skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's normal to have a hard time delineating between conspiracy and genuine concern when it comes to this. We're literally carrying around powerful computers with exceptionally reliable connectivity combined with high-resolution cameras and high-fidelity microphones that are frequently used for voice recognition. Not to mention that for 50% of US smartphones, the software is designed by the most prolific advertiser in the world.

I had an experience a few years ago where I had talked about a fairly niche product (I can't recall exactly what it was) and the next day I started seeing ads for that product all over the place. I commented about it to two of my coworkers that day, how I had been skeptical about the conspiracy that our phones were listening to us for marketing purposes but that this felt eerie. What shocked me was their response: They had seen the same ad all over the place. Since then I've had a hard time deciding what to be more concerned about: That my phone might be listening, or that I might have been subtly influenced into thinking about this thing; that my whole experience was actually a result of being susceptible to marketing directed at my demographic
if something is bad you won’t be able to make an empire out of it and outsell your competition by a wide margin - you gotta use a little bit of your head here… millions of people won’t pluck down $50k because something is “popular”

elon is a fucking tool - the cars are fucking amazing.
why are you on a written forum right now? why aren't you making 15 second videos with rapidly changing frames?
I mean if you’ve ever bought enterprise software, you know that much of the sales pitch is for aspirational features. Ugh.
One thing that is rarely discussed in relation to this urban myth is that it is widely believe and yet it doesn't actually effect the behavior of most believers. That is one of the major reasons why most companies and many governments don't care about privacy, the public doesn't really care about it either.

People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing sacrificed when push comes to shove. If the average person is given the choice of having everything said within earshot of their phone being recorded and sent to Facebook or giving up Instagram, they'll happily choose Instagram and forsake their privacy.

If privacy advocates want to start turning the tide in this battle, the first step needs to be convincing the average person why privacy is important on a personal and tangible level. No arguments about future totalitarian regimes or hypothetical ideals. Abstract concepts like that rarely motivate people who have so many more practical political concerns. It needs to be something that is more important to people than having access to Instagram. And I have absolutely no idea how that could be accomplished which makes me concerned that we're already too late.
I use Prompt by Panic.
The subject seems pretty interesting, but the article itself had a few disappointments.

Decades ago I thought for sure by now we would be harnessing the DNA to express chitin and strands of cellulose into structural forms to start replacing the ubiquitous poison petrochemical plastics that we're still dumping in massive amounts into toxic waste dumps around the world.

We're still not there yet 8-/ So the subject at least offers some advance in understanding biological processes.

But the biggest disappointment of the article was in the author's emphasis of the importance of the name of the thing.

While the name might have a big effect in the intensity of the "neato" response in a lay audience. I seriously doubt it would have much effect at all on specialists in the field. They're gonna follow the results, not the names.

Then the author doubles down at the end with a nice little bible story about the big invisible swinging dick in outer space, and how HE got Adam to name the animals.

Is the author seriously advocating this prehistoric creation myth? If so, that's pathetic.

As for my own advocacy, I've always taken the opposite position regarding what happens when we apply a name. I always told my son when he was a small child, and learning a lot of words, that once we learn a name for a thing, it becomes invisible to us.

As soon as our brain can identify something that we know a name for, we instantly slap that label on the thing and we never see another detail of it's actual existence. That kind of covering up endless layers of detail is essential to prevent being bogged down in the real world, but it's also a major inhibitor to getting over stereotypes and uncovering new facts.
Comparative Linguistics Has Unsavoury Roots, Here's Why
Discussed last year when they made their announcement. No one gave a believable mechanism for them being able to do this. The consensus was that they were blowing smoke.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...
Ctrl+F "Bitcoin", 0 results.
Could you please add some examples? I'm still living in poor man's SQL land
You assume an awful lot for someone that has no executive insight into how Apple operates. How are you so sure?
All that sounds sadly familiar. Once you cross the threshold of not having to work for a living, the illusion fades away.

You are still you, your problems are still there, you are still bound to a slowly decaying body, there's no GAME OVER banner and credit roll proving that you have won the game of life. Because you haven't. Hah.

You can of course keep yourself entertained with all sorts of stupid stuff that doesn't actually matter. Or you can accept that there are still only a handful of things that bring people contentment, and you don't need to be financially independent to do any of them. I'm talking about bland obvious stuff like spending some time with loved ones (including pets and plants), going out for a walk in the park, etc. Unsurprisingly, a ton of retirees do just that. It's not because they are old and can't do anything else, it's because they have finally figured out what works.

And it's not like doing five times as much of that stuff is going to make you five times happier, either. Anybody with a full time job can carve out some quality time instead of arguing with strangers online.
It also doesn't render unicode characters correctly (specifically unicode block chars). And they refuse to fix is, so d. is kinda a moot point.
> the technical description seems convincing.

Isn't the technical hurdle just changing the "Alexa" or "Siri" wake word into a keyword for an ad campaign?
Or maybe there is a hidden variable that:

(A) Explains why you noticed the Privia.
(B) Explains why you searched for something that might have triggered a Privia ad.

To a layman this might be indistinguishable from magic. So in some way maybe the phone really can read your mind :)
100% this. Calling others NPCs is the same type of psychology as the people you meet who complain about how everyone in their life - parents, spouse, friends, coworkers is a jerk...
do some research and then come back here… coming with shit like “you don’t believe they are querying sql server directly” is childish and unprofessional.
Good!

Beyond the many usual critiques, in this context "owning bitcoin" doesn't mean much, barely a step above having a hoard of hidden gold bars.

While it is indeed more "on the internet" than precious metals, possessing that speculative-asset does not provide any special niche, ownership, or control over the broader, er, cybernetic means of production.
well, looks like a business opportunity - a service using AI to automatically pass the challenges like this so the people like the original poster could, for a small service subscription fee, use the Internet hassle-free again.
I think it’s wild that your counter argument is basically just gaslighting everyone. There are tons of (possibly coincidental) examples of this type of thing happening. Even if it’s a coincidence, it’s not explained away by “maybe everyone just forgot or is not paying attention”.
>They distribute set-top boxes with an integrated voice assistant. So, I would wager that is at least one source, and I would actually put down money that it is the only source. Cox Media Group doesn't make any claims about where they get the data or how much they have, and it seems like it would be very difficult to negotiate to get that data from the other major voice assistants.

There was a class action lawsuit back in 2019 alleging that Apple accidentally recording people's conversations with siri counted as wiretapping. If no enterprising lawyers has tried this lawsuit with cox, and no news articles has come out criticizing their broad ToS, it's probably safe to assume cox isn't doing it.
Negatively Producing Characters? Or maybe Null Producing Characters.
Exactly. The big companies are scared of lawsuits and trying to get approval for something like that would be a nonstarter. As a matter of fact the device folks at the same company would be working hard to kill such an idea in its infancy because it’s already an uphill battle to sell always-listening or always-watching devices to consumers because of the creepiness factor.

And people also are terrible at math. Modern ML (regression & neural nets) are ridiculously good at predicting stuff you might be interested in, particularly when rich data sources like browsing and e-commerce histories are available; the decision to show the ad to you at some point almost certainly was made long before any audio-to-marketing pipeline could act on it.
This is good advice for people whose livelihood depends on the attention of anonymous strangers. For everyone else, it’s probably ok to ignore.
Empathy is about understanding people from their perspective. I would think that highly empathic people would be harder to scam, as they would recognise the con artists for what they are.
Yes, this is why I called it "kind of a pointless tangent". :)

However, the reason I think it's only "kind of" pointless... it is in fact true that as far as I know, there is no way to pirate any of the "immersive" TV shows Apple has released. You can't watch them on any other VR headset, or even watch some 2D version on a flat screen.

Which means there are videos out there in the world right now which are immune from the analog loophole, at least as far as I know. It's a very small subset of all the content that has been produced, and it will stay that way, but it does exist.
“ I looked it up on my laptop when I got home”

That is the real mechanism for triggering the ads and memes, not that “your phone is listening to you.”

At least feel creepy about the real cause and not some imagined monster under the bed.
I wonder if there's an Aaron Swartz of paywalled university course material out there? Someone (or a group) downloading, datahoarding, and sharing every collection of courses they can get that you need a university login to access?
Sounds like yes then. I thought they would have stopped doing this after the layoffs bc they hired too many underqualified people with that method.
I know my iPhone isn’t listening to me. And I know about my friend’s activity influencing the ads I get served, and my demographic, and location, and all of that. And my random idea for a test word being predictable in a shocking way.

But, recently I started thinking about the average user, who will install anything and approve any permissions requested without reading it. And imperfect App Store reviews approving a Trojan horse accidentally.

Am I positive someone hasn’t inadvertently allowed mic access to a malicious party? I wonder if that person’s phone may, in fact, be listening to them.
you have a lack of purpose, sorry buddy but finding one is a life's work. you'll never fully admit it even if you write blog posts like this, but you basically got fooled. happens to lots of people
Ask HN: Math (Academy) Discord Group
I first heard about Math Academy last year here on HN. It took me some time to pull the trigger and I am now a happy subscriber looking to connect with other users - email's in my profile.

I saw some HNers added Math Academy in the recent "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2025?" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42509408) - hopefully I hear from some of you.
To all the people expressing doubt and disbelief, refer to every whistleblower story which was derided as tinfoil hat conspiracy until blown up. If we still haven't learnt that money will make corporations (and people) do despicable things, only we are to blame ourselves.
Related:

Apple will pay $95M to settle Siri privacy lawsuit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579009
>through legislation or potentially through existing powers

well yes. The obvious think everyone knows but no one says out loud is that congress has been in a deadlock for 15 years now or so. which is a small part of why newer presidents are much more liberal in making executive orders, and why agencies (especially ones moderating tech) have had to take charge to get anything done.

This story here is just another episode of the aftereffect from overturning Chevron, which will simply further stagnate any chances for change.
This is gaslighting. Even if it’s a coincidence, people have numerous examples of situations where they or anyone with them did not search for a thing. I’m not saying the only possible explanation is that the phone is spying on you - but I’m saying, don’t gaslight people and say “you probably searched about it and forgot”.
If you know of any Linux/u-boot GPL violations, reporting them to Software Freedom Conservancy might help:

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html
> Later, (for unrelated reasons) I built an entirely new desktop computer, not using anything from the old one, except the new wifi adapter. This included a fresh install of Windows 10… A few weeks later, and the issue suddenly began happening on the new computer also

This pretty clearly points to some weird software you’ve got installed. It’s not hardware, and it’s not a wonky Windows installation. What else could it be?
I've been running Gnu/Linux for my desktop for over a decade. If I can't make a windows app work in my preferred OS, I just don't use it. There is a decent free alternative almost everything and I can make do with that.
Taking money from one group of people and giving it to another isn’t “government waste”, though. It’s essentially zero-sum (unless you get way down into the details of the economic effects of how that money gets spent or saved.)
You forgot f) so lacking in features that it's a productivity roadblock
Unfortunately the isn't the first very serious security oversight with iterm2.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15286956
R/agency subreddit is being auctioned for $50K and used by mods to promote scams
The idea is to make it almost completely commercially unviable to sell locked down DRM hardware to small players, and only somewhat harder for XYZ Healthcare to buy the multimillion dollar GE MRI machine unless the MRI is fully open and compliant (XYZ can borrow and amortize, but Joe can't do that to buy playstations and cars).
Also - keep your feet on the ground, or, if needed, on top of a box. Do not sit on your foot. Your back will appreciate your efforts.
It’s extremely sad
Have you read the early stories and discussions that make that look unlikely?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/no-a-marketing-firm-...
> out of an instinct to believe they are a lot more unique than they actually are.

This is trivializing people in my opinion. The non-trivializing interpretation would be that for whatever reason people are skeptical that a black box that they don't understand very well, don't know how to audit, and don't know how to exert low level control over is doing things that they don't want it to do.

When framed that way it is immediately clear that this is an incredibly reasonable stance to take. The default assumption should always be that a third party who has a vested interest is pursuing it.

As an example. It is paranoia to assume that a 1970s era vehicle with almost no electronics in it is reporting on me to the manufacturer. It is willful ignorance bordering on delusion to assume that a vehicle manufactured in 2020 is not.
To me, the above paragraph reads like:

"Having wealth makes you responsible to others, therefore you should do arson."

If you manage to help make a powerful machine and then convert some piece of it into liquid value, you are probably good at stuff and whatever responsibility you have to others includes using that alongside the liquid value.

And worse, it's not just on you to do what people say they want. You're also actually responsible for trying to figure out what they would find most valuable. ("If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”)
Technilogical causes are much more likely than accidental causes for such effects to appear, in today's world.

Occam's Razor and the answer to the question, "What kinds of companies are at work in the environment?" push that probability in a specific way, because the motives and means are definitely there. Do you think they are the kinds of companies that would waste such an opportunity?

Their Chief Councel's recommendation depends on how slimy they are, right?

What would happen if they got caught? Slap on the wrist would be all, if that, no?
stop lying about being rich. its cowardly and self defeating
Something similar -- while on a family visit at my parents' house, my brother was talking about his upcoming Hawaii trip, Specifically he was going over a snorkeling adventure he signed up for.

For the next week or so, I got many ads on my phone about underwater packages for Hawaii, along with ads for various snorkeling and swimming gear. Now I had never researched any of that on my phone, however obviously my brother has. And the ad trackers saw that both my phone and his had communicated out over the same IP address (my parents wifi) on other random internet connections, so that is probably why they were then targeting my tracker cookie with ads that would be related to his tracker cookie. (This is all technically "easy" for the trackers to do, and seems logical that they would, because "why not").

On an unrelated note, I was making a peanut butter sandwich, started browsing some sites, and started getting ads for Skippy peanut butter. My phone must have smelled the peanut butter in the air.
I hate fake wood floors with a passion… they are so slippery they are fatal- I had a dog become paralyzed by slipping and breaking his neck, and an Ex break a foot falling on these. They are so hard they hurt your feet, look disgusting even when brand new, wear out quickly, and disintegrate if they get wet. They are a safety hazard and should be illegal.
Baader-meinhof phenomenon
Author here. Glad I'm not the only one with this problem!

What I'm experimenting with is building a graph out of "entities", which I'm calling people, places and things found in each card. The point I guess is to allow the LLMs to make connections between cards, but this won't be replacing user made connections.

This lets me pick up all cards that reference something like, I don't know, "factories" as a concept, which isn't something the user will necessarily want to directly connect.

Downside is that deduplicated taxonomy: I have, from a scan through my list, "factories", "Factory" and "Factories". My attempt to head this off is by vector searching based on the proposed entity keywords and having an LLM decide if they are the same or not. I think I need to work on my prompt for this though.
Another option not mentioned is that the thing they’re talking about might have been in their subconscious because of an ad they’d recently seen but didn’t notice. The topic/concept/product eventually bubbles up to consciousness, they talk about it, then start noticing the ads that were already there.
If you look at the court filings, the only part where they were "caught red handed" was that they knew they were recording audio for inadvertent activations, but didn't take steps to stop it. There's remotely close to proving that they were using it for advertising.
Location: Oregon, USA.
Remote: Only.
Willing to relocate: No.
Technologies: AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible, Git, Linux, Docker Python, etc. All the Stuff a modern SRE should do.
Resume: Upon Request.
Email: mike+jobs@garfias.org

I've been doing Sysadmin/DevOps/SRE (the names keep changing on me) since the mid 90s. I've worked for big companies and small startups (one was even acquired!). I've run ops departments and been a cog. These days I'd like to be some kind of lead, designing things, and helping my juniors implement it. I believe in incremental improvement, not the ONE BIG CHANGE that will fix our lives.
What I worry about sometimes is malware sniffing for hardware wallet seed phrases being practiced out loud by users when they think they're alone. I always tell people if they keep crypto on a hardware wallet - NEVER speak your seed phrase aloud. This could also be spied on by laser microphone surveillance.
I expected him to mention colocation. Kids these days. shakes his cane.
society subjects people to artificial misery? society is all we have, it's the most authentic misery you'll ever experience.
Wait, if Siri was “accidentally” activated to listen to our voices then does the led light up or not?
What? That's exactly what I use stars for - to bookmark repositories so I can go through things I've found interesting at a later date, or to keep being updated on their releases.
I wasn’t thinking forbidding them from decompiling it or anything. I don’t think any rights are violated if government doesn’t issue any further copyright protections (even though I don’t think this for the best).

I am not saying that the puzzle author should have any legal authority to restrict people from disassembling the puzzle.

I’m just saying that the government shouldn’t compel the puzzle designer to distribute disassembled versions of the puzzle.

If other people want to take apart their rubix cubes, they’re free to, I just shouldn’t be forced to help them take it apart.
Ask HN: I didn't see any year in review articles? Did I miss them?
Or have things changed and they are not being assigned by editors as much?