MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ghaff | 2025-12-13 16:15:06+00:00
A lot of walls were open after a kitchen fire. Electrician was redoing a lot of knob and tube and other older wiring. I had previously had a limited amount of DIY wireless switching (originally X10 but then a couple of voice-controlled switches) but basically everything was being redone anyway. And I basically just now have some dimmers and a simple programmable thermostat I haven't even programmed.

The parent point was that it's silly not to have a smart house (whatever that means exactly) and I disagree. It may make sense to do selectively rather than get an electrician in unless you have some other reason to do so.
by g947o | 2025-12-13 16:15:48+00:00
This story proves that none of it matters if your money along with your account vanish because the megacorp doesn't like your gift card for whatever reason.

In fact, it is far worse than paying with a credit card directly in terms of risk. At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back. On the other hand, I have seen too many cases where people find their gift card codes invalid.
by systemtest | 2025-12-13 16:16:36+00:00
I remember 20 years ago where you could just impromptu hop onto a train to Paris, party for the weekend and come back Sunday evening.

I just checked online with the Dutch Railways:

- Train that leaves in one hour (18:00), arrives at 21:40 just in time to party. 148 euro! - Train that leaves 21:00, arrives at 10:35 the next morning. You'll miss the party plus you can't even book the train online for some reason. Multiple transfers and you need to sleep on a bench in Brussels between 00:15 and 07:30

Then for the train back:

- Train that leaves at 17:50, arrives at 22:30, decent times, 185 euro! - Train that leaves at 20:50, arrives at 08:20 the next morning, right in time for work. Can't book it online. This time your are sleeping on a bench at Antwerpen between 00:25 and 05:50

If you are with four people, just drive the five hours to Paris instead. Have one person be sober. So much better than the train. I'm sure the fuel and tire wear are less than the €1332 in train tickets you would have with the four of you.
by vintagedave | 2025-12-13 16:16:49+00:00
I went to Uni with this person (though I doubt they remember me.) They have a very high reputation. If anyone should be able to resolve this, it’s them — that they can’t, and they have to go public, is absolutely terrifying and should make Apple execs pay attention.

I mean that. Exec level. This story and that this specific person cannot get it fixed indicates absolute failure.
by Twisell | 2025-12-13 16:17:07+00:00
It won't solve for people that only own an iOS device but setting up a Time Machine backup is aggressively recommended by OS level notifications for every macOS users.

A simple usb hard drive will actually do, no need for a NAS. The only action required to implement proposed solution is to check "Keep all data on this Mac" in both photos and iCloud Drive settings. And to be extra cautious add a second backup drive from another vendor (to be extra extra cautious don't use Time Machine for the second drive).

For the specific case of thoses that don't have a big enough internal drive they might need to store data on an external drive. But if you do have 6TB of pictures you normally should ask yourself if a RAID1 or RAID6 is not warranted at this stage.

In conclusion it's not a binary decision there is lot of room between "I solely rely on the cloud" and "never trust the cloud".
by dahart | 2025-12-13 16:18:24+00:00
So what would explain why AI writes a certain way, when there is no mechanism for it, and when the way AI works is to favor what humans do? LLM training includes many more writing samples than you’ve ever seen. Maybe you have a biased sample, or maybe you’re misremembering? The article’s style is called an outline, we were taught in school to write the way the author did.
by dmix | 2025-12-13 16:18:43+00:00
That’s because internet addiction isn’t sufficiently taken seriously as a society, even for adults. We haven’t fully adapted properly to this reality on a social level because it’s very new so people are panicking. It will eventually become standard parenting and as far as I can tell it already is becoming standard. More adults need to look at their own behaviour to fix their kids.

Every cellphone already comes with the ability to limit those things. It doesn’t require coming home from work early to toggle parental controls at a certain time.
by cube00 | 2025-12-13 16:19:06+00:00
> The problem is that it is very hard for "usual people" to do that.

Exactly, for all the victim blaming in other comments, try to explain 3-2-1 backup to non-technical people and you'll be met with glazed eyes.

Sadly I think it's going to take more people losing their irreplaceable data and for the network effect of having it happen to someone close to actually see any change.

There's a surge of people losing their Google accounts with hackers abusing parental controls at the moment, although I suspect a lot of those people will just move to Microsoft or Apple thinking they're safer until they get burnt there too.

As more non-deterministic AI is built into abuse systems it's inevitable that there'll be more false positives, couple that with impossible to access human support to override the decisions, it's a risky time to trust your irreplaceable data with anyone but yourself.

You could do everything right and still get locked out.
by lapcat | 2025-12-13 16:19:44+00:00
> How do governments become corrupt in the first place though, if they don't start that way?

I think the US government did start that way. Maybe not "corrupt" as such, but the United States was founded by plutocrats and was clearly designed to protect the minority of plutocrats against mass democracy.

> Even the log cabin has downsides compared to the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Yes, but I'd say the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle has even greater downsides, and our current state of convenience is in many ways a vast improvement over the precarious existence of our distant ancestors.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-13 16:19:56+00:00
Big part of that is just that it's insanely easy to use compared to most of the competition.

But still, most people go to the shop to buy toilet paper. Once you get used to Amazon, it just saves so much time and effort. The prices aren't bad either, I just checked toilet paper on amazon.com and 30 rolls of good quality amazonbasics toilet paper costs $0.22 more than the equivalent kirkland product on costco.com

You can order almost everything you need in the same app, whenever you feel like it. Just a couple of clicks, no need to fill in delivery information or anything.

The only part where YMMV is receiving the parcels obviously.
by tim333 | 2025-12-13 16:20:32+00:00
“what does the number 7 taste like?” is a nonsense question.

"how much thinking time did the LLMs get when getting gold in the maths olympiad" is not a nonsense question. Four and a half hours apparently. Different thing.

You could go on to ask if saying humans thinking about the problem is thinking but LLMs thinking about the problem is not thinking and if so why? Maybe only synapses count?
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-13 16:20:42+00:00
I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself?

I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.

A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card.

Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access.
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-13 16:21:08+00:00
The OP is in Australia, but I'd like to add some advice which would apply in the US: Apple is one of the few organizations which does not use an arbitration clause, which means suing in court really is an option.

(With the exception of some services like their credit card, but you can opt out of that more easily than any other arbitration clause I've seen.)
by cafard | 2025-12-13 16:21:13+00:00
Educational fads come and go. My brother is five (school) years younger than I am, which was time enough for our school to move from phonics to shape recognition. (His first-grade year will have been 60 years ago in September.) He survived and reads a lot. It didn't hurt that we grew up in a house with lots of books.

I had New Math somewhere around middle school. Probably the time could have been better used, but it didn't cripple me.
by NalNezumi | 2025-12-13 16:21:19+00:00
As for Princess mononoke it's a bit hard to write down everything. It's Miyazakis magnus opus. (not spirited away. That was explicitly to woo western audience with oriental mysticism)

It's a story of conflict and mistakes. Do you watch a history movie about WW1 and also get perplexed "and then they did WW2, What?". As said, it's not a story about linear start-end like theater. It's a snapshot of a historical event.

And the idea is not industrial revolution. The idea is that tatara village is a sanctuary for the outcast. The place is for prostitutes and slaves that fled. Eboshi, is presented as this opportunistic woman but also simultaneously presented as a savior that even accommodate lepers. During the story, the village is also attacked by Samurais; the outer world "lords" that shunned the outcasts, and now that they're successful, come to ask for tithe. Something the village shuns by shooting at the emissary. This leads to war. The Eboshi is desperate and contact the Buddhist monk and get a formar letter from the emperor to hunt for the god, to gain legitimacy and protection.

The nature, Shishigami, doesn't care. They explicitly say that in the end. It's the process of nature and doesn't choose sides. and really, for everyone to move on, in a harsh world, is to be "OK" with what happened. This is more realistic than some story of tragedy or revenge that have an "end of history" synonymous as "the end of the story". Life goes on.

Miyazaki have been anti industrial, pro nature all his life. But, he also admits that industry is helping humans. The tatara village is just that. They are "evil" from mononoke and forest spirits point of view, but they're the down trodden, desperate that finally built a place for them.

The point of the movie is that Ashitaka, the outsider, that comes from a dying tribe in Japan peninsula, realize that his deadly curse is not caused by monochrome "evil, selfish people" or "revengeful nature". But that everyone (except the samurai and monks) have their reasons for the actions, and that lead to conflict. That in the end, would lead to destruction and the only way to live is to coexist.

The story of coexistence START at the end of the movie. Which is ofc underwhelming to watcher if you want a definitive answer of "will it work? Is this happy ever after? Who won? Whose story is this". The anser is "we don't know, we don't know, and the story is the event that transpired".

Most ghibli stories (that are actually written by Miyazaki) follow similar patterns. History continues
by loloquwowndueo | 2025-12-13 16:21:42+00:00
hopefully he’ll get resolution by bringing his case to the “media”. Still, for someone who heavily presents the argument that he’s a professional writer and even says “I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case.” , I find it odd that he tries to make his case via an obviously ai-written post.

I mean, isn't writing what you said you do for a living?
by hodgesrm | 2025-12-13 16:21:51+00:00
> It seems like they are building a complex distributed system to solve a problem that is better solved by tar -cvf

That doesn't work on Parquet or anything compressed. In real-time analytics you want to load small files quickly into a central location where they can be both queried and compacted (different workloads) at the same time. This is hard to do in existing table formats like Iceberg. Granted not everyone shares this requirement but it's increasingly important for a wide range of use cases like log management.
by cwnyth | 2025-12-13 16:22:10+00:00
Hard disagree. I find that Linux (particularly but not exclusively Gnome) is actually even better than Windows or Mac OS. I hate having to use Windows or Mac again for how clumsy and poorly thought out they are. It took how long before they finally got Window snapping? And file search is still atrocious on both, and getting worse on Windows.

It always seemed to me the people who deride Linux's desktop GUI are those who actually never bothered to use it, especially not seriously in the past decade.
by bromuro | 2025-12-13 16:22:27+00:00
I have poor eyesight and I don’t support this practice of linking old reddit on HN. Old website is unusable for me. I have to load the link in the native app to read it.

ctrl+F doesn’t work anyway as the comments are also buried in a “load more comments” on old reddit too. New website and app have a search comments field.
by WolfeReader | 2025-12-13 16:22:58+00:00
Web-based password manager user here! It's worth noting that Bitwarden and 1Password (probably all the others too) let you export all of your data into an encrypted archive, so anyone who does this periodically won't be "locked out".

(Naturally, this requires extra effort on the users' part, so who knows how many are actually using this ability.)
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-13 16:24:16+00:00
I just re-binge-watched Silicon Valley in its entirety, with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, so I could get all the interconnected characters and sub-plots and cultural references together in my head better than the first time I watched it in real time at one episode per month.

It really should be required viewing for anyone in the industry, it has so much spot-on social commentary, it's just not "tecthical" not to be fully aware of it, even if it stings.

https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Tethics

>Meanwhile, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) comes up with a code of ethics for tech, which he lamely calls "tethics", and urges all tech CEOs to sign a pledge to abide by the tethics code. Richard refuses to sign, he considers the pledge to be unenforceable and meaningless.

>Belson invites Richard to the inauguration of the Gavin Belson Institute for Tethics. Before Belson's speech, Richard confronts the former Hooli CEO with the fact that the tethics pledge is a stream of brazenly plagiarized banalities, much like Belson's novel Cold Ice Cream & Hot Kisses.

>Once at the podium, Belson discards his planned speech and instead confesses to his misdeeds when he was CEO of Hooli. Belson urges California's attorney general to open an investigation.

>Richard mistakenly thinks that Belson is repentant for all his past bad behavior. But, as Ron LaFlamme (Ben Feldman) explains, Belson's contrite act is just another effort to sandbag Richard. If the attorney general finds that Belson acted unethically during his tenure as Hooli CEO, the current Hooli CEO would be the one who has to pay the fine. And since Pied Piper absorbed Hooli, it would be Pied Piper that has to pay the fine.
Show HN: Kinkora – A creative playground for experimenting with video models
by heavenlxj | 2025-12-13 16:24:34+00:00
Hi Indie Hackers We’re building Kinkora, a creative platform that brings multiple image and video AI models into one place for experimentation and creation.

Like many builders, we found ourselves constantly switching tools just to test different models or creative directions. Each platform felt limited to a single workflow or use case. So we decided to build a space that’s more modular, exploratory, and creator-first.

Kinkora focuses on:

Supporting popular generative models

Making experimentation fast and enjoyable

Laying the foundation for a creative community, not just a generator

Our long-term goal isn’t just “generate content”, but to create a place where creators can play, iterate, and discover new ideas as models and techniques evolve.

We’re early, actively iterating, and would love feedback from fellow indie builders on:

Feature direction

Community mechanics

Creator-friendly workflows

Happy to answer any questions
by belorn | 2025-12-13 16:24:50+00:00
We should definitively attribute some blame to the company and those who ran it. It is very similar to the nuclear projects in UK and Finland that went over budget and got delayed, except that those at least did finish and are predicted to create profit in the near future. Northvolt ended with nothing to show, and all the government subsidies it already received just went into the ether.
by heavenlxj | 2025-12-13 16:25:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the maker of Kinkora. We built this as a creative playground that brings together multiple mainstream image and video generation models in one place, making it easier to experiment, compare outputs, and iterate on ideas.

This is a major update from an earlier version, with expanded model support, improved UX, and clearer creative workflows. We’re still early and would really appreciate any feedback from the community.

Happy to answer questions.
by some-guy | 2025-12-13 16:25:29+00:00
I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/samsung-touches-lcds...
by more_corn | 2025-12-13 16:25:40+00:00
Fusion for the uninitiated. Great promise, difficult to make happen. So far it costs billions and it’s unstable, too hot, hard to control. You can’t run it long enough get out more energy than you put in. When I was twelve it was 20 years away. The joke is that it always will be.

If we could make it happen it’d change everything. Nature even provides an example! But we’ve had brilliant minds on it for decades and no breakthroughs.
by seec | 2025-12-13 16:25:50+00:00
Exactly. There are some “rules” that are perfectly valid, like “don't kill anyone,” but those make perfect sense and don't need much debate.

Plenty of rules are actually retarded and sometimes harmful if you follow them blindly. This is precisely how they got Nazism, and they like to pretend that it was only the bad guy Hitler's fault and a few other people's. If you know Germans well enough, it becomes pretty clear that a large part of the population was actually responsible in a small but meaningfull way.

I had a German exchange partner who refused to use the crosswalk unless the traffic light was absolutely green, even if there was absolutely no car or traffic around. That's just beyond stupid, and mindlessly following rules like that is how you get tyranny…
by ajross | 2025-12-13 16:26:07+00:00
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption

Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.

This statement is awfully one-sided.
by dachris | 2025-12-13 16:26:11+00:00
Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-13 16:26:35+00:00
AppleTV doesn’t record everything you watch on your TV like the smart TVs. A smart TV can track what you watch no matter which input source you are using.

How could an AppleTV or any device connected to an HDMI port know what you are watching on other input sources?

The AppleTV device doesn’t track what you watch at all. The AppleTV+ service knows what you watch on their service.

Their is no justification for the TV to know anything. There is obviously a reason for each service to know what you watch on their service. What exactly are you arguing? That you should be able to use the AppleTV+ service anonymously?
by fulafel | 2025-12-13 16:26:56+00:00
You can do app optimizations to work with object databases that are slow for small objects, or you can have a fast object database - doesn't seem that black and white. If you can build a fast object database that is robust and solves that problem well, it's (hopefully) a non leaky abstraction that can warrant some complexity inside.

The tar -cvf is a good analogy though, are you working with a virtual tape drive or a virtual SSD.
by Zak | 2025-12-13 16:27:18+00:00
I think the time limit to request compensation under EU261/2004 in Germany is 3 years. If this happened within the past 3 years, you can demand that they pay you.

Their claim form is here: https://www.lufthansa.com/us/en/fast-compensation

An overview of the regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...
by dmix | 2025-12-13 16:27:45+00:00
It’s always some other persons poor kid in their imagination with bad parents.

Basically the only solutions I see suggested is some world where all tech companies in multiple countries band together to ban kid/teens from the internet or that government will start aggressively controlling access to the internet.

A big movement to have better education on parenting with tech and evolving via cultural changes is hard. Writing a law sounds simple.
by iainmerrick | 2025-12-13 16:27:49+00:00
Glad to see Vince Guaraldi prominently mentioned here. Like the author, I got into Guaraldi via the Peanuts music, then found I loved the rest of his stuff as well.

I think Guaraldi is almost like a jazz version of Erik Satie, who’s been discussed here a few times. His music seems very simple, almost simplistic, but his taste and feel are superb. It’s just really good and easy to listen to, which unfortunately means it gets dismissed as “easy listening”.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-12-13 16:27:51+00:00
Presumably, as the GP said, you're not a normal person and you live in a basement. >sigh< (I'm with a lot of what the GP said but they didn't need to be insulting.)

The solutions self-hosting storage for non-technical people are terrible. Presumably there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty. I would guess the margin isn't there and a recurring subscription for something you own is probably unpalatable to a lot of consumers. So this is what we get.
by repstosb | 2025-12-13 16:28:00+00:00
>> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? >Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.

Right, because every executive who pursued offshore manufacturing was thinking, "gosh, how can I deliver even lower prices and better value to my customers?", and not "OK, we've shown the market will pay $X for product Y, how can I cut my costs and free up more money for bonuses and cocaine?"

Graphs of price indices (aside from a few sectors such as electronics where it was the core technology that improved, not labor efficiency) and wages over the last 50 years clearly show that the bulk of any offshoring savings were not passed along to consumers or front-line workers.