MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aembleton | 2025-12-15 12:57:14+00:00
I like rewatching old TV shows and films, streamed from my Jellyfin server.

For me, my rule is to get a Google TV, because I can change out the launcher to Flauncher. At least that way I don't see any ads. Google may well still be tracking me, but they do all over the web and I have an Android phone so they've already got plenty of data on me. I just avoid their ads so that it minimises the profitability of that data.
by georgeecollins | 2025-12-15 12:57:15+00:00
I worry a lot about privacy in general but its hard for me to figure out the danger posed by my roborock. I suppose it has the floor plans of my house and knows we vacuum on Saturdays. It doesn't seem to know if the object passing by is me or my cat.

Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets.

What is the concern?
by anymouse123456 | 2025-12-15 12:57:19+00:00
This!

I was a very early customer of Roomba and loved them when they came out. I had pets at the time, and the machine would consistently fail in about 14 months. I finally figured out that I needed to buy them from Costco, so that I could get them replaced.

Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.

I guess Rodney Brooks got busy with other interests, and whomever ran things didn't realize that Tim Ferris is full of shit.

It was extremely frustrating to watch these assholes destroy the company right from the outset. All they needed to do, was to slowly walk forward and iterate with improvements.

The only surprise in this news is that it took SO LONG for them to dismantle the company.

I do not think it's appropriate for an organization holding this much deeply personal data can be sold to any foreign entity.
by _Chief | 2025-12-15 12:57:39+00:00
Also Kenyan, I once recently spent 10min explaining a technical topic via chat, and the response I got was "was this GPT?". I took a few minutes then just linked an article of how underpaid Kenyans trained ChatGPT for OpenAI [1]

1: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
by dsign | 2025-12-15 12:57:44+00:00
Actually, there's a sweet solution to the writing and art crisis we are inflicting ourselves with in our AI craze. I call it "the island". Just find a nice tiny islet somewhere, make a few houses, and rent them by the week to writers/artists. No internet in the place. Rent out sanctioned devices; glorified typewriters without Internet access nor GPU nor CPU fast enough to run an LLM. Bring a notary to certify stuff was purely human-made. Have fun with like-minded individuals.
by nicolaslem | 2025-12-15 12:57:56+00:00
I have an i3 controlled by Home Assistant, it is on an "IoT" network without access to the Internet. Works like a charm. The integration allows to start, stop and view information like battery level, area cleaned, issues, etc. No mapping though.

The only caveat is that to associate it with a WiFi network, the legacy app is required. So if the app is pulled from the app stores, it may not be able to connect again after a factory reset. I don't think the pairing requires access to the Internet but it uses a bluetooth protocol that I don't think anyone reverse engineered yet.

Edit: I vaguely remember that mine also stopped working a year or so ago. I factory reset it, re-paired it and it has been working well so far.
by kome | 2025-12-15 12:58:05+00:00
as a researcher, writing ended up being my job, and more specifically, writing in english. i never developed any sentimental link to the english language, to me it always felt bland, because i had to use it in bland environments, to write texts that had to be bland and manneristic.

chatgpt revolutionized my work because it makes creating those bland texts so much easier and fast. it made my job more interesting because i don't have to care about writing as much as before.

to those who complain about ai slop, i have nothing to say. english was slop before, even before ai, and not because of some conspiracy, but because the gatekeepers of journals and scientific production already wanted to be fed slop.

for sure society will create others, totally idiosyncratic ways to generate distinction and an us vs others. that's natural. but, for now, let's enjoy this interregnum...
by rimunroe | 2025-12-15 12:58:09+00:00
> If your job is cut by AI, you've been producing mediocrity anyway.

In my opinion it’s unfortunate and inaccurate to frame this as most likely being a problem with the quality of the work of a person who was let go or who can’t find a job. It’s very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.
Show HN: Empirical evidence of a multiscale structural intersection
by johnoliveiradev | 2025-12-15 12:58:36+00:00
I’m publishing aggregated results of an empirical benchmark documenting a multiscale structural-intersection regime.

The intersection persists across scales, seeds, and parameter sweeps, and separates from strong null models that preserve marginals and coarse support while destroying correlation.

Results only; generator and engine are intentionally private.

Repo: https://github.com/johnoliveiradev/Multiscale-structural-reg...
by lm28469 | 2025-12-15 12:58:39+00:00
I know someone who was camping in a tent next to a river during a storm, took a pic of the stream and asked chatgpt if it was risky to sleep there given that it "rained a lot" ...

People are unplugging their brains and are not even aware that their questions cannot be answered by llms, I witnessed that with smart and educated people, I can't imagine how bad it's going to be during formative years
by Treegarden | 2025-12-15 12:58:48+00:00
I see a natural equilibrium with a tension: automation (also through AI) causes unit economics to drop and results in cheaper prices. At the same time, salaries for contributors grow because their impact is so high. So you end up with a new equilibrium of much cheaper prices and much higher salaries. What, however, about the people who can’t contribute? IMO the most natural and fair approach is to support (through whatever means) people’s “education”, allowing them to upgrade their skills so that they can contribute. IMO this leads to a new tension: not rich vs poor, or useful vs useless, but people who can up-level their skills vs those who don’t. And I think, at its extreme, it boils down to this: how much plasticity does your brain have? Because every other constraint, society can adapt or accommodate for.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-12-15 12:58:54+00:00
Arduino was the first (and then, the only) simple microcontroller, that you could give to someone, even a child, give them a 5 page tutorial, and they'd be able to blink leds, capture a button press, a potentiometer input and display the results via leds or 7 segment displays. Every other microcontroller needed a special board to program it, you needed a thick book to program it, take care of registers, use some weird windows-only ide and usually none of that was free... arduino was just different, one board, one cable, free software and good documentation.

Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project.

But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money.

Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-15 12:58:57+00:00
Yes, and email is decentralized in theory...

If using a VPN for access is forbidden by the ToS, you only need to detect a VPN connection once to prove violation.

The IPv4 address space to consider is limited and it is technically absolutely feasible to exhaustively scrape and block the majority of VPN endpoints. Realistically any VPN provider will have some rather small IPv4 subnets make do, shit's expensive. More so, for the trivial case, VPN anonymization works best, when many people share one IP endpoint, naturally the spread is limited. There are VPN providers, some may even be trustworthy, which have the mission of "flying under the radar" with residential IPs and all, but they are way, waaaay more expensive. For most people that's no option.

IPv6 is a different matter, but with the very increase in tracking and access control discussed here, that may be even more of a reason, IPv6 is not going to be a thing any time soon....

Thinking about it, maybe this AI monetization FOMO and monopoly protectionism, will incidentally lead to a technological split of the web. IPv4 will become the "corpo net" and IPv6 will be the "alt net". I think there may be a chance to make IPv6 the cool internet of the people, right now!
by general1465 | 2025-12-15 12:59:42+00:00
If it won't then it is effectively short circuiting whole capitalist society as we know it

If people are not working, then they have no income - Less taxes for state

If they have no income, they can't buy stuff or services - Less taxes for state

If companies can't sell stuff and services, they are going bankrupt - Less taxes for state

If state has no income from taxes, state is going bankrupt.

Consumers, Companies and Governments all will go bust if state are not going to massively and aggressively tax AI and automation. Then pay UBI to consumers so we can at least pretend that capitalism is still a thing.
by atwrk | 2025-12-15 12:59:44+00:00
That was kind of my point, I don't buy any of these surveillance appliances.

But answering as a hypthetical roomba owner: As I am from the EU, this new ownership would actually be better for me. The US already mandates spying with devices like these, and has been caught multiple times doing so already. It is also known to share info with the domestic services, the latter point not being true for China.
by Jemm | 2025-12-15 13:02:12+00:00
https://sim.mycnc.app/ A CNC simulator that runs in the browser or as a PwA. I wrote this mostly for myself to compliment a g-code sender I am also working on https://mycnc.app/ . The simulator has some basic g-code and cut verification and analysis built in with more to come.

I am learning hobby CNC having come from the 3D printer world and I found that the CNC software is considerably more complex than today's 3D printer software.

CNC seems to be the next hobbyist maker boom with the likes of Makera and Nestworks having very successful Kickstarters.
by dilap | 2025-12-15 13:02:16+00:00
I read about 4 paragraphs of the blog post, it does not at all read like it was written by ChatGPT!

Some people are perhaps overly focussed on superficial things like em-dashes. The real tells for ChatGPT writing are more subtle -- a tendency towards hyperboly (it's not A, it's [florid restatment of essentially A] B!), a certain kind of rhythym, and frequently a kind of hard to describe "emptiness" of claims.

(LLMs can write in mang styles, but this is the sort of "kid filling out the essay word count" style you get in chatgpt etc by default.)
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-12-15 13:03:13+00:00
Same can be said about private corporations. We humans still havent figured out how to structure institutions without constructive destruction in the end. Democracies and free markets both have this correctiv destruction built in and both mechanism are under attack.

Lets hope we still get chances to vote out autocrats peacefully and smash oligopols as the sovereign.
by actionfromafar | 2025-12-15 13:03:32+00:00
First, just the evergrowing tracking of everything, it's just unwholesome in general.

Second, why assume a random Chinese tech company will manage to keep this information to themselves? I wouldn't exactly bet against some terabytes of videos appear on some torrent indexer. Now, combine with modern AI tools for sifting for what you are interested in, and it might hit closer to home for someone.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-15 13:04:10+00:00
Small project I've been developing. It's designed to make configuration easier, after many frustrations with omegaconf and hydra in the past.

The idea is quite simple: you create clean objects in pure python, but the glue between them can be expressed declaratively (also in python, or maybe a ini/toml/json/yaml config file).

I know there are some challenges with this approach, such as IDE support and auto-complete. However, tab-completing agents are quite good at working with apywire config files, and I've been quite comfortable maintaining object specs without a dedicated extension.

Would love to hear feedback!
by nout | 2025-12-15 13:04:27+00:00
Well, his writing style is too good. The sentences flow too beautifully, he uses rich vocabulary and styling. It's unusual to see that style of writing online. I definitely don't poses that power.

I don't know the author of this article and so I don't know whether I should feel good or bad about this. LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM. The ride in the closed horse carriage was so comfortable it felt like being in a car and so people assumed it was a car. Is that good? Is that bad?

Also note that LLMs are now much more than just "one ML model to predict the next character" - LLMs are now large systems with many iterations, many calls to other systems, databases, etc.
by nextaccountic | 2025-12-15 13:04:37+00:00
Just big AI datacenters. If this encourages people to run local AI, all the better.

> Should an AI data center from pharmaceuticals or biotech startup be taxed extra per kWh, even if the AI is purely used for medical research?

That's not a gotcha.. those are all policy choices. My personal preference is, yes, of course - medical research today is taxed just fine. If there's lobbying to specifically grant tax benefits to medical research, I can see an exception being carved.
by torginus | 2025-12-15 13:05:45+00:00
I'm arguing this is an entirely flawed product category (which might have elements of fraud as well) - things that are easy to get started with, but as your skill level or the requirements complexity increases, you start to see the limitations, and get entangled in the 'ecosystem', so given a sufficiently knowledgeable workforce, you are at a net negative by year 2 or 3 compared to experts having built something bespoke, or going the open-source route.

I'm sure you have encountered the pattern where you write A that calls B that uses C as the underlying platform. You need something in A, and know C can do it, but you have to figure out how you can achieve it through B. For a highly skilled individual(or one armed with AI) , B might have a very different value proposition than one who has to learn stuff from scratch.

Js packages are perfect illustration of these issues - there are tons of browser APIs that are wrapped by easy-to-use 'wrapper' packages, that have unforeseen consequences down the road.
by muixoozie | 2025-12-15 13:05:51+00:00
I read the comments you linked and don't really think they literally believe Rust is magic. I dunno though I guess I could imagine a vibe coder tacitly believing that. Not saying you're wrong. I just think most people say that tongue in cheek. This saying has been around forever in the Haskell community for decades. Feels like a long running joke at this point
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-12-15 13:06:16+00:00
You'll have to rip the ability to generate unique numbers from quite literally anywhere in my app and save them without conflict from my cold, dead hands.

The ability to know ahead of time what a primary key will be (in lieu of persisting it first, then returning) opened up a whole new world of architecting work in my app. It made a lot of previous awkward things feel natural.
by mindslight | 2025-12-15 13:06:55+00:00
Those benefits were chiefly lower prices for the manufactured goods. But the Federal Reserve interpreted this as a problem per their mandate to keep CPI going upwards, and created a bunch of new money that went into asset bubbles. So the "benefits" to the average person also included housing unaffordability and the general financialization of everything. Viewed through this lens, it does not seem like any sort of collective societal decision.
by analog31 | 2025-12-15 13:07:10+00:00
I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service.

But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?

I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-15 13:08:20+00:00
Sounds like a great way for someone to accidentally harm their infant. What an irresponsible thing to say. There are all sorts of little food risks, especially until they turn 1 or so (and of course other matters too, but food immediately comes to mind).

The stakes are too high and the amount you’re allowed to get wrong is so low. Having been through the infant-wringer myself yeah some people fret over things that aren’t that big of a deal, but some things can literally be life or death. I can’t imagine trying to vet ChatGPT’s “advice” while delirious from lack of sleep and still in the trenches of learning to be a parent.

But of course he just had to get that great marketing sound bite didn’t he?
by twistslider | 2025-12-15 13:08:48+00:00
Last.fm isn't really expanding their API unfortunately. You can however see Last.fm stats in the main artist/album/track commands.

As for spammyness, I'm aware this is an issue. For non-bot channels I recommend using .togglecommand and enabling just a few specific commands, and setting a small embed mode so .fm commands don't take up too much space in chat.
by NekkoDroid | 2025-12-15 13:08:53+00:00
To be fair, `/bin/sh` is suppose to be the POSIX shell, so as long as they are compliant it really doesn't matter. The problem with `/bin/sh` being bash, is that it provides extensions (even when running in POSIX mode from what I remember) and relying on them makes those scripts technically broken.

It would be more of a comparison if dash was aiming to be a drop-in replacement for bash and not a POSIX shell.
by stephen_g | 2025-12-15 13:08:54+00:00
> LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM.

I really don’t think that is what most normal people assume… And while LLMs can definitely produce more grammatically accurate prose with probably a wider vocabulary than the average person, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good writing…
by nephihaha | 2025-12-15 13:09:03+00:00
I think you missed my point. The idea is not new at all. Winston Churchill supported the idea of a United States of Europe, and so did certain figures way back in the EEC days. If an idea is promoted over the course of decades, of course some kids will promote it later.

I heard ideas being promoted in the early to mid nineties that are only coming about now. In fact the 1980s, "Star Trek the Next Generation" does that in several instances (such as AI assistants and tracking everyone's location electronically.)

"Had no idea who Oswald Mosley even was, but looking him up, he's been dead for 30+ years now."

Erm, that was my point. It's not a new idea and has long been promoted across the political spectrum including the far right.

"The EU, in its form back then from 30 years ago is different than the EU beast of today which swallowed the previously separate EU, EEC and EC post 2009. The US of 30 years ago is different than the US of today because society has changed a lot since then both demographically and economically."

I see it largely developing to plan. It started as a kind of customs union in Benelux and has been on that road ever since.

The absorption of the Iron Curtain countries has been its biggest challenge, and if it expands outside Europe that won't be some great shock either. There has been talk of adding Turkey and even Morocco to the EU for decades.

"You can't dig up people from 70 years ago as representative for the same ideologies because both the ideologies and the people are different now. That's like driving forward while only looking in the rearview mirror."

Yes, you can. It's historical progression. There was a roadmap for EU development that was being discussed as far back as the seventies and even the fifties.

"Right wing people have and will be Eurosceptics (Euro here meaning the EU org in Brussels, not Europe the continent) since they don't want to be led by a foreign org that's not directly accountable to them."

That isn't true. Plenty of right wing people have been Europhiles, even the far right.

On the flipside, there have also been plenty of left and far left Eurosceptics. Left wing Brexiteers in the UK are/were a thing. They called their movement "Lexit" but have been mostly written out of accounts, which tend to focus more on Farage and the right wing ones. Their arguments are not usually based around migration, but local democracy and also their notion that the EU was capitalist and neoliberal, and revolved around trade and money.
by codeflo | 2025-12-15 13:09:04+00:00
To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.

Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article:

> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country.

And ChatGPT's "improvement":

> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country.

Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.
by oersted | 2025-12-15 13:09:18+00:00
It's an age-old cycle in media. There have been innumerable waves of more gritty aesthetic trends when things became too polished or inane: jazz, rock, punk, rap, hippies, goths, hipsters, 70s cinema, HBO golden-age, YouTube, blogging, early social media, even MAGA...

Authenticity, wether it is sincere or not, can become an incredibly powerful force now and then. Regardless of AI, the communication style in tech, and overall, was bound to go back to basics after the hacker culture of the post-dotcom era morphed, in the 2010s, into the corporatism they were fighting to begin with, yet again.