skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would have a slightly different approach here. Instead of trying to make the thing smart with lots of sensors I would start from the "clippers on a long pole" or some other manually-actuated design and try to solve the things that make it fail in reality.

Some ideas:

Clippers on a unit that just sits stationary on the floor, actuation via a cable, so you can hold the actuator but the clippers don't wobble around. Some control to move the clippers but also some reliance on being able to position your foot. A foot rest that is designed to help you position your foot correctly (with, eg, individual toe-rest, etc). Would need to experiment a bit to work out what clipper or foot-rest movement is actually needed - the less the better, for simplicity and reliability, but given users have mobility problems and most people aren't super dexterous with their toes anyway, perhaps it does need several axes of controllable motion.

I imagine one problem is seeing what you're doing so add a camera in the unit on the floor, put a display in the control unit. Nice nail close-up to work with ;-)

If everything is motorized you can use a smartphone for the control unit, but motorization might not be the best approach and wouldn't be my initial approach. "Actuation via cable" could mean a literal physical cable like a bicycle brake cable.

Actual clippers are cheap so if it makes things easier to design you can use, eg, multiple clippers in the floor unit (different sizes or angles) to use for different nails. (I don't mean clip multiple nails at once)

For woodworking/working with machine tools, you can get lasers that fit to the tool and show on the piece exactly where the cut will be. These are very simple (they're just static things). Perhaps something similar could be included to help with positioning. Again, the human will be doing the positioning, just want to give them good controls and clear direct feedback to work with.
"enshittification" is my least favorite recent word. i like the concept but it's a terrible word. very cringe, it's got middle schooler trying to cuss vibes
Is that even remotely in the real world?
Grafana security release: New versions of Grafana with a security fix
Yes, but these licenses have far more protection for me than regular licenses.

I'm working with a lawyer to ensure that these licenses are void if the user expects me to have any duty, like the Bitcoin lawsuits ([1], see comments at [2]) or the EU's upcoming Cybersecurity Resilience Act that might require me to be audited or worse [3], which I can't afford. (I do want an audit when I can afford it, though.)

[1]: https://laanwj.github.io/2023/02/06/regrets.html

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34684715

[3]: https://blog.opensource.org/what-is-the-cyber-resilience-act...
https://picrankr.com - upload pictures and have friends rank them. I've already showed it to enough people to know about some of the issues the idea has, and will improve it whenever I find the time .

Some issues:

- most issues where people need to choose a pic is a large N problem (100s of pics, not a handful)

- no-one wants to bubble sort pics for large N

- people want qualitative feedback, not only quantitative

There are some other issues I know about as well, such as image compression, etc., but feel free to try it out and give additional feedback :)
Do use energy saver for that?
In the case of the Metal Mohawk, it actually was difficult for the owner to maintain. He kept bumping the spikes on things and eventually had them removed. Granted, his was a cosmetic change and not a functional one. I would be willing to put up with extra care to effectively replace a hand.
Additionally, consider that people who receive donor transplants will use immune suppressants for the remainder of their life.
That said, material selection is also important.
I don't understand the mechanism here. The thing that makes competition work isn't that competitors don't know each others' prices. It's that each participant in the market makes more money by lowering their price below the monopoly price.
> If you build a business that makes 500k a year, which can be done with 30-50 customers for saas selling for 10-15k, you can sell the business and retire

That's a big if, and no guarantee that it's easier to pull it off than if you have VC money. Let's assume for a second that VC brings nothing to the table other than money.
This is slightly tangential, but has anyone recently used ChatGPT for non-trivial programming tasks where you start typing a precise description of what you need from the system and by the time you finish writing it you realise there's a simple way to do it? It has happened to me several times and it was as if serialising the problem was the hard part, like that famous Einstein quote.
To your last point, LLMs can translate your writing into different styles. Try feeding it one of your writings, then asking it "now make it sassy." It's also good at writing low-effort things like Instagram product blurbs.
That's 100x more true if you're a business owner. You can't take simply time off whereas as a employee you can
> One of the bad learnings you get from YC is that there’s a formula for success, and it looks like this: First you do some brainstorming. Then you come up with a good idea that can scale to a billion dollars (otherwise what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?) Then you work hard until you find “product-market-fit.” And then if the noises from investors indicate you won’t be getting a next round of funding, you start looking for a “pivot.”

YC is fairly relentless about iteratively finding product market fit but as far as pivoting goes - while YC makes it clear that you can pivot, it's pretty obvious that it's not ideal (but if people don't want your product, that's even less ideal). YC most definitely does not bill pivoting as part of a formula for success.

They also care about your idea when you apply, they do not expect you to start fresh during the batch. I honestly don't remember them saying anything about brainstorming, and that's probably because it's not true - most good startups have an unfair advantage in their industry and most founders already have some experience in their field of choice. Throwing a dart at a board and making a unicorn is quite rare indeed.

So this "formula" is mostly a strawman. And notably he tears down pretty much everything but iteratively finding product market fit, the one kernel of truth in this entire rant.

> Think about this for a second: The most successful business owners are typically in their 40s and 50s. Why is YC full of 22 year olds? Why aren’t the 40 year old entrepreneurs taking up this incredible deal that YC is offering? YC will tell you it’s because only the 22 year old kids can be true visionaries. BULL. SHIT.

So I went through YC in 2014 and I was 22 at the time - and I was among the youngest in the batch. Most founders seemed more towards his proposed age range, and to be fair they seemed to have a better handle on things. Go figure. So YC most definitely does not say that "only the 22 year old kids can be true visionaries." At least in 2014, it was in fact rare for them to bet on 22 year-olds.

> You might think that those who failed might still have gotten something. Maybe.

If you haven't founded a business before, it's quite valuable because you don't know what you don't know. Once you're a little more seasoned, I'd say it's a lot more situational.
Yes, you are correct.

I have a widely deployed FOSS project that I do "customer support" for. It is draining, and it does take a lot of time when I do need to do it.
> only the “tells sellers what they should charge” part

that, and when they inform the seller they use emotionally loaded language implying "if they are not the market leader, they are leaving money on the table, like a fool." Yes, the service consumer has to be a little manipulable for such mechanisms to work, but they do, nearly all the time.
Is that what that says? I have noticed that every substack page pops up some stupid modal as you scroll down the page and, for the most part, it's made me avoid them when I can because it's just obnoxious. I'm contemplating a Chrome Extension or something that will auto close them but for now I just find that most of the time it's not worth clicking anyway.

I just close it immediately without reading it like the internet has trained me to do with literally every modal. You want my attention? Put some call to action in the text I'm reading. A modal popping up mid-content asking for my email is just a good way to signal to me that you don't value your content and that you just wrote it so you can get my information. And sorry to those folks, I don't even read it.
How the top% stay ahead in music streaming
I'm not sure what you mean by "offline first." Can you elaborate?

(I've heard people use that term in multiple ways.)
I’ve been lightly pushing on the idea of there being a “soft” cartel on product prices for a while and have had a lot of people push back on the idea. But it doesn’t take a bunch of ne’erdowells sitting in a smoky dark room plotting out high prices. If I’m company A and I see company B selling the same widget as mine for $5, should I sell it for $4 or $5? What’s the downside of selling it for $5, especially if it doesn’t seem like it matters. During the pandemic, people showed they didn’t really care what things cost if they wanted them. So companies just aren’t behaving like economists say they will. They have no reason to when customers have no other choice. I mean, what are we going to do?
Ask HN: How do I start over at 37?
Quick background: Grew up in an immigrant household with very little in the way of resources, guidance, encouragement. Was enamored by House MD and medicine from a young age, but foolishly followed the family tradition of computer science despite hating it as I felt I had no choice. Went to technical school, dropped out, worked a few odd end gigs for the next couple years, stumbled into a UAP role that I was let go from due to performance.
I am now 37 without an impressive educational or professional background, no network of colleagues, no mastery in any one skill, and a whole lot of mental health debt. And yet the child inside of me still wants to pursue the scrappy John Hopkins surgeon dream.
I would love to enlighten you further but of course my time costs money.
He has a lot of other useful trackers on his page. I’ve been using them off and on (the Emergent Task Timer) probably since it came out ~17 years ago. (Just yesterday I was thinking I should print some off and use them. It took me a minute to realize this was on the same site.)
https://gencmd.com

Generate cmd line options on the cmd line. The web interface is a quick trial ground, but the real productivity boost is with the cli with integration in-place at the prompt.

As of now, it's very basic and working directly of the PaLM Text Bison model, but I'm adding more features and fine tuning. Also, trying to make it usable by enterprises.

E.g.

$ gencmd find txt files that contain the text hello
find . -type f -name "*.txt" | xargs grep -i hello
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep -i "hello" {} \;
find . -type f -name "*.txt" -exec grep -i hello {} \;

$ gencmd -c grep find txt files that contain the text hello
grep -r hello *.txt
grep -r "hello" \*.txt

If you want to know more about how I went about building it, I've written about it here: https://medium.com/@sathishvj/gencmd-generate-commands-with-...
Hah, yes. It's just the remnants of a template. As I said - totally half-baked and not ready for (or expecting) users yet.
The cycle repeats ad infinitum. Flip phones, where some slid up, others folded out. Some had iTunes but were dogshit otherwise. Then you had templating languages. Twig, Smarty, blade, etc. Then you had social media, where everyone wanted a piece of the Facebook pie. Then Crypto. Then NFTs. Now it's LLM. Tomorrow it will be something different.
Quarkus 3.4.3 released – Maintenance release
Show HN: Talk to YouTube – RAG for YouTube Videos
Hi HN,

I built this little application for setting up RAG on Youtube video transcripts. I haven't seen a lot of RAG for multimodal use-cases so I thought this was interesting. It uses YoutubeDL to get transcripts and Vectara to set up the RAG system. It's multilingual so other languages besides english work as well.

The answer produced by the LLM has references with timestamps to where its deriving information from from within the video. Right now the interface is a clunky terminal but I'm planning on adding a UI or maybe a voice I/O interface to the app.

Full disclosure: I work at Vectara, but this was a personal/side-project!
Whenever I hear ‘stakeholder’ I assume someone is about to be stabbed through the heart. I've never been wrong.
Only in the US and mostly there in the tech bubble cities. That compensation is for an equally skilled expert nowhere else seen in the world.
OpenWrt is incredible.

My USG-3P died a few months ago, so I dusted off my old Asus router and made an unplanned switch to OpenWrt. This was meant to be a temporary solution until I could get a new UniFi device, but after setting it up and getting it working the way I want I'm more than happy to make this temporary solution into a permanent one.
I am bookmarking your comment for myself. It is a great warning, and I would do well to pay heed.
cool idea. I tried to upload a 17mb sample video to test and I can't get it to work.
Is that common in OpenWrt to introduce more changes between RC versions? Usually you want to stabilize everything as much as possible until the final version been released, but seems they continue to push out RCs as standard updates...
Damn, I misread Fastly as Fastmail and thought Mozilla had partnered with them too provide a paid email-hosting service.
The State has sovereign immunity. It cannot be sued unless the State explicitly waives its sovereign immunity rights.

Can’t sue me unless I say you can.
Optimising for dumb money trading on earnings call transcripts.
> Do you really believe that businesses priced their products low until the business press started reporting on inflation and then realized “oh man, I should raise my prices!”?

Do you really think a believable excuse people will swallow doesn't make a difference in what companies can get away with? (Especially one that's global?)

See, for example, daily housekeeping in hotels. Hotels were trying to do away with this pre-COVID, without much success; people correctly saw it as a measure to boost profits at customers' expense.

People accepted "oh it's COVID" as an explanation, so they got away with it, and it's not going to come back.
And when you finally have a along controls everything is overloaded.

Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow.

But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote.

Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass.

Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.
> These are the people who are keeping training and product decisions on track with the big-picture trends, which can change on a dime in a day.

If things appear to change that fast, I’d suggest one isn’t well calibrated to the overall environment.

There are deeper fundamentals that don’t change very often. The specific industry moves and product offerings can only deviate so much from ground truth. The more they deviate, the more one should be skeptical of their claims.
> Dont't "organize" your life. Live it!

That's not how it works if you have even a little bit of complexity in your life, which anyone with responsibilities has.

> Did you ever forgot to eat or hug your beloved one and organize a birthday party for your wife / children / whoever?

Some do, yes. And how does one even throw a party without some basic organizations?

But what about the boring parts? Taxes, doctor visits, household, managing finances... Not everyone can afford to thrift through live.

> If one value is punctuality then you will find a natural way to reach this value.
>If the Value is your own and it is real, then you will find various ways to reach it.

People call that organization.

> maybe, these goals are not your own goals.

Staying alive and healthy is may goal, I still sometimes forget some duties which support this, because life is more than what is under my nose.
I just don't see how it meaningfully reduces competition. This barely moves the needle. If I look at the top sellers on Steam, the vast majority are not Activision Blizzard.
Yes, but my point is that as you continue to code you are likely to encounter more tech debt, especially as you get more customers and as you need to make dependency version upgrades to address security vulnerabilities. A world without tech debt is a dream.
OpenWRT is great for taking bargain routers on eBay (which can be had for as little as £5 and yet have fast CPUs and support modern WiFi radios) and making them into proper homelab gateways with VPN, VLANs, DNS proxies etc. I would often do this for friends who wanted VPN access to their home network but didn't want to fork out for a router that would offer this out of the box. I would find it amusing when an ISP's stock firmware would turn out to just be an OpenWRT skin.
Well, roenxi specifically mentioned health and energy. Healthcare isn't a free market. It's an FDA regulated market.

Say I've got a killer (um, bad choice of adjectives) idea for a new way to do heart stents. I could create a startup and develop them. But then I've got to get them FDA approved before anyone can actually use them. That's going to cost a decade, and one or more tens of millions of dollars. So startups aren't going to come save us from high healthcare costs, even if there's inefficiencies or price-gouging in the healthcare market.

Energy is kind of the same way. You have an idea for a more efficient way to do a refinery? You can't just go build one, not without EPA approval (plus local zoning regulations).

Now, in both cases, the regulations are there for good reason. I don't want my doctor implanting Billy Bob's Discount Shunt Of The Week in my coronary artery, thanks. But healthcare is more costly than it would be in a freer market.

The idea is that fewer people die with the regulations. But the regulations also mean that some people die because they can't afford the healthcare. Is it a net win? I don't know.
100%. Also an ADHD case here.

Forgetting things actively gets in the way of me living life.

I wouldn’t vouch for over-planning since that’s going to topple over the second you slip up, but having a list of “things you probably don’t want to do but past-you thought was important” is how I manage to do the big fun parts of living!
That's just classic rubber duck debugging, where explaining the problem forces you to organize your thoughts. It's a good practice!
All I can cite is my wife's boss, a teacher and very left wing, who nearly got fired for talking about it.

I've been talking with him about maybe gathering the necessary data (it's available upon request but the district records people aren't exactly a sane API, you get PDF's with hundreds of pages). If I do that analysis to confirm his claim, I'll send you a link to it.

But even without the budget information, we can just look at headcount. What ratio of teachers to admin would you consider unhealthy? How many assistants to the vice principal do there need to be before it starts to look like a retirement program for people who can't be bothered to teach anymore?
Archytas is famous for having designed a steam powered glider. And for having freed Plato from his brief slavery. But he also appears to have written the first treatise on mechanical engineering:

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Field Technicians/Engineers love them. It's so much easier to use a never changing default at a new site under construction/finalization.

Compared to other manufacturers that have default passwords printed on the device or something made from the serial number. When that hardware could be shoved in behind a ceiling panel somewhere (even chances of that hardware not being where it's supposed to be).

_____

It's clearly not the "right answer", but it is an answer.
It seems wildly shortsighted as well.

I think everyone here is pretty clear how they would ethically view such a thing, but view it from NIST's (/ NSA's) perspective for the sake of argument. Maybe there's a specific threat where NIST (or presumably the NSA) believes it has a mandate to insert a backdoor.

In order to successfully do this, NIST needs to maintain a very large bank of social capital and industry trust that it can spend on very narrow issues.

But over the years there have been enough strange things (Dual EC DRBG being the most notorious) that that trust, at least when it comes to crypto design, simply isn't there. My perception is that newer ECC standards promoted by NIST have been trusted substantially less than AES was when it was released, and I can think of a number of major issues over the years that would lead to this distrust.

The inevitable outcome is that NIST loses much of its influence on the industry, which certainly is not in its own interest.
Cisco is a very large company, that mostly acquires existing products and employees. They do make an effort to train new hires on their SDLC and security practices. But at the end of the day, security is up to the individual product development team. There's lots of those teams, and most of them are clueless about security. So it's honestly kind of a miracle when there isn't a big security vulnerability in any given product.

I've worked for a lot of large enterprises, and they all are the same. Nothing special about Cisco or any others. Security is hard, and it does not provide a good return to invest in good security. You can stop using hardcoded passwords, but it won't make you any more money, and customers clearly aren't leaving because of them. The stock price is the only thing that matters. As long as that's safe, it's business as usual.
> The problem is that companies are throwing tons of garbage at the wall to see what sticks. And somehow, investors are rewarding them for this.

I'd turn that around. Investors are throwing tons of money at AI to see what sticks, and journalists are throwing tons of attention at AI to see what sticks. Companies are realizing how easy it is to get in on the action.

I just had a talk with the head engineering at a startup that just came out of stealth mode. We talked for over an hour about the work they're doing, the market they're addressing, their technical challenges, and how their technical teams are structured, and AI didn't come up a single time. But if you go to their web site, it's all about "using advanced AI to supercharge your _____."
Ask HN: Is it just me or is mobile web browsing awful?
I've got an iPhone X. It's not the latest and greatest, but still runs fine and does basically everything I need it to do.

However, it seems like any time I need to visit an actual web site from my phone, the entire experience is just terrible. Nearly every web site fills the screen with resource-intensive ads, enormous newsletter sign up dialogs with tiny close buttons, and of course, the obligatory cookie notice.

I don't want to have an app for every single business I visit or service I subscribe to, but I also do what I can to avoid visiting their horrid web pages.

How do you tackle this? Or am I just making a big deal over nothing?
Maybe he just knew he had more throws at the dart board.
This is a compelling piece.
USPS has 3 unions. This is just a speculative rant, please don't do that here.