MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasongill | 2025-12-15 12:05:44+00:00
I had one of these as well as a handful of iButtons. I think I still have them in my box of "maybe this will be useful some day" electronic junk that will never be useful. I got them, as well as some iButton readers of different shapes and sizes, as free samples from Dallas Semiconductor back in 1999 just because I thought they were neat. Never found a use for them, but it was fun to have a "class ring"-size ring that contained some favorite bookmarks.

I have only seen iButton's "in the wild" in one use case - for tracking the nightly rounds of security guards in commercial buildings/industrial complexes. You've probably seem small round discs on the wall in office buildings (normally a round disc with a concentric ring); those are iButton terminals. The guards each have a keychain with an iButton, and as they do their rounds they press it on the terminal to record proof that they went to each terminal at the proper time. Obviously this is a use-case for NFC or a variety of other technologies but for some reason I've seen the iButton-based systems used in a half dozen buildings.
by crote | 2025-12-15 12:06:06+00:00
> Are they more in number and easier to use than the Arduino libraries?

I haven't done a direct comparison, but considering that the hobbyist ecosystem (which is the main source of those libs) is shifting over, it is just a matter of time.

> Why do you think the Arduino is more difficult than "drag-n-drop flashing" by comparison?

Because you need to install an IDE and mess around with things like serial drivers - and it gets a lot more complicated if you ever have to flash a bootloader. It's not hard, but it's definitely not as trivial as the RP2xxx's drag-n-drop.
by willis936 | 2025-12-15 12:06:23+00:00
I can't give 100% confirmation, but it was working one day and not the next, with no changes to my network along the way.

Yes, it is an absolutely infuriating state of affairs and one could claim we were naive to not see this coming. Needing to be this cynical is the root of crisis of trust. The only thing we can rely on is that everything is a race to the bottom.

That being said, there aren't many commercial offline robot vacuums. I bought a secondhand roborock unit that is on the approved list put out by valetudo. I got one that required some disassembly to flash, which maybe lowers the market price. It's been working great and the home assistant hooks are working. There isn't a company on the planet that is in between me and my robot vacuum now.
by tanin | 2025-12-15 12:07:35+00:00
For an absolute beginner in public speaking who has fear of public speaking, I'd recommend joining Toastmasters.

A Toastmasters club is like a simulated environment for public speaking where everyone is extremely supportive. I was still anxious even I knew that at the beginning... even when everyone insisted anything was okay.

After 100+ speech giving at a club in Bellevue, now I don't feel anxious anymore speaking in front of 50+ people in a real-world situation where everyone might not be supportive. I can just get up and speak.

It's funny how our minds even work. It turns out simulation is good enough for training our minds.

The quality of public speaking is a separate aspect. Toastmasters do help with that but I can't claim I am good at it yet. But, for anxiety, I now feel almost nothing.
by antonyh | 2025-12-15 12:07:42+00:00
Nothing on the scale of most the things mentioned here, but I'm trying to assemble the first version of my digital garden to publish online a bunch of notes I've collected over many years. I'm also trying to put together a workable system to catalogue and index hundreds of thousands of digital images scattered across multiple devices so I can deduplicate them and collate them effective. Digital Librarian is not a hat I ever thought I'd end up wearing, but I refuse to buy more 18Tb HDDs and still not have any means to locate pictures in a meaningful way.
by cs702 | 2025-12-15 12:08:11+00:00
According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a]

Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too.

The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobile, camera/microphone-equipped robots already inside people's homes and offices.

More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.

---

[a] https://www.ft.com/content/239d4720-aee4-443d-a761-1bd8bb1a1...
by saubeidl | 2025-12-15 12:08:30+00:00
The French aren't "the people" of the EU either.

There was no EU wide vote, so you cannot claim "the people" want or do not want things.

It hasn't just been communicated in the founding charta, but communicated and confirmed over and over and over again. [0]. If you have a problem with what member states do, then I actually agree - that's why we need to get rid of that layer!

I never claimed your opinion didn't exist, I just called you out for trying to frame your opinion as the one of "the people".

[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
by jonjodev | 2025-12-15 12:08:34+00:00
I’ve been working on https://github.com/coro-sh/coro, which is an auth management platform for NATS.

The goal is basically to be a self hosted, open source alternative to Synadia Cloud’s BYON feature.

The whole project is shipped as a single Go binary with an embedded UI developed with Svelte. Has been a lot of fun to work on!
by heidarb | 2025-12-15 12:08:43+00:00
Working on Infralyst: https://infralyst.io

Self serve AWS cost savings for Terraform users. Connect AWS (read only role via a Terraform module), GitHub and Terraform state. Infralyst finds underused resources and opens a PR to downsize, gated by best practice checks so it doesn’t suggest sketchy changes.

Free: 3 downsizing PRs per workspace. Pro: $99/mo unlimited PRs. Looking for early users and blunt feedback from teams running AWS + Terraform.

If you try it and mention you came from HN, I’m happy to set you up with an early adopter discount.
by cons0le | 2025-12-15 12:09:20+00:00
Look at the app ISSEN. The "best" would be to somehow have a hypothetical LLM that actually works. For now it's only at the beginner level. We can use raw input and spaced repetition to guage progress instead of tests.

I've learned 2 languages to fluency, and the only thing that ever works for me is immersion with comprehensible input, and conversation. I've been generally disillusioned with language learning apps that aren't "language exchange / penpal". And I've tried all of them. I don't think language learning is easily "gamified".
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-15 12:09:29+00:00
The top 1% already pays more than 40% of all federal income tax at a 26.09% effective rate. The bottom 50% has an effective rate of 3.7% and contributes only 3% of all tax revenues.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

How about the rich say that 50% of the economy should pay their fair share?
by darkwater | 2025-12-15 12:10:00+00:00
Well, I don't know how much you can innovate in that space, while keeping things reliable for decades like Vorwerk does. I own a (2n hand) TM31 that's probably 15 years old now, and I have friend with the TM21 (I guess?) which is like the first version and it has over 20 years now and it's still perfectly working.

Last versions, with big LC touchscreen, recipes on a cartridge o downloaded from Internet, and now I read that latest one can reach 160C to caramelize things or can do slow cooking.

I mean, I don't feel like they sat on the product, although the other day I saw a cooking robot from some other (japanese?) manufacturer which had 2 bowls in the same machine to cook 2 things at the same time. That seems an interesting feature Thermomix is missing.
by anomaly_ | 2025-12-15 12:10:38+00:00
I recently bought a handheld spectrophotometer for work (color assessment). The product from the leading US company (X-Rite) is ~US$15k in my market. I bought the Chinese equivalent for US$3k. Maybe if I needed guaranteed nine 9s of colour accuracy the US product would be worth it, but for 95% of users in the market, the Chinese product is more than fine.
by alexgotoi | 2025-12-15 12:11:28+00:00
https://hackernewsai.com/

Trying to grow this newsletter - a roundup of the most votted and commented AI links from HN. After 11 issues I am at 221 subs, most of them from Reddit posts (I post a short description of the top 5 links on several AI subreddits). Not sure how long this will work, I feel like I spam these subreddits.

I want to launch on Product Hunt soon and maybe add it to some newsletter directories, but I have low expectations.

I post here on HN a link to each issue after I send it, maybe that will get from traction one day.
by williamtadeus | 2025-12-15 12:11:35+00:00
Hi there! I tried reaching out via hello@tikpal.ai, but the email bounced back saying the address doesn't exist yet—just wanted to give you a heads-up so you can fix it!

I have two quick questions regarding the subscription and API specs:

Core Subscription: Which specific LLMs are running the default agent? Is it OpenAI-based, Gemini, or something else?

BYO Keys: You mentioned users can "bring their own APIs." Could you clarify which providers are currently supported? (Specifically looking for Gemini vs. OpenAI support).

Thanks and good luck with the campaign!
by ghc | 2025-12-15 12:11:38+00:00
A market doesn't have to shrink all that much before there's a collapse. Generally it's quite gradual, and then very sudden. There's a tipping point where a market cannot sustain a public company and their structural overhead and have declining revenue. Investors don't want to invest in shrinking markets because it's a guaranteed way to lose money. This leads to share price collapse and the sudden rapid destruction of market incumbents.
by blazingbanana | 2025-12-15 12:11:47+00:00
Really sorry about that, longer running audio (~10m+) is something I'm working on along with handling multiple speakers.

I've been focused on getting functional parity across all OS's since the Android release. This is very close to being done and I just need to reach the milestone of it being available on all platforms before I move forward.

Hopefully you will take another look when the next update is out.
by sbuttgereit | 2025-12-15 12:11:52+00:00
OK... but that concern seems a bit artificial.. if bigints are appropriate: use them. If the table won't get to bigint sizes: don't. I've even used smallint for some tables I knew were going to be very limited in size. But I wouldn't worry about smallint's very limited number of values for those tables that required a larger size for more records: I'd just use int or bigint for those other tables as appropriate. The reality is that, unless I'm doing something very specific where being worried about the number of bytes will matter... I just use bigint. Yes, I'm probably being wasteful, but in the cases where those several extra bytes per record are going to really add up.... I probably need bigint anyway and in cases where bigint isn't going to matter the extra bytes are relatively small in aggregate. The consistency of simply using one type itself has value.

And for those using ints as keys... you'd be surprised how many databases in the wild won't come close to consuming that many IDs or are for workloads where that sort of volume isn't even aspirational.

Now, to be fair, I'm usually in the UUID camp and am using UUIDv7 in my current designs. I think the parent article makes good points, but I'm after a different set of trade-offs where UUIDs are worth their overhead. Your mileage and use-cases may vary.
by 0dayz | 2025-12-15 12:12:01+00:00
Do you think that Russia wants to Kickstart a nuclear war considering they would start the war?

The reason why Russia hasn't used nukes against Ukraine is simple: it would cause Russia to be isolated completely from China and even seen as a unhinged potential enemy and it would most likely be seen as an attack on nato and if nothing else would normalize nuke proliferation as now countries who don't have nukes sees that a new precedent.
by Y-bar | 2025-12-15 12:12:17+00:00
I too think yearly updates are a bit too much and I too want to keep my devices for a long time. Still rocking an iPhone 12 (mini).

But support for newer codecs like AV1 and general hardware refreshes to keep up with the underlying Android base would still seem like good ideas to me.

Reading the specs it seems that the Shield also would benefit from being able to detect frame rate to auto-switch via HDMI.

Higher network bandwidth to play UHD Blu-ray rips seems like something people want.
by willis936 | 2025-12-15 12:12:57+00:00
I pulled the battery.

As an aside, I will say that municipal waste has antipatterns for responsible waste disposal. Someone could:

A) disassemble their ewaste, remove the battery, look up which of 10 days a year they can drop it off, and pay a $50+ fee

B) quietly put it in their trash

I'll let you guess what most people are actually doing.

Contrast this with car batteries where manufacturers pay for batteries that are not responsibly handled and consumers are incentivized to dispose of them responsibly with a financial carrot. The manufacturer pays for the disposal, passes that cost on to the consumer, and the consumer gets the money back when they responsibly dispose of it.
by aurareturn | 2025-12-15 12:13:44+00:00
Very unfortunately, they have passed escape velocity and there is no turning back.

Unfortunate in what sense?

And I am not sure how the West or even the rest of the world can do about it.

The last 200-250 years seems to be an abnormal period in which China was not a superpower. Historically, China has always had 25-40% of the world's GDP. It's been so long that many generations have lived and died without seeing China at the top. I think it's kind of neat for this generation to witness it.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-15 12:13:56+00:00
2022. My kind of humor.

Until March of 2023, decreasing the nuclear share was the law in France. The law said that the nuclear share was to be decreased to below 50%.

In addition, the absolute capacity of nuclear power was not allowed to increase.

So in order to build even just one new nuclear power plant, for example to maintain industrial capacity, they had to shut down two existing plants.

Which generally makes very little sense. And it precluded building nuclear power plants the way we know how to build them quickly and cheaply: multiple units of the same design, slightly overlapping.

So the law forced France to build Flamanville 3 the exact way we know how not to do it.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-15 12:14:00+00:00
It's absolutely defamation if they have no or unreliable sources and something Reiner's son could sue over. They are a big enough publication to know the risks here.

They'll reveal those sources to a judge if it comes to it. They won't reveal them to the public because nobody wants to have their name attached to something like this.

It could still be false, but I somewhat doubt it is.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-15 12:14:21+00:00
I'm not sure I'm following your thought on capital gains tax.

Capital Gain tax occurs when you sell an asset for more than you paid for it.

AI (software) is not an asset, and I'm not sure how you'd sell it. Computers and robots are assets (although they typically depreciate not appreciate.)

Either way capital gains tax is applied to the asset not the productivity of the asset. The productivity in turn is taxed as part of income tax.

Perhaps I have misunderstood your point though?
by grugdev42 | 2025-12-15 12:14:26+00:00
A much simpler solution is to keep your tables as they are (with an integer primary key), but add a non sequential public identifier too.

id => 123, public_id => 202cb962ac59075b964b07152d234b70

There are many ways to generate the public_id. A simple MD5 with a salt works quite well for extremely low effort.

Add a unique constraint on that column (which also indexes it), and you'll be safe and performant for hundreds of millions of rows!

Why do we developers like to overcomplicate things? ;)
by graemep | 2025-12-15 12:15:04+00:00
> This is a little misleading because this has actually been the main contention, not the very existence of the EU/EC even since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Why is Thatcher significant here? She was strongly pro-EEC - she supported remain in the 1975 referendum but she had been long out of any significant political influence by the time integration became more political.

Looking at more recent British politics at the time of the 2016 referendum it was very common for remainers to claim that the EU was just a trade organisation and not going to evolve into a full political union or federal state.

I think part of the problem is that the EU's founding treaties both indicate it is a supranational organisation and promise ever closer union. I would argue that just reflects differences in what different groups of people want.
by isodev | 2025-12-15 12:15:23+00:00
You’re looking at this from a point where the only piece of information about you out there is the data collected by the roomba. In reality, every sensible data broker would just add that signal to your already verbose profile and feed it to a model to determine the stuff you’re likely to buy… or would trigger you to generate engagement or whatever is needed.

The privacy danger here is not the one data point, it’s the unknown amount of other parties who will mix and match it with more data.

With GDPR, I’ve been requesting copies of my telemetry from various corps and it’s amazing the kind of stuff they collect. Did you know kindle records very time you tap on the screen (even outside buttons), in addition to what you read and highlight and pages you spend time on? Now add to that your smart tv’s insights about you and your robot vacuum cleaner … you see now this all grows out of control.
by MrJohz | 2025-12-15 12:15:33+00:00
This is what's been explained to me before. The problem is that lawyers don't necessarily work on the basis of "if it seems reasonable that the user allowed this, then this is allowed". Their goal is to make a contract that, if they need to go to court, will make their job as easy as possible. So it's not enough to say "obviously the user pressed the 'compile' button and we needed to do all this stuff to make that happen, here's all my technical experts who agree", instead they would rather say "paragraph 3 subsection 12 clearly allows this behaviour and the user has agreed to it".

It's also, as I understand it, the reason why law has so much of an emphasis on seemingly magic phrases that you copy and repeat in all sorts of different places. These are phrases that have already been tested and have a meaning that has been made clear in a court of law, so if you need to go to court to defend them, you can pull up the existing case law on the subject and rely on that, rather than having to analyse exactly what the new wording means. Hence why these T&C documents tend to have a lot of fairly standard phrases that don't obviously mean what you expect them to mean.
by jwr | 2025-12-15 12:15:34+00:00
I would include this in the "spreadsheet" metaphor. I do not know your use case, so please don't take this as addressed to you specifically, but I found that there is a learning/complexity problem: many people do not realize there is much more to inventory and production management than it seems. It might seem easy to AI-code something, only to find out later that things could have been done much better.

This is actually a serious problem for me: my SaaS has a lot of very complex functionality under the hood, but it is not easily visible, and importantly it isn't necessarily appreciated when making a buying decision. Lot control is a good example: most people think it is only needed for coding batches of expiring products. In reality, it's an essential feature that pretty much everyone needs, because it lets you treat some inventory of the same part (e.g. a reel) differently from other inventory of this part (e.g. cut tape) and track those separately.

AI-coding will help people get the features they know they need, but it won't guide them to the features they don't know they could use.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-15 12:15:58+00:00
I don't think we're disagreeing either. I didn't mean to suggest that it was Typescript's fault, just that the relationship between TS and JS in theory is something like "TS is a superset of JS" but once you get down to the practice of writing idiomatic reusable code it's more like TS and JS are fully different languages.
by cm277 | 2025-12-15 12:16:29+00:00
Same background as you and I fully agree. Again and again you see market/economic takes from technologists. This is not a technology question (yes, LLMs work), it's an economics question: what do LLMs disrupt?

If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. Which is an economics disruption, not a technological one: cloud added complexity and points of failure and yet it still disrupted a ton of companies, because it enabled new business models (SaaS for one).

So far, the only disruption I can see coming from LLMs is middleware/integration where it could possibly simplify complexity and reduce overall costs, which if anything will help SaaS (reduction of cost of complements, classic Christensen).
by moffkalast | 2025-12-15 12:16:51+00:00
That's kind of nonsense, since if I ask you what's five times six, you don't do the math in your head, you spit out the value of the multiplication table you memorized in primary school. Doing the math on paper is tool use, which models can easily do too if you give them the option, writing adhoc python scripts to run the math you ask them to with exact results. There is definitely a lot of generalization going on beyond just pattern matching, otherwise practically nothing of what everyone does with LLMs daily would ever work. Although it's true that the patterns drive an extremely strong bias.

Arguably if you're grading LLM output, which by your definition cannot be novel, then it doesn't need to be graded with something that can. The gist of this grading approach is just giving them two examples and asking which is better, so it's completely arbitrary, but the grades will be somewhat consistent and running it with different LLM judges and averaging the results should help at least a little. Human judges are completely inconsistent.
by ogogmad | 2025-12-15 12:17:10+00:00
Given that LLMs can make their own calls to the command line, I think it's obsolete ten times over. Much of the learning curve - and therefore most of the downside from CLIs, is now gone. A person can now learn only the most basic facts about operating systems - and let the AI handle the rest. Given all of that, I'm not sure where the world of software and IT is heading.

There's a danger though that people won't even learn the basics.