left behind.

[1]: https://garbage.jcs.org
by viraptor | 2025-12-26 02:25:27+00:00
I've played with this a bit and it's ok. I'd place it somewhere around sonnet 4.5 level, probably below. But with this aggressive pricing you can just run 3 copies to do the same thing, choose the one that succeeded and still come out way ahead with the cost. Not as great as following instructions as Claude models and can get lost, but still "good enough".

I'm very happy with using it to just "do things". When doing in depth debugging or a massive plan is needed, I'd go with something better, but later going through the motions? It works.
by rgoulter | 2025-12-26 02:25:29+00:00
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.

It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.

Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.

The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
by mingus88 | 2025-12-26 02:25:30+00:00
It’s very subjective, like any jewlery purchase.

For instance I never liked the default band, but the Milanese loop is great. My wife never wore her series 5 but I got her a series 11 which is a few grams lighter and thinner and she wears it all the time now.

I was on the fence about getting an ultra but for some reason never liked the size and shape (big rectangle with a huge crown bulge) since I have small wrists. I ended up getting a garmin epix pro at a big discount which is slightly smaller and round.

At the end of the day they are great if you want to collect data on yourself. Even though my wife didn’t like her series 5 the hypertension features were worth trying a newer one.
by dpatterbee | 2025-12-26 02:26:01+00:00
As a daily user of both a first gen framework 13 and a M1 MacBook Pro, the MacBook touchpad is like 5-10% better. And I suspect that's all software because I did something recently that absolutely fucked the response and feel of my framework touchpad that I haven't figured out how to undo so there's clearly a lot of room for manoeuvre in software.
by lemming | 2025-12-26 02:26:47+00:00
Well done, when I was growing up we would always have some time in the evening when we would read a book out loud. When we were younger my parents would read and as we got older we would read sometimes too. I tried the same with my daughter but she stopped wanting to when she was around 10, but she’s in a better space now two years on so I’m going to try to resurrect the custom. It’s a really lovely thing to do as a family, but as the article suggests is quite strange these days and it can be difficult and require discipline to make the time.